Honor has an extensive line-up of MagicBook X, N and View series laptops – all with a similar stylish design and focus on functionality and connectivity. But the MagicBook Pro 16 we’re about to review is undoubtedly the company’s most powerful product ever.
Here are the numbers – MagicBook Pro 16 features a 16-inch 3072x1920px 16:10 IPS LCD with 500 nits brightness, Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 8GB Nvidia 4060 GPU, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD and a 75W battery.
This Honor laptop is dedicated to productivity, gaming, content creation, and of course, artificial intelligence. The MagicBook Pro 16 has been hailed as a product that ushered in a “new era of AI PCs,” making heavy use of AI in its marketing, claiming it can improve cross-operating system collaboration, intelligent interaction, and general PC performance.
AI is powered by Intel’s latest processors, which have built-in dedicated neural processing units (NPUs). The NPU can perform low-power AI acceleration and CPU/GPU offloading for tasks such as background blur, eye tracking, picture framing, and image generation.
The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 comes with a large 200W charger – a requirement if you want to use the 115W Nvidia 4060 GPU.
Unboxing the MagicBook Pro 16, its 200W charger
Design and build quality
In terms of design, the Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is no ordinary gaming laptop. Generally speaking, the laptop comes in purple and white colors, but the version with the Nvidia 4060 GPU only comes in white.
Considering the type of hardware it comes with, this laptop is both stylish and thin. It weighs 1.86 kg and is only 17.9 mm thick.
The top bezel of the 16-inch 16:10 aspect ratio display is slightly thicker to accommodate the 1080 webcam. The bottom bezel is also slightly thicker, while the side bezels are quite thin.
The webcam does not have infrared Windows Hello functionality. It is flanked by two microphones.
There aren’t any flashy design cues on the back of this laptop. There is only an Honor logo in the center of the metal cover.
What sets the MagicBook Pro 16 apart from the competition is a slight iridescent color cast under the white lid. Honor calls this all-metal 3D color spray technology. It stands out more in direct light and is very soft in normal light.
There are a total of six ports on the laptop. The 3.5mm audio jack is on the left side, alongside two USB-C ports – a 3.2 Gen 2 10 Gbps and a 4.0 Thunderbolt 4 40 Gbps port, which can also be charged via Power Delivery. There are no ports on the right side. Back around, there’s an HDMI 2.0, two USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 ports, and the proprietary charging port.
In terms of connectivity, the MagicBook Pro 16 has a 2×2 MIMO antenna, Wi-Fi 6 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax, 2.4GHz and 5GHz (though not 6E and 7), and Bluetooth 5.1.
Ports on the back and left
The MagicBook Pro 16 has air vents on all sides, including the bottom. Improved airflow is necessary, as powerful hardware is sure to generate a lot of heat.
Air vents on the right and bottom
The MagicBook Pro 16 is very well built. The body is sturdy and compact—there’s virtually no flex in the keyboard deck, display cover, or display itself. The hinge is also well damped and opens seamlessly with one finger.
The body is mostly made of metal. Both the top and bottom panels are metal, with a chamfer around the latter and trackpad cutout, giving the laptop a premium feel.
Keyboard, trackpad, monitor, audio
The MagicBook Pro 16’s keyboard is arranged in full width, with the numeric keypad on the right side. Numpad diehards will love this setup. People who like the keyboard to be centered will hate it at first, but will eventually get used to it.
The keys are big and nice and the travel is great. Once you get used to its off-center position, typing on this keyboard for long periods of time is comfortable.
There’s an automatic white backlight that you can’t adjust or turn off. The low contrast between the white keys and the white backlight makes for a poor experience when you’re looking for specific keys. We’d say it’s only really useful in very dim environments.
There are speaker grilles on both sides of the keyboard. It is part of the six-speaker layout of the Honor MagicBook Pro 16. Sound emanates upward from these vents, as well as from the vents on the lower front side of the laptop.
Since Honor needs to accommodate the numpad, the right Shift and Enter keys are on the smaller side. The arrow keys are large and comfortable, though.
The trackpad is large, but it has a plastic surface instead of glass. Gestures work well, but there’s some resistance when you drag your finger across the plastic surface that you don’t get on glass trackpads.
You can tap on the trackpad with one or two fingers, but you can also click it. The upper part of the trackpad requires a lot of pressure to click, while the bottom feels slightly loose when clicking. It’s not a very premium experience.
The power button is slightly recessed and doubles as an instant fingerprint reader. This means just one click turns on your computer and lets you log in to everything. We found the readers to be responsive and accurate.
The display of the MagicBook Pro 16 has a 16:10 aspect ratio, a resolution of 3072x1920px, a refresh rate of 165Hz, and a response time of 3ms. The non-touch screen covers 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut and sRGB color gamut. There is a display manager to change between the two, adjusting contrast and colors, but on our device the app didn’t run for some reason (and we couldn’t find where to reinstall it).
The panel is TUV Rheinland certified for low blue light emission and flicker-free. There’s dynamic dimming and eBook mode (accessible via the Display Manager app).
