There are many products that cross my desk for review, and very few of those products surprise me. I’ve been doing this for long enough that I can generally guess how a device is going to perform or work before it even gets to me.
Huawei’s new MateBook X Pro is an exception. Even though the MateBook X Pro has a deep bench of specs and an eye-catching design, Huawei is not exactly an established brand in the laptop world. Prior Huawei laptops weren’t great, either: they had poor battery life, not enough power, bad design, frustrating trackpads, and were generally not worth considering.
Fortunately, the MateBook X Pro has completely and thoroughly exceeded my expectations. While it is not a perfect laptop and it has a couple of faults that will stop some from considering it, it is still the best laptop I’ve used all year. That makes it my new recommendation as the productivity and entertainment laptop to buy right now.
This looks like a great all-rounder
It still has those awful half height up and down arrow keys that the macbook has.
What is the state of Linux support with these laptops? Firmware update, or fingerprint reader!
System 76
Still, nothing can match the typing experience of Lenovo ThinkPads, so thanks but no thanks, Huawei.
Are you sure? My Work laptop is a Thinkpad, and it is probably the worse keyboard I have ever used. I think it’s a “me too” poly-carbonate Macbook clone mechanism. It’s a T540P I believe (it is docked under a desk and I would upset my setup to get it to verify.) Using the trackpad is also a work of pure satanic self flagellation.
There’s thinkpads, and there’s ‘thinkpad’s.
I still think the T23 was the ultimate thinkpad in terms of screen size and aspect ratio, keyboard and trackpoint, weight etc.
Is the “new style” (introduced half+ decade ago) Thinkpad keyboard as good as the old? So far I had prolonged exposure only to the old one…
Only 16GB? I’m struggling with 32GB. My next laptop will have 64GB. Author should have written more about his workload, I suppose it’s nice if all you do is writing articles and a bit of googling.
I haven’t used windows in a long time now, and it’s hard to imagine getting the type of work I do done on a windows machine (nodejs development for backend API’s).
So it feels like a waste to me show it with windows.
But maybe nodejs dev is fine on windows. anyone have experience with this? I think I’d miss the terminal too much now. Been using *nix exclusively too long.
btw, one comment mentions System 76. Is their hardware/software taking off now?