Chuwi LapBook 14.1 Ultra-Budget Laptop: All for the sake of economy
Can a laptop with a 14-inch IPS-matrix and a weight of 1.7 kg cost 14 thousand rubles? No, better rephrase the question. Is it possible to buy a decent machine inexpensively so that you can carry it all the time? A month ago, I would firmly say no. But today the answer will not be so categorical. And, after reading this post, you will find out why my beliefs were somewhat shaken.
In mid-January, an unusual letter arrived at the personal address. A Chinese man with a simple Chinese name, Jeff, said that he constantly reads my blog on Habrahabr and is really dreaming that I should review the Chuwi LapBook laptop on the Intel Celeron N3450 processor. Jeff's desire is so strong that he is ready to send me this very laptop on a completely free basis.
I last observed a similar attraction of unprecedented generosity in 2002, when the reader of Computerra sent me a newfangled mouse with an optical sensor. But one thing is a mouse, and the other is a computer. I asked Jeff - is he seriously ready to take the risk of sending such a generous vow to a stranger? Jeff replied in the affirmative. Then I asked - who else did he send a similar offer? It would not be desirable that on Geektimes a dozen reviews of a single device came out at once to the delight of admins. Jeff swore that he had offered nothing to anyone else, and I was his first.
')
In fact, as it turned out in a correspondence with the observers Habra (Burum, hello!), The guys from Chui already specifically spammed the boxes with their requests to test the Chuwi LapBook. Perhaps Jeff personally did not write, but his colleagues bombed Habr's mail long and hard. It is good that professional paranoia made it clear in advance.
And then, in January, I just sent Jeff my home address with a mobile number and forgot about it.
About two weeks later, an SMS about some mysterious product fell on the phone, crossing the border of Russia, stopping at the customs, safely leaving it and heading to my house. And on Saturday morning the courier rang the door with a big box. Before his visit, I thought that the message in question was about some kind of case with eBay, but the dimensions of the package clearly hinted at the thing more seriously. And the truth is - inside was a laptop Chuwi LapBook. And Jeff was a serious man.
Packing a laptop literally shouted that its task was not to delight the owner of Chuwi with its exterior and tactile properties, but simply to keep the contents during transport. Inside, too, no frills: the power supply to the box of the thinnest cardboard, a few useless pieces of paper and the hero himself. Power supply and pleased, and upset at the same time. I was pleased - because in terms of size and weight it fully corresponded to the mobile purpose of the laptop. And upset because of very shaky materials. There was a feeling that a couple of months of operation - and the cable will fall apart.
At the time of receipt of the laptop, he was worth 14 thousand rubles on GearBest plus 450 for delivery. Now the action is over, and 17,000 people have already been asked for Chuwi LapBook, however, the shares on GearBest happen all the time, so I would prefer to focus on the initial price.
What do we offer for such a sum?
Surprisingly a lot.
It is worth starting with the body and the matrix. Chuwi LapBook is made entirely of matte plastic. No glass and metal (no, well, what do you want for such money?). If you take Chewie at one angle, the design will bend a bit under its own weight. This is quite common for budget models.
Keyboard Chuwi very carefully copied from the MacBook Air. And, it should be said, it turned out great. The keyboard is almost the best part of a laptop. The key layout is optimal, the stroke is almost optimal. Typing is very convenient. True, there is no version of the Cyrillic keyboard, so a significant portion of users will have to resort to special stickers. But I have been typing texts blindly for a long time, and I liked everything. More precisely, almost everything.
The fact is that the touchpad at the laptop is quite strange, and when you print it, you constantly touch it with brushes. This for some reason leads to the switching of windows. In general, touchpad touch reactions are puzzling. It is not clear why it was made specifically rough, and this complicates the exact positioning of the cursor. One awkward movement - and instead of scrolling the screen in the browser, the scale changes ... In general, you can use it as a last resort, but as soon as possible it’s better to connect a mouse, since there is a USB port and Bluetooth support.
