Honor MagicBook Art 14 review

08 September 2024

Back in July, Honor unveiled the MagicBook Art 14 for the Chinese market and it looked truly impressive on paper.

It has a nearly 15-inch screen (14.6-inch) with the very convenient 3:2 aspect ratio, and it's a 120 Hz touchscreen OLED panel to boot. The laptop has a 60Wh battery, a full set of ports, Intel's Core 7 Ultra 155H processor with up to 32 GB of RAM, and up to 1 TB of storage.

All that fits in a 1.03kg package - you read that correctly - a feather above 1kg. To put that into perspective, the 15.3-inch MacBook Air has only around 7% more display area (677cm2 vs 634cm2) but weighs 46% more (1.51kg vs 1.03kg). Half a kilo is a huge difference for an ultraportable laptop.

Honor ships the MagicBook Art 14 itself in a thin box and its 65W adapter and detachable USB-C cable in a separate box, tucked into a plain bigger cardboard box.

Design and build quality

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 has found a unique solution for its camera placement. Instead of fattening the laptop's top bezel to house the camera, adding an unsightly notch, or settling for an up-your-nose solution, it made the camera a magnetic piece that attaches to the top of the display when in use and tucks into the laptop's body the rest of the time.

This leaves the screen bezels a svelte 2.2mm on the sides and top and makes for a clean-looking machine. Plus it eliminates any privacy concerns you might have as not only the camera isn't looking at you it's outright detached when you don't need it.

A clever inner design and selection of light materials throughout make the incredible 1.03kg weight possible. The laptop has an titanium keyboard, which reduces the weight by 16% compared to previous models.

The body is made from a magnesium alloy, making the casing 30% lighter than previous models. The finish is called Satin Emanel Spraying Technology, which is a skin-friendly coating that's also highly durable per the company's claims. The laptop ships in either Sunrise White (with subtle pink and purple hues) or Emerald Green, which leans towards blue in certain light and isn't as olive green as the press materials would have you believe.

Inside, Honor designed battery so it optimizes space utilization by 28%.

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 feels very similar to the Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024, which we reviewed back in July.

Both machines feature a similar textured finish, but while the MateBook X Pro 2024 is slightly lighter at 980g, its 14.2-inch display is notably smaller, as is its touchpad.

The tuckaway camera module is undoubtedly innovative. It sits flush inside the left corner of the laptop and can be popped in or out by a finger press. The module sits very securely in the laptop body, and it can be tucked in whichever way you want - even with the pins outward (though you shouldn't do that).

It's a clever way to deal with the camera on a laptop but it does push the two ports on the left side of the MagicBook Art 14 a bit further down. It's an unbalanced look that could irk some people.

The camera module attaches to the top of the laptop and largely stays out of sight. It snaps with a positive magnetic feel and can be used facing the back of the laptop if you'd want that for whatever reason.

Display, keyboard, speakers, camera

The display of the Honor MagicBook Art 14 is a masterpiece. While it's not the only laptop to ship with an OLED panel, it's really among the best out there.

This is a 14.6-inch 3120x2080px FullView 10-bit display with a squarer-than-average 3:2 aspect ratio, up to 120Hz refresh rate, and 10-point touch control. The panel has 100% DCI-P3 coverage, as well as a DeltaE (ΔE) rating of below 0.5. The panel does 4320Mh PWM flicker-free dimming and even got TUV Rheinland to certiify for low blue light emissions certification.

The panel is rated at up to 700 nits of brightness in HDR mode and we measured a consistent 500 nits in SDR mode. The Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024 measured slightly higher, especially in HDR (950 nits) but the MagicBook Art 14 is still impressively bright.

We've always commended Huawei and Honor for shipping their machines with proprietary display color support and the MagicBook Art 14 follows that trend. Right-click on the desktop and go into Display Manager, where you can choose what color spectrum the laptop adheres to - sRGB, P3, or native. This is an excellent feature that most other PCs lack and is especially useful for content creators.

This is also where you can adjust the color tone of the screen, put it in eBook mode, and finetune the color.

Honor and Huawei keyboards have long been excellent for typing but the MagicBook Art 14 is a step above. We can't really say we can appreciate the titanium build but the keys feel slightly softer and more dampened than on the MateBook X Pro 2024.

The keys have the standard 1.5mm key travel and are very well-spaced. Avid gamers will scoff at the smaller Up and Down arrow keys, but that's the only complaint that we could think of.

The trackpad on the Honor MagicBook Art 14 is enormous and very high quality. The smooth glass surface is excellent for gliding your fingers and being a solid-state unit, you can click anywhere you like with the same precise feel. You can adjust the tracking sensitivity and the vibration strength to your liking.

The trackpad supports up to 5 fingers, though Windows currently tops out at 4. There's a number of proprietary gestures through Honor's pre-installed software like the knock to screenshot. They all get short demo videos and you can decide whether to enable them or not.

There are six speakers and three microphones on this laptop and they're doing an excellent job. There's plenty of volume to fill a room and there're even some hints of bass underneath, making the sound full.

