Honor MagicBook 16 (2026) review: An excellent all-rounder with epic battery life
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Long battery life -
Solid keyboard -
Stylish all-metal build
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Colourless display -
SSD is divided into two partitions -
Low-rent 720p webcam
Apple’s MacBook Neo has heralded the arrival of what may prove to be the golden age of affordable laptops. Of course, there have been cheap laptops before, but the MacBook Neo is a machine you want to own even if you can afford something better.
Windows laptop manufacturers don’t want to be left behind, so we’ll soon see a slew of laptops built around Intel’s Wildcat Lake chips, like the eagerly anticipated Dell XPS13, which will go head-to-head with the Neo on price.
Honor’s new MagicBook 16 is another machine with an affordable price tag that belies its performance, looks, and build quality.
What you need to know
Honor’s ambition with the MagicBook 16 is obvious: to deliver a basic all-purpose laptop that looks and performs like it should cost rather more than it does. On the whole, I have to say it’s achieved exactly that.
Honor has also done it without resorting to dated components to keep the price down. The chipset is one of Intel’s new Series 3 Core Ultra affairs, launched at the start of 2026 with a 47 TOPS NPU to support local AI tomfoolery.
A solid all-metal shell houses those up-to-the-minute internal components, which run on a high-capacity 80Wh battery and connect to a wide range of I/O ports. The display and webcam could be better, but despite that, the MagicBook 16 is a lot of laptop for a little money.
Price and competition
Configuration tested: 8-core Intel Core Ultra 5 Processor 325, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, 1,920 x 1,200 60Hz IPS display; Price when reviewed: £849
There’s only one model of the MagicBook 16 currently available in the UK, and it has a sticker price of £999. However, Honor has been offering a £150 coupon since it first went on sale, so it’s safe to assume you’ll be able to pick it up for £849 for some time to come.
Though the Apple MacBook Neo is quite a bit smaller than the MagicBook 16, it’s also quite a lot cheaper. But despite the low price, it’s still a laptop you can whip out anywhere and be ashamed. Performance is adequate for most day-to-day tasks, and like all Apple devices, it’s a superb piece of design.
Providing you can live with a smaller 15.1in screen, the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3x has much to recommend it. The Snapdragon X1 CPU performs well, the battery lasts through solid use, and £1,099 buys you a 2.5K OLED screen. The keyboard is a little bouncy, though, and the speakers could be better.
If you want an affordable gaming laptop, the Medion Erazer Deputy 15 P1 has a lot going for it. Thanks to an 115W TGP Nvidia RTX 5060 GPU, graphics performance is very good, and with a price tag around £1,000, it’s usefully affordable. Battery life is rather poor, but that should come as no surprise.
If you want a Windows laptop in the next league up from the MagicBook, you’ll be looking at something like the Acer Swift 16 AI and spending around £1,600. Performance is strong thanks to the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H CPU and Arc B390 GPU, and the 2.8K OLED display is gorgeous. This Swift also has a truly vast touchpad.
Design and features
The look and feel of the MagicBook is far beyond what you’d expect for the money. The body, lid and base plate are all made from aluminium alloy, and the whole enchilada feels very solid and well put together.
The build quality is more than skin deep, too. Honor boasts that the MagicBook 16 meets MIL-STD-180 standards, carries a five-star SGS Exceptional Reliability Certification, and features an IPX32 splash-resistant keyboard. Apparently, it will even withstand a 1.2-ton car—think Vauxhall Corsa—rolling right over it.
The finish is anodised silver. It’s a bit anonymous, like the generically rounded design, but it’s extremely good at resisting greasy fingerprints, which is more important. The only branding is the highly polished silver HONOR logo on the lid.
The new MagicBook weighs 1.53kg, which isn’t bad for a 16in laptop, though at 20mm thick it’s a bit on the chunky side.
Well-connected with expandable SSD storage
Honor has done well on the ports front. On the left, you’ll find two 10Gbps Type-C ports, both supporting DisplayPort video, an HDMI 2.1 video output and a 3.5 audio jack. On the right are two 5Gbps USB-A ports. That will do very nicely. The Type-C ports also support 60W reverse charging, which is handy if you want to use your laptop as an emergency powerbank.
At this price point, you’re not getting the very latest word in wireless connectivity; the Intel AX211E modem only supports Wi-Fi 6E rather than 7, and Bluetooth 5.1 rather than v5.4, let alone v6. I’d hardly describe this as a deal-breaker, though.
The MagicBook 16 isn’t the easiest laptop to open up; you’ll need a T5H Torx screwdriver to remove the four screws in the base plate, but it’s worth the effort because I discovered a second 2280 SSD bay. You cannot upgrade the fixed RAM and wireless card, but you can easily swap out the battery.
This being an Honor laptop, there’s a fair amount of Huawei screen and content-sharing software on the MagicBook, much as there was with its Huawei forebears, and there’s an NFC radio to facilitate this. The more you’re invested in the Honor ecosystem, the more value you will find in this.
Keyboard, touchpad and webcam
The keyboard is excellent. The base is very solid, the layout faultless, and you get a numeric keypad and a two-stage white backlight. The 1.6mm typing action is crisp and quiet with a well-damped end stop. I’ve encountered worse keyboards on laptops that cost twice as much.
