The Chuwi MiniBook X N150 - Tao of Mac
Rui Carmo
Tao of Mac
May 15th 2025 · 25 min read<br>·<br>#chuwi<br>#fedora<br>#intel<br>#laptop<br>#linux<br>#minibook<br>#n150<br>#netbook<br>#review<br>#silverblue<br>#small<br>#windows
The Chuwi MiniBook X N150
The netbook era has come and gone, but I am one of the many people who miss small form factor laptops (12" or smaller), and I’ve found it somewhat frustrating that they’ve been nowhere to be found in mainstream offerings.
But one day I was doing a tally of Intel N-series devices that would be interesting prospects for a few scenarios and stumbled upon the Chuwi MiniBook X N150, which I was profoundly intrigued by and just had to try out:
The MiniBook X N150
And that is exactly what I have been doing for a few weeks now. In fact, I’ve been using it as a daily driver for both work and personal stuff, and this post is very much a hands-on review of what it’s been like so far.
Disclaimer: Chuwi sent me a review sample of the MiniBook X 150 free of charge (for which I thank them), and as usual this article follows my review policy.
But since the picture above might not give you a good notion of scale, here it is beside my MacBook:
Sorry, I was out of bananas
Design<br>First impressions were pretty great: the MiniBook (as I will refer to it from here on) has a metallic grey, branding-free aluminum outer shell (the keyboard frame and sides are plastic) that is heavily reminiscent of a MacBook (even down to the inset in front of the trackpad), a nice clear screen with very sturdy hinges that are reminiscent of my Lenovo X1 Yoga, and relatively thin bezels with a discrete logo just below the screen.
The MacBook-like theme is reinforced by the minimal set of USB-C ports that, again, feels very familiar, but it also has hints of Lenovo-style design:
The X, a MacBook 13", a Lenovo X1 Yoga and a modern MacBook Pro
Regardless of influence, it’s a great blend of minimalism and functionality, and if you don’t have a visual reference for size, you would be excused for thinking it is a full-blown high-end laptop.
Hardware<br>The MiniBook has gone through a few hardware iterations, but the current incarnation is based on the Intel Twin Lake N150 and has the following system specs:
4 cores that can burst up to 3.6GHz (and go as low as 700MHz for power saving)
1920x1200 10" display run by Intel graphics with 24 EUs
12GB LPDDR5 RAM
512GB NVMe SSD
2 USB-C ports
1 audio combo jack
The N150 also has a few of the new Intel chipset features for neural and image processing, although there is no software that actually takes advantage of those as far as I know (I did have a go at Intel’s SYCL, but couldn’t get it to work–see below).
Ports<br>You get a mic/headphone combo jack on the left (thank goodness) and two USB-C ports on the right, one of which supports USB PD and (oh luxury of luxuries) actually has a charging light, unlike my MacBook Pro.
Close-up of the ports on either side
Both ports support display output, and I had zero issues connecting the MiniBook to my LG monitors for both display and power or using a small portable monitor (more on that later).
But, of course, the biggest feature of a small laptop like this is the screen (pun intended).
Screen<br>The MiniBook has a nice, glossy (but thankfully not overly reflective) 1920x1200 touch screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio that I’ve found comfortable to use despite its size. The interesting side effect of this combination of size and resolution is that you get nearly twice the usual density of an FHD panel, which in turn means that text rendering is very sharp, making it look very much like a top-tier HIDPI display.
Since I spend most of my time reading or crafting text, this is the part I appreciate the most, and the extra vertical 120 pixels come in handy for toolbars of various kinds.
The panel backlight is not among the brightest I’ve used, but it’s strong enough for it to be usable in fairly bright situations, like drafting this post in a bright sunlit room or the back of an Uber in sunny Portuguese weather (yes, that actually happened).
On the flip side, I typically kept the backlight at under 50% most of the time I used the machine during the evenings–although of course your mileage and needs may vary:
Another size comparison
Color reproduction is good–certainly better than my Lenovo Ideapad Flex 5; I have a habit of switching wallpapers daily, and although I haven’t made any scientific testing, the few photos I’ve seen and tweaked looked quite nice.
You can tent the display and even use the machine in portrait mode like a tablet–in fact, the display reports itself as being 1200x1920 when booting Linux, so "normal" use is actually rotated (more details below).
In "tablet" mode (which in Windows disables the keyboard) the MiniBook works OK as a somewhat thick tablet, although when playing with it in that way I was reminded that the panel does not have pen input.
An odd thing I should mention about the screen is that the...