Xiaomi’s Redmi Book Pro Review: An Excellent General Purpose Notebook

It gets a massive MacBook style glass trackpad that has support for Windows precision drivers and it was pretty smooth and reliable in operation. It wasn’t on par with what Apple provides, but then again even the best of Windows notebooks aren’t able to match Apple in that department.

Considering the sub-Rs 50,000 price point of the Redmi Book Pro, everything was never going to be first-class and that’s reflected the most in the panel that Xiaomi has selected for this device. Sure, it is large and pin-sharp at full HD and also has a matte finish which makes it quite private. However, the viewing angles are really poor and the colours are washed out. This isn’t a screen that can be used for creative tasks like video editing or colour correction. But at the same time, it can be easily paired with an external monitor for those kinds of tasks even if it is a student learning how to edit video on Premiere Pro or Photoshop because in terms of horsepower the device can do these tasks quite well on a rudimentary level. The biggest advantage of this screen is the wide canvas it lends to the user, and the biggest weakness is the general quality of the panel because if you put it side by side against even a 2014 MacBook Air, chances are it has the better screen even though it has a lower resolution. But then again, you can’t get everything in a laptop that costs less than Rs 50,000 -- it hasn’t been tuned for creative tasks but rather students and the office going general 9to5 crowd and for them, this is actually an overkill and that’s where its value proposition kicks in.

It is a surprisingly performant and fast notebook. All thanks to Intel’s 11th generation Tiger Lake i5 1130h processor that has a peak clock speed of 4.4GHz and turbo boost speeds scaling to 5GHz coupled with 8GB RAM and Intel’s latest Iris Xe graphics. This is a fast notebook by any measure especially if video editing and gaming isn’t something that’s a core task. For instance, this notebook will not even flinch if you have more than 20 tabs opened in the web browser. It handled games like the Witcher 3 pretty decently with good levels of graphics and very few frame rate drops. It even handled resource-intensive tasks like the broadcast of a high-resolution audio-video stream using a tool like OBS Studio quite nicely. It even managed photo editing based on Photoshop and Lightroom, and I even managed to cut some nice 1080p video using the new built-in Windows 11 video editing tool which I believe is better than iMovie.

The big takeaway from my tests was that for the lowest common denominator, this is going to be an excellent notebook as there are no perceptible performance-oriented bottlenecks. At the same time, it can rise to the occasion when it is tasked with something more pro or enthusiast level. Sure, it will not work as a workstation laptop, but it can be a decent stop-gap solution performance permitting when in an emergency.

There are of course bits that I don’t like about this notebook. For instance, the really low sounding stereo speakers. Xiaomi does better on its phones, so it should be doing better on this notebook, which for many college-going students will be their primary speaker as they are going to be watching Netflix or streaming music videos from this itself. I know this because I did the same when I was in college. That’s why the washed-out nature of the screen is also quite disappointing. The web camera, even though it is embedded in the laptop itself, is a pretty sickly one, which wouldn’t bode well for any kind of professional video conferencing — though for students this should be more than enough. And then there is the bit of the missing backlit keyboard which is a big miss especially if this notebook is being geared towards students.

Sure, the design is minimal, but it is also pretty unimaginative. It is the type of notebook you’d expect Steve Jobs to poke fun at when revealing a mind-bending new Apple gadget. It is boring and sterile like that.

But at the end of the day, that’s what Xiaomi has designed it to be. A boring and sterile workhorse that will do the heavy lifting of a college student's educational life or even a lay person’s professional or personal needs without punching a huge hole in their pockets while delighting them with its rather unassuming and reliable nature, just like Ishant Sharma would do so for the deadly Indian fast bowling attack these days. By that measure, just like Ishant, the Redmi Book Pro is an excellent general-purpose notebook for all seasons.