Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon review: A great laptop with familiar compromises

Ever since its formal split from Huawei, Honor has been putting more and more work into its devices, whether it’s phones or laptops. I hadn’t had the chance to review a non-Huawei Honor laptop until the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon, so I was pretty curious to see what this was like, especially after briefly

checking out the Intel version
at IFA 2024 (a trip that Honor sponsored, to be transparent).

After using it for a while, I’ve come away pretty happy with most of the experience. Being powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite instantly makes this a terrific laptop for all kinda of use cases, and the design really helps here, too. The webcam is also a neat party trick that doesn’t really get old, but it’s also not that impressive, which is something I’ve come to expect from Honor.

About this review: Honor sent me the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon for the purposes of this review, and the company also sponsored my trip to IFA 2024, where I first saw the laptop. The company had no input in the contents of this review.

Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon: Pricing and availability

Right off the bat, the biggest problem with the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon is that you can’t buy it. Splitting from Huawei may have allowed Honor to keep working with American suppliers, but the company still has no presence in the United States itself, so this one is only for the rest of the world to have. On Honor’s website, you can see it listed in France, Germany, Italy, and China.

The laptop comes in a single configuration, featuring a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 chipset, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage for €1,699.90. However, some kind of offer or discount is frequent on Honor’s website.

Design

It doesn’t feel like anything else I’ve seen

I’ve had many a laptop come across my hands over the years, but I still have to say I’ve never seen one that feels quite like the MagicBook Art 14. Even though it’s made of metal (and it feels pretty solidly built), touching this laptop really doesn’t feel like it. There’s a smoothness to the touch that I’ve never seen on any other laptop made of metal, whether it’s aluminum or magnesium. It feels a bit warmer as a result, too. It’s kind of surreal, but in a good way.

That being said, I’m very upset with Honor’s disrespect for the Snapdragon version of this laptop. See, at IFA 2024, I got to check out the Intel version, and that one came in a beautiful Sunrise White colorway that felt even smoother to the touch, feeling almost like rubber. There was also an Emerald Green version that was less cool, but still interesting and different. Those colorways are exclusive to the Intel version, though, and the Snapdragon model is limited to a boring Starry Gray, which is pretty much just silver, and I really would love those other colors.

That being said, the laptop does feel a bit different from your typical clamshell. In addition to the smoothness of the surface, the laptop feels a bit rounded, and interestingly, the lid doesn’t cover the entirety of the base, with a small sliver behind the hinge still showing the bottom half of the laptop. It’s not much, but for me, it does make this laptop instantly recognizable when I look at it, and I like that.

Otherwise, I really love how thin and light this laptop is. For something with a 14.6-inch display, this thing is super portable. It’s very easy to pick up and carry around anywhere, and the extremely thin bezels make it feel smaller than you might expect. Despite the taller 3:2 aspect ratio and slightly larger screen overall, this laptop perfectly fits into my sleeve designed for the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED.

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The ports are a mess

The port situation is more disappointing, however. At first glance, it’s actually great for such a thin and light laptop: two USB-C ports, one USB Type-A, and HDMI, plus a headphone jack. It’s hard to go wrong there. But then you realize neither of the USB-C ports support USB4, so if you want to use a high-end docking station, you’re out of luck. The USB Type-A port is also limited to 5Gbps bandwidth. It’s nice to have all these ports, but it almost makes it weirder that Honor crippled them so much.

I’ve also had issues with power delivery using the USB-C port, particularly paired with my monitor. Usually, I can just plug in a computer using the USB-C cable and it will charge while also outputting to the display. For some reason, the MagicBook Art 14 doesn’t play nice with the monitor, though. It charges if it’s turned off, but when I turn it on, it stops charging, despite still supporting display output. Even weirder, I’ve seemingly fixed this by closing the laptop lid and then trying again. It’s just weird that it doesn’t work seamlessly like pretty much every other laptop.

Display and sound

You can’t go wrong with OLED

It’s been a couple of years since I’ve gotten to review a Huawei or Honor laptop, and the MagicBook Art 14 is definitely a step up from anything the company has done before. This is the first clamshell laptop Honor makes with an OLED display, and its a great one at that, with super-sharp 3120×2080 resolution and a 3:2 aspect ratio that’s great for multitasking. It’s also got rounded corners, which look nice even though Windows is not really optimized for it. It’s always a bit weird to see my mouse disappear into the corners, or some UI elements get covered up, but it’s not a huge deal.

Of course, being an OLED display means it looks fantastic for just about anything. Honor touts 100% coverage of DCI-P3 for this screen, and my testing shows it’s pretty close. I got 99% of sRGB, 94% of P3, 86% of Adobe RGB, and 84% of NTSC.

As for brightness, Honor’s spec sheet mentions up to 700 nits of peak brightness, but what that means is that it can hit 700 nits in HDR mode under the right circumstances. In normal use in SDR mode, my testing showed up to 500 nits, which is still ahead of most OLED laptop displays.

Image credit: XDA

That’s not to say it’s bad in any way, it’s just worth noting that Honor’s spec sheet may be a bit misleading about what you can expect. It’s a great OLED panel, and that’s what matters.

As for the speakers, Honor boasts a six-speaker setup here, which includes some top-facing drivers, and that’s always nice to see. The speakers here are fairly crisp and get decently loud, but they’re not as impressive as something like the Asus Zenbook S 14, which is still my gold standard for audio quality.

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Asus and Intel have hit it out of the park

The webcam is so clever

Honor has a long history of not caring about webcam quality and prioritizing thin bezels over a decent camera experience. A few years ago, many of the company’s laptops had the webcam in the keyboard, so it would pop up and point up at you from a very unflattering angle that also made it extremely awkward if you needed to type something, since your fingers would be in the way of the camera.

