Pay attention to the PC business and you may notice that the momentum is now with AMD rather than Intel. It’s successes, and Intel’s failures, means that Honor is now adding AMD’s Ryzen 5 4600H into its flagship MagicBook Pro 16.
The MagicBook Pro 16 draws plenty of inspiration from another 16-inch laptop we could think to name. As usual, however, Honor and parent company Huawei are more forgiving than some rivals when it comes to connectivity. The machine has a single USB-C port, but three (!) USB-A ports, a HDMI 2.0 port and a 3.5mm line-in.
Design-wise, it looks like the company took Huawei’s MateBook X Pro and stretched that machine out a little. You get the same space gray color, same keyboard and the same pop-up webcam that sits between F6 and F7 on the function row. Weighing 3.7 pounds, it’s not the lightest machine of this size, but for a 16-inch laptop, it’s never painfully weighty.
During my remote briefing, Honor made noises about how this machine should be taken seriously by creative and designer-y professionals. The MagicBook Pro’s 16.1-inch, 16:9, 300 nit display is equipped with a 1,920 x 1,080 resolution screen that offers 100 percent of the sRGB color gamut. And, as part of Honor’s commitment to lightness and thinness, the display has a 4.9mm bezel on the top and sides, ensuring that it fills almost all of the laptop’s frame.
I get why, especially at this price, the display isn’t a 4K world-beater, as much as I would love it to be. Honor’s overall pitch skews toward a younger crowd without the cash to afford a souped-up MacBook Pro. And it’s certainly fine to look at, I just wonder if those same design students who can’t afford anything better really want a 16.1-inch, HD screen.
Alongside the aforementioned Ryzen 5 4600H processor, you’ll find 16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD, paired with a 56W battery promising 11 hours on a charge. Even as a relatively cheap laptop chip, the 4600H can beat Intel’s far pricier equivalents for certain tasks. Compare the 4600H to Intel’s Core i7-9750H, and you’ll see the disparity in benchmarks for productivity tasks and light gaming.
While it’s only packing integrated graphics, Honor claims you should be able to play AAA games like GTA V with the graphics dialed down. So, I did just that, when the company sent me the laptop for some testing.