The screen uses an IPS-matrix with a matte surface and a resolution of Full HD. The picture quality is decent, and even the backlight is quite uniform. However, when viewing photos and movies, the image seems a bit ... cartoony. As if the 16-bit color is set instead of 24-bit. It’s not scary to work with texts and surf the web, and you can watch movies in general, if you don’t be too nosy. And for processing photos such cars are not bought by normal people. The stock brightness is large, I had to twist it to 60% for comfortable work.
(At this point, the hero of the review on which I wrote the text, suddenly turned off and did not turn on any more. The rest is written on the MacBook)
The Intel Celeron N3450 processor is a successor to the Atom line. It was released in the third quarter of 2016, and the recommended price for lots of 1,000 pieces is 107 dollars. Truly, it’s a mystery how Chuwi managed to meet the final price of about $ 230, if only the processor pulls half that amount, and a licensed copy of Windows 10 is installed on the laptop.
The N3450 has four cores with a base frequency of 1.1 GHz and the ability to accelerate to 2.2 GHz. Being manufactured by a 14-nanometer process technology, it fits into a TDP of 6 watts, and in fact - at 4 watts. The kernels, of course, are rather weak, but the four of them are doing quite well. In everyday work, the performance is quite enough, and the only thing the processor stumbled on was 4K video (although, of course, it’s silly to watch 4K on a lower resolution screen). As well as Word, and the browser, and even Photoshop started and turned very cheerfully.
Here we should elaborate on the filling Chui. It is quite simple to understand, only the use of bolts of three sizes at once brings some confusion during assembly. Inside, as we see, the main part of the space is occupied by the battery (more precisely, two paired batteries), and the motherboard is quite small. Perhaps it would be more suitable for the tablet. Despite the fact that the processor can do passive cooling and includes throttling only when heated to 105 degrees Celsius, it is still very cool on the cooling system. In fact, it consists of a piece of heat-conducting tape that transfers heat to the tin screen. On the last one, there is still something heat-conducting which is glued on top, which is trying to divert heat further onto a plastic cover, but you and I understand how useless it is.
In the forums, the owners of this notebook write that the first thing they did was to modernize the cooling system with a heat-conducting paste and a copper plate. I think that such a decision is not ideal, but people manage to play Chewie even in World of Tanks.
The memory capacity is 4 GB, and the two chips are soldered directly on the board. It has room for another pair, but so far no one seems to have managed to upgrade at home. But the flash memory can be expanded. The default is 64 GB eMMC, and this, of course, tears. Not in terms of speed, it is surprisingly decent - 165 MB / s reading, 115 MB / s writing. But after installing Windows and the minimum set of programs, gigabyte 16 remains free. You cannot replace the drive, it is also soldered on the board. But there are two alternatives. The easiest way is to insert the microSD card into the slot on the laptop. We will not achieve speed records, but for storing music and movies is the thing. The second option is to use the M.2 slot on the motherboard. There you can insert any SSD with the appropriate interface and close the question.
There is one catch with SSD. According to most Chuwi LapBook owners, it can only be used to store data, but not to install the system. Say, the BIOS is not able to select the boot disk. However, the owners of the new revisions say that you can still boot from the SSD, and even post the corresponding screenshots. Personally, I would prefer the option with microSD, the benefit even with SSD Chuwi will not work much faster, and the card is cheaper.
Again, the overall performance impression is very good. The system may not fly, but it runs briskly. I’ll say a completely seditious thing: I didn’t feel much difference with my penultimate generation MacBook Pro in my work with texts and the browser. Taking into account the difference in price - a very not weak result.
Wi-Fi adapter in Chuwi middle-aged, sample of 2014. The Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 supports dual bands and even 802.11ac at speeds up to 433 Mbps. In fairness, more than this device is not necessary.
The speakers are not used notebook, but absolutely normal. These are often put in inexpensive radios and children's toys. So there is sound, but quiet and not rich shades.
Looking at the panel above the keyboard, we can assume that the laptop is equipped with two microphones, but in reality there is only one. The second hole, alas, props.
In addition to the memory card slot already mentioned, the Chuwi LapBook has two USB ports (one USB 2.0, a second USB 3.0), an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. Modest, but enough.
