Huawei Matebook 14 2024 review

Ivan, 05 October 2024

This is the Huawei MateBook 14 2024 ushering the lineup into the OLED realm. It's a solid upgrade over the MateBook 14 2023 and the 450-nit OLED panel that replaces a 300-nit IPS LCD is just one of them. This is also the first stylus-compatible MateBook.

Last year's model ran an i7-1360P - this year's model packs a more efficient and much faster Core 7 Ultra 155H.

Huawei also made this year's model lighter than its predecessor.

The laptop ships with a 65W charger with a built-in USB-C cable, and you can spec the machine with an Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H with 16GB of RAM, and either 512GB or 1TB of storage.

Design and build quality

The MateBook 14 2024 has a classic if slightly forgettable design. Ours is the Green model, which is probably the way to go - it's fresh and interesting in a sea of silver and grey machines. Your other option is precisely grey.

The laptop is made of metal, which is nice. The Huawei logo on the lid is the only element of interest. We like the understated look and think it suits this machine well.

It's also reasonably light at 1.31kg and thin at 14.5mm.

When you open the lid, you're greeted by the lovely OLED display with reasonably thick black bezels, the green color-matched deck, and the black keyboard. The preloaded green wallpaper completes the black and green theme.

There are no speaker grilles on the deck of the laptop - those are on the bottom - and you get no sophisticated webcam solution like on the Honor MagicBook Art 14 we recently reviewed - there's a conventional camera in the top bezel here.

Display, keyboard, camera, and speakers

The biggest reason to get the MateBook 14 2024 is the OLED display. It's a big step up from the nicest LCDs around and a quantum leap compared to the 300-nit IPS LCD you'd find on the previous generation MateBook 14.

This isn't the same OLED panel you find on the MateBook X Pro 2024 - that one is both of higher resolution and brighter - but you're still getting a sharp 2880x1920px touchscreen with Huawei's staple 3:2 aspect ratio, 100% sRGB and DCI-P3 coverage, and 95% coverage of the Adobe RGB. These are excellent numbers for photo and video work.

The panel is capable of running as high as 120Hz and will toggle between 60Hz and 120Hz depending on the content.

We've always praised Huawei for its excellent Display Manager app (right-click on the desktop, then more options for the old context menu) as it allows you to choose between P3, sRGB, and a variety of other gamuts.

We measured around 460 nits of SDR brightness (a little lower in the center) and a high of 550 nits in HDR mode. Those are far from the 500+ nit MateBook X Pro 2024 (nearly 1000 nits in HDR), but still solid numbers.

The contrasty OLED display looks far better than your average LCD even at slightly lower comparable brightness. PWM flickering is an issue on OLED panels and more sensitive users may notice some flickering at lower brightness.

The MateBook 14 2024 has the typical Huawei keyboard with excellent 1.5mm key travel, a great layout, a two-row Enter key, and a backlight with two stages. The only thing missing here is a Numpad, though it's a rarity on compact laptops.

We've long found Huawei and Honor keyboards to be excellent for long-term use and the MateBook 14 2024 is no exception.

The trackpad is a good size, though not nearly as impressive as that on the recent Huawei laptops we've seen. What we don't like is the plastic surface - Huawei should've gone with glass at this price point.

The surface isn't as smooth for your finger sliding. Gestures work okay but the experience is lackluster when you've become accustomed to glass.

The power button is in its usual place in the upper right corner. It houses a capacitive fingerprint scanner with caching - so it will boot up and log you in with a single press.

That's the only supported Windows Hello biometric on this laptop - there's no IR camera for face scanning.

There's a great selection of ports but with one huge drawback - no Thunderbolt 4. This omission could be a dealbreaker some, so keep it in mind.

There's a USB-C port (data, charging, and DisplayPort), USB-A port (3.2 Gen 1), HDMI, and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left side of the machine. There's a single USB-A plug (3.2 Gen 1) on the other side. It would make for a far more versatile device to have seen a second USB-C on this side, but alas.

