Apple's MacBook Pro has a serious competitor from Xiaomi

Xiaomi is one of those companies that aims to follow and improve on Apple’s offerings. It won’t be wrong to say that Xiaomi’s MIUI takes immense inspiration from iOS and their smartphones owe their designs to those of Apple’s — all of which is not necessarily a bad thing. That is why Xiaomi has also unveiled its take on the MacBook Pro with their Mi Notebook Pro (even the name is inspirational).

Xiaomi’s copy of the MacBook Pro has some serious names on its specification sheet, the latest eighth generation Intel Core i7and Core i5 processors to be the highlight. Other attention grabbing goodies include an entry-level NVIDIA GeForce MX150 graphics and a 256GB PCIe NVMe solid-state drive (SSD), which clearly mark this as a laptop meant to deal with presentations, documents and web browsing. The laptop has 15.6-inch Full HD display has a Corning Gorilla Glass and its trackpad has an integrated fingerprint sensor. It also has its usual array of USB ports, both the standard ones as well as two USB-C, full-size HDMI and an SD card slot.

As of now, the laptop is meant to sell only in China, which means that it will run a Chinese version of Windows 10. The only difference between this and the MacBook Pro remains to be the touch bar on the latter, which gains mixes user response from consumers. The Mi Notebook Pro will available in three configurations with varying prices, with the base Core i5 + 8GB + 256 GB variant starting at RMB 5599 (approx. Rs 54,000) and going up to RMB 6999 (approx. Rs 68,448) for the Core i7 + 16GB + 256 GB with the NVIDIA MX 150 graphics card.

(Also published on Deccan Chronicle)