The claimed battery capacity is 9000 mAh, and the manufacturer promises "four hours of video viewing." In fact, it all depends on the tasks. For example, if you just type something and read Facebook, one charge will last for eight hours. I checked it during a trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow: the Sapsan lasts four hours, and 55% of the charge remained at the arrival in the capital. But if you watch a movie - really, it turns out about four hours. There is no reason to dream about fast-charging technologies: it takes about 3.5 hours to complete a cycle.
Contradictory impressions from the brainchild of Chuwi.
On the one hand, this is the embodiment of the dream of a cheap and lightweight laptop, which you can always carry with you, without worrying about its safety. The set of capabilities and performance margin for working needs is more than sufficient.
On the other hand, such a low price is achieved only by austerity. And in Chuwi LapBook, it is visible in everything, including vital nodes. I got the impression that this machine, even with the most favorable scenario, will not last longer than a year.
And in my case, everything happened even faster. By the end of the second week of operation, I sat down to write a review of the LapBook right on my own, and approximately in the middle the laptop turned off. Yes, so more and did not turn on. Neither from the battery, nor from the power unit - in any way. Fortunately, there was nothing really valuable in the memory, and the half of the review was successfully preserved in the cloud.
Jeff, having learned about the accident, got drunk and offered to urgently send a new copy. But, from the experience of buying goods in foreign online stores, they ask a mere mortal to send them a defective product first, study it for a long time, and only then - maybe - send a replacement. Everything stretches for months.
It is quite possible that only I was not so lucky, because they don’t seem to write in the forums about the sudden deaths of representatives of this model. Are you ready to risk in the name of solid savings? If yes - this is a great option.
But one thing must be understood. Miracles are not that does not happen at all. But all of them are missing. And if the magic ends on you, there is no point in grumbling. For a comparable amount, you can find a tablet on Windows with a diagonal of 10-12 inches and pick up a case for it with a keyboard. Also on the sites of free ads can be 20-25 thousand rubles to find portable machines of past generations, which with proper care will certainly work for at least a year.
And Chuwi, thanks for the interesting attempt. Try again.
PS Preparing photos for the post, I noticed that there is some kind of strange piece of hardware on the memory chips. Yesterday, when examining a corpse, I did not notice it. Well, I took it apart again. It turned out that this is a screen mount, not firmly soldered to the motherboard, and therefore fell off. The mount collapsed on the side and something obviously closed. I removed it and the laptop started working again. Hooray! The question is, really, for how long ...
In mid-January, an unusual letter arrived at the personal address. A Chinese man with a simple Chinese name, Jeff, said that he constantly reads my blog on Habrahabr and is really dreaming that I should review the Chuwi LapBook laptop on the Intel Celeron N3450 processor. Jeff's desire is so strong that he is ready to send me this very laptop on a completely free basis.
I last observed a similar attraction of unprecedented generosity in 2002, when the reader of Computerra sent me a newfangled mouse with an optical sensor. But one thing is a mouse, and the other is a computer. I asked Jeff - is he seriously ready to take the risk of sending such a generous vow to a stranger? Jeff replied in the affirmative. Then I asked - who else did he send a similar offer? It would not be desirable that on Geektimes a dozen reviews of a single device came out at once to the delight of admins. Jeff swore that he had offered nothing to anyone else, and I was his first.
')
In fact, as it turned out in a correspondence with the observers Habra (Burum, hello!), The guys from Chui already specifically spammed the boxes with their requests to test the Chuwi LapBook. Perhaps Jeff personally did not write, but his colleagues bombed Habr's mail long and hard. It is good that professional paranoia made it clear in advance.
And then, in January, I just sent Jeff my home address with a mobile number and forgot about it.
About two weeks later, an SMS about some mysterious product fell on the phone, crossing the border of Russia, stopping at the customs, safely leaving it and heading to my house. And on Saturday morning the courier rang the door with a big box. Before his visit, I thought that the message in question was about some kind of case with eBay, but the dimensions of the package clearly hinted at the thing more seriously. And the truth is - inside was a laptop Chuwi LapBook. And Jeff was a serious man.
Packing a laptop literally shouted that its task was not to delight the owner of Chuwi with its exterior and tactile properties, but simply to keep the contents during transport. Inside, too, no frills: the power supply to the box of the thinnest cardboard, a few useless pieces of paper and the hero himself. Power supply and pleased, and upset at the same time. I was pleased - because in terms of size and weight it fully corresponded to the mobile purpose of the laptop. And upset because of very shaky materials. There was a feeling that a couple of months of operation - and the cable will fall apart.
