Huawei MateBook 16s: The Best Huawei Laptop Yet

The Huawei MateBook 16s is the latest evolution of Huawei’s largest premium productivity laptop line. It is based on Intel’s latest 12^th generation H-Series mobile processor architecture (up to 14 cores, 60W TDP)  but doesn’t feature a discrete GPU, probably to maximize battery longevity.

Underneath the surface, Huawei claims to have dramatically improved the cooling performance with new materials and a dual-fan system that’s supposed to be relatively quiet. This is interesting because the 60W TDP Intel processor can deliver serious performance and heat.

The industrial design is similar to the previous MateBook 16 model but slightly modernized. The chassis is made from CNC aluminum and is undoubtedly very rigid. It looks neat and minimalist, with a gigantic glass trackpad and prominent top-firing speakers. Our experience with Huawei’s laptop speaker design has been outstanding, so we’re hoping for a repeat.

The full-size keyboard has large keys with a deep 1.5mm key travel. That’s significantly more than the 1.3mm of the previous generation. Below the keyboard, there’s a sizeable 84Wh battery. It will be interesting to see the battery life, but I suspect it might be a bit lower than last year’s AMD edition.

The MateBook 16s has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, thanks to the Intel platform. It’s terrific news for anyone wanting to create a one-connector desktop extension or connect ultrafast I/O devices.

The 16-inch display finally gets multitouch and conserves the excellent color accuracy making it a good Light Creative laptop (photoshop, web development). The display is factory-calibrated, so practical color accuracy is as high as the LCD panel would allow.

Additionally, a new 1080p AI camera is located at the top of the screen representing a significant improvement over the 720p camera of the MateBook 16. We’re in a Zoom world, after all.

The bezels are extremely thin, making the laptop beautiful to look at and very compact for a 16-inch laptop. The 3:2 aspect ratio allows for additional vertical content space, another productivity booster many people love.

Finally, Huawei’s laptop connect and interacts in more advanced ways with other Huawei products, such as its smartphones. It’s possible to drag and drop content from the two devices or use a Huawei tablet as a digitizer tablet. If you already have Huawei devices, staying within that ecosystem is a strong incentive.

The maximum amount of RAM is 16GB, which might be a bit tight for some Creative activities like video editing, and the same is true of the 1TB SSD max storage. That said, it should be more than enough for lighter applications, and this computer seems perfect for executives, people who read a lot of documents, or developers.

Eliane Fiolet
Categories: Computers
Tags: Huawei, Huawei Laptops, Huawei MateBook, Laptops