The Chuwi LapBook 14.1 Review: Redefining Affordable
by Brett Howse on March 10, 2017 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Compromise is always a word that can evoke the wrong impressions, but it’s a fact of life that every laptop is full of compromise. The art is finding the right balance of compromise to fit into the target budget, while still providing the features that people need and expect. When discussing a laptop with a MSRP under $300 USD, this can be more pronounced than on a $2000 Ultrabook. Luckily, within a few hours of using the Chuwi Lapbook 14.1, you can see that the company has done a great job finding that balance of features and cost. There is a lot to like about this notebook from a Chinese company trying to make a splash on the world stage.
I think it’s the right place to start by talking about the display. It’s been a thorn in my side that any time a low-cost notebook is offered, almost exclusively they are still shipping with TN panels, often with 1366x768 resolutions. Heck, you can still find a TN display on $1000 gaming notebooks. Chuwi, by offering a 1920x1080 IPS display, has already moved a good step ahead of most of the competition. The fact that this is a 14-inch notebook really drives this home, since you don’t feel cramped like you would on a 11-inch model. That’s really only half of the story though, since Chuwi also implemented much thinner bezels than most of the notebooks in this price range, which gives you a much better display in a smaller footprint. Our display testing showed that the IPS is relatively good with color reproduction, although it does only cover less than 65% of the sRGB gamut. That’s not ideal, but it’s also a result of having to use lower cost LEDs to keep the display in-budget. I would think for most people this trade-off is the right kind of compromise. You still get the great viewing angles of IPS, along with very decent contrast on this device, all in a thin-bezel design. This is an easy win for Chuwi.
The overall notebook design is also very well done. The white plastic doesn’t have the premium feel of a metal laptop, but it looks good, it feels good, and is a nice choice in materials for something in this price range. The plastic does not feel brittle, and the matte texture gives plenty of grip. White is always going to be a concern long-term, with dirt and grime building up on it, but this is a sharp looking laptop.
Also, the move to Intel’s Apollo Lake SoC, with the new Goldmont CPU cores, and Gen 9 graphics, is a surprisingly solid platform. It doesn’t offer the snappy response of Intel’s Core lineup, but in light tasks, it is decent. Coupled with 4 GB of RAM helps a lot too, since some of these notebooks can be saddled with only 2 GB of memory, which is tough to use when a web page can use over a Gigabyte on its own. Also, the 64 GB of eMMC is reasonable quick, but it’s the volume here that is important, since 32 GB eMMC devices can be a burden to live with long-term. This isn’t going to set speed records, but a quad-core Goldmont with 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of storage is a nice bit of kit in a notebook in this price range. Just don’t expect to do anything but the lowest end gaming.
Purchasing from a less familiar brand does bring about questions of long-term durability and support, and it’s difficult to comment on this when only using a device for a couple of months, but over the last couple of months it’s been solid. The reports of overheating are somewhat alarming, and although it looks like that can be fixed by the owner, it’s never a great sign. Whether that is just a few devices, or more, it’s tough to say, and Chuwi did not mention this being an issue when questioned on the matter. This one has not shown any signs of this though, and in fact the temperatures are very respectable for a fanless notebook. I have to mention it though.
For those that have the abilities to tackle the CPU heat transfer, it’s also interesting to note that if you remove the bottom of the notebook, there’s a M.2 slot for a SSD, so you can add extra storage this way, as well as through a micro SD card.
My only real complaint with the laptop was the battery life, which came in well under what I was expecting for a laptop with a 45 Wh battery and an Atom CPU. I think the display could be a major cause here though, since to get to our 200 nits brightness, the display was almost set at 100%, which is likely not the most efficient for the backlighting. It still delivered between six and eight hours of battery life, but I must admit I was expecting closer to ten or eleven hours.
Even with the concerns about CPU cooling, which I never experienced, it’s hard not to recommend this notebook. For around $250 USD, you get get decent performance, a 14-inch 1920x1080 display, 4 GB of RAM, and 64 GB of storage. The design is pleasant to look at, with a nice white color and thin display bezels, and it’s only a few pounds, so it’s pretty easy to carry around. As much as it’s fun to see the most powerful systems, it’s also great to see a well-executed take on the low-cost notebook, which is a market that has been neglected somewhat of late.
Chuwi is offering a $24 discount code on Amazon for AnandTech readers. Please enter the code TIUGTN5W at checkout
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BrokenCrayons - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Here's a link to a reviewer that tested the Lapbook with Ubuntu:http://www.cnx-software.com/2017/02/07/installing-...
