Honormagicbook 14
LAPTOP ❘ £550 from Amazon www.snipca.com/34688
Abracadabra!
This lightweight metal-caseede laptop looks pricier than itt is, especially in the darker Spaacea Grey option, even if the bluueu stripe round the lid is dubiioous. In the UK, retailers are stocckingc both colours (the other is Mmystic Silver) but only one configuuration,u, with an AMD Ryzen 3500U processor, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD.
The solid chassis supports a good-quality keyboard, though it’s not backlit. Our test unit had a proper UK arrangement, with the double-height Enter key, but models advertised here all show a US layout, so you might want to check this before buying if it’s important to you. The touchpad felt a bit cheap, but worked well, supporting Windows 10 gestures. The fingerprint reader offers a quick login. The Full HD screen showed adequate brightness, good contrast and wide viewing angles. For general work and Youtube, it’s fine. But our test meter found only 58 per cent of the SRGB colour space covered – not good enough for photo editing.
Elegantly narrow bezels have squeezed out the webcam, which instead pops up from the keyboard. If you’ve been watching the TV news during lockdown, you’ll know which pundits have these webcams – they’re the ones whose chins you’ve been staring at. Find yourself a pile of books to stand the laptop on and it’s acceptable.
The 2.1GHZ quad- core Ryzen 3500U isn’t a particularly new or fast processor, but for this class of laptop it’s decent, and the integrated Vega 8 graphics will cope with many 3D games at 720p resolution. For comparison, a Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 with Intel’s i7-1065g7 looks stronger on paper but was beaten by the
Not as pricey as it looks, Magicbook 14 is quick and stylish
Magicbook 14 in many of our tests. Despite its fairly low capacity, the SSD was pretty quick, too, managing 2,456 megabytes per second in sequential reading and 1273MB/S writing.
Like most modern laptops, the Magicbook 14 isn’t upgradeable, so any additions will need to be external. It has a relatively generous three ports: one USB-A 2, suitable for a mouse; one USB-A 3 Gen1, which isn’t bad for memory sticks and hard drives; and one USB-C, which supports faster SSDS and other compatible accessories and adapters, including monitors, but is also used for charging the Magicbook.
You’d probably want a USB-C hub (from around £50 for units with multiple port types) if you use peripherals regularly. Battery life, at 8 hours 15 minutes in our video-playback test, was very good.
SPECIFICATIONS
2.1GHZ AMD Ryzen 5 3500U quad-core processor • 8GB memory • 256GB SSD • 14in 1920x1080-pixel touchscreen • Webcam • 802.11ac Wi-fi • Bluetooth 4/1 • USB-C port • USB-A 3 Gen1 port • USB-A 2 port • Windows 10 Home • 15.9x323x215mm (HXWXD) • 1.38kg • One-year warranty www.snipca.com/34689