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

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.)