It’s not just the Huawei phone business that’s been hit by the recent blacklisting from USA, but also the laptop business. I suppose the tablet one is also affected, even though Huawei recently climbed on second spot, dethroning Samsung. Anyway, Huawei has put its laptop business on hold. The reason is available after the break.
Huawei has asked its supply chain partners to suspend deliveries and also stopped all new notebook projects over the past weeks. It’s all because of the US ban, that forbids American companies to work with the Chinese firm. This also means that Windows and Intel CPUs are off the table. Microsoft can no longer sell licenses to Huawei and Intel can’t supply chips to power the laptops.
Without them, you can’t make a proper laptop and the latest MateBooks were actually quite well specced and pricey. Of course, there could be an OS to replace Windows, but it’s not ready yet. The chipset thing is more tricky though, since Qualcomm is also not allowed to work with Huawei and Kirin-based laptops are yet to be a thing.
MateBook X Pro and MateBook D were very praised by reviewers and they even made solid VivoBook and MacBook alternatives. I guess that it would be nice to catch them on a fire sale, but too bad to see the product segment die.
