Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

bargain hunters beware The Unibook is a weird entry-level laptop for people with patience. Chuwi's Unibook 304. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Chuwi's Unibook 304. Credit: Andrew Cunningham In another time, the MacBook Neo could have caused a substantial realignment of the lowish-end laptop business. Sure, it has shortcomings compared to the MacBook Air, but it could have at least encouraged PC makers to start shipping consistently decent keyboards, screens, and build quality in the Neo’s $599 price window. The PC makers did start responding, thanks in part to Intel’s actually new non-Ultra Core Series 3 processors (codenamed Wildcat Lake). Intel has resisted its usual compunction to serve the budget market with aging, re-labeled silicon and has created a lower-end, lower-performance processor with the same building blocks (and the same manufacturing processes) as this year’s high-end, high-performance models. The likes of Dell, Acer, Asus, and Lenovo began hopping on the Wildcat Lake train fairly quickly, announcing would-be Neo competitors. But it felt like most of them were having trouble matching the Neo’s barebones specs, let alone undercutting them. Dell’s XPS 13 started at $599, but only for students. It would be $699 for everyone else. Acer’s Swift Air 14 was announced at $699, too. Sure, sometimes these offered features the Neo didn’t have. But the point of the Neo is that it eschews frills and frippery in favor of nailing the basics. But even the MacBook Neo ended up being too good to be true. Apple raised its price by $100 three months after introducing it. Yes, if you want a laptop that feels good, looks good, and performs well here in The Year Of The Unforgettable Memory Crisis, it’s hard to find a good deal, even if you’re willing to settle for a middle-shelf processor, the bare minimum amount of RAM that a modern operating system and browser will reasonably run on, and a meager 256GB or inexcessive 512GB storage drive. There was one US-announced Wildcat Lake system that has managed to undercut the MacBook Air and the rest of the industry, though. Chinese PC company Chuwi has put together the Unibook, a Wildcat Lake computer with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage that it’s selling for an introductory price of $449 (its “normal” price is listed at $569, but it’s not clear whether or when the price might go back up.) On paper, that looks pretty good. And in practice, the Unibook isn’t completely without its charms. But “you get what you pay for” applies here in multiple ways, and it’s difficult to imagine recommending this machine to anyone other than a computer geek looking for a weird project PC. Look and feel The Unibook’s keyboard is pretty good, and its trackpad is pretty bad. Andrew Cunningham The Unibook looks unassuming at first glance, somewhere in the neighborhood of an Asus Zenbook. It feels like a cop-out to describe something as “nondescript,” but this is a pretty down-the-middle clamshell PC design. To begin with the good, the Unibook far outstrips the port offerings of the MacBook Neo or the new XPS 13. It offers a pair of USB-C ports, a full-size HDMI port, two 5Gbps USB 3 ports, one USB 2.0 port, a micro-SD card slot, a headphone jack, and even an Ethernet port. I’ve never loved the little folding-out design for Ethernet ports that some laptops use to save a little space—if and when the little hinge breaks, it will start flopping around and looking bad—but so many laptops use thin-and-lightness as an excuse to ship a bare-minimum allotment of ports that it’s nice to see a budget-minded laptop ship with a ton of connectivity options. The Unibook’s M.2 2280 drive is also pretty easy to replace. Remove the 11 Philips-head screws on the bottom of the laptop, and its bottom pries up with a bit of pressure. If you want a larger drive or just one from a better-known company, it’s easy to put one in (the built-in SSD is made by “HOGE,” a name that means about as much to most North Americans as “Chuwi”). The Wi-Fi/Bluetooth module is also easily accessible; the battery is, too, if you can manage to find a replacement somehow. Also in the “good” column is the laptop’s perfectly not-bad keyboard. The keys aren’t as firm or satisfying as those on the keyboards in the MacBook lineup or in Framework’s Laptop 12 or Laptop 13, but the typing feel is decent, and the backlight is nice and even. The computer is missing a fingerprint reader (there’s also no face-scanning camera, which means the Unibook has no biometric login option at all), but this is a corner that the MacBook Neo’s base model also cuts. Judged by the standards of the category, the Unibook’s screen isn’t awful. It’s a 13-inch IPS display panel with a decent 1920 x 1200 resolution and 16:10 aspect ratio, a step up from the 16:9 1080p displays you’ll still find in some ultra-budget systems. But it’s also not very