Chairman and CEO of China's Xiaomi Inc. presents the company's new product, the Mi Note (Photo : GettyImages/ChinaFotoPress)
Xiaomi has just announced their new Mi Notebook Air which is expected to take on the MacBook Pro 2016 from Apple in terms of specs and features as the former has surprisingly decent hardware.
The new Mi Notebook Air actually comes in two variants with one more powerful than the other. First off is the 12.5-inch model comes with a decent Intel Core M3 processor with just 4GB RAM.
What makes the smaller model still capable of fast everyday tasks is its 128GB SSD internal storage which is significantly quicker at file operations than the traditional mechanical hard drive. Both models of the new Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air actually run Windows 10 for the operating system, Firstpost has learned.
In fact, the Mi Notebook Air is actually thinner than the would-be Macbook Air 2016 from Apple. Xiaomi's 12.5-inch variant will cost $520 which is still not cheap for some considering that it only has a small amount of RAM.
Xiaomi also has their larger and more powerful 13.3-inch Mi Notebook Air which boasts an intel Core i5-6200U processor and a discrete NVIDIA GeForce 940MX graphics card for it to be able to play modern video games, Digital Trends reported. It also has more 8GB RAM and a larger 256GB SSD storage which is not a joke as it is not commonly found in most laptops today.
It could certainly take on the MacBook Pro 2016 in terms of specs and performance. Unfortunately, there have been no benchmark results yet from both the small and the large model of the Mi Notebook Air.
Both of the variants will have a 1080p screen and two USB 3.0 ports for those who want to plug in their fast external hard drives and such. It also has a USB Type-C charging socket for those newer smartphones and electronic gadgets that need to be charged or to transfer some data faster than the previous generation's tech.
Xiaomi's larger Mi Notebook Air will cost $750 and will go on sale at August 2 in China. The international rollout is still not confirmed but the MacBook Air contenders could still see a release for the United States and other countries.
