The Huawei MateBook X Pro Review: Calling Out The Competition
by Brett Howse on June 27, 2018 8:00 AM ESTBattery Life
One of the sacrifices made when making a laptop as compact as possible with thin bezels is that you’re got less room for a large battery, but Huawei still managed to squeeze in 57 Wh of capacity, which is less than some of the competition, but not necessarily a lot less.
And despite the MateBook X Pro offering a discrete GPU, that’s of course turned off with NVIDIA Optimus when not in use, so for more mundane tasks, the integrated GPU is leveraged to save some power.
We test all laptops at 200 nits brightness, and use the built-in Microsoft Edge browser and Films & TV app for testing.
2013 Light Battery Test
This test is being phased out because it’s become too easy for modern machines, and is almost the same amount of time you’d see for a completely idle system, but we’ve got a long history of devices tested so we’ll likely keep it around for Bench for a while still. Despite the high-resolution display, and average battery capacity, the MateBook X Pro still got over 13.5 hours of battery life on this test.
2016 Web Battery
Our newer test is much more demanding, and impacts battery life pretty significantly, and should represent a more accurate depiction of what you could expect if you were just browsing the web all day on the device. Once again, the MateBook X Pro delivers very solid battery life, at over 9.5 hours.
Normalized Results
By removing the battery capacity from the run time, we can see how efficient each device is. On our lighter 2013 test, the MateBook X Pro gets a very respectable 14.3 minutes per Wh, which is right up there with the most efficient devices we’ve seen, but those generally have a much lower resolution display.
On the 2016 version of the test, the result is the same, with the MateBook very close to the top of our efficiency chart despite the display. Huawei has done a fantastic job of getting as much battery life out of the limited battery size as they could.
Movie Playback
Playing back a locally stored movie on the MateBook resulted in right about 12 hours of battery life.
Tesseract
To put the movie playback in perspective, we divide the run time by the length The Avengers movie to see how many movies you could watch if you needed to. The MateBook would let you watch almost six entire movies before it forced you to go do something else for a while.
Charge Time
Huawei ships the MateBook X Pro with a 65-Watt adapter which is USB-C based, and can charge in either of the USB-C ports. A small complaint would be that there’s no USB-C on the right side, so you’re stuck charging on the left, but that’s not that much different than laptops that charge with a barrel connector so it’s hard to be too upset.
Charge time was fairly average at 161 minutes, but it does reach 50% charge in about 40 minutes which is likely quick enough for most people.
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SFNR1 - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
if the spyware would be on the SSD, than yes ;-) .notashill - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Are we not remembering the Windows Platform Binary Table 'feature' Lenovo used to automatically reinstall their spyware when the system was wiped with a fresh Windows 10 ISO from Microsoft?Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
And, installing Windows 10 is installing spyware.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
CPUs and other chips have built-in spyware now.Notmyusualid - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
Nice, on-topic comment for a change.eek2121 - Saturday, July 7, 2018 - link
The problem is, we in the US are, oddly enough, in a position of 'guilty until proven innocent'. Back doors have been found in enough consumer hardware, accidental or otherwise, to raise serious concerns of security.rocky12345 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Coming from a company that is not as well known is this sector the prices are fairly steep. A i5 using Intel's graphics and only 8GB's DDR3L for $1199US is pretty sad I do not care how thin it is not worth more than $799US-$899US and even then that would be if it was from a better known company in this hardware sector.SFNR1 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
the base model is really quite expensive but the i7-verison i think, keeps it up with the xps and others out thererocky12345 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Yea the i7 model with the Graphics card an 16GB memory and larger 512Gb NVMe drive is priced a lot closer to what it should be and I guess if the build quality is good and will last as long as the big brand names systems do then it should be fine.rocky12345 - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
I read the review again because the first time was just before I had to leave for work so I skimmed it. The i7 model is a pretty good deal for sure you get a lot of grunt for that $1500 and from what they said in the review the screen is pretty good and the build quality is good as well. If you want to tinker in some light duty gaming you can with the i7 model and Nvidia graphics. The battery time if also very impressive at least to me it was being that this is a laptop and not a tablet.