Less than a week into the launch of the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air, Chinese tech giant Lenovo has followed suit with its own Air 13 Pro ultrabook.
With the latest addition, it now means that Apple’s MacBook Air lineup is in even in a tougher position than earlier thought. The Mi Notebook Air is expected to be released on August 2, but it is still unclear which regions the laptop will be shipping to, especially since the company has yet to spread its wings to larger parts of the world.
The opposite is true for its counterpart Lenovo, which has its products in almost every corner of the world, be it smartphones or PCs. Now that there is a new Lenovo Air 13 Pro laptop, the company will be competing with its local counterpart Xiaomi on the local front as well as other major names in the industry in other markets across the globe.
Just like the Xiaomi Mi Notebook Air packed hardware specs that are almost similar to what the MacBook Air brings to the fold, the new Lenovo Air 13 Pro has taken the same direction with respect to the former. For starters, you get the same display screen of 13.3 inches, which is still an IPS display panel with Full HD resolution of 1080p.
Under the hood, the Air 13 Pro packs the same chipset as what you get on the Mi Notebook Air – an Intel Core i5-6200U SoC – but the RAM is half what the former has, which is 4GB for the 13 Pro laptop. These two Chinese models will definitely outshine the MacBook Air in terms of gaming thanks to the inclusion of a dedicated graphics card. Just like Xiaomi’s version, Lenovo went for a dedicated 2GB Nvidia GT940MX graphics card, which should deliver the best of gaming experiences.
The two have an almost identical weight, with the Mi Notebook Air slightly lighter at 1.28kg as compared to the 1.29kg weighed by the Lenovo Air 13 Pro laptop. While these two laptops are technically the same, you get an advantage for buying the Air 13 Pro because it has a fingerprint scanner, which is just as smart as Xiaomi’s feature that allows the laptop to be unlocked via a Bluetooth connected Mi Band 2.
As for the pricing, the Lenovo Air 13 Pro laptop has a Chinese price tag of CNY 4,999, which is approximately $750. This is the same price that the Mi Notebook Air is available for, however, the 4GB RAM variant of the same Notebook Air costs much lower than 4GB RAM variant of the Air 13 Pro.