Soup To Nuts

The world has a new desktop operating system, and our path to that new OS has a hell of a story. And if the global economy is about to become less globalized, it could be a harbinger of what’s to come.

To set the stage: Six years ago, the Chinese tech company Huawei found itself in an unusual position with U.S. tech consumers. It was seemingly about to be banned from the American market—but its Matebook X Pro laptop had found a cult following among tech enthusiasts.

For example, The Verge called it “the best laptop right now,” high praise coming from them. That review dropped in May of 2018, about three months after a group of top intelligence officials warned the public not to buy Huawei or ZTE phones, and two months after it lost its biggest commercial partner, Best Buy. It only went downhill from there, with the Chinese company—once one of the world’s largest smartphone makers—losing access to an essential market.

But, as the above review suggests, the Matebook X Pro was hard to deny. Thin, and sporting a quite-good screen, it was the full package. It was a MacBook without the compromises that MacBooks came with at the time. Its only real problem from a technical standpoint was bad webcam placement. But it wasn’t enough to stem the tide of the bad press sparked by a series of intelligence controversies that eventually led to the arrest of the company’s CFO. Despite the reviews, you had to be a little brave to rock a Matebook X Pro with that logo on the back.

In 2022, the company’s devices were banned from sale in the U.S. entirely, and many other countries followed suit—and its sub-brand, Honor, had been sold. If you really want one, they’re on eBay, but you’re essentially going to be on your own if that device breaks.

Eventually, the company—which could no longer work with U.S.-based vendors—decided to focus on its biggest market, China. It built its own smartphone OS, HarmonyOS, which was initially based on Android.

Until recently, the company could still sell Windows, but a couple of months ago, that license ran out. The obvious play for a company like Huawei might be to go with Linux, but the company seems to have doubled down on HarmonyOS, an iOS-like play across multiple operating systems. The latest version, HarmonyOS NEXT, eschews its initial Android base entirely in favor of a homegrown micorkernel approach—and that new operating system is coming to the desktop.

The operating system’s design appears to be a combination of Windows and MacOS that at first glance looks not unlike Deepin, a homegrown Linux distro that I’ve tried in the past. (That distro has had some dramatic design shifts over the years; compare its design circa 2017 with its current design.)

While I don’t exactly have an ISO or VM image to test it out myself, there are a lot of examples of videos out there, largely in Chinese. While YouTube’s closed captioning failed me on most of the videos, this promotional video has an English translation included, which should give you an idea of its capabilities:

As you might imagine, there’s a lot of AI (thanks in part to DeepSeek), but there’s also a lot of document sharing capabilities—thanks to WPS Office, a widely used Microsoft Office alternative developed in China. It feels like a different take on a dynamic we’re already well familiar with.

(Honestly, it’s a good video and the presenter is entertaining. Apple should take notes.)

There’s no chance this will win the market outright. But Huawei is a big enough player that they have deals with most of the major Chinese app players. (Don’t expect a bunch of games, though.) It is not starting from scratch, and China is a big enough market that it will likely be fine if that’s the way it is.

Huawei’s new OS offers an example of tech as isolationism

With the company essentially untethered from Western computing concerns, it’s charting its own path. And while I have no doubt the security concerns raised by U.S. officials have a kernel of truth—given how hard they pressed them—Huawei’s announcement hits at an interesting time.

Given what’s happening in the world around tariffs, it’s intriguing to see what a company that was once a global powerhouse can do on its own. It’s not only relying on itself, it’s doing so in a vertically integrated way. It still faces an uphill battle—I mean, when was the last time we saw a large company launch a desktop OS from scratch, soup to nuts?—but the fact that they’re about to ship hardware shows it’s possible.

And it raises the question: If things get worse, could other companies follow suit? There are some large companies with Chinese ties that have not gotten a tenth of the scrutiny of Huawei. (TP-Link, the dominant router maker, is an example of one that is.)

For example, Lenovo, the largest computer manufacturer in the world, is Chinese, and three of the “big six” laptop manufacturers (Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, Acer, Asus) are based outside the U.S. All six of these companies have benefited greatly from our global economy. But what if any one of them had to lean in on their local market alone because of changing economic conditions? It might look something like what Huawei’s doing.

If Jerry Rig Everything is doing a video about your phone, odds are American audiences would be interested in using it.

The company is not only building its own ecosystem from scratch, it is still producing innovative products, including a triple-fold smartphone that drew a lot of attention from tech-heads outside of China.

To be clear, Huawei is trying to make the best of a bad situation, and if you think they’re bad or dangerous in some way, you can ignore them. But the dynamic they’ve created for themselves suggests that the current tech-industry dynamic we’re all used to isn’t necessarily the end of the road.

If the world becomes more isolated, our tech companies might just try to compete a little harder.