Michael G

What if the kind of laptop you’re looking for just isn’t available from any of the major or even minor manufacturers? You know exactly what you want out of a laptop, and while quite a few fulfill many of your requirements, the requirement that matters most just isn’t being made. It’s not a case of “too expensive” or “too cheap” – simply nobody will sell it to you. From HP, Dell, Apple, down to smaller and local OEMs, none of them can serve your particular set of needs. For me, that particular requirement, that particular need is that of the laptop with an 8″ to 10″ screen size. Even the most portable laptops sold by well-known brands today stop at 13″, often even 14″, with nowhere to go but up. I currently have a 13.3″ laptop – an otherwise excellent XPS 13 9370 with a gorgeous 4K display – but as much as I love it, it’s just too big and heavy for me. I want something smaller, no bigger than roughly 10″. Why? Well, I use my laptop in exactly two locations: on the couch in one of our two living rooms, or in bed (okay that’s technically three locations). That’s it. I work from home on my workstation, I play games on my gaming PC, so I don’t need big performance on the road, nor do I need a big portable display to make working on the go bearable. On top of all this, I have two small kids running around the house, so a laptop that is easier to quickly close and put out of harm’s way is very welcome. And considering the most intensive workload it’ll ever have to contend with is playing YouTube video, I don’t need the latest Core i7 or Apple M3 either. Why not a tablet, then? First and foremost, I want to use a desktop operating system, not Android or iOS, since writing OSNews posts or doing a quick translation for my job are not fun experiences on mobile operating systems. On top of that, a tablet with a keyboard accessory often makes use of a kickstand and flappy keyboard, which are cumbersome to use on the couch, in bed, or on your lap. The exception here would be the iPad with a Magic Keyboard, but that’s an incredibly expensive affair and an Apple product, so obviously a no-go. Luckily, while the kind of small laptop I’m looking for is not available from one of the major OEMs, there are a small number of specialised OEMs that do focus on making small laptops. Roughly, the devices they make fall into one of three pricing categories. First, there’s the high-end – these usually start at around €800 or so and get well over €1000, and have a decent set of specs, often focused on gaming by opting for AMD APUs. A major player in this market is GPD, who’ve been offering products in this segment for years, and are actually a decently well-known brand at this point, even being featured on major YouTube channels like Linus Tech Tips. Then there’s the very low end, a market segment drowning in the exact same 7″ laptop priced at €250 or so, sold under a variety of brand names, sporting the same low-end Celeron chip and rather crappy display. It’s also quite thick, made out of cheap plastic, and every review I’ve seen of these are not particularly positive. Unless you know what you’re getting into, do not buy these. They’re e-waste trash. In recent times, however, a middle segment has slowly started to take shape, coming in price points in between the low and high end, with reasonable specifications and build quality, without going overboard. This was exactly what I was looking for. Aside from price and specifications, mini-laptops also come in a variety of different input layouts. Being smaller than other laptops, some compromises will have to be made, and it’s this particular aspect that will most likely play a major role in which models appeal to you. The gaming-focused mini laptops will often come with dual joysticks and face buttons, while other models will come with a more traditional keyboard and trackpad, and the smallest laptops in this category ditch the trackpad in favour of a little sensor pad in the top-right of the keyboard, or a ThinkPad-style nipple. Having kept and eye on this market for years now, I knew exactly what I was looking for: I wanted a traditional keyboard and touchpad layout, with medium specifications, a capable display, and all-metal construction, for no more than roughly €400-500. Clearly, the time to strike was now, as the small, budget-oriented OEM Chuwi had just updated its 10″ mini laptop with Intel’s latest low-power processor, the N100. The Chuwi Minibook X (2023), as it’s called, has an all-aluminium construction, and comes with quite decent specifications, and I managed to snag a new model through their eBay store for a mere €320 (I asked them for a discount down from €400 , and they gave it; I did not mention who I was or that I run OSNews). It has the aforementioned Alder Lake Intel N100 – released earlier this year, it’s an Intel 7 processor with 4 cores and 4 threads (so no hyperthreading) with a maximum turbo frequency of 3.4 Ghz, with a TDP of just 6 W. It’s not going to compare well to the various Core i3/i5/i7 processors, of course, but considering the type of device, it makes perfect sense to opt for something like the N100. Furthermore, this device is packing 12 GB of LPDDR5 RAM running at 4800 Mhz, and my model comes with a 512 GB SSD. The display is a 10.3″ panel with a native resolution of 1920×1200, with a refresh rate of only 50Hz (although some people managed to reach 60Hz and even 90Hz), and support for touch. Ports-wise, it has two USB-C ports (one marked as compatible with charging – I haven’t dared