I have the Chuwi lapbook 14 from last year and it came with just 64gb of emmc storage. I added a 128gb SSD to the empty M.2 slot and ghosted everything over and made it my boot drive. Now I use the emmc as extra storage plus I have a copy of the factory Windows install on it that I can boot to from bios Incase of emergency. It's actually come in rather handy and I'd like to see more manufacturers include a small secondary bootable drive in their systems.
Only thing I can figure is that they originally intended on an eMMC only base model and were stuck with that PCB design when they changed their mind (or the eMMC model exists but just not for export to the west). I wonder where they put the OS; hopefully on the 128 just because trying to do anything with Windows on 32 is a PITA.
According to a company reply on GearBest, Windows is installed on the eMMC. You could probably manually reinstall it to the SSD, but it's silly they are shipping it that way.
I don't use it but is 32gb really not enough for Windows??? My linux system has 24gb which is way over the top with 10+ free... My other with 16 tends to be a bit tight with updates.
Like you said it would not surprise me if they either offer this model in their home market with just eMMC, or the board itself is shared with another device intended for their home market which would be eMMC only.
If you're going to review it, I'm interested to know about the quality of trackpad and keyboard, brightness of the screen, and overall build quality (all those compared to Apple Macbook). Also, I wonder if 4GB of RAM or the processor is causing any issues for Youtube/VLC, Remote Desktop work, and browsing.
I've posted similar concerns about Chuwi in the past, but I think they are worth repeating. Their product support is awful. For example, there are at least three versions of the Lapbook 14.1 that was reviewed here on Anandtech. Some have slower storage, some don't have the BIOS option to install Linux, and some don't have the empty M.2 port. As far as I can tell, these are not different models, but rather changes made after the initial production run that make the laptops worse than the ones reviewers received. There are numerous unresolved threads on their support forums about these issues.
I get that it's a $300 laptop, but a history of changing specs without any way for the consumer to check is problematic.
I bought the Lapbook 14.1 partially based on the Anandtech recommendation. It's been a waste of money for me. The battery was defective and I was unable to get any response from customer support. It's also not easy to find a replacement battery like you would for a Dell, etc. There is no driver support. The drivers on the touchpad are so poor that it is unusable, this is not an exaggeration, the cursor will jump around and shortcuts will be randomly triggered.
I bought one based on the Anandtech recommendation as well. The only good thing about it is the screen. It was embarrassingly slow running Windows. Edge was the only browser that was even close to smooth. Luckily, I got one of the early revisions that still had Linux support, and running Mint KDE on it is much better. It's actually useful for basic tasks now. As you say, the trackpad is basically useless. Mine doesn't jump around, but it misses touches frequently and tap-to-click only works occasionally. Any kind of multitouch (even scrolling) only works about half the time.
Thanks for the feedback! I agree the trackpad is poor and would only use that laptop with a mouse to keep myself sane. If and when we get this new model I am hoping for some improvements.
In my case the production life cycle changes made all the difference. I gut the 12.3 lapbook first after it got reviewed here. The touchpad was interfering constantly, only found out how to disabled much later and they space bar wouldn't work on the right side, which has my 'dominant spacing thumb'.
So I returned it, but kept looking for an alternative. Since none was to be had but the price had dropped by €100, I tried again this summer and got a much better piece, where the keyboard felt generally rather good and the touchpad hardly ever interferes.
Kept it and enjoy it mostly for reading, where the display is at its best, e.g. with dual sided PDFs on the high-res screen.
When a screw got a little loose, I just took them all out for a look and found a) that the source of the relatively high weight has nothing to do with a massive "Aluminum" body, but is actually a steel bar, mounted under the touchpad as "haptic value enhancer", I guess. b) this steel bar is actually the only metal part of the case, whereas everything seems lile molded plastic with a healthy(?) dose of metallic spray paint (could be aluminum particles for all I know).
So I removed the steel bar without any negative impact on tilting that I noticed, because the display doesn't actually open nearly as wide as the renders seem to suggest.
