The MSI Prestige 16 AI+ is a high-quality business laptop at an attractive price – it's nigh on impossible to criticise

When we reviewed the 2025 MSI Prestige 16 AI, we declared it to be "one of the best business laptops on the market". Reading back over our review, that's an opinion we stand by.

The new 2026 model differs in some important ways. The IPS screen has been replaced by OLED, the AMD chipset has been replaced by one from Intel, the weight and thickness have both dropped, and the price. The quality of the sound system and the battery life have both gone up.

That's the good news. The bad news, such as it is, is that the numeric keypad has disappeared, and performance levels are lower. Does that make the new machine a better buy? If you can't be bothered to read the entire review, the short answer is yes.

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MSI Prestige 16 AI+: Design

Compared to the 2025 model, the new Prestige is an altogether more curvaceous affair. Out have gone the flat slab-sides to be replaced by a much more rounded profile. At 1.59Kg and 13.9mm, the new model is considerably lighter and thinner than the 2025 model. Despite that, the new Prestige is still an all-metal build and is still impressively solid with very little flex to be felt in either the body or lid.

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The new model is again MIL-STD-801H resistant to various degrees of vibration, temperature change, humidity, dust ingress, and shock. There's still only one colorway, a rather dour affair which MSI calls Platinum Grey, though to our eyes it's more silver. The new cursive logo script etched on the lid is a nice design touch. Whatever the aesthetic qualities of the exterior, it does a good job at keeping greasy fingerprints at bay, which, in our opinion, is more important than a snazzy paint job.

For such a slender machine, there's a solid selection of ports. On the left, there are two Thunderbolt 4 ports and an HDMI 2.1 video output, while on the right, there are two 5Gbps USB-A ports and a 3.5 combo audio jack. Some might argue that the USB-A ports should be faster, but it's hardly a deal-breaker. One thing the 2025 model had that the new one doesn't is a memory card slot, which we think is a shame. The Intel Killer BE1775 modem is bang on the money, though, supporting Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth v6.0.

Getting inside the Prestige is a straightforward operation, but once in, all you can do is swap out the M.2 2280 SSD, remove the battery, and blow dust out of the fans. The RAM and wireless card are all fixed in place, and there's no space for a second SSD. Speaking of SSDs, the 1TB Phison drive in our test machine performed decently enough, recording sequential read and write speeds of 4,761MB/s and 2,808MB/s respectively.

MSI Prestige 16 AI+: Keyboard, touchpad, and webcam

Some users will bemoan that MSI has ditched the numeric keypad, but given that it felt just a little cramped and offset the touchpad, we think MSI has made the right call. Physically, the new keyboard is difficult to criticise. The base is solid, the typing action perfectly weighted, the keycap graphics are models of clarity, and the three-stage white backlight that shines through the translucent walls of the keys is ideal, no matter what level of ambient light you find yourself working in.

Dead centre below the keyboard sits a large 160 x 100mm Mylar touchpad. It's a mechanical affair but none the worse for that. The click-action is light and clean, if just a wee bit on the noisy side.

The touchpad supports what MSI calls Action Functions. So a double-tap in the top right opens the MSI control centre, and one on the top left opens the calculator. Swiping up and down along the left edge adjusts the display brightness, do the same on the right and the volume changes.

Swiping along the top edge fast forwards and rewinds video, doing the same on the bottom flips through pages. You can also set custom actions or app launches when you swipe inwards from centre left, centre right, and centre top. It's a rather handy feature.

There's no want of biometric options with the webcam supporting Windows Hello IR facial recognition and the power button housing a fingerprint scanner. The webcam itself is nothing out of the ordinary, and the best it can do in terms of video is 1080p and 30fps, but it's bright and colorful and reacts well to changes in ambient light. We've seen a lot worse on laptops costing a lot more.

MSI Prestige 16 AI+: Display and speakers

The 2,880 x 1,800 120Hz Samsung-made OLED display may not be the brightest we've encountered, peaking at 385cd/m2 in SDR mode and 635cdm/2 in HDR, but it is very colorful with gamut volumes of 164.9% sRGB, 116.8 DCI-P3, and 113.6% Adobe RGB.

Using the MSI Centre S control panel, you can lock the display to the Display P3, Adobe RGB, and sRGB profiles, and doing so returns very good average Delta E variances of 0.6, 1.3, and 1, respectively.

That's by some margin the best color accuracy we've seen from a laptop with this sort of price sticker. There's also a Movie profile, which maximises color saturation, and two settings designed to reduce eye strain called Anti-Blue and Office.