At the time of receipt of the laptop, he was worth 14 thousand rubles on GearBest plus 450 for delivery. Now the action is over, and 17,000 people have already been asked for Chuwi LapBook, however, the shares on GearBest happen all the time, so I would prefer to focus on the initial price.
What do we offer for such a sum?
Surprisingly a lot.
It is worth starting with the body and the matrix. Chuwi LapBook is made entirely of matte plastic. No glass and metal (no, well, what do you want for such money?). If you take Chewie at one angle, the design will bend a bit under its own weight. This is quite common for budget models.
Keyboard Chuwi very carefully copied from the MacBook Air. And, it should be said, it turned out great. The keyboard is almost the best part of a laptop. The key layout is optimal, the stroke is almost optimal. Typing is very convenient. True, there is no version of the Cyrillic keyboard, so a significant portion of users will have to resort to special stickers. But I have been typing texts blindly for a long time, and I liked everything. More precisely, almost everything.
The fact is that the touchpad at the laptop is quite strange, and when you print it, you constantly touch it with brushes. This for some reason leads to the switching of windows. In general, touchpad touch reactions are puzzling. It is not clear why it was made specifically rough, and this complicates the exact positioning of the cursor. One awkward movement - and instead of scrolling the screen in the browser, the scale changes ... In general, you can use it as a last resort, but as soon as possible it’s better to connect a mouse, since there is a USB port and Bluetooth support.
The screen uses an IPS-matrix with a matte surface and a resolution of Full HD. The picture quality is decent, and even the backlight is quite uniform. However, when viewing photos and movies, the image seems a bit ... cartoony. As if the 16-bit color is set instead of 24-bit. It’s not scary to work with texts and surf the web, and you can watch movies in general, if you don’t be too nosy. And for processing photos such cars are not bought by normal people. The stock brightness is large, I had to twist it to 60% for comfortable work.
(At this point, the hero of the review on which I wrote the text, suddenly turned off and did not turn on any more. The rest is written on the MacBook)
The Intel Celeron N3450 processor is a successor to the Atom line. It was released in the third quarter of 2016, and the recommended price for lots of 1,000 pieces is 107 dollars. Truly, it’s a mystery how Chuwi managed to meet the final price of about $ 230, if only the processor pulls half that amount, and a licensed copy of Windows 10 is installed on the laptop.
The N3450 has four cores with a base frequency of 1.1 GHz and the ability to accelerate to 2.2 GHz. Being manufactured by a 14-nanometer process technology, it fits into a TDP of 6 watts, and in fact - at 4 watts. The kernels, of course, are rather weak, but the four of them are doing quite well. In everyday work, the performance is quite enough, and the only thing the processor stumbled on was 4K video (although, of course, it’s silly to watch 4K on a lower resolution screen). As well as Word, and the browser, and even Photoshop started and turned very cheerfully.
Here we should elaborate on the filling Chui. It is quite simple to understand, only the use of bolts of three sizes at once brings some confusion during assembly. Inside, as we see, the main part of the space is occupied by the battery (more precisely, two paired batteries), and the motherboard is quite small. Perhaps it would be more suitable for the tablet. Despite the fact that the processor can do passive cooling and includes throttling only when heated to 105 degrees Celsius, it is still very cool on the cooling system. In fact, it consists of a piece of heat-conducting tape that transfers heat to the tin screen. On the last one, there is still something heat-conducting which is glued on top, which is trying to divert heat further onto a plastic cover, but you and I understand how useless it is.
In the forums, the owners of this notebook write that the first thing they did was to modernize the cooling system with a heat-conducting paste and a copper plate. I think that such a decision is not ideal, but people manage to play Chewie even in World of Tanks.
