Honor debuted its flagship laptop, the MagicBook Pro 16 at MWC; the notebook – Honor’s first AI PC – will go on sale in China imminently with the rest of the world getting it in Q2. What sets it apart from the competition for now is the fact that its base configuration is, by any measure, surprisingly beefy, making it a good candidate for a business laptop.
Engineers opted for an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, eschewing AMD CPUs in that particular model. Then there’s 32GB of soldered LPDDR5 memory with a (replaceable) 1TB SSD and an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 GPU equipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.
The other surprise is the inclusion of a 16:10, 3,072 x 1,920-pixels, 16-inch display with a 500 nits brightness, a 165Hz refresh rate and an e-Book mode that’s easy on the eye and the battery. It is not a touchscreen model but offers almost 3x the screen resolution of a full HD display. As for the battery life, Honor claims that the 75WHr battery can run for up to 10 hours using the popular PCMark 10 benchmark.
The rest of the spec sheet is more than adequate: there’s Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth 5.1, a fingerprint sensor, a dedicated numeric keypad, six (yes six) speakers, six ports and plenty of holes for air circulation – but no memory card reader and the charger is a brick-type rather than a sleek GaN one.
Waiting for the price tag
Two color schemes are available (white and purple) and at less than 1.9Kg, it is reasonably portable for a device with a big screen and a dedicated graphics card.
As for pricing, a quick glance at Dell’s website for a similar configuration yielded a Dell XPS 16 and a $2,799 price tag, the one and only piece of the puzzle that’s missing to confirm whether the MagicBook Pro 16 is one of the best value-for-money laptop around. I have reached out to Honor to find out more about pricing and to see whether there will be other variants, presumably with a lesser configuration and lighter price tag
A word on the plethora of services that Honor has or will provide soon. These include the ability to search for pictures and photos locally, as well as summarize documents, both using the inbuilt NPU in the Intel CPU as well as Windows 11’s AI capabilities. When paired with a Honor smartphone, you can also manage your handset through the laptop and use it as a portable webcam, something that brings it nearer to what Samsung and Apple can achieve.
The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is geared towards a wide audience and creative professionals, developers and freelancers may want to keep a close eye on what the sticker price will be. Will it make it to our best laptop for photo editing buying guide? Stay tuned!
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