Apple might not reboot the MacBook Air, but its biggest “fan” just did. Sort of.
Amidst ongoing speculation of the MacBook Air being on its way to retirement, fans of the last Retina-less MacBook are left wondering whether they should be waiting for a MacBook Air that may never come, or whether they should be looking at an increasingly plausible next generation 12 inch MacBook Retina.
Apple’s biggest, and creepiest fan, Chinese device manufacturer Xiaomi, has a history of blatantly copying designs from other manufacturers, including Samsung, Microsoft, but most of all, Apple. After cloning products like the Apple iPhone, the iPad and the iPod touch, Xiaomi is at it again this time, with what seems to be a MacBook Air clone, borrowing from the thinness of the MacBook Air, the USB Type-C port on the 12 inch MacBook Retina, with a very Apple-inspired Windows 10 lock screen.
It’s hard to keep a straight face, with so many obvious winks at virtually every single Apple and Surface product currently on the market, mashed up into this Frankenstein’s laptop. The “Mi Notebook Air” (kidding you not), comes into two sizes: “Microsoft Surface Book” and “Apple 2015 MacBook Retina”, or 13.3 inches and 12.5 inches for short.
The internals are not exactly Apple-like, as much of the effort was put into making this laptop look like a bigger “niner-niner” than last year’s 12 inch MacBook Retina clone.
Powered by an Intel Core i5 CPU, and shipping with 8GB of RAM and a 256GB of SSD storage, this laptop has a discrete (ahem...), dedicated graphic card featuring an NVIDIA GeForce 940MX, as a wink to the Surface Book, if it weren’t obvious.
If it were operating on US soil, Xiaomi would be a mile deep under a lawyer’s dogpile, but as Samsung has experienced the hard way, fighting copyright violations in China can be not only pointless, but also dicey, especially when companies like Xiaomi operate strictly within their country’s borders, making it more difficult for pursuants to build a reasonable case of lost sales income, even before the Supreme People’s Court, where, most recently, Apple has lost its claim to the IPHONE (all caps) trademark, to a leather goods manufacturer.