Impressions: HONOR MagicBook 15 2020

This laptop isn’t mine — I bought it for someone else. Their budget wasn’t high, and the requirements were just these:

• A bigger screen, since they deal with Excel spreadsheets all day
• Decent performance — besides spreadsheets, the occasional game, roughly LOL and Overwatch level
• Looks nice, nothing too flashy
• Reliable after-sales service

Honestly though, I think these days every laptop looks fine except those weirdly shaped gaming machines.

Originally it was a choice between the Redmibook and the MagicBook. The Redmibook got passed over because it has no webcam, so this MagicBook 15, 2020 model, got bought.

Ordered it on JD, and it was fast — ordered that day, arrived the next morning. There are plenty of reviews of this machine online already, and I handed it over to the person right after I got it sorted, so I only used it briefly. Still, I formed some basic impressions, so let me jot them down:

• The look is very by-the-book, the standard “imitating a MacBook” feel, you know the type
• The webcam hides under a button — anyone who’s followed Huawei laptops knows this. In practice I’d say the camera is just “usable”
• The screen is a 1080p IPS, but the color gamut really isn’t high, maybe 45% NTSC? Everything I found online about this machine’s screen was actually about the MagicBook Pro, and obviously mine isn’t a Pro
• The keyboard is very ordinary, just usable
• The touchpad feels like glass, no idea if it actually is. The body uses a lot of metal, which is genuinely good at this price
• It runs an AMD Yes Ryzen 4500. I didn’t push the performance much, but it’s definitely not slow. I didn’t open it up to check expandability, but you should be able to add RAM and swap the drive yourself

All in all, at 3,599 yuan this laptop strikes me as pretty decent. The screen is a bit crappy, but not unbearable. Performance is certainly stronger than the various Intel options, RAM and storage can be expanded later, and the keyboard is fine if you make do — or you can just use a mechanical keyboard.

Lately, when people ask me for entry-level laptop recommendations, I usually point them to Huawei and Xiaomi, occasionally Lenovo. But Huawei and Xiaomi fight harder in the low-end market, especially Huawei — it feels like they deliberately pile on specs to make noise. Most laptops from these brands look good, have passable specs, and are cheap, so they should count as solid choices.