Honor's MagicBook Pro 14 is a big, flashy notebook with a great keyboard and long battery life – but the haptic trackpad sounds like a tiny trampoline

Since being spun out from Huawei a few years ago, Honor has built a solid reputation for smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Here we have the MagicBook 14 Pro, a 14.6in laptop launched at MWC alongside a new MagicPad 4 tablet.

Our review unit has the Intel Core Ultra 5 338H processor, but there are options for the 336H and 388H versions, which can also be configured with either 24GB RAM and 1TB storage or 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14: Design

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With its all-white chassis, silver trimmings, and shimmering Honor logo, the MagicBook 14 Pro review unit ITPro received looks like a luxury item. Perhaps too fancy for business, though it does come in other, less glamorous, color options. Add the flashy keyboard backlighting, which makes the numbers and letters light up, and you have a laptop that will certainly turn heads in the office.

Screen to body ration the MagicBook is 91.5%, with its 14.6in display (diagonally), but it has a lot more height than that suggests. And, despite that, it still feels like a dainty notebook that's easy enough to carry from desk to meeting room and back.

The charger we received is European, so we haven't been able to test how quickly it can charge (Honor suggests 68 minutes for a full charge). The charger slot is one of two USB-C slots on the left-hand side. There's also an HDMI port and a headphone jack. On the right-hand side, you have two USB-A ports.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14: Display

The MagicBook 14 Pro comes with a 14.6in OLED touchscreen, featuring Honor's Eye Comfort technology, a 120Hz refresh rate, and 3.2K resolution. The touchscreen element is great, though there's no tent mode or stylus, so no real need for it to be touchscreen.

With our colorimeter, the MagicBook came back with 95% coverage of the sRGB gamut color space, and 132.4% for volume. The coverage score is a little lower than recent reviews, such as the Asus ExpertBook Ultra and the Geekom X14 Pro, though the volume score is comparable. The panel is nice and bright, peaking at 490.95 cd/m2. It isn't, however, good enough for intensive color work or editing images as it only notched 78% for Adobe sRGB.

From our own experience, the MagicBook 14 Pro has a beautiful, crisp screen, and that doesn't appear to be replicated in the tests. Blacks are deep and inky, colors are vivid and seemingly true to life, and it was bright enough to be clear in any outdoor conditions.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14: Keyboard and trackpad

The MagicBook 14 Pro comes with a 1.5mm fully backlit keyboard. When we say 'fully', even the icons on the keys light up – it looks sort of magical? The keys themselves are nice and punchy. Plenty of travel and no real clack sound, just a dull thud, which is great for everyone else in the office. It's easy to get up to a fast typing speed, and there's plenty of room to rest your palms on either side of the trackpad.

Speaking of which, things get strange when you click the 'force-sensing' haptic touchpad, as the haptic settings make it sound like a tiny trampoline. It's loud enough to make you stop and notice. Other than that, the trackpad is a little on the narrow side – 124mm x 80mm – but it's long, so it can still be expansive, and it has useful three and four-finger gesture controls.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14: Specs and performance

There are three spec options for Intel Core Ultra 5 chips with the MagicBook. Our review unit is the 338H, which came with 32GB of RAM and 1TB of SSD storage.

The Pro performed well in Geekbench 6, with 2,716 for single-core and 13,905 for multi-core. It isn't anything near the MacBook Pro (M4 or M5), or the Asus UltraBook, but it's in a similar performance bracket to the cheaper Geekom X14. So not super fast, but highly capable.

What really impressed, though, was the 18hrs and 52min it lasted in our looped video test. That is right up there with the best of the best. I was able to get through a day and a half of work on one charge, though there wasn't a high volume of intensive work for it to do.

There's nothing really computationally intensive about this job; it is largely Google Docs, email, and Slack on repeat. Every so often, there's video or image editing, which takes a bit more processing power or bandwidth, but the MagicBook 14 Pro got through everything with barely a whimper from its internal fans. No sound, nor much heat.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14: Features

One of the most interesting features on the MagicBook (and other Honor devices) is within its WorkStation suite of controls. You can effortlessly share content and files across operating systems with a simple drag and drop. Android, Windows, and yes, even iOS. The specific iOS Interconnection is great and actually a solid business application.

Another worthy mention is Honor Connect, which shares many similarities with Huawei's multi-device connection platform. It has almost the same planetary vibe and look. But, again, it just makes connecting to other displays and sharing content that little bit easier.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14: Is it worth it?

The design on the MagicBook 14 Pro is a little too ostentatious for your average office. It's too white and sparkly, and you'd be surprised if the IT department handed it to you on the first day. Although it's far better than any Chromebook that's lurking in their stock room.

What is worth your IT manager's attention, though, is how productive it is. A long battery life, a capable processor, and an effortlessly good keyboard, all for a lot less than any of your M-series MacBooks. It might very well be magic.

Honor MagicBook Pro 14 specifications