There’s a thing my friends have noticed about me: I buy laptops. It’s the thing I do, more than anything else, that makes me subject to capitalism. (Well … there’s also phones. However, in the last month I have had no less than three people ask me if I had laptops to give/sell them. So I think laptops is the biggest thing.) The last few years have been a bit of a slowdown for me, though, in the ‘switching-laptops-every-three-months’ department. This was because I eventually got a Surface Laptop 7, which I used as my main laptop for a good year. It’s fantastic, but there are some software compatibility issues I’ve run into that have made it a little more frustrating than I’d like.

So the Framework Laptop 12 was announced to come out in June, so I made plans to switch to that, mostly because plastic and pink. But then (then!) I put a bid on this laptop on eBay called the Chuwi Minibook X. And my bid was accepted, even though it dropped the price from the already on sale price to something that I would feel fine getting just to try it out.

… It arrived here and I’ve used it for about two weeks now! Here are my current thoughts on this laptop, which I would rate as ‘surprisingly good’:

• The keyboard is cramped. It works, it’s the best you could possibly do in the form factor, but still. A little annoying.
• The touchpad is pretty usable, but has some weird quirks. Sometimes it just misses swipes.
• It doesn’t open one-handed, but it feels very satisfying to open and close!
• The touchscreen is … barely good enough, on Windows (it’s worse on Ubuntu). But that’s okay, I didn’t get it for that.
• The battery life is between 3-7 hours for me, depending on usage: from semi-light games on Windows (3 hours) to text editing on ubuntu with wifi (7).
• All of the apps I’ve tried work and have been fast! … Except for … davinci resolve. Don’t do that to yourself. But hell, Ableton Live runs on it. Somehow.
• The case is some sort of metal. It feels great.
• The screen is good enough and pretty sharp.
• It’s so small. This whole laptop is lighter and smaller than my 11” ipad pro and magic keyboard, which is what I was bringing with me before.
• And it was under $200??? How?

As someone who’d spent the last five years looking for a laptop in this form factor - from the surface go, to the lenovo 10w (look it up!!), to just giving up and having an iPad Pro … I’m so happy that I can have a full x86 laptop in this form factor now. :)

It fits in a larger purse!!! Just … really nice.