Gadgetory

welcome back to hardware unboxed often on the channel I find myself talking about high end laptops like beefy gaming machines or sleek ultra portables well today we're going to the complete opposite end of the spectrum to talk about an entry-level laptop that was sent to me out of the blue by Chinese OEM Chewie at least I'm pretty sure that's how it's pronounced anyway the laptop in question is the Chewie lap book air which is built as an ultra portable like 14 inch machine with a price tag of just 430 US dollars this puts it in the realm of some of the cheapest Windows laptops on the market of this display size Chromebooks are also available for 400 bucks or less but we'll just keep those over the dance corner for now because we're mostly interested in true Windows systems here so what does 430 bucks get you well if you're more familiar with top-end Hardware you might have heard of the CPU used in the lap book air it's the Intel Celeron n 34 50 and Apollo Lake SOC that uses Intel's gold monster microarchitecture which is designed for low end power efficient systems it's a 6 watt SOC with 4 CPU cores and 4 threads clocked up to 2.2 gigahertz with a 1.1 gigahertz base plus Intel HD graphics 500 which has 12 execution units clocked up to 700 megahertz the lopaka also packs 8 gig of ddr3 RAM and a 128 gig SSD both of which are not bad inclusions at all in an entry-level system along with a 14 point one inch 1080p IPS LCD it's all sounding pretty good so far and it gets even better when you take a look at the design if you've seen entry-level notebooks before most of them pack a bland plastic and generally terrible designs they're really built just to contain the hardware and screen for the lowest possible cost but that's not the case at all with the lap book air is what we're getting here would be acceptable even on a high-end system the build here is fairly basic from a visual standpoint with nothing unique or stand out in that regard but the key feature here is the use of metal on all sites along with glass protecting the display it's ready to see this sort of quality materials used on a low-end machine so chewy is definitely targeting those that want a beautiful design for the lowest possible price however Chuy's marketing materials do exaggerate the dimensions of this laptop to the point where it's almost false advertising it is a pretty slim machine at this price point but it's nowhere near as slim as the product pictures make out the images make it seem like the front end of the wedge design sits flush on your desk when in fact it's raised up by a bulge that chewy has attempted to disguise through curves and other standard visual trickery later on they claim this front section is just 6 millimeters thick which I guess is technically correct if you don't count the Bulge but my measurements put the real thickness at more like 14 millimeters which again it's pretty good for an entry level system but it would have been nice if truly presented a more realistic picture of the machine on their website though this isn't the only dodgy thing you can find on their website in the performance section they talk about the glod Mont architecture and how it performances faster and later on their show images that clearly misrepresent the bezel size again the bezels are quite reasonable for an entry-level product but on Chuy's website they are shown to be much slimmer than in reality aside from that dodging is though the rest of the design is filled with decent inclusions there's two USB 3.0 ports a mini HDMI port a micro SD card slot and a 3.5 mm jack along with a proprietary power connector I would prefer a full sized SD card slot over micro SD but that's just a bit of a nitpick to be honest the keyboard it's great too with a surprisingly large travel distance and great clicky response or what I imagined definitely isn't the most expensive laptop keycaps you can buy each key is appropriately sized and I appreciate the large modifiers and full-size error Keys having page up page down and so forth on the right of the enter and backspace keys it's a little annoying but in general the typing experience is great it's even backlit and that's a feature that's often cut from budget systems the trackpad on the other hand is pretty bad it lacks precision for fine movement and it feels quite sluggish to use as if the polling rate isn't quite high enough for typical usage I didn't expect every aspect of this laptop to be amazing and it's clear the track pairs one department that's received a few budget cuts I wasn't expecting the display to be particularly amazing though in some aspects this IPS panel did perform better than I anticipated especially as it has a 1080p resolution brightness could be a bit better though 266 nits isn't bad and you do get a decent contrast ratio around 1150 to one and great viewing angles chewie have also done okay in terms of white balance and greyscale leading to a 70 100 K temperature average and a three point zero to Delta a average that's better than a lot more expensive notebooks the problem comes with gamut coverage and this is a standard area where manufacturers look to cut costs rather than producing a hundred percent of the srgb spectrum like you'd want from a decent display the lapdog air hits just 67 point four percent so colors look muted and under saturated if this was a high-end device I would slam it a bit for poor color performance but a lot of entry-level laptops suffer from the same camera issues so it's hardly a big problem in this class of device so let's talk about performance because the lap book air