The Magic

Product Information

The only other model worth mentioning is the HP Pavilion 16.1-inch notebook, a gaming laptop with an Intel Core i5-10300H and a dedicated Geforce GTX1660Ti GPU. It is far heavier than the MagicBook Pro, has a smaller battery and its quad-core CPU won’t stand a chance against the Ryzen’s hexa-core processor. Final verdict The HD webcam - based on the Omnivision OV9734 - is a pop-up type that resides inside a key between F6 and F7 and don’t worry, it won’t damage your screen if you happen to close the display without remembering to push down the webcam. That said, we’d like to commend the LG Gram 17 which received our recommendation in July 2020 and a comment from our fellow reviewer, Bill Thomas, that this is a laptop that “can't actually be real”. Why? For a start it is the lightest 17.3-inch laptop ever built, it is even lighter than the smaller Apple’s MacBook Pro 13-inch albeit with a much larger footprint. While it does cost more than the Honor MBP, the Gram 17 has a bigger battery capacity, a higher screen resolution, Thunderbolt 3 ports and a numeric keypad. Some models also come with a dedicated Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650 GPU. Other than the questionable choice of having the webcam hidden in the keyboard, there’s a number of changes we’d advocate for the next iteration. Use a 16:10 panel - just like Apple’s - which will allow for more room above and below the keyboard.

Doing so means you can get a proper numeric keypad - surely a must at this size - in and move the speakers above the keyboard. Next, try to fit a bigger battery even if it means bumping the price up; matching the 100WHr battery on the Apple MBP would be ideal. A memory card reader would also be appreciated as well as the inclusion of Thunderbolt 3 as a universal connector. We understand Honor’s desire to have a faceoff with Apple’s MacBook Pro but we have to question the wisdom of adding yet another screen size, one which is after all only half an-inch diagonally bigger than most of its peers. There are very few 16-inch Windows laptops at the time of writing, a slightly odd category that fits between the usual 15.6-inch models and the awkwardly bigger 17.3-inch ones. At just over seven hours, the battery life is decent without being exceptional. Our best time was reached by the LG Gram 14 with well over 10 hours, a 50% difference. That said, the MBP achieved this with a 56WHr battery (8WHr per hour), making it less frugal than the Gram 14’s 73WHr (7WHr per hour). Note that you should be able to charge the device to 50% capacity in 30 minutes. The competition

Last but not least, we’d love to see a “ Pro As mentioned before, the obvious rival to the MagicBook Pro is the MacBook Pro 16-inch. The latter costs almost three times as much but comes with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, a much bigger battery, a higher-resolution display, six speakers and a discrete GPU. Whether or not the 200% premium is worth it is debatable but one thing that cannot be argued is that the MacBook Pro 16-inch is an exceptional workhorse. The webcam is probably the only glaring weak spot of an overall very good product. While the picture quality is good, its fixed location means that interlocutors on your video conference calls will see you from a downward angle (see picture) when the laptop is on one’s lap. The problem is different on a table where its inflexibility becomes a clear flaw. The pleasant experience continues on to the screen: the display is a 300nits model with a 1000:1 rated contrast ratio and a 100% sRGB color gamut. While it is not bright enough when working in direct sunlight, the fact that it is matte reduces the glare that usually makes glossy screens almost unusable whenever it’s sunny. Out of the box, the image quality is, pun intended, clearly visible. Hardly any bleed, colours that pop out, just enough vibrancy, an all-round (subjective) success. The highlight of the MagicBook Pro is the AMD Ryzen 5 4600H that powers it. It is a six-core processor with a base CPU speed of 3GHz, 11MB cache, 12 threads, six graphics cores running at 1.5GHz. Now there’s a good reason why a hexa-core model was chosen and that has to do with the fact that the base MacBook Pro model has a 6-core CPU, the Intel Core i7-9750HF, a CPU launched last year with a comparable 45W TDP.