The results look promising.
tipoo - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
If I could don my tin hat for only a few seconds...Has anyone ever looked at the outbound traffic on these lesser known Chinese designed electronics? There was some controversy with Xiaomi router traffic even iirc.
BrokenCrayons - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
A quick search didn't turn up anything. I don't think they're selling in large enough numbers to attract a lot of interest in sniffing their outbound traffic. It's a reasonable concern, but I don't think Chuwi would actively attempt to perform mass data collection. That's a pretty widely cast net that wouldn't reap much value because you're probably looking at largely home users. The data collection would be almost entirely uninteresting. Maybe some social networking, shopping and general web browsing, someone's hidden inappropriate photos and videos...that kind of thing isn't worth a lot unless you have a specific target in mind and in that case its more prudent to isolate that individual rather than everyone buying your products. Probably the best you'd get is access to someone's personal finances and a deep enough investigation would do a lot of damage to business interests. It's really worth more to establish a good brand reputation and land decent numbers of sales than it is to go through the trouble of getting one or two generations of hardware out there to a small number of people that probably are collectively deep in debt and have little liquid cash.fanofanand - Monday, March 13, 2017 - link
I think the concern would lay more on the government's involvement (The Chinese government is involved with virtually all exported electronics). I agree with every single thing you wrote, but Chinese businesses don't all exist for the sole purpose of making money.Bullwinkle J Moose - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Good point tipooThis article just today and all the turmoil at Samsung and S Korea makes me think we should be looking out for malware popping up in other places
Even places we have considered to be quite reliable up till now
https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/03/preinstal...
Things seem to be escalating but I'm sure the CIA will put a start to any malware threats to this Country (LOL)
Murloc - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
to make such low costs devices you buy standard chips so I don't think they can put anything in it.If chinese-designed chips have espionage software in them, then a bunch of the network infrastructure we rely on is bugged because huawei is everywhere in them. Also phones that use mediatek devices.
So worrying doesn't make sense, also because it's well-known from the various leaks and stuxnet that the NSA and the CIA and mossad don't need hardware to snoop or damage critical infrastructure so the chinese don't either.
Meteor2 - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
Nice review of a nice machine.Good to read about how Goldmont finally played out. MS must've been pissed when Intel cancelled Broxton, but I imagine it's now Intel's turn with Windows on 835 coming. It's a shame Intel did what they did as Goldmont appears to be good silicon.
aryonoco - Friday, March 10, 2017 - link
The main competition in this price category is Chromebooks.The fact that you are pitting this device in your comparisons against a Yoga 3 Pro and a Asus UX305, and not a single Chromebook, says all that needs to be said about the sorry state of AT these days.
Sure, I miss Anand & Brian, but when they left we got Jarred Walton Andrei Frumusanu, who at least knew what they were talking about. Ryan, these new writers you have hired do not stack up.
Ian Cutress - Saturday, March 11, 2017 - link
To clarify an obvious error: Jarred was here 10 years, and both Andrei and Brett were here well before Anand left. Brett has been one of our freelance editors for over two years and attends events such as CES and Build as our Senior Laptop Editor. If you dislike the context of this review, sure, I'll grant you that opinion, but he has a large body of great work under him already. He's not new, he knows the score.On the testing front, it's a factor of what we get in for testing at any given time. Ultimately 90% of the time vendors want us to test their premium units, not something low cost. And there's a thousand low-cost options out there to potentially compare them against. When you've got a freelancer with time for 6-10 reviews a year, most of those will be high-end premium reviews. So if something interesting comes along, even at a super low price point, you compare against what you can or have at the time.
Which in this case, the HP Stream 11 is the perfect comparison point for all these benchmarks. The Yoga/Surface are added to show the comparison to what a high-end notebook investment would be, which users always want to know without having to dig through our results database. We do have some Chromebooks in our database, but they are old. We haven't tested one in a long while (so we don't have one in for retesting), and they were all done by a different reviewer over 1000 miles away at the time. Most of the Chromebooks are Atom based anyway, which is why the HP Stream is still a relevant comparison. Heck, I even recommended the Stream 11 to someone I know a couple of weeks ago, and she loves it (especially now there's a 360-degree hinge version).
fanofanand - Monday, March 13, 2017 - link
I get what the OP is saying but it is misguided in this case. Brett's reviews are solid. Some of the review product choices (case and PSU reviews) have been questionable but other than mobile reviews I haven't seen a real decline in the quality of Anandtech's journalism. Yes, they have had some major misses in the last year (especially in the GPU space) but what they have actually written has been fairly solid content.