In fact there is very little similarity between the renders on their website and what you actually get: I wonder where that difference becomes illegal; my impression is that they are grossly misrepresenting their product. BTW: The battery also reports only have the advertised capacity, 3400mAh not 5000 in the 12.3.
Apart from the steel bar, the insides are rather empty: Plenty of space left for a bigger battery. The SoC with RAM and everything else hides behind a tin cover, I tooke the advice found somewhere else on the net to apply some generous helping of leftover Noctua paste to have the tin cover and the SoC a warmer relationship.
Prime95 won't throttle in any setting now, but I don't remember it doing that before either: I never get less than 2.1GHz on all cores when there is anything to compute. It can, however, get a little warm and the SSD sensor typicall reads ~60°C.
Of course my phone with its Snapdragon 835 still beats it into shame with much less 'heat' and 8GB of RAM, but the screen cannot compete for reading.
I really would like a passive clamshell screen with a nice big battery pack which just allows me to put my smartphone in as a touchpad... A Korean company did a design like that years ago, there was Asus' tablet/phone combo, there is SentIO I believe offering essentially a DisplayLink screen in notebook form factor, but somehow the most obvious add-on for a phone never seems to become reality (and I don't want to be tied to a vendor like Samsung and their DEX).
Just in case I sound dissatisfied: I'm not. It fills a rather specific niche as a tablet replacement for my Asus Transformer TF101, that has just gotten too slow with today's browsers browsers and the battle of the ad blockers vs. the ad pushers.
It doesn't replace a real notebook or a desktop but also works well enough as a thin client for those bigger machines. Streaming ARK Survival evolved at 'epic' settings on the screen and boasting just how powerful that tiny laptop is, only works with the very naïve but can be fun.
Agree that it's interesting at a $300 price, especially if they don't downgrade the specs after getting good reviews (bit of a risk there). I have a quibble and a suggestion, both related to the battery: 1. The table: Please list the capacity in Watt hours, not amps. I know that most notebooks use the same voltage for their battery packs across their models, but this is not most notebooks, and Chuwi is not (yet?) Dell, HP, Asus etc., where I would simply assume that to be the case. 2. Chuwi, if you would make that same model with a battery twice the capacity, I'd pay $30 more for it. Call it the SEL. Yes, it would add 150-200 grams or so, but, for anything portable, hours of use on battery matters a lot. I think I am not the only one who would gladly carry another 200 g of laptop around in return for twice the usable hours on battery.
Just wanted to address the concern with the company changing specs mid-cycle. To my knowledge (and I've looked into this so if this isn't the case please let me know) Chuwi has done model revisions that have changed or removed items that they were not advertising, such as the removal of the M.2 on the LapBook 14.1, but that device was never listed as having support for additional M.2 unlike some of their other models like the 12.3 which has a separate door for the drive. As far as I'm aware, they've never removed a feature that the device was first advertised to have.
There's also been concern about Linux support based on different revisions, where early models did work and later did not, but they aren't selling this as a Linux laptop.
From the vendor's perspective, when profit margins are so small, and they can redesign a board to be more compact and therefore cheaper, are they not entitled to do that if they have not changed the advertised specifications of the device? Curious to hear your thoughts here. I can see some frustration, but at the same time if you want to lock in support on a model for a long period of time, you generally have to step up to a business class device.
@Brett: Thanks for the reply! I don't expect business class support at this price level, but would like to know that the unit that I might buy will actually match the specs on the mfrs website. Also, when you review this and similar devices, please include information on the drivers (revision etc.), and, if possible, information on the sources for the trackpad, keyboard and screen. Thanks!
Virtually no laptop is advertised as having linux support, yet there is a general understanding that generic x86 hardware will work in linux.
Yes, you might find that your laptop has some obscure bluetooth or wifi chip that is not supported, but the device itself functions fine as a computer.
This is [not] what we are getting with many Intel Atom powered devices, for you can't even install a linux distro!