nice by the MacBook Neo’s standards: only 300-ish nits of maximum brightness, pretty noticeable backlight bleeding around the edges (at least on our unit), and around 59 percent coverage of the sRGB color gamut, according to my colorimeter. At that level, colors appear visibly faded or washed-out to the naked eye; I find it particularly noticeable with shades of red and purple. MacBook Neo on top, Chuwi Unibook on bottom. Credit: Andrew Cunningham MacBook Neo on top, Chuwi Unibook on bottom. Credit: Andrew Cunningham The mediocre screen was an unpleasant surprise given that this thing advertised 100 percent sRGB gamut coverage when it was announced and on its product page for many weeks (the Internet Archive captures it here). But since then, the company has said that only a higher-specced Unibook 315 actually has a screen with 100 percent sRGB gamut coverage, in addition to an extra P-core on the CPU, 12GB of RAM instead of 8GB, and a 512GB SSD. You still can’t buy this version of the Unibook, though Chuwi says it “may” be available this month and it “may” cost $599. I run out of nice things to say about the Unibook after the screen. The webcam is usable, insofar as it functions, but the image quality is fuzzy, and it has trouble with white balance. The speakers produce sound under some circumstances (more on that later). The trackpad is probably the worst of the Unibook’s core features. The actual finger tracking is OK, one gift of the precision trackpad era that endures despite the hardware’s shortcomings. Aside from that, it’s awful—it’s stiff. It’s hard to click. It’s so, so loud. It’s a trackpad that makes you glad for tap-to-click. It’s almost bad enough to ruin the laptop all by itself, though it does have some other help. Weird software When you buy a no-name PC, part of what you have to assume is that you are essentially out in the cold with respect to aftermarket software support. Maybe you’ll get some driver and/or BIOS updates directly from the manufacturer, and maybe you won’t! But you should assume that you won’t, and you should assume that whatever driver support page exists might be busted or deleted at pretty much any time. The driver page for the Unibook has not worked even once at any point during the weeks I’ve been using it. Sadly, Chuwi’s support database was “Working Un-normal” for the entire time I was using the Unibook. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Sadly, Chuwi’s support database was “Working Un-normal” for the entire time I was using the Unibook. Credit: Andrew Cunningham Usually this means putting up with things that feel just a little off or downright weird, like a BIOS that seems to expose every possible setting whether it’s necessary or not, a shortcut to a Windows 7-era Control Panel applet sitting on the desktop by default for some reason, or the system’s pre-installed Microsoft Office 2024 suite. If you think it’s odd that a $449 computer would come with Microsoft Office pre-installed or that it’s even more odd that Chuwi doesn’t advertise pre-installed Microsoft Office, you’re right. The copy installed on our review unit was definitely activated using a common activation script, something I verified by running the script and checking Office’s activation status. Security-wise, the Windows install seems to check out, insofar as it meets Windows 11’s Security dashboard’s “enhanced security” baseline (at least, it did after a round of updates and a reboot). Chinese PC makers will occasionally ship a driver, inadvertently or otherwise, that comes with malware on board, so it’s something you need to watch for. What the Unibook does ship with is all kinds of weird little Microsoft bits and bobs that don’t come with a clean-from-USB Windows 11 install, including a “mobile plans” app (the laptop has no modem, and the app opens to a blank window that does nothing), and the obscure “Microsoft PC Manager” app. The only page I can find for it on what is apparently Microsoft’s actual website is full of bizarre, possibly auto-translated sentence fragments like “Cleanup your system and free up spaces” and “Enhance the efficiency of computer use”). Some Chinese language packs are also preinstalled. Windows re-installers beware Normally, I’d treat this sort of PC the same as I’d treat most computers from most OEMs: Blow away the stock Windows installation and control my own destiny. Sure, a “clean” install of Windows 11 isn’t the cruft-removal magic wand that it used to be, but it’s still a good way to make sure you’re dealing mainly with Microsoft’s nonsense and not additional manufacturer-added nonsense on top of that. For the Unibook, this wasn’t smooth sailing. As you saw earlier in this review, Chuwi’s support site is currently suffering from an acute case of “Database Working Un-normal.” This made downloading drivers pretty difficult, partly because Wildcat Lake is new enough that Windows Update doesn’t seem to have drivers ready to go.