The Mi Notebook 14 & Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edison come with 10th Gen Intel Core CPUs, NVIDIA MX350 GPU, upto 512GB NVMe SSD, 10 hrs of Battery Life & has a starting price of ₹41,999.
Xiaomi has left other laptop brands in shock as their Mi Notebook 14 & Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition just made their global debut in India. Offering great build quality & powerful internals at an affordable price point was exactly what we were expecting. But, Xiaomi has exceeded our expectations with their pricing in India.
Display, Build & Audio
The Mi Notebook 14 & the Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition use the A5052 alloy of Magnesium & Aluminium for the chassis. In theory, that should be a pretty good construction for a thin & light. On that note, the Mi Notebook 14 weights at around 1.5 kilograms while the Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition is lighter at around 1.35 kilograms. Both of the laptops are using scissor switches on their keyboards so in theory, that should give nice tactile feedback while typing. But, there is no back-light under the keyboard & the track-pad is made out of plastic & it does not use the Windows Precision Drivers.
The Horizon Edition has a three-side slim bezel (3mm) design achieving a screen-to-body ratio of around 91%. The regular Mi Notebook 14 has a two-side slim bezel design leaving it with thick top & bottom bezels. None of the models house a webcam in the bezel though. An external 720P webcam will come in the box. Both of the models have a 14-inch 1080P IPS display with an anti-glare coating to minimize reflections. They might also be using different panels but, we do need to get a confirmation on that.
In the Audio department Xiaomi has included a Stereo speaker system with 2W speakers on both sides of the laptop. These are bottom firing speakers though so, the sound will get muffled if you place the laptop anywhere but on a table. DTS audio is also supported using an app that comes pre-installed.
Processing, RAM & Storage
Hardware wise, there are three variants of the Mi Notebook 14 and two variants of the Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition. Although, if you want to go with the regular model, you do not get the i7 option. You can get the Mi Notebook 14 with an Intel Core i5 10210U (4.2 GHz at boost) quadcore CPU and 8 Gigabytes of DDR4 (2666 MHz) RAM with either 256 or 512 gigabytes of NVMe SSD storage. There is an optional NVIDIA MX250 GPU (with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM) option available with the 512GB model.
The Mi Notebook Pro Horizon Edition is available with either an Intel Core i5-10210U or an i7-10510U (4.9 GHz at boost) CPU with 8 Gigabytes of DDR4 (2666 MHz) RAM, 512 gigabytes of NVMe SSD & the new MX350 GPU from NVIDIA with 2GB GDDR5 VRAM. That means, the Horizon Edition is the only laptop with an MX350 GPU in India right now.
Battery & I/0
Both models come with a 46 Whrs Battery which Xiaomi claims, lasts up to 10 Hours. This is an area which is definitely a lacking point for the Mi Notebook 14 & Mi Notebook 14 Horizon edition. Although, Xiaomi does claim a 50% refill in 35 minutes with the included 65W power brick so, make whatever you want of that.
Coming to I/O, the port selection is different between the models. The Mi Notebook 14 gets two USB 3.1 (Gen 1) ports, one USB 2.0 port, one HDMI 1.4b port, one 3.5 mm Headphone jack & the DC power jack. The Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition gets the exact same ports as the regular Notebook 14 but, for the i7 variant, it gets an extra USB 3.1 (Gen 1) Type-C port.
There isn't much when it comes to connectivity. There is support for 802.11 ac Wi-Fi (Wi-Fi 5) and Bluetooth 5.0. There is no Biometric Authentication which is super weird considering every new laptop these days come with at-least a Fingerprint Scanner supporting Windows Hello. That's another big setback for both of the models.
Price & Availability
As I've mentioned previously, there are three different variants of the Mi Notebook 14 and two different variants of the Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition. Find the pricing details below,
Mi Notebook 14
i5, 8GB, 256GB: ₹41,999
i5, 8GB, 512GB: ₹44,999
i5, 8GB, 512GB, MX250: ₹47,999
Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition
i5, 8GB, 512GB, MX350: ₹54,999
i7, 8GB, 512GB, MX350: ₹59,999
The Mi Notebook 14 and the Mi Notebook 14 Horizon Edition will go on sale on 17th June at 12PM on Amazon India & Mi.com. You can also pick up the device offline in Mi Homes or in Xiaomi's partner stores.
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