When you get the new Chuwi device, please try installing Ubuntu 18.04 and Suse Tumbleweed, so we know...
And no, I would not consider it reasonable for that non-advertised feature to change, as I might a non-advertised m.2 slot.
That's fair I guess, but I think it's worth warning people that they've done this in the past, so anything outside of the baseline advertised functions might not exist in the model consumers buy. Maybe this is common with cheap laptops, but I don't usually see a lot of reviews for cheap laptops, so this stands out to me. I'm not saying you ought to do this in a review, but just that I'm probably going to keep doing it in the comments on Chuwi articles and reviews.
However, after digging into this a bit more, it seems that Chuwi also changed the TDP limit on the CPU in later revisions to try to keep the thermals under control. The effect of this is that the CPU doesn't boost past about 1.5ghz, while the original version could hit 2.2ghz. I know Turbo speeds aren't guaranteed, but it should be capable of hitting that speed at least in short bursts. Turbo speed is something they do advertise, and all the benchmarks from the review units will be better than what consumers get now.
Would be awesome if we could get some benchies to see how Gemini Lake performs and how she stacks up against all the old Atom processors to see how far we have come.
A $399 Surface Go kills this thing. At least you get Microsoft support for hardware and software for a few years whereas cheap junk from Chinese OEMs are disposable computers. The Pentium Gold CPU also has much stronger single threaded performance compared to Gemini Lake Atom cores.
I'm happy with my $250 Atom tablet but I bought that years before the Go was announced. If I was looking for a cheap and light Windows machine, I would go for a Go.
Agree that the Surface Go is an interesting machine, but the Chuwi has a 13.3" screen (yes, it's 16:9, but still significantly larger than the Go's), and it is a laptop with an actual keyboard. For me, the Go's screen size is a bit too small (the Surface Pro's or the Chuwi's screen size is about right for my uses), and having to buy the actual keyboard (the cover) for the Surface Go increases the price to the $ 500+ range. All that being said, I have my reservations about the Chuwi, and look forward to an actual review.
Seems like the problems with these devices are multiple... - Often cannot install linux - Atom is terrible performance, especially in Windows - A used Thinkpad from multiple Intel generations ago with an SSD will hands-down smash the performance of this device, give more port options and a replaceable battery, without costing more
Those used laptops are either on the heavy side or lack the battery life of this. If you want portability, long battery life, windows 10, with real keyboard, low price and no noise, this is the thing.
I actually love my Chuwi 14.1. I bought it based on Ars' recommendation. It cost me about 180 euro all in from gearbest, it runs Linux like a breeze, is fast enough and has very long battery life.
I use it as my makerspace laptop - nice & cheap so I don't have to worry about a soldering iron rolling against it or blowing up a USB port with some loose wires on my laptop. Wouldn't risk that with a MacBook :)
But I heard about the spec changes on later models - especially the linux part. That's sad.
I really wonder if this new one will run Linux ok.
Here I made a review about this! Please feel free to comment about it. I liked it for this price. Dont forget to open subtitles! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gogFplBmTkg
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Biathanatos - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Heck yes, decent selection of gates:https://des.gbtcdn.com/uploads/pdm-desc-pic/Electr...
