Honor MagicBook X14 Pro review

Build quality is often the bane of budget machines, but this one is a head-turner with a neat aluminium unibody outer shell, and the device appears quite sturdy. The surfaces have a matte finish that repels fingerprints and dirt and gives a premium feel. Well, nothing can be completely smudge-proof, but it’s quite easy to wipe off. The laptop is lightweight at 1.4 kg and easy to carry around. So if you like extreme portability, you would appreciate this design. The plastic hinge appears sturdy and offers an optimally damped action. The laptop is available only in Grey colour.

The MagicBook X14 Pro doesn’t offer many ports, and this is one thing you would really miss. With two USB Type-A (USB 3.0) ports, a single USB Type-C port (which is used for charging as well), an HDMI port and a 3.5mm headphone jack, it limits wired connectivity. You can use a USB Type-C hub, but you can’t use it while the laptop is charging.

The 14-inch FullHD (‎1920 x 1200) IPS display has an anti-glare coating, and with 300 nits of peak brightness, it is a pleasure to use indoors. However, you will find it illegible in bright sunlight. The screen offers a narrow bezel, keeping the overall dimensions of the frame lower than usual 14-inch laptops. The screen is capable of displaying 100 percent sRGB colour gamut, and we could verify this with our profiling test. The display is optimal for watching movies, web browsing and even some image editing in a crunch.

The keyboard is quite basic, as expected in a budget-friendly laptop, though it offers useful backlighting with three levels — Off, Low, and High. The keys feel clunky and lifeless, devoid of much relief in spacing. The main alphanumeric keys are still manageable once you get used to the keyboard. There’s a fingerprint scanner on the power button, but this button occupies the farthest corner on the right, usually reserved for the Delete key. Hence there’s more chance of your finger landing on this key in the middle of typing a document. However, the fingerprint scanner proved quite responsive, never failing to unlock the laptop even once during our review period. The laptop offers a large trackpad, which performed as expected throughout without giving us a chance to complain.

The Honor MagicBook X14 Pro uses a 13th Gen Intel Core i5-13420H processor with a maximum clock speed of 2.1 GHz and comes with 8GB and 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM. You get a 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD, which can be expanded to 1TB. However, this is not user-expandable. We received the variant with 8GB RAM and 512GB storage. The graphics department is handled by an on-board Intel UHD processor with 128MB of VRAM. 

A basic HD camera helps in video conferencing, though the output quality is not something worth writing about. There’s a shortcut to disable the camera, but no physical shutter. Two ‘surround’ speakers provide audio output. The laptop houses a 60 Wh battery and it is capable of 65W fast charging. The bundled charger has a slim profile, but it is broad enough to infringe the neighbouring sockets on a linear power strip.

The 13th Gen H-series processor bestows some serious processing ability to the X14 Pro while the display makes it competent for creative applications, especially focussed on online use. It’s indeed a great option if your usage involves general browsing, light applications like documents and spreadsheets, and entertainment. You can easily work with multiple tabs open in your browser without glitches. 

The lack of power-hungry components makes the battery last for a long time even with keyboard backlighting switched on, and the supplied charging adapter tops it up really fast. Another plus is the output from the integrated speakers. The speakers are quite loud and capable of reproducing room-filling music with a wide and pleasant experience.

However, if you want to do something more, the supporting components and features limit the capabilities of this wannabe ‘Pro’ laptop. The device comes with the usable 460GB of storage partitioned into a 199 GB + 261 GB configuration, which limits the use of cloud-based storage meant for any serious work, especially if you have images and videos to work with. Most of these applications like OneDrive and Creative Cloud use the C-drive as the default location, and it’s tricky to change this. Coming to creative applications and games, the lack of a dedicated GPU and the namesake memory of the integrated graphic unit make it impossible to do any critical work.

Choosing a mid-priced laptop is not easy, especially if you are looking for a lightweight device to take on your frequent commute. The Honor MagicBook Pro doesn’t fail to satisfy the average user who needs it for entertainment and light professional work. We can certainly recommend this laptop as a secondary device for travel in place of a tablet or two-in-one. It might have severe limitations in performance, but the combination of a compact, lightweight design and affordable price still makes it a decent choice for the right user.