Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air Refresh Brings Kaby Lake Processors, Fingerprint Sensor

Xiaomi launched its first laptop in July last year, the Mi Notebook Air. Seen as a direct competition to Apple's MacBook Air, the Mi Notebook has now been refreshed with some performance upgrades, which now see Intel's latest Kaby Lake processors inside three new 13.3-inch variants.

The new Mi Notebook Air with 13.3-inch display now comes with a seventh generation Intel Core i7 processors for the top-end variant with clock speed peaking at 3.0GHz, while the two other variants get a seventh-gen Intel Core i5 chip. This is said to boost performance by up to 10 percent over the previous version. Meanwhile, the 12.5-inch model now gets a seventh-gen Intel Core M3 processor, which boats a 12 percent performance improvement over its predecessor. All of these models also carry forward the support for 4G LTE modems announced in December last year.

Notably, the new Mi Notebook Air now gets a fingerprint sensor on the top right corner of the trackpad, which can be used to unlock the notebook, and as an added security feature for when you make online payments, for example. Rest of the specifications have been untouched. The 13.3-inch Mi Notebook Air claims a battery life of up to 9.5 hours, while the 12.5-inch model promises to deliver up to 11.5 hours of battery life on a single charge.

Memory is at 8GB of DDR4 RAM for all three 13.3-inch Mi Notebook Air variants, which will be offered along with 128GB or 256GB PCIe SSD storage. Graphics also get a boost with Nvidia GeForce MX150 graphics card with 2GB GDDR5 memory. The new graphics chip is tuned to deliver up to three times better performance-per-watt when compared to the previous 940MX GPU.

The starting price of the new 13.3-inch Mi Notebook Air remains the same at CNY 4,999 (roughly Rs. 51,400) for the seventh-gen Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB PCIe storage variant. Meanwhile, the 256GB PCIe storage variant is priced at CNY 5,499 (roughly Rs. 52,100) and will be available starting June 18 on mi.com. Price and availability for the top-of-the-line model with seventh-gen Intel Core i7, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB PCIe storage have not been revealed yet.