To address this and get the best of both worlds, Honor created a “hidden magnetic camera”, as the company calls it, for the MagicBook Art 14. The bezels around the display are still absolutely tiny, and that’s because, once again, there’s no webcam here. Instead, the webcam is stored inside the laptop next to the USB-C ports. Push in the elongated slot on the side of the laptop, and the webcam pops out, and then all you need to do is attach it magnetically to the top of the screen using the pin connectors.

This is an ingenious solution, and it has some perks, too. For one thing, you can rest assured no one is seeing you through your webcam when you’re not using it, because you can physically disconnect it, and that’s what you’re expected to do. You also don’t have weird viewing angles, and as a bonus, you can also snap the camera on backwards so you can show off something in front of you.

The problem here is that the webcam itself is still not very good. Even in good lighting, it looks pretty washed out and grainy, but it is far more usable than most of Honor’s previous efforts. What really makes this worse is the microphone placement. It’s very apparent that Honor doesn’t think anyone uses their laptops for meetings because these are two factors that consistently create problems. The microphones on this laptop are housed in the front edge of the laptop’s base, right where the touchpad is. So, again, if you’re in a meeting and need to do something else with the laptop, you have to either mute yourself or use an external mouse, otherwise you will be told it sounds like you’re scratching your microphone.

Keyboard and touchpad

A solid offering

Turning to the keyboard, all I can really say is that the MagicBook Art 14 is good. I’ve never been someone who’s overly picky about keyboards, and here, the experience is fairly solid. There’s enough feedback when pressing down on the keys and a decent amount of travel for it to be comfortable typing away at an article, even if it’s a long one. My only real complaint here has to do with the fact this is a German unit, and the keyboard layout doesn’t work very well for me. As far as the quality goes, I can’t really complain.

Below the keyboard is a very large touchpad which is haptic. This means that the touchpad doesn’t physically click when you press the buttons, and instead, it simulates a click using a haptic motor. I’m not usually a big fan of haptic touchpads, but I do think Honor did a very good job here of making this feel exactly like how you’d expect a touchpad to feel.

Performance and battery life

The Snapdragon X Elite is a star

While there’s a lot of good things about this laptop, I have to admit that the big thing that makes it appealing to me is the fact that it has a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset. This is only my second Snapdragon laptop, and the first one with the higher tier of the processor, the X1E-80-100 model. And, just as you’d expect, it’s great.

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 performs excellently, and I had no issues for the most part. The only area where Snapdragon PCs really lag behind Intel is the GPU performance, and while I don’t game on PC, I notice this a lot in Adobe Lightroom. The AI Denoise feature runs extremely slowly here, making it unviable when I’m editing multiple pictures, and I’m forced to just settle for manual denoising. Otherwise, I really didn’t have any issues. Here’s a rundown of my benchmark testing, most of which I ran on AC and battery power, as well as in both Best performance and Balanced power modes in Windows.

Unless specified, all tests are running on AC power and the best performance power plan. The reason I included the results for all these different scenarios is to illustrate how Qualcomm still manages power better than Intel. Turning the power settings down to Balanced, the Snapdragon X Elite only loses a small amount of performance, but the gulf between the best and worst scores on an Intel processor is still pretty big, even though it’s become far better with Lunar Lake.

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It does most things right

On the flip side, you can see where Arm PCs will still struggle because of emulation with a test like CrossMark, which still isn’t native on Arm. And in terms of graphics performance, Intel is very far ahead. If you’re someone who likes gaming occasionally, a Snapdragon laptop just isn’t for you, both because of the weaker GPU, but also because a lot of games just don’t work on Arm PCs.

While we’re talking about performance, I should mention that the SSD on this PC seems a bit strange in my benchmarking. CrystalDiskMark shows very low sequential write speeds that don’t match the rest of the results. It didn’t seem to impact my day-to-day use, but I wanted to mention it.

As for battery life, I’ve seen some great results, but maybe not as amazing as you might expect. One of my tests saw about 7 hours and 2 minutes of active time, though it also included nearly 26 hours of standby time, during which the laptop drained 6% of its battery. Another test yielded 9 hours and 52 minutes of active time, with nearly 11 hours of stanby time overnight. During a continuous YouTube video playback test, it lasted 14 hours and 39 minutes at 50% brightness and volume, with battery saver disabled. That’s still a very strong showing.

Is the Honor MagicBook Art 14 worth it?

I have mixed feelings about the MagicBook Art 14. At this asking price, this should be a laptop that’s premium in every way, but it really isn’t. Yes, the performance and battery life are fantastic, it has a fantastic screen, and the design feels premium in pretty much every way. But then there are some really strange compromises, like the slow USB ports, power delivery issues, and the poor webcam and microphone placement.

I think you can’t justify sacrifices like that when you ask nearly $2,000 for a laptop, even if these aren’t deal breakers for everyone. This is still a great laptop in my eyes, but if you have this kind of money, you’l probably be better off with something like a Dell XPS 13 or a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x.

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You should buy the Honor MagicBook Art 14 if:

• You want great performance and batery life
• You work in color-sensitive work or want a great screen for movie-watching
• You live in Europe or China
• You find it on sale

You shouldn’t buy the Honor MagicBook Art 14 if:

• You’re in online meetings
• You’re interested in gaming, even casually
• You want high-speed USB ports

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Great, but flawed

Honor MagicBook Art 14

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 does a lot right to deliver a premium experience that matches its price tag, but it makes compromises that make it harder to justify spending that much. It’s a great laptop, but there may be better options if you’re willing to spend this much.