The Chuwi AeroBook Review: One Small Step For Chuwi
by Brett Howse on June 21, 2019 8:00 AM ESTFinal Words
Chuwi took a bit of a gamble moving from the Atom platform they were comfortable with, to Intel’s Y series of Core processors, and overall, it is a gamble that has paid off well. Even the Skylake-era Core m3-6Y30 found in the AeroBook offers a noticeable improvement in performance compared to the previous LapBooks we have tested from the manufacturer, which featured Atom-based processors. The GPU gets an especially large bump, moving from 12 Execution Units on Atom, to 24 on Core, and although the GPU is still anemic for gaming tasks, the extra performance is still welcome.
Chuwi has mimicked the MacBook with their design, and it’s hard to fault them on the execution. The aluminum exterior offers a premium feel, even though some of the notebook is still plastic. Chuwi also offers a modern slim-bezel design, which shrinks the 13.3-inch notebook and makes it even more portable. They’ve done that while keeping the webcam in the correct location though, so it’s nicely achieved.
The laptop is very light, coming in at 1.26 kg / 2.77 lbs, and coupled with the thin design and small bezels, makes the AeroBook very easy to take with you. When you consider the price, it’s very impressive that they’ve designed such a great looking device while still keeping it thin and light.
Not all was done well though. The display, while continuing to be a 1920x1080 IPS panel like they offer on some of their other notebooks, is well off the mark in terms of color accuracy. Its only real saving grace is that it is able to achieve the sRGB gamut, but that’s a low bar. A similarly priced Surface Go from Microsoft comes with an individually calibrated display. Coupled with the poor accuracy is mediocre contrast. The 1920x1080 IPS is appreciated, but also expected in this price range; and other than the resolution and wide viewing angles, the rest of the display is sub-par.
Chuwi has often struggled with battery life, which could be somewhat attributed to smaller battery capacities to hit their price target. That is certainly the case here again, with just a 38 Wh battery when the typical 13.3-inch Ultrabook has closer to 50 Wh or more. Furthermore, Chuwi has not done any real work on the platform power draw, and the Chuwi AeroBook has some of the highest idle power draw of any notebook in its class, so when coupled with a smaller than average battery, overall battery life is well off the mark.
There are other areas where Chuwi has saved money, but they aren’t as big of an impact. The 1x1 wireless solution is there as a cost-savings measure, but they’ve at least gone with the Intel Wireless adapter, meaning it’s slow, but rock solid. Chuwi has also opted for a slower SATA SSD, but considering most of the competition in this price range would still offer a spinning drive, or eMMC storage, the 256 GB SSD is most certainly welcome. Chuwi also makes it incredibly easy to replace the SSD with a dedicated cover on the bottom of the laptop for easy access. The single-channel RAM is also a cost-saving measure, but at least there’s a solid 8 GB of memory, meaning this laptop isn’t going to run out of RAM on most light tasks.
There’s no doubt that the AeroBook is an improvement over some of the other Chuwi models, while still keeping a great design, but, and this is always the key, Chuwi has to be especially careful when their price creeps up, because they are no longer competing against poor machines. But they’ve continued to offer the value-add bonues compared to their competition. The AeroBook would be something I would compare against the original ASUS Core M laptop – the UX305 – where they offer enough RAM and storage to make this device usable, but keep the price down. The AeroBook doesn’t quite hit the same level of fit and finish of the ASUS Zenbook, but offers similar performance and specifications at hundreds of dollars less.
If you need great battery life, this Chuwi AeroBook is not for you. But for a general purpose laptop, it offers a great design, reasonable performance, and as much RAM and SSD storage as machines that cost quite a bit more. So when you factor that in, the $499 MSRP is still rather attractive. If Chuwi is going to continue to try and compete in higher brackets, they will need to address some of their faults, but at the $500 range, the Chuwi AeroBook still offers a lot for the price.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
51 Comments
View All Comments
bubblyboo - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link
US-warranty vs no warranty is also pretty unfair.nandnandnand - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link
Marlin and levizx are right. The sucker price is for suckers. There's something on sale in any given category at any moment. Go back a year or two and the main difference in a laptop will be the specific CPUs and GPUs, so judge price/perf accordingly.systemBuilder - Friday, July 19, 2019 - link
You can think of the "m" series of processors as "bringing the Atom Slowness to the Pentium Line of CPUs". In other words, when you spend 90% of your life thermally throttled because the device is stupid-thin AND stupid-light, you suffer a great deal... I prefer my Acer Chromebook c720 i3.Urthor - Saturday, June 22, 2019 - link
You have to understand the pressure that Intel puts on sellers with the prices of its CPUs to OEM'sSecondhand laptops have been FAR cheaper for a LOT longer because ultimately Intel's control of the key part stops them discounting.
mkozakewich - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link
Chuwi are a cheap manufacturer that have been known to ship cheap parts that fail, and they won't respond to warranty requests unless you can post a video to YouTube (seriously, what) showing some kind of physical damage.yeeeeman - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link
For 250$, maybe, but for 500...no wayabufrejoval - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link
I got the Lapbook 12.3 after the review here.The main attraction was the high-resolution (3k) screen and totally silent operation for e-books and surfing. And while my first unit had a defective space-bar and completely unusable touchpad (way too sensitive), the second one was rather better with both, and delivered on the performance and usability criteria.
