“Born for enthusiasts” is the initial impression left by Xiaomi, a mobile phone manufacturer. Over the past few years of continuous growth, Xiaomi Technology’s products have expanded beyond just mobile phones to include smartphones, smart devices, digital peripherals, and even daily necessities. Recently, Xiaomi once again expanded its product range by launching two laptop models— the Xiaomi Notebook Air 13.3 with a dedicated graphics card, and the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5 with an integrated graphics card, both produced by Xiaomi’s ecological chain enterprise, Tianmi Technology in Beijing.
Both of these laptops feature an ultra-thin design. For instance, the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5, which I am experiencing, has a 12.5-inch screen and utilizes the ultra-low power Intel Core M series processor, lacking the 940MX dedicated graphics card found in its 13.3-inch sibling. Therefore, the performance that this Xiaomi notebook can provide is not exactly “born for enthusiasts”. So, how does it actually perform?
Upon first seeing the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5, you might feel, like I did, that it has a strong “fruit flavor”—after all, the aluminum alloy material and highly integrated body design are quite similar to Apple’s MacBook. However, upon closer inspection, its design style leans more towards the earlier “loud but not much substance” Google Chromebook Pixel. Nevertheless, if you happen to like the sharp, minimalist style like I do, the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5 is still visually appealing and has a nice feel to it.
▲Measured thickness (when closed) is within 13mm, considering measurement errors, consistent with the claimed thickness of 12.8mm.
This laptop features a logo-less surface design, with the official saying being, “Nothing means anything is possible.” It turns out that the designer made a bold decision when designing the Xiaomi Notebook: to remove the logo on the front, resulting in a 100% clean front surface.
▲The clean front without a logo means that every corner can be personalized with body stickers.
The minimalist design of the body also brings about a problem: the expandability of this laptop is also “minimal”. It has only one HDMI port, one standard USB 3.0 port, one headphone jack, and a Type-C port that also serves as a charging port at 5Gbps. Without the use of a docking station, it can still meet the mainstream user’s needs for external USB drives and video output.
▲Overview of ports
The display is a 12.5-inch 1080p (non-touch) with a common 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio. The developers reduced the distance between the display panel and the protective glass to 0.2mm, which reduces glare caused by light refraction and improves the screen’s usability in bright light. Additionally, the narrow bezel design (on the sides) is quite advantageous among models in the same price range. The higher screen-to-body ratio provides a larger display area under the premise of a small body, with the entire back being covered by a piece of hard edge-to-edge glass, creating a seamless visual effect.
▲Screen color gamut measured
Regarding the keyboard, Xiaomi claims that the island-style keyboard on the Air 12.5 is a “full-size backlit keyboard”; however, it is not a full-size keyboard with 104 keys, but rather refers to the key area being the same as that of a desktop keyboard. The keyboard’s key travel is 1.9mm, and the 1.3mm key travel feedback is clear and strong, without the feeling of hitting a hard object. Each key has undergone a four-corner test, and the tactile feeling upon finger contact is quite mild. If users are using it late at night, there is backlighting assistance with a brightness of 3 nits. The actual experience shows that the keyboard feel of the Xiaomi notebook is quite good.
In contrast to the keyboard, the touchpad of the Air 12.5 is surprisingly good. Unlike the sandblasted finish of the entire machine, the touchpad, which has a silky feel, is covered with a thin layer of glass. The touchpad maintains a uniform color with the keyboard and metal palm rest; it also supports multi-touch and Windows 10’s three-finger swipe gestures—two-finger swipe for scrolling through documents, websites, and more; two-finger pinch for zooming in or out; three-finger tap to summon Cortana; three-finger swipe to preview the task view, browsing all tasks on the computer; four-finger tap to summon the action center. The Xiaomi notebook does not come with a touchscreen, but this touchpad, which has a good feel and sensitivity, can still provide some “touch” experience in operation.
▲Xiaomi claims that the touchpad uses a coated silver insulating material, which has almost no impact on capacitive sensitivity.
Like the Huawei MateBook I experienced before, performance is clearly not the strong point of the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5. However, for most students, non-gaming users, and even business people, its performance is certainly sufficient. It has decent disk performance, the ability to decode 4K high-bitrate videos, and a smooth Windows 10 system experience. I played a few rounds of League of Legends on the Air 12.5 at 1080p resolution with medium graphics settings and achieved an average frame rate of 42 fps.
