Beyond the chipset upgrade, the Xiaomi MIX also got significant improvements to the display, battery, and cameras.
Xiaomi equipped the MIX with a 1080p OLED panel, only a step behind the top-tier OLED used on Samsung's Galaxy Note5. To secure that supply, Lei Jun reportedly made several trips to Samsung in South Korea before he finally got access to the panel Xiaomi wanted.
Power was upgraded as well. The MIX carried a large 4,000 mAh battery and used Qualcomm's latest third-generation fast-charging tech, putting it squarely in flagship territory for charging speed and endurance.
The most obvious shift, though, was the camera system. Xiaomi phones had long been mocked as "great for people who don't care about photos," and their imaging was a consistent target for criticism. This time, Xiaomi clearly decided it was done taking those hits.
The MIX came with a 20 MP front camera, a custom Sony 40 MP telephoto camera supporting 4x optical zoom, and an 8 MP wide-angle camera. From the way Lei Jun presented it, Xiaomi treated this release like a profound statement. On paper, the phone was strong across the board, a premium flagship with no glaring weaknesses.
That level of completeness also revealed how hard Xiaomi had leaned into the build. Performance, imaging, battery life, and the display were all pushed to a high-end standard. Xiaomi also checked off nearly every "flagship checklist" feature people liked to argue about online: NFC, an IR blaster, a linear motor for better haptics, and optical image stabilization.
Then Lei Jun revealed what he framed as the MIX's signature premium feature: wireless charging.
Wireless charging is a convenience feature that most people forget about until they need it. Still, as a technology signal, it matters. It reads as "premium," and Xiaomi was clearly using it as a selling point. The irony, of course, was that the technology had been introduced by Huaxing Technology the year before, but it hadn't appeared in any major release that year. Xiaomi bringing it back onto a flagship stage was, at minimum, a deliberate move.
Watching the live stream from Huaxing's conference room, Heifeng only smiled. When Huaxing launched the Harmony X2 the previous year, he already knew what would happen next. Once a feature like that shows up, competitors will start building their own versions, even if it takes a while to reach the mass market.
After Lei Jun finished the spec rundown, he went straight to the pricing.
The Xiaomi MIX lineup landed between ¥3,599 and ¥4,999 (≈ $514 to $714), depending on memory and storage:
• 3 GB RAM + 32 GB storage: ¥3,599
• 3 GB RAM + 64 GB storage: ¥3,999
• 4 GB RAM + 64 GB storage: ¥4,499
• 4 GB RAM + 128 GB storage: ¥4,999
For a lot of viewers, that range was the real shock. People hadn't expected Xiaomi to price a phone in the ¥3,500 to ¥5,000 band. The announcement left many potential buyers momentarily speechless, not because the phone looked weak, but because Xiaomi's brand identity had been welded to "value" for so long.
The realization came quickly afterward: Xiaomi was not selling another value phone. It was selling a premium flagship, and it was pricing it like one.
On stage, Lei Jun looked out at the room and heard only scattered applause. He couldn't hide a hint of resignation. The costs behind the MIX were far beyond anything Xiaomi had carried before.
A customized Snapdragon 901 alone reportedly costs over ¥1,000. The Samsung OLED panel was around ¥800. Sony's main imaging hardware, plus the additional camera modules, pushed past ¥700. Battery, fast charging, and wireless charging together added another ¥300-plus. Once you piled on smaller components and the unavoidable Qualcomm licensing costs, the total production cost was already around ¥3,500 (≈ $500).
In other words, Xiaomi had poured real effort into the MIX, and it still wasn't a big-margin product. Lei Jun's posture made the subtext clear: Xiaomi was investing in credibility. Whether the market would reward that investment was not something he could force.
Still, Lei Jun could say one thing without blinking. This was the most sincere flagship Xiaomi had put out in years.
In Huaxing's conference room, Heifeng turned to Jianyu Liu and asked, "What do you think?"
"Very strong," Jianyu said without hesitation.
He did not bother downplaying it. A first-tier display, a top-tier chipset, serious camera hardware, strong audiovisual fundamentals, and flagship-level charging and battery life, plus the attention-grabbing hook of wireless charging. Taken together, it was a focused attempt from Xiaomi, and it landed only slightly below Samsung's Galaxy Note 5 in overall positioning.
Heifeng, however, still saw the underlying trap. He looked at Jianyu and said, "It'll succeed because it's cost-effective, and it'll fail because it's cost-effective."
Xiaomi had spent years training the market to associate its phones with value. In the minds of many buyers, "cost-effective" was not just "good value." It was "cheap," and by extension, "not truly high-end." That belief had been baked in for so long that it became a brand ceiling.
Even when Xiaomi tried pushing upward with the Mi 5 series, it still kept a lower-priced model around to soothe expectations. This time, Xiaomi came in with a genuinely aggressive value proposition for the hardware it offered, but the BOM was too high to go meaningfully lower. Some buyers would still refuse on instinct, no matter how good the deal looked on paper.
Heifeng respected Lei Jun's nerve. If you want to enter the premium market, you have to accept the possibility of failure. At the same time, Heifeng could see why Lei Jun had done it. If Xiaomi kept living comfortably in the ¥2,000 range (≈ $286), breaking into the high-end tier later would become harder every year.
The day after the event, the Xiaomi MIX went on sale through major online storefronts. Lei Jun also leaned on his influence to pull in tech reviewers and push early coverage. Reviewers compared the MIX against the current top-end Galaxy Note5, focusing on performance, battery life, the display, and camera results.
In raw performance and endurance, the MIX tested slightly ahead of the Note 5. In photography, it landed at roughly the same level, and on paper, it even looked stronger in some specs. The two areas where the MIX still couldn't match the Note 5 were software polish and the absolute peak of display quality.
Even so, the reviewer's wave helped. Buyers began to accept the MIX as a legitimate premium model. Within an hour of release, Xiaomi reportedly sold around 100,000 units, a strong result for October, a month usually dominated by Apple and Samsung.