Huawei MateBook 16 in the test: One nose (s) too short for great things

Huawei laptops have not been widely used in the US for years. But they have traditionally been fantastic products with enough performance and build quality to make them serious MacBook competitors. So I figured I’d try the MateBook 16, Huawei’s newest flagship notebook, even though it might not be on our US readers’ radar. Think of this as a resource for those in markets where Huawei is still in business, but also as a quick rundown of what the rest of us are missing out on.

Externally, the MateBook 16 looks … like a MacBook Pro. Huawei has the colors and the general mood under control. Whether it performs as well as a MacBook is of course another question. Most of the MateBook 16 is great, from the quick and comfortable keyboard, to the all-day battery life, massive 3: 2 display, and surprisingly powerful speakers. I know people who have replaced MacBooks with MateBooks as the main driver, and I can see that the daily experience is pretty much the same for most office workers.

The main difference, however, is that I occasionally run into weird things when using a MateBook. They aren’t things that make or break the experience, but they’re just weird flaws for a laptop this beautiful. And they add up to a product that is great, but not as great as it easily feels.

Before we go too far, I should note that the MateBook is only available in a limited number of countries. For now, you can only order it directly from the Huawei website if you are in China or Germany at the time of this writing. (I don’t see it going to be available in the US anytime soon, given Huawei’s relationship with the Biden administration.) If you’re outside of those countries but willing to ship one, I have models on AliExpress for found as low as $ 1,259. My test device with a Ryzen 7 5800H, 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage is currently available for 1,469 US dollars on AliExpress. (Of course, the usual caveats with ordering from third-party sites apply when shopping there – you likely get no warranty, you might need a separate charger, and you should make sure you’re buying it from a reputable seller.)

When you get your hands on either of these, it has a number of selling points. At 4.39 pounds, it’s pretty light for a 16-inch notebook. The trackpad is sleek and roomy, though it occasionally had palm rejection issues. The keyboard is sturdy and impressively quiet – it’s probably the MacBook-like keyboard I’ve ever used on a Windows laptop (and I mean the newest models, not the goddamn butterfly models). There’s a useful port selection with two USB-Cs, two USB-A’s, a headphone jack, and HDMI. The speakers are pretty good, with a little weak bass. It has a low-key, professional look.

For me, the highlight of the device is the display. Not only is it a whopping 16 inches, but it also has a 3: 2 aspect ratio, which is my favorite aspect ratio for laptops. (Yes, I have a favorite.) There’s a lot of vertical space and I’ve worked comfortably in multiple windows side by side; For someone who normally uses a 13-inch device, the extra space feels luxurious. The panel itself doesn’t quite show MacBook quality, but still shows strong colors and sharp details and shows almost no glare. I enjoyed looking at it.

Now for the strange things. The mics on the MateBook come with Huawei’s Ai noise-canceling technology designed to reduce echoes and ambient noise, but colleagues said I sounded very weird on Zoom calls. It was clearly processing my voice as I spoke; Someone said I sound like I’m underwater. You could still hear and understand me well, but it’s an odd limitation on such a beautiful laptop. I asked Huawei about this problem.

Another curiosity: the SSD is partitioned? There are essentially two drives on the MateBook 16. I asked Huawei why that is, but I really can’t imagine why this would be necessary on a consumer laptop. It probably seems to create unnecessary confusion and annoyance – I had various downloads paused halfway because they were placed on a partition that had no space and I had to move a number of things to accommodate a large folder that I was trying to load, that was well below 512 GB, but too big for both partitions. Finding the files and applications I needed was also more complicated because I couldn’t always remember which drive they were on.

And finally the webcam. The MateBook has a nosecam that pops out of the top row of the keyboard when you press it. For me, that’s the equivalent of not having a webcam – I’d rather be a black square on zoom calls than have colleagues stare into my nose. So that’s a thing too.

Huawei enthusiasts can use a multi-screen collaboration feature to connect the MateBook 16 to a Huawei phone or tablet. You can then drag and drop files between the connected devices, access your apps interchangeably or use the latter as a conventional external display. I couldn’t test this as I didn’t have any Huawei phones or tablets on hand, but it sounds practical and is similar to Apple’s sidecar feature. It seems you have to Enter a passcode every time you plug a device back in which would probably blow me up the wall after a while.

The MateBook also connects to Huawei earbuds with ease – according to Huawei, the two devices will prompt you to automatically pair them when you place them close together. Huawei is clearly moving towards a resilient and developed ecosystem. However, whether people buy into it will likely depend on how well the features keep working as new products are released. Regardless, I’m jealous of the Bose 700 getting disconnected from their Surface Book at least a couple of times a week.

The eight-core Ryzen processor in the MateBook did an excellent job as a work driver. Fans were silent under the many Chrome tabs, Spotify streaming and Zoom calls. I’ve never worried anything would crash or slow down, and nothing was ever hot. You can switch to a dedicated performance mode by pressing FN + P, although I’m not sure where a user who doesn’t have Huawei’s test guide would find this information.

As we generally expect from AMD Ryzen 5000 systems, the MateBook did quite well in multi-core benchmarks and lagged a bit behind in single-core devices. It hasn’t blown any graphical chores out of the water either – AMD’s integrated graphics haven’t received a major update in a couple of years. We saw an average of 15 frames per second Shadow of the Tomb Raider at the native resolution of the MateBook of 2520 x 1680 and 28 fps at 1920 x 1080. Neither of these is a fantastic gaming experience, and they are significantly worse than what we saw on the 13-inch M1 MacBook Air.

It took the MateBook 13 minutes and 44 seconds to complete our 4K export test. This isn’t a bad result on AMD systems with integrated graphics, but it does highlight the delta between such a system and a more powerful creative workstation (which is what people often expect from 16-inch laptops). The latest MacBook Pros, even the 14-incher, all took less than three minutes to complete the same task. On the Puget Systems Benchmark for Premiere Pro that MateBook has also landed far behind Apple’s machines, including the very similarly priced MacBook Air. None of this is to say that the MateBook is a bad laptop; It just needs to be emphasized that if it is your priority, you can get more graphics power for that price.

What AMD’s chips lack in single-core power, however, they often make up for in battery life. The MateBook comes with an 84 Wh battery, and I’ve gotten a little over 10 hours of continuous use on average with the screen around 200 nits of brightness. (Huawei claims you get 12.5 hours of “continuous local 1080p video playback,” so beware if you’re doing a lot of this.) That beats the MacBook Air (though not by a ton) and many Intel laptops from these Size.

For me, the battery life is the strongest argument for buying the MateBook. It should get you through a day of work with ease, which is particularly impressive given the massive high-resolution screen. I would love to take it to a conference without a charger and have so much space to work when I open it up.

While the MateBook 16 seems like a notebook with the potential to be widely adopted, the people I would recommend it to most are still, for the most part, Huawei superfans. The compatibility of the MateBook with other Huawei products cannot offer anything from Apple or Asus. I can see that this advantage outweighs the strange disadvantages for people who already own other Huawei devices.

For everyone else, I think the MateBook might be a good purchase for a general-purpose work driver, but you can get other laptops with most of the same benefits and without the weirdness surrounding the webcam, speakers, and drive. Even if MacBook Pros are out of your price range, many Ryzen devices have similar performance and battery life to the MateBook, as well as a working webcam and microphones. The MacBook Air is basically there too (and bad as its webcam is, I’ll take that shot through the nose every day). Basically, I think you really, really have to want the 16-inch 3: 2 screen for the MateBook to stand a chance.