On the whole though, the MagicBook Pro is a great laptop to use, very well built and with a solid pedigree as it is essentially a Huawei device. We are fans of physical buttons and this one didn’t have any; sure it was responsive and of good size, but beyond that, it did lack character. One thing that is immediately noticeable is the lack of holes on the bezel which means that the camera sensor and the microphones are located elsewhere. The latter costs almost three times as much but comes with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, a much bigger battery, a higher-resolution display, six speakers and a discrete GPU.

The Type-C connector doubles up as a universal power port that is paired with the bundled Huawei-branded switching power adaptor. While it is not bright enough when working in direct sunlight, the fact that it is matte reduces the glare that usually makes glossy screens almost unusable whenever it’s sunny.

There’s no numeric keypad and two speakers are hidden behind grills located on each side of the keyboard. it doesn’t aspire to be the lightest or the thinnest although a screen-to-body ratio of 90% means that it is not much bigger than a 15. Now there’s a good reason why a hexa-core model was chosen and that has to do with the fact that the base MacBook Pro model has a 6-core CPU, the Intel Core i7-9750HF, a CPU launched last year with a comparable 45W TDP. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the fastest non-workstation laptop we have tested to date, conceding defeat on compute benchmarks to the almighty and undisputed king of the hill, the 16-core XMG Apex 15. The base of the laptop contains two parallel rubber strips that act as raisers to allow air to cool the components inside via a perforated grill.

Doing so means you can get a proper numeric keypad - surely a must at this size - in and move the speakers above the keyboard. That said, we’d like to commend the LG Gram 17 which received our recommendation in July 2020 and a comment from our fellow reviewer, Bill Thomas, that this is a laptop that “can't actually be real”. That said, the MBP achieved this with a 56WHr battery (8WHr per hour), making it less frugal than the Gram 14’s 73WHr (7WHr per hour).Whether or not the 200% premium is worth it is debatable but one thing that cannot be argued is that the MacBook Pro 16-inch is an exceptional workhorse.

The keyboard is likely to divide opinions as always; it has a much shorter travel which in turn impacts on the feedback, which feels sharper and less noisy. While it does cost more than the Honor MBP, the Gram 17 has a bigger battery capacity, a higher screen resolution, Thunderbolt 3 ports and a numeric keypad. Honor says that six temperature sensors and a cooling-fan motor with higher spin rates helps cool the laptop more effectively.

The difference is even more marked once you include the integrated GPU, a Radeon RX Vega 6, one of the beefiest on the block. The design language of the MagicBook Pro shares common features with the Xiaomi Mi laptop brand, the Dell XPS 15 and, of course, the Apple MacBook Pro.

It is mightily quick, has a good battery life and overall provides a very rounded and polished computing experience. The battery - which is charged by a relatively compact 65W fast charger - is a 56WHr model, 40% smaller than Apple’s or the LG Gram 17; this has obviously a direct negative impact on battery life. We understand Honor’s desire to have a faceoff with Apple’s MacBook Pro but we have to question the wisdom of adding yet another screen size, one which is after all only half an-inch diagonally bigger than most of its peers.It is far heavier than the MagicBook Pro, has a smaller battery and its quad-core CPU won’t stand a chance against the Ryzen’s hexa-core processor. The combination of a very fast processor, a capable graphics subsystem, ample system memory and a nippy SSD means that this is a supremely capable laptop that will easily take on the mantle of a mobile workstation. It is a six-core processor with a base CPU speed of 3GHz, 11MB cache, 12 threads, six graphics cores running at 1. Last but not least, we’d love to see a “ Pro The pleasant experience continues on to the screen: the display is a 300nits model with a 1000:1 rated contrast ratio and a 100% sRGB color gamut.