Honor claims the panel has a maximum brightness of 500 nits. We measured the brightness at the center at 527 nits, with the left edge around 480 nits and the right edge around 510 nits. This is very good uniformity and you’re unlikely to notice differences in brightness.
The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 has the loudest speakers we’ve ever heard. The sound they produce has a well-defined mid-range and enough low-end to make it rich when listening to music or watching movies. We thought the overall output was excellent. Since the speakers are placed around the keyboard and underneath the laptop, they’re also widely spaced.
Honor’s software suite can adjust the speakers to mimic spatial audio or work in stereo. Once the headphones are installed, you can choose between spatial audio and DTS enhancement.
Software, performance and battery life
Honor equips the MagicBook Pro 16 with a suite of applications – PC Manager and WorkStation. PC Manager is a hub through which you can control the performance of your machine and update various drivers for your laptop.
You can also pair your laptop with an Android smartphone in PC Manager and project your phone’s screen to your laptop, or your laptop’s screen to your tablet or foldable device. Honor Share uses Wi-Fi to send files to your phone.
There are two performance modes: Smart Mode, which prioritizes battery life while giving you adequate performance, and High Performance Mode, which unleashes the laptop’s full potential.
Honor Workstation is where you can use MagicRing. When you have multiple Honor devices with the same Honor account, they automatically sense each other and are able to share files and connect apps – apps flow seamlessly between your phone and laptop, so you can work on one of them Start a task on one device and continue it on another.
At the time of this review, some AI features were not yet available for testing. Smart image search, smart document summarization, text understanding, AI subtitles, and Magic Text are all important components of MagicBook Pro 16’s AI capabilities.
Continuing the discussion of scalability and performance. Opening the MagicBook Pro 16 is easy – just remove the T6 Torx screws. Once open, you can clean the internals and replace the SSD and battery. RAM and Wi-Fi are both soldered.
That’s about as upgradable as the MacBook is, but the MagicBook Pro 16’s specs are just as good, and that’s a good thing. In Europe, only a single hardware configuration seems to be available, and it’s pretty much maxed out.
You get an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor, 32GB of 6400MHz DDR5 RAM, a 1TB Western Digital SN740 PCIe-4.0 SSD, and an 8GB Nvidia GeForce RTX 4060 laptop GPU. The Honor MagicBook Pro 16 is equipped with the latest generation Meteor Lake Intel Core 7 Ultra 155H. It has 16 physical cores and 22 threads. There are 6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores and 2 new low-power efficiency cores. The built-in GPU is an Intel Arc with 8 Xe cores, and the NPU has two Gen3 compute engines (the largest engines on any core Ultra processor).
powerful hardware
The PCIe-4.0 SSD delivered excellent performance and stable read and write capabilities in all tests. By default it is divided into two partitions – C and D.
We ran Geekbench 6.2.2 to see CPU performance and GFXBench to see GPU performance. The CPU posted impressive multi-core results. The Nvidia RTX 4060 easily scored over 80fps in GFX’s 4K test, over 200fps in the 1440p test, and over 400fps in the 1080p test.
Geekbench and GFXBench
Even more impressive is the MagicBook Pro 16’s cooling performance. In our CPU stress test, the Core Ultra 7 155H maintained 2.6GHz throughout the test. Even more impressively, the fan was inaudible during testing, and the laptop didn’t get too hot.
During gaming, the fan noise reached 50 decibels. That’s not bad at all, not enough to disrupt office work.
Finally, there’s battery life. The built-in 75Wh battery pack enables long-term video playback. We ran two tests of streaming 10 hours of video – with screen brightness and speaker volume both set to 100%, and another test with both set to 50%.We have 4 hours and 40 minutes in extreme testing and respectable 7 hours and 43 minutes in the latter.
in conclusion
Honor enters the gaming laptop business with MagicBook Pro 16. The company does this with confidence—the MagicBook Pro 16 looks different from other mainstream consoles, with its white body and 3D-painted lid, while its single, max-looking configuration exudes determination.
From the 500-nit 16-inch display to the excellent sound quality to the powerful performance of the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and Nvidia 4060 GPU, it’s hard to find any faults with the MagicBook Pro 16.
We deducted points for the plastic trackpad, which isn’t nearly as premium (or precise) as the glass one, and the keyboard backlighting isn’t impressive either. There’s no Wi-Fi 7, and there’s only one Thunderbolt 4 port.
But these are shortcomings that most buyers easily live with. The MagicBook Pro 16 gives them a package that can easily handle at least the next 5 years, and 5 more if the task is light gaming and office work.
However, at the time of writing this review, we can’t say we recommend the MagicBook Pro 16 because you can’t buy it yet. Honor will launch the MagicBook Pro 16 in China first, but even there, there’s no price to speak of.
We have a feeling Honor won’t be charging Razer Blade money for the MagicBook Pro 16. If the price is reasonable enough, it’ll be on a lot of people’s short lists.