New products tested by our experts
Honor MagicBook X 16 2023
LAPTOP | £700 from Honor www.snipca.com/47111
Heavy metal
With its 16in screen and £700 price tag, the MagicBook X 16 2023 sounds too good to be true. And, on closer inspection, that might be the case. For example, you’ll find a 12th-generation Intel processor inside, rather than one of the very latest models. Nor will the mid-range Core i5-12450H processor blow anyone away with its power. But it remains a decent all-round performer. It ran about 10 per cent behind our current favourite laptop, the Acer Swift 3 14in (see page 30), when put through benchmark tests that gauge general Windows performance.
It also doesn’t fare particularly well when it comes to gaming. In our tests, it ran at less than half the speed of the Swift 3, which will disappoint anyone who enjoys Microsoft Flight Simulator or similar games. You could probably get these to run with low-detail settings, but it wouldn’t be much fun.
Memory and storage are also less generous than the Swift 3, with 8GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD rather than Acer’s 16GB and a 1TB respectively.
These specifications may sound underwhelming, but the huge plus point of this laptop is the size of its screen. It’s 16in across the diagonal (the Swift 3 is 14in), so you get a lot more space to open and arrange your windows, or watch TV and films.
For the price, it’s a decent screen. Whites look white, and it’s capable of recreating 96 per cent of the sRGB colour standard. We would have liked it to nudge higher than its 339cd/m2 peak brightness, while the 1920x1200-pixel resolution stretched across the large screen means you don’t get the sharpness of a higher resolution, but for this price it remains impressive.
The 720p webcam produces subdued colours but is fine for everyday video calls, thanks to clear focus and loud (if echoey) voice capture via the two mics. The webcam doesn’t support Windows Hello, but the fingerprint reader built into the power button at the top right of the keyboard does – and worked almost instantly each time we used it.
The keyboard has pros and cons. We like the fact that it’s quiet, and the width of the chassis means it doesn’t feel cramped despite the inclusion of a separate number pad. However, we found it tricky to hit the slimmed-down apostrophe and hash keys, even though the spacebar and Enter key are both easy to locate. Honor keeps things simple with the touchpad, which is a reasonable size (120x72mm) and feels responsive.
What’s most surprising is the all-metal chassis, which includes the base. As a result, the MagicBook feels w
