Lately, laptops are achieving the same status as smartphones, delivering good performance without breaking the bank. Further, they have become lighter, brighter and faster but all these at a reasonable pricing. Lastly, most of them look like graduates from the MacBook school, which is not at all a bad thing.
Xiaomi has been having an impressive run with its laptop portfolio, delivering at a constant pace. After Notebook Pro and Notebook Ultra, this time they have something called Xiaomi Notebook Pro 120G where the number stands for the screen refresh rate.
Welcome to the ecosystem
The company is slowly getting out of the mindset that being inexpensive wins the day. The 120G is not exactly a cheap laptop but for its price, it packs in enough power. It has competition in the form of Samsung Galaxy Book2 and Asus VivoBook S14 OLED but there’s something to remember. As we dive deeper into a brand, we are getting into ecosystems. For example, our journey with a brand may begin with a phone, expand into the TV zone and then maybe even a laptop. So if I have a Xiaomi phone and a TV, why not a laptop?
There are a lot of things to like about this laptop with a matte aluminium finish. It’s a clean design with rounded corners, slim bezels and a fantastic keyboard. Highly portable, it can easily slip into any bag and going by the looks, durability shouldn’t be a problem, at least that’s what we felt over two weeks. Weighing around 1.4kgs, it can easily be carried from one place to another.
The laptop is compact enough to be carried around
Every little thing adds up
At a glance, a few things win over the user. First, there is a fingerprint scanner in the power button and it works very fast. Second, there is a small hole near the webcam; this is where the ambient light sensor is and it changes the brightness of the screen depending on the lighting in the room. It’s a small but important feature to have.
Turning the laptop over, the bottom-firing speakers are among the loudest you will find at this price point while the tuning is quite good. It may not be able to deliver a lot of bass but it surely has depth. On the ports front, you are covered well with a Thunderbolt 4, HDMI 2.0, USB-A, USB-C and 3.5mm headphone jack.
Perhaps the only thing that Xiaomi could have done better is in the webcam department, which now rocks a 720p option. Now, this is as good (or bad) as on any other laptop but it certainly gets a video call done properly. What I would like to see from all brands is upgrading to a better webcam because we are doing more videoconferences than ever before.
Coming to the display, you get a 14-inch IPS display and that is a very good quality display. Videos look crystal clear while colours are true to life. There is 100 per cent sRGB coverage, so the machine is perfect for photo editing. Do I miss having an OLED screen? Frankly, this is more of a productivity device and I wouldn’t have cared much for an OLED panel here. It’s a smooth 120Hz panel that doesn’t draw too much battery. Keeping the refresh rate high and brightness to around 50-60 per cent, you can get around six hours of on-screen time and with the high refresh off, around 7.5 hours. But it all depends on the kind of work that gets done.
The keyboard and trackpad have zero flex and are comfortable to work with
Let’s talk about performance
Xiaomi has delivered an efficient processor in the form of 12th Gen Intel Core i5 12450H with NVIDIA MX550 graphic processor and 16GB LPDDR5 RAM. Plus, there is the latest 512GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. All this means you will not have any reason to complain about the machine slowing down.
The workflow that I have involves some photo editing on Photoshop, simple 1080p video editing on Adobe Premiere Pro, a whole lot of browsing, the usual office-related suite from Microsoft, video calling and occasional gaming. All these things can be managed on the machine. A game like Valorant can be played but try not to get into high graphic settings for complicated games. There are two fans to take care of heating issues and it certainly delivers.
Complementing the performance is a full-size keyboard with keys that are well spaced out. Typing is a pleasure and the trackpad is big with enough space on the palm rest. There is backlighting on the keyboard but it could have been slightly brighter.
Should you get it?
As we go deeper into any ecosystem, we will go for products from the same company. What I would like to see is what extra features Xiaomi can deliver to its phone users, like what Samsung has done. That the company is delivering laptops at regular intervals proves there is some sort of strategy involved. As for Xiaomi Notebook Pro 120G, it has ‘hit’ written all over because of its no-nonsense approach.
The laptop comes with a strong hinge
At a glance
Device: Xiaomi Notebook Pro 120G
Price: Rs 74,999 (first sale on September 20)
Ports: Type-C USB 3.2 Gen 2 (for charging and data transfer), thunderbolt 4 (for charging and data transfer), type-A USB 3.1 Gen 1, HDMI 2.0 (4K resolution, up to 60Hz), combo audio jack
High notes
- Compact, lightweight
- Enough processing power
- Excellent keyboard and trackpad
- Perfect for office work and, to an extent, gaming
Muffled note
- 720p webcam could have been better