Chuwi's $449 Unibook: A Cheap Laptop That's a Funhouse Mirror of the MacBook Neo
Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo
Chuwi's Unibook, priced at $449, is one of the few laptops to undercut Apple's MacBook Neo, but it's a mixed bag. It offers a decent keyboard, plenty of ports, and easy upgradeability, but suffers from a dim, washed-out screen, a terrible trackpad, and a broken driver support page. The preinstalled Windows includes suspicious software, and a clean reinstall is a driver-hunting adventure. Only for patient tinkerers.
It's a trackpad that makes you glad for tap-to-click.
- freetonik
>The Unibook’s keyboard is pretty good, and its trackpad is pretty bad.
Just like 98% of non-Apple laptops. Amazing how after all these years nobody could replicate the feel of macbook's trackpads.
- pizza234
As a previous owner of a Chuwi laptop, I think Chuwi is a wasted opportunity. They essentially make product bottom-quality knockoffs, at the lowest possible price.
If they just decided to invest, say, 20% more on quality, they'd have very competitive products - but they just don't.
- alexpotato
> Some others have had some success getting this stuff working, but it wasn’t something I spent much time on for this review.
One of the unexpected benefits of LLMs is that they make figuring out random Linux issues a breeze.
Personal story:
- I have a separate /home partition
- This means I can just re-install to the main / partition when I OS upgrade
- Re-install some packages and all of my configs from /home/.local, /home/.config etc all come back
This worked great for years but my Firefox kept using lots of CPU. Fire up a free LLM from OpenCode and it immediately figured out that I had a "blacklisted" GPU rendering FF config. This was most likely from when I had a non-GPU laptop. The LLM made a script to back up my config, remove the blacklisted config and then I was back up and running.
- codingisfreedom
I will never buy another laptop with less than a 500 nits display, no matter its specs/price.
I can’t believe virtually every other manufacturer is still making laptops with 250-300 nits.
Spending a full day looking at a dim, washed-out screen is just the worst experience ever. The fact that out of all manufacturers, Apple, which is considered the “expensive” and “premium” brand, made the Neo with 500 nits at that price point is just amazing to me. The rest have no excuse for putting these displays in laptops anymore.
- markvdb
This looks like not too bad a little budget machine. The hardware is just very recent, with Linux kernel support caught up so recently that it hasn't shown up in distros yet. Not a perfect screen or trackpad is to be expected at this price level.