Huawei have been building high-quality laptops, netbooks and ultrabooks over the last several years. They have a selection of Chromebooks, but have decided to double-down on Windows 11 and its premium range of laptops. The Huawei Matebook X Pro is the pick of the bunch, and has been a very good product for a while. How does the latest version with Intel’s 12th Gen silicon stack up? In our Huawei Matebook X Pro review we explore its niche appeal, performance and unique design.
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Some of the headline features of the new Matebook X Pro is a beautiful screen with a 90Hz refresh rate, a larger trackpad with new gestures, speedy 90W charging and, luckily for most, the webcam is where it should be and not in the strange pop-up key in the keyboard.
Design and Build
While the new Huawei Matebook X Pro falls in line with its siblings in the Matebook series in terms of design language, this premium model has a sleek and matured design that would fit quite nicely in any professional environment without looking too industrial. It has a similar look and feel to the new Macbook models, but has a more unique feeling exterior shell and more interesting colour options. These include the boring Space Grey model, a very nice White option, and our lovely Ink Blue version.
As was the case with its previous iterations, the new laptop’s build quality is fantastic, with no flex in the chassis at all upon using the keyboard. The device feels sturdy and durable, and since the laptop weighs in at just 1.33kg, it was fine for throwing in your backpack and taking it to and from work. The magnesium alloy chassis also feels great to the touch, making it a treat to carry around.
There is a limited port selection here, which may irk some. Huawei sells dongles specifically made for the Matebook X Pro, which again, is very similar to Apple’s strategy. You only have a 3.5mm headphone jack and four USB-C ports, two per side. Two of the four are Thunderbolt 4 ports, which is great for the latest accessories and additional displays, and makes the laptop very future-proof. However, it would’ve been great to have one or two USB-A ports for other peripherals and older technology.
Generally, the new model is less angular than its predecessors and curvier around the edges. It has a familiar wedge shape which tapers to only 5.4mm at its thinnest point towards the front of the laptop. We also appreciate the dearth of stickers on the inside, only having a single Intel Evo i7 sticker. Other laptops tend to have several stickers which is a chore to remove and uncomfortable on the hands and wrists if not removed.
The keyboard, which is flanked by speaker grilles, provides a comfortable typing platform, with 1.5mm key travel and a sensible layout. It’s quite clicky, but shouldn’t annoy office colleagues, or family members who are within earshot, too much. There’s a two-stage keyboard backlight, toggled via the F3 key.
The large Free Touch touchpad below the keyboard also has a very comfortable feel and is responsive enough. Because of its large size, its unintended touch recognition is very important to the overall experience. Luckily, it worked well enough for phantom touches not to become a major annoyance. It also supports a range of gestures and delivers haptic feedback when you slide your finger along the left side (to adjust screen brightness), top (to rewind/fast-forward video or move the cursor through text) or right side (to adjust volume). Some other useful ways to use it include pressing the upper left corner to minimise a window and the upper right side to close a window or browser tab, taking a screenshot by double-tapping with a knuckle, and accessing the Notification Centre with a two-finger swipe from the right.
Display
The Huawei Matebook X Pro has a 14.2-inch display with a 92.5% screen-to-body ratio, which gives the laptop a premium look. It also has a 3:2 aspect ratio with a resolution of 3120 x 2080 which many professional users prefer to the 16:9 or 16:10 options. While the display isn’t as large as on some other productivity-focused machines, the aspect ratio gives it plenty of vertical space for working.
The display is very sharp, but it isn’t flawless. Given the price of the Matebook X Pro, I would’ve expected that the OLED panel would have better contrast. However, we can’t fault the vibrant colour reproduction, which makes it a perfect media consumption laptop.
It is also a touch screen, which worked brilliantly. It is extremely responsive, and with the 90Hz refresh rate in tow the experience of scrolling through documents or emails and zooming in on images very intuitive and a pleasure to use. I even threw some chunky spreadsheets on it used to the touchscreen to navigate vigorously without problems.
The main purpose of this laptop is as a productivity device, and the display lends itself to that brilliantly.
Performance and Battery
The Huawei Matebook X Pro has several internal configurations, but the majority on the market is the review model we received. There are models with Intel’s 12th Gen i5 processor and slightly less storage and RAM, but we worked with the i7 model. There is no option for a discrete GPU, however, which most buyers in this price range would potentially be after.
The new Intel chips perform admirably, delivering speedy load-up and response times. While we don’t often look at benchmark scores, it is interesting to note that it delivered nearly identical scores to the 2022 Apple Macbook Pro with an M2 chipset.
It will multitask with the best of them, and we pushed it with several concurrently running apps like Chrome, YouTube, music streaming and Slack. When we hooked it up to an external 4K display with the Thunderbolt 4 port, performance was still untouched. Even using two 4K displays didn’t push it extensively.
Ideally, Huawei could introduce a model that comes with an optional RTX 3050 or RTX 3060 from Nvidia to really broaden the use cases for this device. It would make it quite a bit more expensive, however, and perhaps out of the buying range for the people looking at this type of laptop.
The Huawei Matebook X Pro comes with a 60Wh battery, which is significantly less than many other laptops in this price range. The maximum battery size allowed to be taken on an airplane is 100Wh, which several other brands use as their upper limit. However, Huawei needed to keep this laptop as portable as possible, and its smaller chassis size means it has less space for a big battery.
That being said, it performed well. Its smaller screen uses less power, and Intel’s new 12th Gen chips are also a lot more forgiving on batteries – this all shows in its battery performance. In our testing it lasted about 9 hours on a single charge, dropping to around 6 hours with intensive multitasking. This is more than enough for most, but still about 30 percent behind a comparable Macbook.
Conclusion
The Huawei Matebook X Pro is a great laptop. It has several needed improvements over its predecessors, including a better display with improved brightness and better colour accuracy (albeit with less than spectacular contrast). The new 12th Gen processor from Intel is also a significant upgrade over the previous iteration.
The touchpad has great, useful gestures, which makes its large size more usable than most laptops of this size. It has a sturdy build and looks great, and decent battery life. For most people it will be a good workhorse, but is ideal for remote workers or hybrid workers, easily slotting into a home environment or the office.
What will be the most difficult pill to swallow for most is the price. The Huawei Matebook X Pro will cost you around R40,000.
