Rumours of a Xiaomi laptop go back years and were even laughed at by Lei Jun during the Xiaomi Mi3 launch way back when. For whatever reason the rumours have endured though and it’s now expect a launch is planned for 2016.
While around the globe Xiaomi appear to be sitting pretty and growing fast, in their local Chinese market their growth is slowing and rivals are scrabbling to catch up. Xiaomi’s model of keeping costs low and demand high has been the secret to their success, but it has also hindered them too. Rivals such as Huawei, Meizu, OnePlus etc have all followed suit and are eating in to Xiaomi’s initial market lead.
I’ve seen this first hand. While in Shenzhen last week the most popular phone were Huaweis, Xiaomi, Apple and even Samsung were not to be seen.
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So with a drying up mobile phone base in their home market Xiaomi need a new direction and many believe that a laptop is the way to go.
The latest rumours are that Xiaomi have teamed up with Foxconn once again to build a laptop computer that will launch in China in 2016. Although not confirmed it seems likely that the Xiaomi laptop will run Windows, it is the OS of choice in China and we have already seen Xiaomi partner with Microsoft on the Xiaomi Mi4. However, there is the chance that Xiaomi will take the opportunity to launch it’s own Linux based OS.
Hardware is not known but expect a premium alloy product with a display of around 15-inches.
Would you buy a Xiaomi laptop? Would you prefer it to run Windows or a custom OS?
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