One of China’s largest phone makers launched a laptop that will turn heads — Honor’s MagicBook Pro 16 has 32GB RAM by default and an Nvidia Geforce RTX 4060 GPU
There’s another player wanting to grab a share of the premium laptop market
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Honor debuted its flagshiplaptop, the MagicBook Pro 16 at MWC 2024.
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 abusiness laptop.
Engineers opted for anIntelCore Ultra 7 155H processor, eschewingAMDCPUs in that particular model. Then there’s 32GB of soldered LPDDR5 memory with a (replaceable) 1TBSSDand anNvidia Geforce RTX 4060 GPUequipped with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.
Waiting for the price tag
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.
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 atDell’s website for a similar configuration yielded aDell XPS 16and 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
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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 asWindows 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 whatSamsungandApplecan 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 ourbest laptop for photo editingbuying guide? Stay tuned!
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Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled inwebsite buildersandweb hostingwhen DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.
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