Xiaomi aims to knock Apple off its branch with move into computers

Upvoting because you will be proven right!

Anything but Windows or iOS or Chrome. I'm looking forward to seeing the specs. I can hope for heaps of expandable memory, nice IPS 4K non-glare screen, plenty of ports, SSDs, etc.

And Linux.

Interesting

I wonder if "high end" - windows + phone/tablet manufacturer might equal decent display?

Interesting development perhaps...

Linux on Laptop ?

Just ask Asus how well it worked for them.

seriously

what market will this be aimed at?

The bling-loving toy-wankers won't want it. It doesn't have the Apple icon.

Anyone who does serious graphics won't want it. The GIMP is many things, but a replacement for Photoshop is not one. I know. I've been looking for a Photoshop replacement since Adobe went cloudy; Affinity Photo is very nice indeed, is cheap, and isn't cloudy... and much, much better than the GIMP. In addition, Affinity Design may actually be _better_ than Illustrator.

General-purpose users won't want it. Sorry, LibreOffice simply is not as good as iWork. Even after iWork was crippled to make it.... work, for lack of a better term... with iOS. It's not close to MS Office. That's just how it is. LibreOffice is pretty good for what it is, a free office suite. It's simply mediocre at best when compared to non-free office suites. Free only goes so far.

Devs who must work with Windows or Mac or iOS stuff won't want it. How can they run Visual Studio or XCode or whatever?

Gamers won't want it. It can't run Crysis. Or Call of Duty. Or...

Yes, some of the problems can be fixed by application of VMs or WINE or something similar. But why bother when you can get the real thing and not need to go to extra trouble?

I use an ASUS laptop as my main laptop. It's getting a little old. Time for a new machine. Frankly, I'd not even consider replacing it with the new Xiaomi as that machine can't run the software I need to use. (Yes, I really have looked at the GIMP, and LibreOffice. I really have. I'm still using Creative Suite 5.5 because I didn't get CS 6, it was too soon after the last upgrade, and I will never, ever, under any circumstances whatsoever use Creative Cloud. If the GIMP would do what I need I'd long since have dumped Photoshop. It doesn't. Similarly, I've tried to use LibreOffice. Several times. Every time there's a new major release I try again. I currently have v5.0.1 installed and undergoing testing. So far it still doesn't do what I can do with MS Office 2010 and 2011 (Mac) and 2013 and 2016(Mac) and 2015 (beta). I'd love it if it did, Apple has gone cloudy with iWork, and Microsoft is trying hard to go all cloudy, too, and I'm not letting their cloudy crap near my systems any more than I'm letting Adobe's cloudy crap near. It would be beautiful if I could just dump MS Office forever, but I can't. LibreOffice is the best FOSS office suite out there, and it's simply not up to the task.)

Luxury?

While a Linux laptop is not a bad idea - one company sells a specially-configured Linux laptop for seniors who are uncomfortable with computers - positioning one to compete with the Macintosh as a premium-priced item seems several kinds of daft to me. For one thing, people who want a Linux laptop can just buy a cheap Windows one and install Linux for less as far as that goes; but they'd prefer to have the savings from the absence of Windows.

Of course there's a demand for luxury items; but even a Rolex watch has to tell the time. A computer with Linux poses... challenges... in finding desired applications software for it in some cases. The techno-geek can surmount such challenges with ease. The luxury product customer, on the other hand...

I am very impressed with the build quality of my £94 Xiaomi phone, I wait with baited breath to see what they do next.

(Hong Me, aka Red Rice 3G)

Xiaomi MIUI?

"This is a move that might point to a port of the Xiaomi MIUI user interface used on the phones to the laptop and would be consistent with the company’s plans to be a source of content as well as hardware."

I wouldn't be surprised if they used a customised version of Ubuntu for it. Canonical have been working with a major un-named Chinese ODM for a while on exactly this sort of thing.

The OS may carry the Xiaomi brand name and styling, but it would be Ubuntu underneath and have access to Ubuntu's repositories, developers, infrastructure, and security fixes. Canonical have also been working with game developers to get game platforms on Ubuntu.

The standard applications could be hooked into Xiaomi cloud services by default, and probably sync files with Xiaomi phones. Xiaomi could add their own proprietary apps for this pre-installed.

The fact that it wouldn't use the same Android apps from the Xiaomi phones is pretty much irrelevant, since phone apps aren't really written for desktop use anyway.

Drivers and Xiaomi

"I don't know why you're getting down-votes because it's absolutely true. I've had to throw away perfectly good hardware because the drivers were not updated beyond Windows XP too."

And I've gotten to enjoy hand-me-down, perfectly working hardware, because people got rid of it due to it only having XP drivers... but Linux's drivers continued to support the hardware to the present day. People tend to have this fantasy that "Windows supports everything", blurring together support of Windows 98, 2000, XP, 7, and 8/8.1/10, ignoring that newer Windows versions indeed do lose or drop support for older hardware (which may not even be that old.) Linux, once an open source driver comes out the hardware is basically supported forever. In the case of a "binary blob" driver... once the vendor drops support for some hardware, you may be S.O.L. if the binary blob is expected to load straight into the kernel (for most drivers) or X.Org (for video drivers.) You may be fine if there's enough of a wrapper between the blob and kernel or X.Org... you may also be fine if the "driver" runs in user mode (for instance, Linux supports USB done from user mode, and printing in Linux usually is done from user mode too.)

As for the Xiaomi -- I'm not that interested in an Air type device, even half the cost of an Air is pretty high for me. But I'm interested in seeing what the hardware specs are on this bad boy, and see if Xiaomi comes out with lower cost ones. I'm also interested to see if they install some nice Linux distro or something nasty.

Linux is ALMOST there.

It's just the attention to detail that's missing.

Various programs not supporting Ctrl-Tab to move between tabs, etc, etc.

It's all in the details as Apple knows so well, and Apple's customers demand.

Perhaps someone like Xiaomi will invest in sorting out the details, just like Google did with Android, and make real Linux viable on the desktop.

EACH application installed must be made to conform to certain design criteria, or people will get pissed off, and rightfully so.

There are other issues, such as moving away from X11 one day. But those issues are not really any obstacle to end user acceptance.

Drat!

I've just bought a new laptop since the old one died. First thing that I did was to upgrade it from MS Win 8 to Linux Mint - works very nicely, although I'm not keen on HP ImagePad (no mouse buttons).

It came with a 1 year MS Office 365 - which is a waste of money unless I can find someone to give it to.

I've been using GUIs on Unix/Linux for 30 years, all MS Windows on new machines just replaced.

One worry that I have is legal restrictions that may come in as a result of TiSA/TPP that might make it harder for FLOSS.

I am also worried as to what MS may do in a year or two - by which time it will have almost all Windows machines being upgraded in a way that it never has before (the important ones being PCs owned by home users). I can see it introducing changes to protocols and things like .docx files (under false guise of security/... reasons) - which will not be properly documented; so LibreOffice, etc, will be playing catch up even more and MS will be shouting that Open Source software is no good - while pretending that it has not planned this all along.