warisz00r - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Not a bad looking Surface Laptop clone. The storage option is a little strange though.SquarePeg - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
I have the Chuwi lapbook 14 from last year and it came with just 64gb of emmc storage. I added a 128gb SSD to the empty M.2 slot and ghosted everything over and made it my boot drive. Now I use the emmc as extra storage plus I have a copy of the factory Windows install on it that I can boot to from bios Incase of emergency. It's actually come in rather handy and I'd like to see more manufacturers include a small secondary bootable drive in their systems.DanNeely - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Only thing I can figure is that they originally intended on an eMMC only base model and were stuck with that PCB design when they changed their mind (or the eMMC model exists but just not for export to the west). I wonder where they put the OS; hopefully on the 128 just because trying to do anything with Windows on 32 is a PITA.cfenton - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
According to a company reply on GearBest, Windows is installed on the eMMC. You could probably manually reinstall it to the SSD, but it's silly they are shipping it that way.PixyMisa - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Yeah, I have a cheap Lenovo with 32GB eMMC. Windows updates are a constant struggle.jospoortvliet - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
I don't use it but is 32gb really not enough for Windows??? My linux system has 24gb which is way over the top with 10+ free... My other with 16 tends to be a bit tight with updates.Brett Howse - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Like you said it would not surprise me if they either offer this model in their home market with just eMMC, or the board itself is shared with another device intended for their home market which would be eMMC only.p1esk - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
If you're going to review it, I'm interested to know about the quality of trackpad and keyboard, brightness of the screen, and overall build quality (all those compared to Apple Macbook). Also, I wonder if 4GB of RAM or the processor is causing any issues for Youtube/VLC, Remote Desktop work, and browsing.heffeque - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Yep, lets compare a $300 laptop with a $1300 one. I know MacBooks are overpriced, but certainly not THAT much.cfenton - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
I've posted similar concerns about Chuwi in the past, but I think they are worth repeating. Their product support is awful. For example, there are at least three versions of the Lapbook 14.1 that was reviewed here on Anandtech. Some have slower storage, some don't have the BIOS option to install Linux, and some don't have the empty M.2 port. As far as I can tell, these are not different models, but rather changes made after the initial production run that make the laptops worse than the ones reviewers received. There are numerous unresolved threads on their support forums about these issues.I get that it's a $300 laptop, but a history of changing specs without any way for the consumer to check is problematic.
nwrigley - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
I bought the Lapbook 14.1 partially based on the Anandtech recommendation. It's been a waste of money for me. The battery was defective and I was unable to get any response from customer support. It's also not easy to find a replacement battery like you would for a Dell, etc. There is no driver support. The drivers on the touchpad are so poor that it is unusable, this is not an exaggeration, the cursor will jump around and shortcuts will be randomly triggered.cfenton - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
I bought one based on the Anandtech recommendation as well. The only good thing about it is the screen. It was embarrassingly slow running Windows. Edge was the only browser that was even close to smooth. Luckily, I got one of the early revisions that still had Linux support, and running Mint KDE on it is much better. It's actually useful for basic tasks now. As you say, the trackpad is basically useless. Mine doesn't jump around, but it misses touches frequently and tap-to-click only works occasionally. Any kind of multitouch (even scrolling) only works about half the time.Brett Howse - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Thanks for the feedback! I agree the trackpad is poor and would only use that laptop with a mouse to keep myself sane. If and when we get this new model I am hoping for some improvements.Hereiam2005 - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Not the atoms please. Windows on atom is really underpowered.abufrejoval - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
In my case the production life cycle changes made all the difference. I gut the 12.3 lapbook first after it got reviewed here. The touchpad was interfering constantly, only found out how to disabled much later and they space bar wouldn't work on the right side, which has my 'dominant spacing thumb'.So I returned it, but kept looking for an alternative. Since none was to be had but the price had dropped by €100, I tried again this summer and got a much better piece, where the keyboard felt generally rather good and the touchpad hardly ever interferes.
Kept it and enjoy it mostly for reading, where the display is at its best, e.g. with dual sided PDFs on the high-res screen.
When a screw got a little loose, I just took them all out for a look and found
a) that the source of the relatively high weight has nothing to do with a massive "Aluminum" body, but is actually a steel bar, mounted under the touchpad as "haptic value enhancer", I guess.
b) this steel bar is actually the only metal part of the case, whereas everything seems lile molded plastic with a healthy(?) dose of metallic spray paint (could be aluminum particles for all I know).
So I removed the steel bar without any negative impact on tilting that I noticed, because the display doesn't actually open nearly as wide as the renders seem to suggest.
In fact there is very little similarity between the renders on their website and what you actually get: I wonder where that difference becomes illegal; my impression is that they are grossly misrepresenting their product. BTW: The battery also reports only have the advertised capacity, 3400mAh not 5000 in the 12.3.