Ports

The 1080p camera is centered in the top bezel of the laptop. It's only okay in terms of quality. Huawei's PC Manager app provides a myriad of virtual backgrounds for the camera, as well as a Beauty filter, auto-centering, and the ability to simulate that you're looking at the camera or turn it off on a system level.

Camera

There are two speakers on the underside of the MateBook 14 2024. They offer surprisingly loud and solid output. There's even a more than reasonable layer of bass underneath, making this a very good laptop for media consumption.

Performance, battery life

The Huawei MateBook 14 2024 ships with a choice of Intel Core Ultra 5 125H or a Core Ultra 7 155H (in our unit) - these are last year's 7nm Meteor Lake, which are just now being replaced by Intel's latest Lunar Lake processors. The 155H has a total of 16 cores with 6 performance cores with a peak clock of 4.8GHz, 8 efficient cores, and 2 low-power efficiency cores. There's 16 GB of RAM no matter the version, and you can have either 512 GB or 1 TB of storage.

Graphics are handled by the 8-core Arc GPU with a peak clock of 2.25GHz.

The SSD on our laptop is a 1TB PCIe 4.0 unit with excellent performance.

Geekbench and disk speed

We performed our usual 1-hour stress test of the MateBook 14 2024 to see how it handles the Core Ultra 7 155H in practice. The laptop had no issues cooling the processor under intense load and performed notably better than the Huawei MateBook X Pro 2024 with the Core Ultra 9 185H and the Honor MagicBook Art 14, running the same 155H. While those machines quickly throttled to mid-20W, the MateBook 14 2024 held its processor at 40W throughout the test.

That's about 2.5GHz without an issue. The fans were on for the entire test but are barely audible in a typical office environment. This is a perfectly adequate laptop for office work and can easily handle some more demanding tasks like photo and video editing, and even light-to-moderate 1080p gaming.

Thermals

The MateBook 14 2024 comes with a large 70Wh battery - the same size as the MateBook X Pro 2024, and 15% bigger than the 60Wh inside the Honor MagicBook Art 14. We ran two tests on this laptop - a YouTube video loop at 400 nits and 80dB volume, and a browser loop at 400 nits. The MateBook 14 2024 managed an impressive 10 hours and 20 minutes in the streaming test and 9 hours and 10 minutes in the browsing test - more than solid showings.

Conclusion

The Huawei MateBook 14 2024 is an excellent laptop for everyday use. It's light, well-made, and very well-equipped. You get a powerful Intel Meteor Lake processor, 16 GB of RAM, up to 1 TB of storage, great ports, and an excellent OLED display.

This configuration will set you back £1,199 (£999 at the time of this article) or €1,350, which is a bit less than mainstream rivals like the Asus Zenbook 14, Acer Swift Go 14, or the Lenovo ThinkPad E14. The 13-inch Apple MacBook Air is €1,530 with 512 GB storage and €1,760 with a terabyte SSD. That makes the MateBook 14 2024 the best value in the segment, and the best equipped with the Core Ultra 7 155H and an OLED display.

However, Intel's Lunar Lake chips promise huge gains in battery endurance, thanks to TSMC's 3nm process. On the performance side, Lunar Lake should be faster, though it's not as drastic - it's mostly about efficiency.

AMD's Ryzen AI 9 300 series are both faster and more efficient than the Meteor Lake chip inside the MateBook 14 2024, but they're also quite new and come in more expensive laptops. Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus ARM-based chips are even more efficient, likely just as fast as the Core Ultra 7 155H, but also available for around the same money. So those are the most likely devices to turn away the MateBook 14 2024 buyer.

There's always a better deal around the corner. There are always discounts waiting to happen. But for right here and right now, the MateBook 14 2024 offers excellent value for money and makes for a great candidate for your main portable laptop.

Huawei will start delivering the MateBook 14 2024 in the second part of October.