Honor Magicbook 14 refreshed with new Intels inside
Big battery thin-and-light promises power as well as portability
Honor’s sensibly-priced, well-specced MagicBook range has been keeping Windows laptop fans on a budget happy for a while now, and the latest model looks to be no different. the MagicBook 14 lands as an updated version of the firm’s most compact offering, with new 12th Gen Intel CPUs and uprated cooling to keep them running at peak performance.
The 14 machine has a 3:2 aspect ratio LCD screen with 2.1K resolution and 300 nits peak brightness. Eyecare experts TUV Rheinland has given it the thumbs up for low blue light and screen flicker, and it promises to cover 100% of the sRGB colour gamut to keep artists happy when working on anything colour-critical. It’s protected by Gorilla Glass, too.
It lands in space grey colours, with an aluminium build that weighs in at a relatively lightweight 1.54kg. It’s only 15.9mm at its thickest point, too, so should make for a handy dandy travel companion. There’s a pair of USB-C ports on either side of the machine, plus a 3.5mm headphone port.
Power comes from a 12th Gen Core i5-12500H, which hails from the beefier end of Intel’s laptop chip line-up. It’s no Core i9 in terms of grunt, but can draw significantly more power than the U- and P-series equivalents when performance is required. It’s paired with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD, with your choice of integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics or a dedicated Nvidia RTX 2050 GPU.
Honor had to tweak the internal cooling to tame that new hardware, enlarging the air intakes by more than 30% and doubling up on internal fans, which pushes 35% more air without also making a lot more noise.
The firm reckons the 75Wh battery is good for as much as 15 hours of video playback, with typical daily use targeting a bit closer to ten hours. The laptop comes bundled with a 135W rapid charger, so you shouldn’t need to spend too long tethered to a plug socket when it does reach time to top up.
The Honor MagicBook 14 is set to go on sale pretty quickly, in all the countries Honor sold the previous-gen model. Some territories have availability right now, but there’s no exact date for the UK just yet. Pricing also remains a mystery, although it’s already up for grabs in Malaysia for the equivalent of £830.
Tom Morgan-Freelander
Deputy Editor