Apart from the steel bar, the insides are rather empty: Plenty of space left for a bigger battery. The SoC with RAM and everything else hides behind a tin cover, I tooke the advice found somewhere else on the net to apply some generous helping of leftover Noctua paste to have the tin cover and the SoC a warmer relationship.
Prime95 won't throttle in any setting now, but I don't remember it doing that before either: I never get less than 2.1GHz on all cores when there is anything to compute. It can, however, get a little warm and the SSD sensor typicall reads ~60°C.
Of course my phone with its Snapdragon 835 still beats it into shame with much less 'heat' and 8GB of RAM, but the screen cannot compete for reading.
I really would like a passive clamshell screen with a nice big battery pack which just allows me to put my smartphone in as a touchpad... A Korean company did a design like that years ago, there was Asus' tablet/phone combo, there is SentIO I believe offering essentially a DisplayLink screen in notebook form factor, but somehow the most obvious add-on for a phone never seems to become reality (and I don't want to be tied to a vendor like Samsung and their DEX).
abufrejoval - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Just in case I sound dissatisfied: I'm not. It fills a rather specific niche as a tablet replacement for my Asus Transformer TF101, that has just gotten too slow with today's browsers browsers and the battle of the ad blockers vs. the ad pushers.It doesn't replace a real notebook or a desktop but also works well enough as a thin client for those bigger machines. Streaming ARK Survival evolved at 'epic' settings on the screen and boasting just how powerful that tiny laptop is, only works with the very naïve but can be fun.
R3MF - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Install linux on it, tell us about how it went.Ubuntu 18.04, and Suse tumbleweed.
eastcoast_pete - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Agree that it's interesting at a $300 price, especially if they don't downgrade the specs after getting good reviews (bit of a risk there). I have a quibble and a suggestion, both related to the battery: 1. The table: Please list the capacity in Watt hours, not amps. I know that most notebooks use the same voltage for their battery packs across their models, but this is not most notebooks, and Chuwi is not (yet?) Dell, HP, Asus etc., where I would simply assume that to be the case.2. Chuwi, if you would make that same model with a battery twice the capacity, I'd pay $30 more for it. Call it the SEL. Yes, it would add 150-200 grams or so, but, for anything portable, hours of use on battery matters a lot. I think I am not the only one who would gladly carry another 200 g of laptop around in return for twice the usable hours on battery.
Brett Howse - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Just wanted to address the concern with the company changing specs mid-cycle. To my knowledge (and I've looked into this so if this isn't the case please let me know) Chuwi has done model revisions that have changed or removed items that they were not advertising, such as the removal of the M.2 on the LapBook 14.1, but that device was never listed as having support for additional M.2 unlike some of their other models like the 12.3 which has a separate door for the drive. As far as I'm aware, they've never removed a feature that the device was first advertised to have.There's also been concern about Linux support based on different revisions, where early models did work and later did not, but they aren't selling this as a Linux laptop.
From the vendor's perspective, when profit margins are so small, and they can redesign a board to be more compact and therefore cheaper, are they not entitled to do that if they have not changed the advertised specifications of the device? Curious to hear your thoughts here. I can see some frustration, but at the same time if you want to lock in support on a model for a long period of time, you generally have to step up to a business class device.
eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
@Brett: Thanks for the reply! I don't expect business class support at this price level, but would like to know that the unit that I might buy will actually match the specs on the mfrs website. Also, when you review this and similar devices, please include information on the drivers (revision etc.), and, if possible, information on the sources for the trackpad, keyboard and screen. Thanks!R3MF - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Virtually no laptop is advertised as having linux support, yet there is a general understanding that generic x86 hardware will work in linux.Yes, you might find that your laptop has some obscure bluetooth or wifi chip that is not supported, but the device itself functions fine as a computer.
This is [not] what we are getting with many Intel Atom powered devices, for you can't even install a linux distro!
