He Xiaomi 15t Pro In color Mocha Gold That it shines under the spotlights of Munich, where it has just been presented, tells a story that the company would surely prefer not to verbalize: Xiaomi is trying to escape itself.
It is not just the golden finish, nor the collaboration with Leica, not even the 999 euros they ask for the 1 TB version – Bagatela watching how the patio is. It is the culmination of a transformation that began years ago and now reaches its critical point.
Just a few months ago he warned from Shanghai that Xiaomi needed a new face. That the gap between its products – a Su7 ultra With 24 carat gold badge competing with Porsche – and its brand identity – that cheap and sympathone orange logo – was not very sustainable. Munich’s presentation, which has revealed the Gold Series With goldsmith in his watches, he confirms that Xiaomi has heard the diagnosis, but his response is more radical than expected: They don’t want to change their face, they want to change body.
Metamorphosis goes beyond cosmetic. A Mijia washing machine presumes to save 25% more energy than the European class A standard. A refrigerator incorporates Ag+ technology for bacterial control. The offline communication system allows two 15t Pro to almost two kilometers without mobile network.
In all these situations, Xiaomi is sending a resounding message: We are no longer the cheap alternative, we are the technologically superior proposal. The problem is that this message collides frontally with a decade of mental positioning in consumers.
The 15T Base maintains a price of 649 euros that winks to the past, while the Pro scale up to 999 euros in its top of the range. And the upper models are missing. It is as if Xiaomi would like to climb the ladder without releasing the first step. This clash between aspiration and accessibility generates a dissonance that weakens both proposals: too expensive for the faithful of the beginning, too “xiaomi” for those who can afford a iPhone 17 Pro or a Galaxy S25 Ultra.
There are details that speak for themselves. The 15T Pro bezels (1.5 mm) are 27% thinner than in the previous generation. His reason for being is not the simple technical improvement but an attempt to speak the visual language of technological luxury, that dialect perfected by Apple that everyone wants to imitate. The problem of these movements is that when you copied the vocabulary without understanding the grammar you end up talking to an artificial accent That betrays your origin.
In addition, Xiaomi has reached that technical excellence just when that excellence has ceased to be differentiating. He Xiaomi 9 I was interested because it was a cannon for the price it brought. He Xiaomi 15 It is interested because it is a cannon, point. But we are already in 2025, and now any manufacturer can access the same components, cameras, processors. The real battle is in a more abstract area: brand narrative, symbolic capital, tribal belonging. Nothing has understood. Xiaomi drags the dead weight of his own success story.
Collaboration with Leica is a perfect example of this paradox. Leica is tradition, Hessian crafts, is the weight of photographic history. It is all Xiaomi is not and can never be. And that marriage between Chinese disruption and German classicism produces a strange creature: technically it is competent, it is culturally orphan. Those who value Leica may never consider a Xiaomi. Those who love Xiaomi do not need Leica to validate their purchase.
The 15T Pro processor is another good example. MEDATEK DIMENSITY 9400+. Great, built in 3 Nm, rivals any Snapdragon. But Mediatek charges with that stigma of being the economic alternative (like Xiaomi!). Although their prices are already equated and their qualities too, son two brands trying to escape together of their past.
The need to list each certification (IP68 resistance, CORNING GORILLA GLASS 7I) Talk about that search for external legitimation because Xiaomi does not yet have the authority of those who can define standards. Apple can launch an owner light port and the world will adapt. Xiaomi needs to demonstrate that it complies with each regulation, each certification and each standard established by others.
The mantra ‘Human X Car x Home‘That they promote so much is very ambitious on paper and it will work out well, but it has an asterisk: it aims to unify the user’s technological experience, but the Xiaomi brand means different things in each category:
- In smartphones it is aspirational excellence.
- In Wearable It is pure democratization.
- In appliances is pragmatic innovation.
- In cars it is experimental freedom.
There is no coherent narrative that a these worlds, although the technical promise says they will speak with each other.
The comparison with Apple is inevitable: Apple has its own problems, but it has never had to escape its identity because it consciously built it from the beginning. Each product, announcement, physical store and presentation has reinforced the same narrative: we think differently, we design better, we charge more because we are convinced that we are worth it. Xiaomi spent years trying that the premium price was not justified And now we must convince us otherwise without contradicting too much.
Xiaomi’s current moment reminds the Samsung of 2010 a lotwhen he tried to transcend his image as a cheap photocopier to become a premium leader. He ended up getting it, but he took him many years and many thousands of millions in marketing. Xiaomi doesn’t have that time. The market moves faster, loyalties are now more fluid, and new actors such as Nothing or CMF already occupy the space that Xiaomi is abandoning, which in turn colonized when OnePlus changed the course, which in turn filled the hole that emptied the price increase of the Nexus. Tempus fugit.
The uncomfortable truth is that Xiaomi built an empire on a value proposition that now wants to evolve. Democratizing technology was more than a business model, it was a mission, almost an ideology. Transforming it does not have to be a total abandonment, Perhaps it is to recognize that democratization can also mean bringing excellence to more people, although at different prices. Markets can understand evolutions if they communicate with honesty.
The Xiaomi 15T Pro is an extraordinary telephone trapped in a business identity crisis. Each specification shouts “Premium”, each design decision aspires to luxury, but the logo in the box continues to whisper “cheap”continues to transmit a narrative with its own weight. It is the conflict between inheritance and aspiration. Xiaomi has shown that he can build as the big ones, but now he must learn something more difficult: charge how they without losing the soul in the attempt.
Perhaps the solution is not to escape the Xiaomi identity, but redefine it. But that would require huge courage. Instead, we see a company running faster and faster to get away from itself, without realizing that its shadow will follow it wherever it goes. Because in the end, the most powerful evolution is not to flee what you are, but to build on it. You can only evolve towards what you want to be. And for that, you must first decide what that is.
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