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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MrSpadge - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
I really like the meaningful and fairly priced separation between the i5 and i7 model - keep it simple and the upgrade noticeable to the user.SirCanealot - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Actually, I was thinking the same thing! For the sake of $300 I can upgrade almost everything on the system. For $300 to do that, it's quite a 'may as well' situation! :)DiscoDJ - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
I know the internet is international in scope, but I do find it interesting that this article doesn't even mention the security issues the U.S. Govt. (whatever you may think of it, right now) has with Huawei or ZTE. Is there an article on this site somewhere that dismisses these concerns as unfounded?RedKiwi - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Reading through the summary of the House intelligence report on Huawei and ZTE, it seems more of a "not worth the risk" type of situation. Investigating hardware provided by Huawei and ZTE was out of the scope of the investigation. The House only questioned their involvement with the Chinese government. Both companies were unable to provide a satisfactory answer to the committee. By not allowing Huawei and ZTE to sell telecommunications equipment to US carriers, it removes the possibility of snooping even if there is no risk in the first place.I do believe consumer hardware Huawei makes is safe for general use. It might not be worth it for the government to risk.
On a side note, I wish some of these decisions would be made in other parts of the US government such as environmental laws.
vanilla_gorilla - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
That's one of the most reasonable replies to that question I've seen.But we can't ignore the fact that in 2017 ZTE plead guilty to illegaly exporting US technology to Iran and North Korea.
Let me say that again: Iran and North Korea. In violation of international trade sanctions.
Then when the US called them on it, they agreed to reprimand employees and pay a fine. Instead, they only fired 4 officials and provided bonuses to 35 others. That's why the US Department of Commercen banned companies from buy ZTE products.
I don't think there's much more anaysis the government needs to do. Security is all based on trust and ZTE has zero. I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.
ianmills - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Well the results sound about par for how the US handled their own 2009 financial crisis hahainvinciblegod - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
"But we can't ignore the fact that in 2017 ZTE plead guilty to illegaly exporting US technology to Iran and North Korea. Let me say that again: Iran and North Korea. In violation of international trade sanctions."You say that like it's a super surprising thing but you'll be surprised to learn that many companies actually make a cost benefit analysis and more often than would be expected choose to illegally export US parts to those countries. They just know that if they get caught they will pay a fine and then everything is fine. Just search "companies that violate sanctions to iran" on google and you will see how many companies do it and get caught. ZTE obviously miscalculated on how much they could get away with in the plea deal.
invinciblegod - Wednesday, June 27, 2018 - link
Also, ZTE is not Huawei.Samus - Thursday, June 28, 2018 - link
LOL I was about to say the same thing.Oxford Guy - Tuesday, July 3, 2018 - link
Yep. If the benefit (the profit) outweighs the slap on the wrist (the cost) then why wouldn't any corporation go for it? Corporations are not people. They're financial mechanisms designed to enrich some people. They just happen to have real people to do some of that work (along with AI, robotics, etc.).