Huawei Begins Cutting Ties With Windows After Android

After replacing Android, HarmonyOS is beginning to supplant Windows at Huawei.

On May 19, the Chinese group will put on sale its first PC powered by this homegrown operating system. It will apparently be a variant of the MateBook Pro laptop equipped with a Kirin X90 SoC (10 cores, 20 threads), related to the Kirin 9010 found in smartphones like the Mate 70.

In the background are the United States sanctions imposed on Huawei. Enacted in 2019, they largely ban the company from using American technologies. A few exceptions were granted, but they have gradually expired. Intel and Qualcomm, for example, no longer have the right to sell components to Huawei since last year.

A Windows license potentially expired in March

Microsoft had also benefited from an exception for supplying Windows licenses. But that exception would have ended in March. The pressure was all the greater for Huawei, which has nonetheless already launched, on the Chinese market, PCs without Windows, relying on local Linux distributions such as UnityOS and Deepin.

Intended at first to replace Android, HarmonyOS originated on the AOSP base, with components of the EMUI skin. Huawei moved away from this by leaning on the OpenHarmony project. The result was HarmonyOS Next, which abandons Linux for Hongmeng, a homegrown kernel.

The MateBook HarmonyOS prioritizes Chinese software (notably from Alibaba and ByteDance). This suggests that, as things stand, the commercialization will be limited to that market.

* Huawei had already teased, in autumn 2024, a HarmonyOS version of its MateBook X Pro with Intel Core Ultra, in the wake of an experimental port of OpenHarmony on x86. But the system at that time still primarily targeted smartphones and tablets.