When you get the new Chuwi device, please try installing Ubuntu 18.04 and Suse Tumbleweed, so we know...
And no, I would not consider it reasonable for that non-advertised feature to change, as I might a non-advertised m.2 slot.
cfenton - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
That's fair I guess, but I think it's worth warning people that they've done this in the past, so anything outside of the baseline advertised functions might not exist in the model consumers buy. Maybe this is common with cheap laptops, but I don't usually see a lot of reviews for cheap laptops, so this stands out to me. I'm not saying you ought to do this in a review, but just that I'm probably going to keep doing it in the comments on Chuwi articles and reviews.However, after digging into this a bit more, it seems that Chuwi also changed the TDP limit on the CPU in later revisions to try to keep the thermals under control. The effect of this is that the CPU doesn't boost past about 1.5ghz, while the original version could hit 2.2ghz. I know Turbo speeds aren't guaranteed, but it should be capable of hitting that speed at least in short bursts. Turbo speed is something they do advertise, and all the benchmarks from the review units will be better than what consumers get now.
StevoLincolnite - Monday, August 13, 2018 - link
Would be awesome if we could get some benchies to see how Gemini Lake performs and how she stacks up against all the old Atom processors to see how far we have come.serendip - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
A $399 Surface Go kills this thing. At least you get Microsoft support for hardware and software for a few years whereas cheap junk from Chinese OEMs are disposable computers. The Pentium Gold CPU also has much stronger single threaded performance compared to Gemini Lake Atom cores.I'm happy with my $250 Atom tablet but I bought that years before the Go was announced. If I was looking for a cheap and light Windows machine, I would go for a Go.
eastcoast_pete - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Agree that the Surface Go is an interesting machine, but the Chuwi has a 13.3" screen (yes, it's 16:9, but still significantly larger than the Go's), and it is a laptop with an actual keyboard. For me, the Go's screen size is a bit too small (the Surface Pro's or the Chuwi's screen size is about right for my uses), and having to buy the actual keyboard (the cover) for the Surface Go increases the price to the $ 500+ range. All that being said, I have my reservations about the Chuwi, and look forward to an actual review.IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Not this Pentium "Gold".The Surface Go's chip is really slow.
Jorgp2 - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Any idea if the TDP can be unlocked?xx0xx - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Seems like the problems with these devices are multiple...- Often cannot install linux
- Atom is terrible performance, especially in Windows
- A used Thinkpad from multiple Intel generations ago with an SSD will hands-down smash the performance of this device, give more port options and a replaceable battery, without costing more
Hereiam2005 - Tuesday, August 14, 2018 - link
Those used laptops are either on the heavy side or lack the battery life of this.If you want portability, long battery life, windows 10, with real keyboard, low price and no noise, this is the thing.
BajantheLycan - Wednesday, August 15, 2018 - link
$300. BACK. LIT. KEYBOARD.GekkePrutser - Thursday, August 16, 2018 - link
I know, right! Sounds really good. The case looks very well designed too. Definitely a step up over the 14.1 which I have.GekkePrutser - Thursday, August 16, 2018 - link
I actually love my Chuwi 14.1. I bought it based on Ars' recommendation. It cost me about 180 euro all in from gearbest, it runs Linux like a breeze, is fast enough and has very long battery life.I use it as my makerspace laptop - nice & cheap so I don't have to worry about a soldering iron rolling against it or blowing up a USB port with some loose wires on my laptop. Wouldn't risk that with a MacBook :)
But I heard about the spec changes on later models - especially the linux part. That's sad.
I really wonder if this new one will run Linux ok.
Wardriver - Friday, August 24, 2018 - link
Hi to everybodyI'm really interested to Chuwi lapbook SE, but i'm not sure about 4gb of RAM. Do you think they could be upgradable?
Thanks
chuwi - Sunday, September 16, 2018 - link
Here I made a review about this! Please feel free to comment about it. I liked it for this price. Dont forget to open subtitles! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gogFplBmTkg