The Very Affordable Chuwi Unibook Is Indeed Too Good To Be True

Usable But Problematic

The Macbook Neo quickly turned out to be too good to be true, it’s price jumped $100 almost immediately and there are concerns about the life of the SSD because of the small amount of RAM included in the laptop.  The same is true of the PC side of low cost laptops; Dell, Lenovo and others released Wildcat Lake based systems are all $699+, the only way to get a laptop at the originally promised $599 is to buy it via their student programs.

That disappointment could lead you to seek out alternatives, such as the Chuwi’s $449 Unibook laptop that Ars Technica recently reviewed.  It has an Intel Wildcat Lake CPU, 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage at a very attractive price, however in person there are some challenges you might not expect.  If you were planning on buying a Unibook and wiping out any bundled software by installing Windows from scratch you’ve got some work ahead of you.

Ars Technica discovered that Windows Update couldn’t install all the required drivers.  Thankfully they pulled out the old SSD before imaging as they had to pop it back in and use DSIM to export a list of every third party driver installed from the factory, and then track them down for the fresh install.  It did eventually work, apart from the audio, though recently that has been an issue even with expensive laptop models from better known OEMs.

The battery life was worth mentioning, the 53 WHr battery lasted for nearly 15 hours.  Overall, the software and driver issues, the fact that BIOS updates are likely to be rare and some issues they had with the trackpad and other options led Ars to decide not to recommend the Chuwi Unibook but it is worth taking a look at if you think the price makes it attractive enough to try to make the Unibook work for you.