Xiaomi takes on iPhone 6 Plus with 5.7" 1080p Mi Note phablet launching January 27 for $370; $530 Mi Note Pro with 2560x1440 display coming in March
Xiaomi mocks Apple with its very own premium phablet — There's just no stopping for the world's most valuable startup.
Context & Ripple Effects
With the Mi Note, Xiaomi is moving upmarket for the first time: a 5.7-inch 1080p phablet launching January 27 at $370, plus a March-following [[a:|Mi Note Pro]] with a sharper 2560x1440 panel at $530 — both pitched explicitly against Apple's iPhone 6 Plus rather than against budget Android rivals.
The corpus makes clear this was the opening move of a durable strategy: the same playbook of large-screen flagships priced under Apple recurs in the Mi 10T range, the Xiaomi 12 and 12 Pro, the Leica-branded Xiaomi 14 series, and most recently the Xiaomi 17 Pro Max — a ten-year arc from challenger to full premium-lineup player.
First-order effects
- Phablet buyers in Xiaomi's home market get a 5.7-inch 1080p device on January 27 and a 1440p option in March at price points well below the iPhone 6 Plus they are being invited to compare it with.
- Apple faces its first head-to-head product mockery from the world's most valuable startup, forcing the comparison onto Xiaomi's terms: similar screen size, sharply lower price.
Second-order effects
- Established premium-Android vendors must answer on price-per-spec rather than brand alone, since the $370/$530 pairing resets what customers expect a large high-resolution flagship to cost.
- Panel suppliers gain a new volume customer for quad-HD displays as the Mi Note Pro brings 2560x1440 to Xiaomi's lineup in March.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern visible across the Mi 10T, 12, 14, and 17 generations holds, the 'premium phablet' segment stops being an Apple-Samsung preserve and becomes a recurring annual battleground where Chinese vendors compete on spec density per dollar.
- A structural consequence is that flagship pricing power migrates toward whoever controls component scale in China — the same supplier base that later carries Xiaomi's expansion into laptops like the Mi Notebook Air.
The trend: This launch is the first data point in Xiaomi's decade-long climb from value-brand phablet maker to a vendor shipping annual flagship tiers that undercut Apple on price at matched screen sizes.