A new era of Windows computing

Honor's latest laptop, the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon, has a hardware component that's both eye-catching and practical – a detachable webcam that's usually hidden inside the laptop's body. You just take it out when you need to use it, and it magnetically snaps onto the top of the case and works instantly. In any other year, this clever design would have generated enough headlines, but this laptop has another, more important component, and is part of a sea change in computing initiated by Apple.

The laptop is powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X Elite, an Arm-based chip built on a similar architecture to modern smartphone chips. The move continues a trend of laptop makers choosing Arm-based chips over Intel processors, ending the latter's decade-long near-monopoly in the computer CPU market.

I'll explain the importance of moving to Arm chips in the next few paragraphs, but first let's look at the rest of the hardware.

The MagicBook Art 14 is another stylish laptop from the company, weighing just 2.2 pounds (1kg) and measuring 0.45 inches (11.5mm) thick. The body is made of magnesium alloy with a smooth and silky satin texture coating. The display is excellent: 14.6-inch, 120Hz OLED panel with a resolution of 3120 x 2080 and a maximum brightness of 700 nits. Also supports 100% DCI-P3 color gamut.

It's also a touchscreen, which is a nice bonus for a laptop because sometimes I'd rather use my fingers to quickly exit a window to another location than use the trackpad to move the little arrows around to find a button. The bezels are also thinner than those on the latest MacBooks.

Modern laptops also have plenty of ports, with a USB-A 3.2 port, HDMI port, and headphone jack available on the right side. There are two USB-C ports (3.2) on the left side, which can also be used to charge the laptop's 60Wh battery. There's also a slot on the left side for the aforementioned detachable pop-up webcam.

The 1080p webcam pops up when pressed, and can then be pulled out from the side and attached to the top of the laptop.

Once the camera is connected to the magnetic pogo pins on top, it clicks into place and a notification appears on the screen that the camera is ready. If you open your laptop's camera app, the camera will automatically turn on. You can even flip the lens around, making this laptop one of the very few in the world to feature a front-facing lens. It's a clever design that helps keep the top bezel slim while keeping the webcam in the right place. Some people are also worried about their webcam being accessed by hackers, so this option is great because the camera stays hidden when not in use.

Why is it important to move to Arm?

For those unfamiliar with the Arm/Intel situation, a little backstory: The two companies produce computer microprocessors with very different architectures. Arm-based chip designs are lean and efficient, and have an upper limit on maximum power output; although Intel's x86 processors are built on complex instruction sets and have higher power output, they are also very power-hungry. The two designs are able to coexist and thrive because they don't really compete with each other.

For more than a decade throughout the 2010s, the conventional wisdom in the tech industry was that Arm-based chips were suitable for smaller mobile devices like phones and tablets, while “real” computers required Intel's more powerful processors. That all changed in 2020, when Apple announced that its line of Mac computers would be breaking away from Intel and using its own Arm chips.

There was no shortage of skepticism when Apple announced the news, with some wondering whether Arm chips could replace Intel processors without sacrificing too much performance. But Apple succeeded—its M silicon laptops performed so well—that immediately prompted rivals like Qualcomm to start developing their own Arm chips for high-performance computers.

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

Another major hurdle Apple had to overcome when it first switched to Arm was ensuring that software and apps designed for a decade for Intel chips would run on Arm. To do this, Apple's Arm chips essentially have to run emulation of x86 software, because Arm chips can't read x86 code by default. The same challenge applies to Qualcomm, Honor, and any other Windows laptop maker now transitioning.

The process is basically good. Most of the apps available in the Microsoft App Store worked well with the MagicBook Art 14, but I did notice that Astrill VPN (a third-party app I had to download from the Astrill website) didn't work. I don't think a lot of smaller, standalone Windows software will run on Arm machines just yet. But larger software works just fine. Still, most Windows software is built for x86, so for the foreseeable future you'll have to rely on application emulation when using an Arm laptop.

Snapdragon X Elite is a 12-core chip with the main core operating at 4.0 GHz and the remaining cores operating at 3.5 GHz. As you can see here, the baseline numbers are impressive. The chip also leverages Qualcomm's Hexagon NPU, enabling it to run generative LLM on the device.

Performance

As for performance, I have to admit I'm not a serious PC gamer. I'm using my laptop more for productivity and everything is going great. The keyboard feels great to type on, with a key travel of 1.5mm, and the touchpad is large and precise. You can scroll up and down on the left and right sides of the touchpad to control brightness and volume, a feature we've seen for the first time on a Huawei laptop. You can also double-tap the trackpad with your knuckle to quickly take a screenshot.

I did play some light gaming and the game ran smoothly without any issues. But for me, the biggest benefit of switching to Arm is the longer battery life and the fact that you don't experience a huge drop in power when you unplug it from the wall. Intel processors are notoriously power-hungry, so battery life isn't great, and there's a noticeable gap in performance when the laptop is plugged into a wall outlet or running on battery power. I'm happy to report that battery life is excellent and performance remains similar whether the laptop is plugged in or not, as you can see from these benchmark numbers.

There is a fan inside the laptop, as well as a steam cooling chamber, but the fan is rarely turned on. I only heard it in action when running the Cinebench benchmark. Otherwise, the laptop doesn't need a fan even for gaming or editing quick videos on CapCut.

I've been using the MagicBook Art 14 for work over the past week, and three hours of productivity work (including typing text into the CMS, reading and responding to emails, watching the occasional YouTube video, and playing Spotify in the background) would consume about 20-25%. That's pretty good, and means that depending on my usage, the laptop can last at least 12 hours on a single charge, and possibly more.

Software: Artificial Intelligence capabilities and connections

Without “artificial intelligence,” the MagicBook Art 14 wouldn’t be the modern technology product it is. In this case, it's the ability to run Copilot, Microsoft's generative artificial intelligence chatbot. This includes asking Copilot complex questions, or letting it generate works of art. There are also some Honor-specific AI features, such as the ability to apply filters to videos.

But the connectivity is cool: the laptop runs Windows 11, but has Honor's software built-in, allowing the laptop to seamlessly connect to Honor phones. Once connected, you can mirror your Honor phone screen to your laptop, or mirror your laptop screen to your Honor foldable device, and drag and drop files between the two.

So, are Snapdragon X Elite laptops better than Intel laptops in every way? not necessarily. Most Windows applications are designed for x86, and I don't know if Arm-based laptops will sell enough in the first year or two to force software developers to adapt to Arm chips. Currently the most powerful Windows software will still perform better on Intel processors.

Apple doesn't have this problem because Apple's MacBooks are MacOS-only machines, so apps have to be adapted to Apple silicon to appeal to Apple users. Windows laptops don't have that kind of clout or consumer base. Ultimately, while this is a big first step for Honor and other Windows laptops, even if this change is much slower than for the MacBook, ultimately I do think laptops and portable computing devices will be powered by Arm chips.

As expected, the Honor MagicBook Art 14 isn't cheap. In Europe, the retail price is €1,699 for 1TB and 32GB RAM. But in Asia, it should be cheaper.