Huawei Technologies launched two new laptop models on Monday, the first sold with its own Harmony operating system, in a bid to take on well-established Western Big Tech rivals even as the US seeks to limit its access to crucial chips.
Despite its emergence as the world’s leading producer of tech hardware, China’s development of computer operating systems has lagged behind Microsoft and Apple, whose Windows and macOS have cornered the global market for decades.
The new MateBook Fold and MateBook Pro both run on HarmonyOS 5, the latest version of an operating system Huawei began developing in 2015 and introduced five years later on its Mate series smartphones.
It began developing the laptop prototypes in 2021.
“The Harmony laptop gives the world a new choice,” Yu Chengdong, head of Huawei’s consumer business group, said during a live-streamed launch event. “We kept on doing the hard things but the right things.”
The base model of the MateBook Fold, which does not have a physical keyboard and offers an 18-inch OLED double screen when fully extended, will sell for C¥24 000 (R60 000).
The MateBook Pro model, which uses a conventional laptop keyboard, is priced from C¥8 000.
Washington began restricting Huawei’s access to US technology in 2019 over national security concerns, pushing the company to build its own capacity to develop and produce chips and operating systems.
A billion devices
Huawei said the HarmonyOS for computers currently offers over 150 applications, including WPS Office from Kingsoft — an alternative to Microsoft’s Office — and photo editing app Meitu Xiu Xiu.
By the end of 2024, more than 7.2 million individual developers were developing apps for HarmonyOS, which was installed on over a billion devices, including smartphones and TVs, according to Huawei’s latest annual report.
Huawei did not disclose which processor it had used to power the newly launched laptops, but it said the computers’ relatively high prices were the result of the cost of new manufacturing technology for the chipset. Huawei did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the chip.
Read: Huawei readies new AI chip for mass shipment
The US last year revoked licences that had allowed companies including Intel and Qualcomm to ship chips used for laptops and handsets to Huawei. Republican lawmakers had been angered by the launch of Huawei’s first AI-enabled laptop, which was powered by an Intel processor. — Che Pan and Brenda Goh, (c) 2025 Reuters
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