No, Xiaomi is not about to launch a MacBook Air clone

Chinese gadget maker Xiaomi was in the news a lot yesterday. The company announced a US$1.1 billion round of funding that values four-year-old Xiaomi at $45 billion, and then a number of sites ran with stories showing purportedly leaked photos (one is pictured above) of an upcoming Xiaomi laptop that looks like a MacBook Air. But that last story simply isn’t true, the firm stated today. “That’s false news,” says Kaylene Hong, Xiaomi’s communications manager, to Tech in Asia.

A reverse Google image search on the fake Xiaomi laptop reveals that the closest image source seems to be an undated clone, with the splendid name Kaka i5 (pictured below), that already has an orange power button. So the Xiaomi laptop hoaxers simply had to Photoshop on an orange Xiaomi logo. (Update 2: Amended this paragraph and added the two images below because the Kaka is a much closer image match than the unnamed clone model – image now deleted – in the original version of this article. Sorry for the confusion):

Here they are compared at close quarters:

The dubious story first appeared in English on GizmoChina, a site we’ve never heard of before, and then was picked up without further investigation by well-known sites such as 9to5Mac and BusinessInsider (update: story screenshots here and here, respectively). Not so much Pulitzer prize for journalism as Wurlitzer prize for churnalism.

If you’re really craving after some Xiaomi-related mystery, perhaps you can ponder the new “flagship device” that co-founder Lin Bin teased yesterday at the same time as the funding news. A higher-end smartphone above the Mi4 to challenge the iPhone 6? An early Mi4 replacement in the form of the Mi5? A diamond-encrusted drone? A domestic robot that looks like Steve Jobs? At least we know it won’t be a Xiaomi laptop.

See: Xiaomi on track to sell 60 million smartphones in 2014