OnePlus 6T McLaren Edition hands-on: What should you expect?

Over the past few years we’ve seen a number of Chinese OEMs partner with luxury car companies to provide special edition handsets for fanatics with deep pockets. HUAWEI has Porsche Design, OPPO has Lamborghini, and now OnePlus has a partnership with McLaren to produce a special edition OnePlus 6T.

Like car-themed phones from other manufacturers, the McLaren Edition’s changes are largely visual. This special edition features a black carbon fiber design with McLaren’s signature “Papaya Orange” color around the rim, starting fairly solid on the bottom and fading as it moves towards the top of the device. The phone is supposed to be modeled after the McLaren MCL33, which was the company’s 2018 Formula One challenger. The specialized detail on the device is quite subtle. You also get a special in-screen fingerprint reader animation with some orange accents, but that’s about it for the visual tweaks compared to the standard OnePlus 6T.

This phone feels effectively the same in the hand as the Mirror Black OnePlus 6T. While the various colors of the OnePlus 6 had specialized coatings that gave them a completely different feel, the McLaren Edition holds on to the familiar texture of the mirror black, albeit with a sheen more reminiscent of the Avengers edition OnePlus 6.

The McLaren edition OnePlus 6T is packed with 256GB of storage and 10GB of RAM, making it one of the few devices with 10GB of RAM, behind the Xiaomi Mi Mix 3, Black Shark Helo, and nubia REDMAGIC 2. It’s unlikely anyone would currently have a need for 10GB of RAM on a mobile device, but it’s a nice luxury when you’re spending your hard earned money on a special edition smartphone.

It’s also unlikely that there will be a noticeable performance difference between this model and the standard 8GB RAM model OnePlus 6T, but it’s possible this may come in handy in a few years when phones start demanding more memory in daily use. When both devices use the same chipset and neither are starved for RAM or memory, the performance delta is going to be quite limited. We’re planning some testing further down the line to see how the McLaren edition stacks up.

The OnePlus 6T McLaren edition also comes with some additional accessories in the box, including a special 30W “warp charge 30” charger with a braided orange cable, a black and orange 3.5mm headphone jack adapter, a special transparent plaque, and a booklet detailing McLaren’s history and the design elements ported to the 6T.

OnePlus says the new 30W charger should have the ability to give the device “a day’s power in 20 minutes,” beating the traditional “a day’s power in half an hour” claim by a significant amount. The OPPO Find X Lamborghini Edition, however, sports VOOC Super Charge tech capable of fully charging the 3,400mAh battery in just 35 minutes.

For superfans of McLaren cars and history, the extra accessories are a nice bonus. The booklet has some interesting photos and information about the history of McLaren vehicles and its drivers, and I could see a collector picking up this device just to display some of these accessories on the shelf.

The McLaren edition OnePlus 6T will run you $699, 699 euros or 649 pounds, and be available in Western Europe and North America on December 13th. The phone will also be available in China, India and Nordic nations after the initial wave of countries. This means you’re getting 2GB more RAM, the special edition color, faster charging and some more accessories for a $70 premium, which isn’t bad at all.

The extra $70 is far less than what HUAWEI asks for its 1,695 euro Porsche Design Mate 20 — the standard Mate 20 Pro retails for 1,049 euros. The Porsche model delivers a unique design, 256GB of storage (although there’s a more expensive variant with 512GB of storage), Meanwhile, OPPO’s special edition Find X retails for 1,699 euros, 700 euros more than the 1,000 euro standard model. Your extra cash gets you an OPPO phone with super-fast charging, 512GB of storage, and a carbon fiber-style aesthetic.

Would you consider buying this device? Is 10GB of RAM total overkill for an Android smartphone?

Drop your thoughts in the comments section below!