▲Hardware decoding of a 60Mbps 4K video (H.264 encoding) showed a processor usage of only about 7%.
▲League of Legends at 1920×1080 medium quality averaged 42 fps, with some complex scenes dropping to about 35 fps. For users who occasionally play casual online games, its performance is generally adequate.
PCMark8 Home accelerated scored a total of 2865 points, with a battery life (screen brightness at 75%) of 4 hours and 19 minutes, indicating that this computer is sufficient for most office and leisure tasks; it can also meet the usual needs for short business trips and study— I adjusted the brightness down to 60% and used it continuously for 6 hours and 20 minutes (daily light use, time for reference only).
▲PCMark8 Home accelerated total score of 2865 points, with battery life (screen brightness at 75%) of 4 hours and 19 minutes.
▲We specifically drained the battery completely to test the charging speed of the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5. After charging for 30 minutes (while powered on), Windows showed that 45% of the battery had been charged; after 1 hour and 8 minutes, the battery was fully charged.
▲The charger supports fast charging, similar to the principle of mobile phone fast charging, but the charger for the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5 has a maximum power of 45W.
Due to the use of the Intel Core M low-power (TDP 4.5W) processor and SSD, the Air 12 has a fanless design. So, how is its heat dissipation? After simulating the processor’s full load with Prime95 for 30 minutes, the processor core temperature of this laptop was around 55°C, while the maximum temperatures on the front and back of the body were 45.3°C and 46.2°C respectively, and the keyboard area did not get hot enough to cause discomfort during normal use.
▲After simulating the processor’s full load with Prime95 for 30 minutes, the core temperature was around 55°C.
▲The M.2 SSD from Samsung’s CM871a uses a SATA 3.0 channel, achieving read and write speeds (acting as the system disk) of 429MB/s and 378MB/s respectively, which overall reaches the typical level of mainstream SATA SSDs.
After a few days of actual experience, the performance of the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5 is quite standard. Whether it is daily office work, simple image processing, or most high-definition video playback, it handles them quite easily, and its noise-free operation and reasonable heat generation add to its user-friendliness. So, what else can be done with a Windows laptop that can only be said to have adequate performance?
Android-x86 is an Android operating system that runs on x86 architecture PCs, designed by foreign engineers as an open-source platform that can be used with 32-bit or 64-bit processors. The main purpose of the Android-x86 project is to provide a complete Android system solution for the x86 platform. This project provides a complete and feasible source code tree, accompanying documentation, and Live CD and Live USB, allowing for secondary development. Compared to various “Windows version Android emulators” circulating online, the main difference of Android-x86 is that it does not rely on another system and can independently boot and run on standard PC hardware platforms. Moreover, Android-x86 has a significant difference from many Linux distributions: although it is based on the Linux kernel, it can run most Android apps. This means you can use fully functional apps like WeChat on your computer, and thanks to the powerful performance of the PC, running large games and multi-window operations becomes effortless.
▲The Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5 successfully runs the Remix OS PC version, showing that the Core M processor has no pressure facing numerous Android platform games.
After a simple operation, we successfully installed the relatively mature domestic Android-x86 system—Remix OS PC version on the Xiaomi Air 12.5. Due to the lower hardware overhead of the Android system compared to Windows, it runs very smoothly on the Air 12.5, which can run Windows 10 smoothly. With the laptop’s keyboard and external mouse, games like NBA2K16, Dota Legend, and Sword Hero World become quite enjoyable. I wonder if Xiaomi will launch a similar Android x86 desktop version system? Perhaps a customizable Android system could be the “MIUI PC version”‘s destination, and we will wait and see.
Final Thoughts
After the experience, what impressed me most about the Xiaomi Notebook Air 12.5 was its touchpad. The touchpad coated with glass on this Xiaomi notebook can be considered a subtle surprise, reflecting the designer’s insight into the pain points of laptop users. This perfect support for native Windows 10 gestures is likely also welcomed by Microsoft as an upstream vendor.
So, what significance does a product like the Xiaomi Notebook, which is not so “enthusiast-oriented”, have for us? In a way, the Xiaomi notebook and Huawei laptops can be seen as a fresh breeze in the vast sea of PCs. At the price point of 3499, it can be considered a quality product. If you need a laptop for typing, browsing the internet, watching shows, or business trips, and have requirements for portability, craftsmanship, design, and price, it would be a product with good cost performance. As for the acceptance of this brand in the PC market, only time will tell.
