I am such a big fan of Apple products that I check MacRumors daily.

(How I wish this was a paid promotion article!)

I was to purchase a 16" MacBook Pro M2 MAX with 12‑core CPU, 38‑core GPU and 16‑core Neural Engine and 96GB RAM which was costing a bomb even after a ₹47,000 (~$575) student discount. Then I changed my mind to M2 Air and then I decided to wait for the M3 Air this year. But I kept wondering ... is it really worth to go for a $5,500 MacBook to supplement my existing 2018 edition 16GB/512GB i7 MacBook Pro ? I don't see any performance degradation on my current MacBook Pro and I only need to delete some files to free up space.

Then I came across a particular model on Flipkart that was well under ₹1L ($1200) - 12th gen i9, 32GB LPDDR5 RAM and 1TB SSD. I was like - this is min $4000 if you opt for the Dell Precision - only thing is, this model on Flipkart is from Infinix, a smartphone mobile manufacturer from China.

At first, there was a sense of doubt but I later realized that it's okay as long as the product features are good. It was a bet indeed and so I took the bet. I ordered the Infinix ZERO BOOK ULTRA Series Laptop Intel Core i9 12th Gen - (32 GB/1 TB SSD/Windows 11 Home) ZL12 Business Laptop (15.6 inch, Grey With Meteorite Phase Design, 1.80 Kg, With MS Office).

The design is superb and sleek - The keyboard has backlit keys but the keys are smaller when compared to a Dell or HP laptop (last I checked). Since I am not used to typing on a laptop keyboard, I have an external Dell keyboard and mouse. And since I intend on using the laptop as a desktop device I have it attached to an external Dell 27" monitor. The reason why I didn't choose a desktop (chassis) instead? There are power fluctuations in India (which is common) and if the power suddenly goes out I would not be able to keep the system on all the time long even when I have to go out for some errands. (Inverters would take more ground space and resources to maintain in the first place).

It has a fingerprint sensor to switch on the laptop either from off-mode or from sleep. My MacBook Pro requires the password when switched on from boot. But Infinix allows you to boot with the fingerprint directly.

One thing that kept me thinking was the username. I logged in to my already existing Microsoft account (which by the way cannot be a school / work Microsoft 365 account which was a bummer for me considering one of my primary domains is on a 365 account), a Hotmail account and everything got set up automatically which was a super smooth experience. But my username is anjan and not anjanesh which I would've preferred. No biggie, but I think the username was stipped from my Hotmail address which is my login by default.

I don't play games, so no comment on speed on that part. But this laptop doesn't have GPU which isn't so much of a bother unless I start doing something in Machine Learning.

I did install some 20 or so applications for web development. I am yet to install WSL since I would be waiting for Ubuntu 23.04 to be released this month.

This does come with the Home edition of MS Office which is more than enough for me.