Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon Review: New Era In Windows Computing

Honor’s latest laptop, the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon, has a hardware component that is both eye-catching and practical — a detachable webcam that is normally hidden inside the laptop’s body. You only take it out when you need to use it, and it snaps on to the top of the chassis magnetically and works immediately. In any other year, this clever design would generate enough headlines, but this laptop has another component that’s far more important, and is part of a sea change in computing started by Apple.

This laptop is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X Elite, an Arm-based silicon built on similar architecture as modern smartphone chips. This move continues the trend of laptop manufacturers opting for Arm-based chips over Intel’s processors, ending the latter’s decade-long near-monopoly on the computer CPU market.

I will explain the significance of the move to Arm chips a few paragraphs down, but first let’s take a look at the rest of the hardware.

The MagicBook Art 14 is yet another sleek laptop from the company, weighing just 2.2lbs (1kg) and measuring 0.45-inch (11.5mm) thick. The body is constructed out of magnesium alloy — smooth and silky satin texture coating. The display is excellent: a 14.6-inch, 120Hz OLED panel with resolution of 3120 x 2080 and maximum of 700 nits of brightness. There’s also support for 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut.

It’s also a touch screen, which is a nice bonus to have with laptops, as sometimes I’d rather use my finger to quickly exit a window to another spot instead of playing with the trackpad to move a tiny arrow to find a button. The bezels are also thinner than the borders of, say, the latest MacBook.

There are also a lot of ports for a modern day laptop, with the right side offering a USB-A 3.2 port, HDMI port, and a headphone jack. The left side features two USB-C ports (3.2), which can also be used to charge the laptop’s 60Wh battery. There’s also a slot on the left side to house the aforementioned detachable popout webcam.

The 1080p webcam pops out with a press, after which it can be pulled off the side and attached to the top of the laptop.

As soon as the camera is attached to the top’s magnetic pogo pin, it snaps into place and the screen shows a notification stating the camera is ready. If you have the laptop’s camera app opened, the camera will turn on automatically. You can even flip the camera around, which makes this one of the very few laptops in the world to have forward-facing camera. This is an ingenious design to help keep the top bezel slim while keeping the webcam in the correct position. There are some who are also paranoid of their webcams being accessed by hackers, so this option is great because the camera is hidden away when not in use.

Why is the move to Arm important?

A bit of backstory for those unfamiliar with the Arm/Intel situation: the two companies make computer microprocessors with distinctively different architecture. Arm-based chips are designed to be lean and efficient, which comes with a ceiling on maximum power output; while Intel’s x86 processors are built on complex instruction sets and has higher power output, but is also power-hungry. These two designs were able to co-exist and thrive because they didn’t really compete with one another.

For well over a decade covering the entire 2010s, the conventional wisdom in the tech industry was that Arm-based silicon were meant for smaller mobile devices like phones and tablets, while “real” computers needed Intel’s more powerful processors. All that changed in 2020 when Apple announced its Mac line of computers would leave Intel and use its own self-developed Arm chips.

There were no shortage of skepticism at the time of Apple’s announcement, with some wondering if an Arm chip could replace Intel processors without sacrificing too much power. But Apple succeeded — its M silicon laptops are tremendous performers — and that immediately set rival companies like Qualcomm into motion developing its own high-powered Arm chip for computers.

It took a few years, but Qualcomm got there, with the Snapdragon X Elite, which by all accounts offers competitive performance as the best Intel processors while being much more power efficient. Other PC makers like Dell and Lenovo had already jumped on board the Snapdragon X Elite train, and now Honor is onboard too.

Another major obstacle that Apple had to overcome when it first made the switch to Arm was ensure software and apps, which had been designed for Intel chips for a decade, will run on Arm. To do so, Apple’s Arm chip had to essentially run an emulation of x86 software, because by default Arm silicon cannot read x86 code. The same challenge applies to Qualcomm, Honor, and any other Window laptop maker making the switch now.

The process has been mostly good. Most of the apps available on Microsoft’s app store ran fine on the MagicBook Art 14, but I did notice Astrill VPN, a third-party app I had to download from Astrill’s website, could not run. And I’d reckon a lot of the smaller and independent Windows software will not run on Arm machines for a while. But the bigger software all work perfectly fine. Still, most Windows software are built for x86 so for the foreseeable future, when you’re using an Arm laptop, you will have to rely in emulation for apps.

The Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core chip with prime cores running at 4.0 GHz, with the rest being at 3.5 GHz. Benchmark numbers, as you can see here, are very respectable. The chip also utilizes Qualcomm’s Hexagon NPU, which allows it to run generative LLM on device.

Performance

As for performance, I have to admit I am not a serious PC gamer. I use my laptop more for productivity, and everything has been smooth sailing. The keyboard is excellent to type on, with 1.5mm of key travel, the trackpad is large and precise, and you can scroll up and down on the trackpad’s left and right side to control brightness and volume, a feature we first seen on Huawei laptops. You can also double tap on the trackpad with a knuckle to quickly grab a screenshot.

I did do some light gaming, and the titles ran smoothly without issues. But the biggest benefit of the switch to Arm to me is much better battery life, and you don’t suffer a major power dropoff when unplugged from the wall. Intel processors are famously power hungry, so battery life isn’t great, and there is a noticeable gap in performance between when the laptop is plugged into a wall socket or running on battery power. I’m happy to report that battery life is tremendous, and performance remains similar whether the laptop is plugged in or not, as you can see by these benchmark numbers.

There is a fan inside the laptop, along with a vapor cooling chamber, but the fan rarely turned on. I only heard it in action when running the Cinebench benchmark. Otherwise, even gaming, or editing quick videos on CapCut, the laptop didn’t need the fan.

I have been using the MagicBook Art 14 for work for the past week, and three hours of productivity work that includes typing words into a CMS, reading and responding to emails, watching YouTube videos occasionally and streaming Spotify in the background would drain about 20-25%. That’s very good — that means the laptop can go at least 12 hours on a single charge with my usage, and likely longer.

Software: AI features and connectivity

The MagicBook Art 14 wouldn’t be a modern tech release if it didn’t come with “AI.” Here, it’s the ability to run Microsoft’s generative AI chatbot, Copilot. This includes asking Copilot complex queries, or have it generate artwork. There are also some Honor-specific AI features like the ability to apply filters to your videos.

But the connectivity is cool: the laptop runs Windows 11 but it has Honor’s software built-in which allows the laptop to connect seamlessly with a Honor phone. Once connected, you can mirror an Honor phone screen on the laptop, or mirror laptop screen on an Honor foldable, and you can drag and drop files between the two.

Now, is the Snapdragon X Elite laptop better than Intel laptops in every way? Not necessarily. The majority of Windows apps are designed for x86, and I don’t know if Arm-powered laptops will sell enough in the first year or two to force software developers to adapt for Arm silicon. And the most powerful Windows software are still going to be better on Intel processors for now.

Apple doesn’t have this problem, because Apple’s MacBooks are the only MacOS machines around, so apps must adapt to Apple silicon to take appeal to Apple users. Windows laptops do not have that type of influence or consumer base. Ultimately though this is a big first step for Honor and other Windows laptops to take, and even if the change happens much slower than on MacBooks, eventually I do think laptops and portable computing devices will all be on Arm silicon.

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 is not cheap, as expected. In Europe it’s going to retail for 1,699 euros for 1TB and 32GB of RAM. But in Asia, it should be cheaper.