Is the OLED display in the 2026 model better than the IPS panel in last year's model? The IPS display is faster at 165Hz and brighter, but we think 120Hz is more than adequate, and we prefer the sumptuous colors of an OLED panel and the superior HDR performance (the screen is VESA DisplayHDR True Black 600 certified), so we'd have no hesitation answering "yes".

The screen has a gloss finish that can be a little too reflective in some circumstances, especially when outside in sunlight, but that's a price worth paying for the immersively pellucid images that a glossy OLED display can deliver.

Traditionally, speaker systems have been something of an Achilles' heel for MSI's business machines, but the new Prestige is much improved. The sound system consists of two 2W woofers and two 2W full-range drivers.

Despite being all buried deep inside the casing and firing downwards, they produce a detailed and punchy soundscape with a useful amount of low-end bass. The clarity and volume pay dividends in Zoom and Teams calls, and the overall sound quality makes listening to music a rather enjoyable experience.

MSI Prestige 16 AI+: Specs and performance

Inside the Prestiage 16 AI+, you'll find an Intel Core Ultra 7 355. This sits toward the top of the lower half of the Panther Lake hierarchy and has 8 cores, 4 of which are deemed Performance and 4 Low Power Efficient. The chipset also features the Intel Graphics iGPU with 4 Xe cores, a 49 TOPS NPU, and 32GB of soldered LPDDR5x RAM.

That's a combination that quite clearly is not going to deliver the sort fort of performance we saw from the Core Ultra X7 385H and Arc B390 combo in the Acer Swift 16 AI, which boasts 16 CPU cores and 12 Xe GPU cores.

In our Handbrake-based 4K multimedia benchmark, the MSI scored 238 points to the Acer's 486, the difference mainly attributable to the superior graphics performance of the Arc integrated GPU.

For basic productivity, there's nothing at all wrong with the MSI's performance, it's 4K score is on a par with the likes of the Lenovo ThinkPad T14s (255) and M4 MacBook Air (247).

However, machines like the new M5 MacBook Air and the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2-powered Asus Zenbook A16 (which scored 325 and 375, respectively) have the legs on the new MSI, though both are considerably more expensive if you match the storage and RAM.

In the Geekbench 6 tests, the MSI scored 2,715 in the single-core test, 11,422 in the multi-core test, and 23,606 in the OpenCL GPU test. Again, for comparison, the Acer scored 2,836, 15,936, and 55,780, proving, if proof were needed, that there just ain't no substitute for more cores.

The difference in the graphics performance is underlined by the speed at which MSI ran the SPECviewperf 3dsmax 3D modelling benchmark: 18fps compared to 36fps on the Acer.

It's also worth pointing out here that the 2026 Prestige is less powerful than the 2025 model, with its AMD Ryzen AI 9 365 and Radeon 880M underpinnings. That scored 437 points in the 4K benchtest.

MSI's international website alludes to a 2026 model with the Intel Ultra X9 388H CPU and Arc B390 GPU, which would no doubt at least match the 2025 model, but at the time of writing, we've no details regarding UK availability or price.

In the new MSI machine's favour, it can run flat out without even a hint of thermal throttling, produces very little fan noise, and barely gets warm to the touch even around the vent grille on the underside. You could almost be forgiven for thinking the Prestige 16 AI is passively cooled.

The upside of running a more modest chipset is longer battery life. In our standard battery test, which involves looping a video in VLC with the display set to 170cd/m2, the 81Wh battery inside the MSI kept the lights on for 17 hours and 45 minutes.

That's 2 hours 30 minutes better than the M5 MacBook Air, 2 hours and 15 minutes better than the Acer Aspire, and the same, give or take two minutes, as the Asus Zenbook A16.

MSI Prestige 16 AI+: Is it worth it?

For £1,250, the new MSI Prestige 16 AI is nigh on impossible to criticise. The screen and speaker system are definitely a step forward from the 2025 model, and though you no longer get a MicroSD slot, there's an extra USB-A port to make up for it. The keyboard and touchpad are both top-notch, and the battery life is excellent.

The only area where the new Prestige lacks is in graphics performance when compared to the Radeon 880M-equipped 2025 model and the Arc B390-equipped Panther Lake competition. But of course, the new MSI is quite a bit cheaper than all those alternatives.

Hopefully, MSI will release the Intel Ultra X9 388H / Arc B390 model in the UK to satisfy those who want to run demanding graphics jobs or play a little surreptitious Cyberpunk 2077 at lunchtime, but for everyone else, this model will do very nicely indeed.

MSI Prestige 16 AI+: Specs