Huawei launches its first non-Windows laptop powered by HarmonyOS

China-based technology company, Huawei, has launched its first non-Windows laptop in a bid to eradicate its reliance on Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s macOS. The tech company unveiled two new laptop models on Monday with its own Harmony operating system, representing a significant development in its process to out-turn the planned restrictions on crucial chips by the United States.

The new models, MateBook Fold and MateBook Pro, run on HarmonyOS 5, the latest version of an operating system Huawei began developing in 2015 and introduced in 2020 on its Mate series smartphones. Since then, the company has started developing the laptop prototype of the OS.

“The Harmony laptop gives the world a new choice. We kept on doing the hard things but the right things,” Yu Chengdong, head of Huawei’s consumer business group, said during Monday’s live-streamed launch event.

Huawei’s MateBook Fold, which does not have a physical keyboard and offers an 18-inch OLED double screen when fully extended, will cost approximately $3,330, while the MateBook Pro model, which uses a conventional laptop keyboard, is priced at $1,110.

Also Read: How Huawei’s local cloud infrastructure may redefine Nigeria’s digital landscape.

According to Huawei, HarmonyOS for computers offers over 150 applications, including WPS Office from Kingsoft (a Microsoft Office alternative) and the photo editing app Meitu Xiu Xiu. By the end of last year, over 7.2 million individual developers were developing apps for HarmonyOS, which was installed on over a billion devices such as smartphones and TVs.

While it has less access to chips in the US, Huawei said the high prices of the computers were a resulting factor in the cost of new chipset manufacturing technology. However, experts have correlated the price status to its inability to access affordable chips from the Western Tech giants.

In 2024, the U.S. 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.

Huawei first unveiled Harmony in August 2019, three months after Washington placed it under trade restrictions over alleged security concerns. Huawei denies its equipment poses a risk.

According to Counterpoint, Huawei’s HarmonyOS surpassed Apple’s iOS to become the second-best-selling mobile operating system in China behind Android during the first quarter of 2024. Notably, the OS has not been launched on smartphones outside China. In its localisation model, China banned the use of Windows on government computers in 2014 and now uses mostly Linux-based operating systems. Microsoft earns only about 1.5 per cent of its revenue from China.

Originally built on an open-source Android system, in 2024, Huawei launched its first “pure” version of HarmonyOS that no longer supports Android-based apps, in a move that further masked China’s app ecosystem from the rest of the world.

Huawei’s Harmony – China’s move to localise products

With China’s known status as the world’s leading producer of tech hardware, the country’s development of computer OS has been behind the likes of Microsoft and Apple, whose Windows and macOS have led the global tech market for a while. China’s move to deepen its OS and chip production came at the brink of a restriction placed on Huawei by Washington in 2019 over national security concerns.

Last year, President Xi Jinping of China told the Communist Party’s elite that China must wage a difficult battle to localise operating systems and other technology “as soon as possible,” with the US cracking down on exports of advanced chips and other components.

OpenHarmony, the HarmonyOS open-source project, is now being widely promoted within China as a “national operating system” amid concerns that other major companies could be severed from the Microsoft Windows and Android products upon which many systems rely. With more than 70 organisations contributing to it and more than 460 hardware and software products built across finance, education, aerospace, and industry, OpenHarmony became the fastest-growing open-source operating system for smart devices in 2023.

The collection of the open-source model is situated at the Harmony Ecosystem Innovation Centre in the southern city of Shenzhen, a local government-owned entity that encourages authorities, companies, and hardware makers to develop software using OpenHarmony. 

Charlie Cheng, deputy manager of the Harmony Ecosystem Innovation Centre, explained that the aim of making it open source was to replicate Android’s success in removing licensing costs for users and to give companies a customisable springboard for their products.