The memory capacity is 4 GB, and the two chips are soldered directly on the board. It has room for another pair, but so far no one seems to have managed to upgrade at home. But the flash memory can be expanded. The default is 64 GB eMMC, and this, of course, tears. Not in terms of speed, it is surprisingly decent - 165 MB / s reading, 115 MB / s writing. But after installing Windows and the minimum set of programs, gigabyte 16 remains free. You cannot replace the drive, it is also soldered on the board. But there are two alternatives. The easiest way is to insert the microSD card into the slot on the laptop. We will not achieve speed records, but for storing music and movies is the thing. The second option is to use the M.2 slot on the motherboard. There you can insert any SSD with the appropriate interface and close the question.
There is one catch with SSD. According to most Chuwi LapBook owners, it can only be used to store data, but not to install the system. Say, the BIOS is not able to select the boot disk. However, the owners of the new revisions say that you can still boot from the SSD, and even post the corresponding screenshots. Personally, I would prefer the option with microSD, the benefit even with SSD Chuwi will not work much faster, and the card is cheaper.
Again, the overall performance impression is very good. The system may not fly, but it runs briskly. I’ll say a completely seditious thing: I didn’t feel much difference with my penultimate generation MacBook Pro in my work with texts and the browser. Taking into account the difference in price - a very not weak result.
Wi-Fi adapter in Chuwi middle-aged, sample of 2014. The Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 3165 supports dual bands and even 802.11ac at speeds up to 433 Mbps. In fairness, more than this device is not necessary.
The speakers are not used notebook, but absolutely normal. These are often put in inexpensive radios and children's toys. So there is sound, but quiet and not rich shades.
Looking at the panel above the keyboard, we can assume that the laptop is equipped with two microphones, but in reality there is only one. The second hole, alas, props.
In addition to the memory card slot already mentioned, the Chuwi LapBook has two USB ports (one USB 2.0, a second USB 3.0), an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. Modest, but enough.
The claimed battery capacity is 9000 mAh, and the manufacturer promises "four hours of video viewing." In fact, it all depends on the tasks. For example, if you just type something and read Facebook, one charge will last for eight hours. I checked it during a trip from St. Petersburg to Moscow: the Sapsan lasts four hours, and 55% of the charge remained at the arrival in the capital. But if you watch a movie - really, it turns out about four hours. There is no reason to dream about fast-charging technologies: it takes about 3.5 hours to complete a cycle.
Total
Contradictory impressions from the brainchild of Chuwi.
On the one hand, this is the embodiment of the dream of a cheap and lightweight laptop, which you can always carry with you, without worrying about its safety. The set of capabilities and performance margin for working needs is more than sufficient.
On the other hand, such a low price is achieved only by austerity. And in Chuwi LapBook, it is visible in everything, including vital nodes. I got the impression that this machine, even with the most favorable scenario, will not last longer than a year.
And in my case, everything happened even faster. By the end of the second week of operation, I sat down to write a review of the LapBook right on my own, and approximately in the middle the laptop turned off. Yes, so more and did not turn on. Neither from the battery, nor from the power unit - in any way. Fortunately, there was nothing really valuable in the memory, and the half of the review was successfully preserved in the cloud.
Jeff, having learned about the accident, got drunk and offered to urgently send a new copy. But, from the experience of buying goods in foreign online stores, they ask a mere mortal to send them a defective product first, study it for a long time, and only then - maybe - send a replacement. Everything stretches for months.
It is quite possible that only I was not so lucky, because they don’t seem to write in the forums about the sudden deaths of representatives of this model. Are you ready to risk in the name of solid savings? If yes - this is a great option.
But one thing must be understood. Miracles are not that does not happen at all. But all of them are missing. And if the magic ends on you, there is no point in grumbling. For a comparable amount, you can find a tablet on Windows with a diagonal of 10-12 inches and pick up a case for it with a keyboard. Also on the sites of free ads can be 20-25 thousand rubles to find portable machines of past generations, which with proper care will certainly work for at least a year.
And Chuwi, thanks for the interesting attempt. Try again.
PS Preparing photos for the post, I noticed that there is some kind of strange piece of hardware on the memory chips. Yesterday, when examining a corpse, I did not notice it. Well, I took it apart again. It turned out that this is a screen mount, not firmly soldered to the motherboard, and therefore fell off. The mount collapsed on the side and something obviously closed. I removed it and the laptop started working again. Hooray! The question is, really, for how long ...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/401845/
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