Analysis | Expect to see more mismatches of 4K IPS panels on cheap budget laptops

We've already made a few news posts and even a full review Chuwi's most recent product, the LapBook Plus. It is an interesting (if not great) one due to its low $439 USD price while sporting a very impressive 15.6-inch 4K HDR panel that is advertised to cover 100% of the SRGB gamut.

You'll start to understand the low price of the laptop when you read our review: It's powered by a 12W quad-core Intel Apollo Lake X7-E3950 CPU that can only turbo to 2.0GHz, has one USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 port, and is limited by a tiny 36.5Wh battery. Chuwi claims that you should be able to get up to 9 hours of battery life with that, but our review showed that battery life was more like 3.5 hours. As we concluded, it's simply a totally imbalanced pairing to have such a display with a terribly slow CPU and undersized battery. So why is it happening?

I believe it's very closely linked to the news I wrote about a few weeks ago regarding the OLED boom and IPS bust in China. As Digitimes reported via their sources, a surplus of IPS panel inventory seems to have been created by a combination of Chinese subsidies leading to overproduction and the sudden increase in demand for OLED displays. It is reported that LED manufacturers are sitting on an inventory surplus worth $9.7 billion USD, and you can bet that they are itching to offload it ASAP. This combination of factors means that OEMs with good relationships with Chinese panel manufacturers (mostly other Chinese brands, like Chuwi and Lenovo, for example) will likely be benefactors of fairly high-specced IPS panels sold at bargain prices.

Normally, panel-manufacturers losses would be consumer gain, but just be aware of the pitfalls of buying such cheap laptops with high resolution panels: They skimp on the battery and CPU to keep costs low, and you might end up with a nearly useless laptop that's too slow to do work on and can't be away from an outlet for more than 3 hours.