You get a fingerprint scanner with Windows Hello support inside the power button and it works without issues. It supports fingerprint caching, meaning a single press will power on the machine and automatically log you into Windows once it boots to the login screen.

The magnetic 1080p camera doesn't feature IR sensors for Windows Hello. Quality-wise, it's a good enough webcam but nothing special. The image quality is okay but there's no HDR, for instance.

The field of view of the webcam is very wide and you can set it to track your face across the frame. You can also play around with virtual backgrounds.

Doing calls through the MagicBook Art 14 is a great experience. Callers reported that they heard us fine through the laptop's trio of mics and appreciated the active noise cancellation.

The MagicBook Art 14 doesn't leave you wanting in terms of ports. You have two USB-C on the left side - one Thunderbolt 4 (40Gbps) and one USB 3.2 Gen 1 (5Gbps). On the right is one USB-A (5Gbps), an HDMI 2.1 (4k@60Hz), and a 3.5mm audio jack.

You should use the Thunderbolt-enabled USB-C on the right (it has a bolt of lightning on it) for charging, as it brings the highest charging speed.

Performance, Copilot smarts, battery life

You can spec the Honor MagicBook Art 14 with either an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H (14 total cores, 4 performance, 8 efficiency, 2 low-power efficiency) or the more cable Core Ultra 7 155H (16 total cores, 6 performance, 8 efficiency, 2 low-power efficiency) with Arc graphics, which we have here.

There's a choice between 16 GB or 32 GB of LPDDR5x RAM and 1 TB NVME SSD.

This is Honor's first Copilot-integrated laptop and it swaps the right Windows key for a dedicated Copilot key. Copilot works on-device to give personalized answers and is deeply integrated with Microsoft apps such as Outlook and Microsoft 365.

It can generate formulas, create charts and graphs, summarize key points in emails, and transcribe meetings in real time. This is a real speed booster if you do your work through Microsoft's suite of apps.

Intel's Meteor Lake has been reviewed to oblivion at this point so we'll focus on how it specifically performs in this machine. It's a very close match for the Core 9 Ultra 185H we tested in the Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024, having the same number of physical cores.

In Geekbench 6, it managed a similar score in single-core but is around 15% behind in multi-core. The SSD speeds are good but are closer to PCIe Gen 3 than Gen 4.

We ran a 1-hour stress test on the Honor MagicBook Art 14. Like other thin-and-light laptops, it prioritizes being cool and quiet. When stressed, the processor can briefly top out at 2.7GHz (43W) and then drop down to 2.1GHz (22W) where it stabilizes. It would occasionally jump up to around 2.6GHz-2.7GHz (35W-39W) and then settle back down to 2.1GH (22W) where it stays for the majority of the test.

During the test, the fans were going full blast but produced no more than 45dB - barely audible in a relatively quiet office environment. This is an impressively quiet machine.

The MagicBook Art 14 doesn't get very warm either. The dual fans are bridged by a generous vapor chamber, which combine to contain and then disperse the heat from the top of the keyboard to the back of the machine. We measured just below 50° C at the highest, which wasn't too bad - you can comfortably use this laptop under load.

The MagicBook Art 14 packs 60Wh battery that lasted 6:37 hours in our YouTube video test (400 nits, 80dB) and 6:53 hours in our browsing loop test (400 nits). Charging the laptop from 0% to full took around an hour and a half, and it got to 43% in the first 30 minutes.

Conclusion

Honor made a compelling ultrabook in the MagicBook Art 14. From whichever angle you look at it, this is an exceptional device that stands out from the crowd of thin-and-light laptops. Its build isn't your typical machined metal and it comes in two interesting colors. The innovative magnetic camera allows for a thin and even bezel around a display that's bigger than most 14-inch competitors. Not to mention that it's an amazing OLED panel with fast 120Hz refresh rate.

Then there's the impossible lightness of the MagicBook Art 14 - Art makes Air look like Lead.

And as an overall package, the Intel-equipped machine works quite well - it's powerful but runs cool and silent. And you can get very reasonable running times from the 60Wh battery. However, the newly announced Snapdragon X Elite-equipped MagicBook Art looms over this Intel one with pressing questions - how much better at battery endurance will the ARM version be?

Still, that one is still a while away and the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with its far superior graphics is just about to hit the market.

Pros

• Strikes an excellent balance of size and weight
• Solid feel, we like the unique color
• Color-accurate OLED display with 500 nits of SDR and 700 nits of HDR brightness
• Excellent port selection - Thunderbolt, USB-A, HDMI
• Runs quiet and cool
• Innovative magnetic camera design

Cons

• Only one USB-C is Thunderbolt 4
• Camera slot pushes USB-C ports to the middle of the laptop
• SSD not quite up to PCIe 4.0 standards

Honor hasn't yet disclosed the price and availability of the MagicBook Art 14, so we can't really advise you to get one or not. In China the highest spec model in this review is CNY 9,499 at the moment, which translates to €1,200, though European price will undoubtedly be higher.

But if money's no object - this very well may be the best laptop to get in the 14-inch to 15-inch category.