I moved Windows 10 immediately to a 128GB M.2 SSD and then put a Ubuntu 18.04 on the eMMC, mostly because I needed a little more space anyway and to avoid slowing the machine via the storage.
The disappointment came when I unpacked the ChuWi in the hotel after a flight and found it all bent out of shape from a battery that had gassed out, because a replacement battery cannot be bought from anyone or anywhere: ChuWi simply does not sell spare parts.
It’s easy enough to replace, a couple of screws and unplugging a connector, but without a spare part, it’s life is essentially ended before a year is full.
After a bit of howling and screaming they did offer me to send it to HongKong for a free replacement, and I am torn between using it just on external power or actually see if it gets back fixed.
I’m not sure I can attribute the battery failure to a quality defect on their side, though.
It’s the second time the very same thing happened to me and the other one was a Gigabyte mobile workstation at 10x the price (no issue with the spare parts there).
I believe the fault actually lies with Windows.
When I hibernate a notebook, I expect it to stay powered off until I power it up again. But Windows these days has so much AI, it knows better and seems to wake up hibernated (not just suspended) machines for things like regular reports to Redmont.
Since some of my machines are configured to actually boot Ubuntu, CentOS or Fedora by default, that is especially useless, because the Windows induced wakeup has them boot an OS that didn’t even ask for that.
In the confines of rucksack in an overhead locker then, these machines can easily overheat and cook the batteries until they’re dead.
I have tried very hard to find a recipe to keep these wakeups from happening. I really do like the ability to keep documents and VMs open (and hibernated on SSD), while I travel.
So far the only way to avoid these wakeups, seems to be removing the power supply before hibernating the machines: At that point “hibernate” seems to be actually understood by Microsoft as meaning “don’t wake automagically so you don’t fry batteries by accident in an airplane”.
I have started using that approach on commutes, but for longer trips, I do shut down those laptops, because the risk of unwarranted wakeups is too high.
So there you have it: ChuWis don’t disappoint as hardware per se, but spare parts or service are not included at this price.
olafgarten - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link
Windows doesn't wake hibernated laptops unless some hardware connected to it issues a wakeup signal. You either accidentally hit the on button or you have a faulty keyboard wakeup key.Also if you are using Ubuntu as the main OS, you are probably booting into Grub and so Windows has no control over the wakeup.
abufrejoval - Friday, June 21, 2019 - link
And so would I have sworn, perhaps not on my life, but at least a case of beer...I was far more inclined to blame the flying or even the security scanners at the airport.
Yet major problems there would be hard to hide...
And then I got a Lenovo S730 ultrabook to replace it and observed it for days.
Hibernated it (hybrid disabled) and was very surprised to watch it power up and boot whatever happend to be configured as primary in the BIOS, ... and that changed between Windows 10 1903 and Fedora 30, depending on what was more frequently used.
Mind you, I disconnected all external devices, nothing and nobody touching it, the power button requires quite a bit of force to exercise, but within half an hour to a full one it would power on again.
Now, I am pretty sure, that nobody in my network sends magic packets or patterns, and in any case I disabled that too, but no change. There are dozens of jobs scheduled in Windows and I deleted quite a few of those, mostly the "calling home" type. Also stopped and disabled the "user experience service" etc.
But so far the only thing that changed the behavior was to change the unplugging and the hibernate sequence: With the power plugged in at hibernate, Windows seems to assume it's ok to run scheduled jobs. Without external power, "hibernate" is "hibernate".
And these days, when you say "shut down" on Windows, you have to uncheck a hidden option in Windows to actually *make* it shut-down. Otherwise it will be 'smart' enough to assume that restarting Windows more quickly is more important and interpret "shutdown" as suspend-with-fast-restart...
And I have seen similar behavior in desktops that were *suspended* to RAM, with all magic packets and PS/2 as well as USB events disabled in BIOS to cause power up.
On those systems, massive amounts of RAM and SATA SSDs made hibernation less attractive and standby seemed a good compromise...
Here on the Lenovo RAM is stuck as 16GB and the NVMe will restore RAM at 3GB/s...
But "wakeup2die" isn't really attractive.
Perhaps we could get a little more end-user data on this?
Mil0 - Sunday, June 23, 2019 - link
I've seen this behavior as well, using MSI/Acer laptops, so it's not limited to some manufacturers.Thanks for the no-power-when-hibernating trick, I'll use that from now on.
It's a bit silly that there is no thermal protection on the battery - should be a pretty easy/cheap fix.