I like the way Honor has placed the fingerprint scanner-cum-power button away from the rest of the keys in the top-right corner to reduce inadvertent pressing. The same goes for the four cursor keys. While all four of them may be half-height, there’s plenty of space around them.
At 125 x 80mm, the plastic touchpad isn’t the biggest you’ll find on a 16in laptop, and the click action is a wee bit on the loud side, but it works reliably, and the surface is very smooth.
The 720p webcam isn’t quite as bad as I feared, with images looking surprisingly crisp given the resolution. Things do look rather dark, though, which limits its use in low-light environments. All of the Windows Studio Effects enhancements are present and correct.
Without Windows Hello facial recognition, the fingerprint scanner handles all biometric security duties.
Display and audio quality
The display is the one part of the package that gives away the price. It’s a very run-of-the-mill 60Hz 1,920 x 1,200 IPS panel with a peak brightness of 328cm/2 and a quoted colour coverage of 45% NTSC.
Now, 45% NTSC equates to around 62% sRGB, but even that is optimistic because, according to my colourimeter, the MagicBook’s display covers just 54.4% of the sRGB gamut, or to put it another way, less than 40% DCI-P3. That makes watching films and videos a rather colourless affair, and of course, there’s no support for HDR content.
On the positive side, the high contrast ratio of 1,228:1 and wide viewing angles don’t make for quite as underwhelming an experience as you’ll have with the likes of the, admittedly much cheaper, Acer Aspire Go 15.
With such limited gamut coverage, there’s no point worrying about colour accuracy. A Delta E variance of 6.5 against the sRGB profile means it’s useless for colour grading of any sort.
The wrong choice of panel?
I think Honor would have been better advised to fit a panel with closer to 100% sRGB coverage (like the 2.5K, 180Hz display fitted to the Chinese version). The price impact wouldn’t have been too dramatic. That said, for everyday use, I could certainly live with the UK MagicBook’s panel. It’s not as bad as the raw numbers suggest.
Honor has nothing to say about the sound system, and the two-speaker system is not the loudest around, averaging 74.4dBA on my soundmeter. The sound, however, is warm and detailed; there’s a useful amount of bass and no distortion even when turned up to 11.
I’m listening to the new Evanescence album Sanctuary on the MagicBook as I write this review, and it’s making a more than decent fist of things with Amy Lee’s vocals soaring clearly above the thunderous guitar riffs.
Performance
Inside the MagicBook 16, you’ll find an Intel Core Ultra 5 325 processor with 16GB of RAM. The 325 is an 8-core Panther Lake chip with 4 performance cores and 4 Low Power Efficient (LPE) cores. The maximum boost speed is 4.5Ghz.
Graphics are handled by an Intel Graphics iGPU, which in this instance has 4 Xe cores, and there’s a 47 TOPS NPU, which means it’s technically Copilot-compliant.
Given that Copilot was effectively shot in the head and buried in an unmarked grave at Microsoft’s recent Build 2026 conference, the absence of official Copilot branding on the Matebook 16 isn’t something you need to worry about.
The chipset’s overall performance was solid, scoring 276 in our 4K multimedia benchmark built around Handbrake. To put that into context, the MacBook Neo scored 120 while the new Asus Zenbook A14 scored 322.
That the MagicBook’s performance was much closer to the second, more expensive machine than the cheaper MacBook tells you all you need to know: for an £850 laptop, the Honor punches above its weight.
With only 4 Xe cores, the integrated GPU isn’t a match for the latest Arc B390 GPUs found in the more upscale Panther Lake chipsets, but the MagicBook still managed to run the Doom 2016 reboot in FullHD at a steady 45fps, which is really all you could, or should, ask from a laptop like this.
Reliable performance with no drama
Not only does the MagicBook deliver reasonable levels of performance, but it does so reliably and without drama. Under prolonged stress, both the CPU and GPU ran at 100% utilisation with little fan noise. The vent grill in the base panel did get rather warm, but that was the only sign the system was running hard.
The 512GB 2280 SSD in my review machine was from SanDisk and proved quite sprightly, returning sequential read and write speeds of 4,740MB/s and 2,229MB/s.
I had one minor niggle with the SSD, though, and it’s one you’ll find on lots of laptops intended primarily for the Chinese market. The drive is divided into two partitions: one 199GB for Windows (C:) and one 244GB for Data (D:). Make sure you are saving large files to the latter, or Windows will merrily fill the former until you run out of space and can’t download updates.
Battery life
This is the MagicBook’s primary claim to a spot on anyone’s list of laptops to consider buying. In our standard video rundown test, where we loop a video file using VLC with the display brightness set to 170cd/m2, the MagicBook 16 ran for a whopping 27hrs and 41mins.
That’s not quite the best we’ve ever seen from a laptop; the Snapdragon-powered Asus Zenbook A14 kept going for 29hrs 32mins, but it’s the best from a laptop costing less than £1,000 by a country mile.
Honor MagicBook 16: Verdict
If you’re after a well-made, stylish and reasonably affordable general-purpose 16in laptop, then the new MagicBook 16 is very hard to beat. Key strengths are the excellent build quality, superb battery life, unusually solid keyboard and the option to add a second SSD. Performance is also good for a laptop in this price bracket.
In the minus column are the usual suspects: a basic 720p webcam and a display that’s short of colour, though in defence of the latter, the viewing angles and contrast ratio are both up to snuff, and it’s reasonably bright. For £850, I don’t think you can do better.
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