with its Celeron n 3450 isn't a speed demon by any means even a regular pace of demon instead the n 3450 is pretty slow and that's not at all surprising considering it uses gold montt cause rather than skylake or kb lake from the moment you power and use this device for the first time is clear you won't be using this laptop anything outside of light web browsing and document creation it's here you'll really be reminded that despite that pretty exterior the insides are definitely low-end I'm not going to focus on any one benchmark in great detail but across the charts you'll see over the next few minutes you'll see the n 3450 compared to other mobile chips like the cherry trail x5z 8550 which uses air mont cores from the generation before goals mont along with more recent skylake and cable eight core m core i3 and core i5 cpus i have left out the 8th gen k blake refresh here because you won't find those chips in any product even remote closing price to the black book the basic story here is the N 3450 is very slow it's similar in performance to the x5z 8550 but a long way behind most other CPUs even Core M processes that have a low at ATP something like the core m36 by 30 is around twice as fast and single thread workloads and in the range of 45 to 60% faster when all caused a hit and the M 360 Y 30 isn't exactly a fast see for you it gets even worse looking at the skylake core i3 6100 u which is in the range of two point one to two point two times faster on a single core and eighty to ninety percent faster on all coarse move up the chain to the i-5 7200 U and it gets a dire for the N thirty four fifty as it gets bullied with up to 2.9 times the single core power and at least twice the multi-core power and when we're talking about performance limited mobile chips getting smashed in this way is not good news now you're probably thinking why have I compared an entry-level n 3450 to something like the core i5 7200 u or Core i3 6100 year when it's obvious these CPUs will be significantly faster well the reason is simple in the $400 to $500 price bracket where the chewy lap book air sits you can buy laptops that include processes like this which provides significantly more performance this dell inspiron 13-inch convertible for example cost the same amount as the latter book aid yet it features a core i3 70 100 you which would be a decent alternative if you want something portable but crave decent performance instead if you care less about the form factor asa has a 350 dollar 15 inch notebook that gives you once again the core i3 70 100 you or for $40 more you can get this HP system with a core i5 7200 you now granted these aren't equivalent systems the Acer and Dell models I mentioned pack just four gigabytes of RAM while the HP system doesn't include a 1080p display and all use one terabyte hard drives instead of the 128 gig SSD in the lap book air but if you're looking at getting the best performance for your dollar all three models provide a lot more performance even when hampered by a hard drive and it's much easier to swap out a slow higher drive for an SSD then it is to swap out a slow CPU for something faster and that's the real crux of the problem with the lap book air the Celeron and 3450 isn't meant for this price point it's more commonly found in sub $300 laptops where cost-cutting in every aspect is commonplace for four hundred and thirty dollars it's all well and good to have an excellent design but not before you deliver a reasonable level of performance at the price now I do like some things chewy has attempted here the SanDisk DF 41:28 SSD isn't gonna blow you away with speed but it does provide a noticeable upgrade over a hard drive and there's even an accessible end up to expansion slot for adding more storage in the future getting Intel a Wi-Fi AC in this sort of system rather than a dirt cheap Wi-Fi n module is a nice bonus too but some extra cash could have been put into the processor had Chewie opted for say four gig of ram instead of eight gig because a gig has little benefit over four gig with such a slow CPU and again Ram is easy to upgrade than a CPU one thing I haven't talked about yet is the battery life and with a 33.7 one hour battery inside you shouldn't expect anything amazing even with the slow in 34:54 video playback I changed around 5.5 hours which isn't surprising for this sort of battery capacity and this similar sort of performance carries over to the other benchmarks you certainly won't get ultra portable class battery from this sort of system but it's serviceable enough from an entry-level device at the end though it's hard to recommend the system to most people because the performance simply isn't up to scratch for the asking price this isn't a bad laptop at all the design is fantastic the keyboard is great there's decent features for an entry-level laptop and the display is an awful by any stretch but it should cost either fifty to a hundred dollars less or it should come with a faster processor it's pretty much as simple as that as it stands right now I can only recommend the lap book err to those who value design and portability above all else other buyers looking to spend around four hundred and fifty dollars should look into some of the systems from Dell HP aisa I mentioned earlier links to which you can find in the description below the best wishes to Chewie though as I think with a bit of refinement a system like the lateral care could be a standout option in the budget laptop market it's just not there at the moment but that's it for now back to the benchmark lab for me and I'll see you next time