Budget-friendly laptop unveiled with 12 GB RAM and 8-year-old Intel CPU

Bmax is a growing player in the mini PC and laptop segment. The Chinese brand has announced a few products in recent months, among which the latest happens to be the MaxBook X15 S Pro.

This entry-level laptop is targeted strictly at those with limited budgets, and are willing to go for a lesser known brand. Powered by an Intel Core i3 8109U chip with 2 cores and 4 threads, performance should be extremely modest. Memory and storage taken care of by 12 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD.

In fact, benchmarks indicate that the nearly 8-year-old, 2-core, 4-thread CPU only manages to score roughly 2,000 points in the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark, putting it almost 500 points behind the Intel N150 CPU found in many entry-level mini PCs (Beelink S13 currently $329 on Amazon).

Clearly, the MacBook X15 S Pro is only good enough for extremely lightweight and casual workloads, such as web browsing, communications, lightweight office work, etc.

Moreover, there appears to be nothing unique about the laptop, with the product sharing its design and specs with a few other unbranded laptops found on many Chinese websites such as Alibaba. The I/O on offer has been detailed below:

• Triple USB 3.0 Type-A
• USB Type-C
• microSD
• HDMI
• 3.5 mm audio jack 

When it comes to the display, there is hardly anything worth writing home about. A 15.6-inch IPS panel is on offer with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 and unclear details regarding color reproduction and accuracy. 

Given the rest of the system specs, the display should be serviceable, but unlikely to be anything more.

Notable features, pricing, and availability

Other features of the laptop worth mentioning include a 51.3 Wh battery with a claimed 7 hours of battery life, a 180° hinge, an active cooling system, Bluetooth 5, and unspecified Wi-Fi support. More details should be available once the laptop is officially unveiled.

Bmax does offer many of its products in the international market, and the same is likely to be true for the MaxBook X15 S Pro laptop. Given the specs on offer, pricing is more than likely to be on the affordable side. 

That said, there is no denying that the amount of compute on offer might be a bit too modest for most people, no matter how affordably Bmax manages to price the thing.