Honor MagicBo ok Pro
Magic by name, magic by nature: this “pro” 16in laptop is an almost unbelievably good bargain
PRICE £708 (£850 inc VAT) from hihonor.com
Hot on the heels of the bargain MagicBook 14 – our A-List choice of budget laptop for three months now ( see issue 311, p65)
– comes the MagicBook Pro. While the price is still low, Honor has clearly lifted its sights to more premium buyers here, with many of the same elements as the Huawei MateBook X Pro ( see issue 312, p86).
As Honor is a Huawei spinoff, the similarities come as little surprise. A 16.1in non-touchscreen means it’s larger than any of Huawei’s offerings to date, but its grey, “frosted” matte finish, pop-up keyboard webcam and circular fingerprint power button give the game away.
That’s great news: Huawei’s laptops have proved consistently excellent in terms of build quality, and it’s the same for the stiff, unyielding aluminium chassis here. Although the keyboard and touchpad aren’t the very best I’ve used – the spacebar rattles and I’d prefer a larger touch surface – there’s little that betrays its low price. Even the speakers, flanking the keyboard to the left and right, deliver rich, full-bodied audio that puts many rivals to shame.
Aside from the awkwardly placed pop-up webcam, the MagicBook Pro has all the hallmarks of an ideal laptop for these remote-working times. It has a big screen, which should make working from home a more pleasant experience than a smaller-screened device, although I’d prefer a sharper display than the 1080p one here.
In Honor’s defence, the screen is both colour-accurate and reasonably bright. It peaked at 345cd/m2 in our tests, which is fine for indoor use. It covers 97.8% of the sRGB colour gamut (from a volume of 99.9%) and its average Delta E within sRGB is a brilliant 0.46.
Honor also strikes the right balance between flexibility and portability. There are plenty of ports for attaching peripherals: one USB-C, HDMI and USB-A port on the left edge and two USB-A ports plus a 3.5mm jack on the right edge. All this despite being a hair under 17mm thick and weighing 1.7kg. It’s true that this isn’t as impressively svelte as this year’s LG Gram 17 ( see issue 311, p56), which weighs 1.35kg and also has a higherresolution display, but the MagicBook Pro is half the price and has much more powerful internals.
Here, you’re getting one of AMD’s high-performance CPUs, a six-core 3GHz AMD Ryzen 5 4600H, and it’s backed up by 16GB of RAM and 512GB of PCIe SSD storage. Fast storage too: it raced through AS SSD’s sequential read and write speeds with results of 2,765MB/sec and 2,144MB/sec respectively.
All of this power meant the MagicBook Pro wasn’t just a fraction faster than the LG but three times as fast: a score of 221 in our benchmarks compares to 72 for the Gram and is 13% faster than the Dell XPS 15 ( see issue 313, p48) with its Core i7-10750H processor.
Where it falls behind the Dell, and other more expensive laptops, is in games and graphics-intensive tasks. Those laptops use discrete graphics where the Honor relies on AMD’s built-in Radeon RX Vega 6 graphics, and this meant it could only manage 33fps in Metro: Last Light at its native resolution and 72fps in the less
“In fact, it performs so well and at such a reasonable price that it embarrasses laptops costing hundreds of pounds more”
demanding Dirt: Showdown. As these results illustrate, though, it’s capable of playing less demanding games.
Battery life is respectable, lasting 9hrs 17mins in our video-rundown test with the screen set to a brightness of 170cd/m2 and Flight mode engaged. For a laptop with a 16in display, a relatively small 56Wh battery and all that power, it’s a commendable result.
Looking at those scores, you could be forgiven for wondering what all the other manufacturers are doing. In fact, the MagicBook Pro performs so well and at such a reasonable price that it embarrasses laptops costing hundreds of pounds more.
It does have shortcomings. I’d like to have seen a higher resolution display with a taller aspect ratio, and the keyboard and touchpad aren’t quite up to the standards of the best laptops on the market, while the webcam positioning isn’t ideal.
But, at £850, the MagicBook Pro is simply bonkers good. It’s fast, surprisingly slim and light for a 16.1in machine, and feels well made. If you need a powerful machine for use at home as well as on the road, but don’t have big bucks to spend, it’s the laptop you should buy.