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A Fake Product Listing Inspires Rumors About Xiaomi’s First Laptop

2000px-Xiaomi_logo.svg[1]Xiaomi is already one of the largest makers of mobile devices in the world, and now some are claiming that the  smartphone and tablet maker is adding a laptop to their lineup.

GizmoChina has uncovered details this morning about a new laptop from China’s largest smartphone maker, and reported that Xiaomi has slapped their logo on what looks like a reference design ultrabook with an Intel Core-i7 Haswell CPU.

That would be a hot news story and well worth reporting, but I’ve done some work of my own (3 minutes with Google) and I don’t think this story is legit.

Update: And now Xiaomi has denied the accuracy of the initial report.

After a few minutes of sleuthing, I found a product listing on Banggood.com for a Xiaomi laptop which uses the same stock photos and has the same specs as mentioned in the GizmoChina article. That listing shows the  "Xiaomi  Ultrabook" as being up for pre-order with a price of $710, but I don’t think it’s real.

Here’s the photo from Banggood (aside from the lack of a watermark, it is identical to the photo found by GizmoChina this morning):

Img383707584

Looking at the questions asked by Banggood customers, we can see that the retailer has admitted to not having any actual information on the laptop. They do insist at one point that Xiaomi  has said that it’s coming, but this listing has been  up since at least August 2014 – with no formal announcement from Xiaomi.

While it is entirely possible that Xiaomi is working on a laptop, I think this report is a fake.

Aside from the fact that this listing has been up since August, the other way you can tell that it’s a fake is that the images used actually belong to a reference design laptop. As Liliputing pointed out, someone (in this case Banggood) simply photoshopped Xiaomi logos onto existing pictures and called it good.

And while I would normally simply ignore a fake story, I thought it might be useful today to instead debunk it.

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Comments


Frank Tu December 29, 2014 um 12:53 pm

Mee too, let’s report banggood is selling fake xiaomi products to xiaomi together.


Anonymous December 30, 2014 um 6:57 am

It would be a Haswell CPU, Haskell is the programming language.

Nate Hoffelder December 30, 2014 um 8:10 am

Whoops. Fixed it, thanks.


Tomas December 30, 2014 um 12:46 pm

Some manager from Banggood is saying that they’ve received the info about the laptop from Xiaomi itself and if you actually go to Banggood website you can see that you can only preorder it and you have to wait for some unspecified time until it actually ships.
BTW, I own original Xiaomi MI3 phone myself and I think the product is really good compared even with flagship phones from HTC and Samsung.

Tomas December 30, 2014 um 12:52 pm

Unfortunately it’s fake -> uk.businessinsider.com/xiaomi-macbook-air-laptop-clone-2014-12?r=US :/

Nate Hoffelder December 30, 2014 um 12:59 pm

Exactly what I said all along.

Nate Hoffelder December 30, 2014 um 12:58 pm

Yes, but I don’t trust his reply. One, I don’t think English is his first language, two, the images are clearly 'shopped, and three, some of the listed specs are simply nonsense. I mean, "Linux OS"? Xiaomi has its own version of Android, and I would expect that to be used (or possibly ChromeOS).

I would be willing to believe that Xiaomi has a laptop in the works, but this isn’t it./


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