With its new Huawei MateBook 14 2024, the series has arrived in the OLED space. While the MateBook 14 2023 will come with an IPS LCD with 300 nits of brightness, this model has a 450-nit OLED panel, a giant improvement over the previous generation. It’s also the first MateBook to support stylus input as well.
The MateBook 14 2024 also upgrades last year’s i7-1360P with a faster, more efficient Core Ultra 7 155H processor under the hood. This year’s model is also significantly lighter, partly due to Huawei. Built with a 65W charger and built-in USB C cable, you can purchase the Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H processors with 16GB RAM and storage options that are 512GB or 1TB.
Design and Build Quality
The Huawei MateBook 14 2024 is a minimalist design device. Our review unit is Green, which is a welcome color in a sea of silver and grey laptops. It’s constructed from metal so it feels premium and the understated design feels professional. It weighs 1.31kg and is surprisingly lightweight as it sits at only 14.5mm thick. When flipped open, there is an OLED display bordered by black bezels, a green deck, and a black keyboard. On the top deck, there are no speaker grilles either and the webcam is located in the top bezel.
Keyboard, Display, Camera, and Speakers
First and foremost, the distinction between the OLED display and the LCD that has appeared in previous models in the MateBook 14 lineup is sensational. Though it’s not as high-resolution or as bright as the MateBook X Pro 2024, the 2880x1920px display with a 3:2 aspect ratio (1562 x 1048), 100% sRGB, DCI-P3, and 95% Adobe RGB coverage is still rock solid, especially for content creation.
It offers a 120Hz refresh rate, though it will switch back and forth from 60Hz to 120Hz depending on the content it is being displayed. One of the great traits of the MateBook is the Display Manager app that allows you to make incredible use of its customization options, including the ability to switch between color gamuts, such as P3 and sRGB.
In SDR mode, SDR mode sees the screen hit around 460 nits in brightness, slightly less than the MateBook X Pro but it’s still good enough, while in HDR the screen gets up to 550 nits. Because of the OLED’s contrast, even at matching brightness levels, PWM flickering can impact more sensitive users; it makes the OLED stand out among comparable LCD screens.
Huawei’s signature keyboard, with 1.5mm key travel, a comfortable layout, and a two-stage backlight comes standard on the MateBook 14 2024. Additionally, while the laptop lacks a Numpad, the number of portable laptops that included a Numpad isn’t surprising. The trackpad itself is decently sized, but it does use a plastic surface which is a step down from the glossy glass ones you’ll find in the finest of premium laptops.
With the capacitive fingerprint scanner that serves as the power button, Windows Hello support, and without IR for face recognition, the laptop also lacks an IR camera. The 1080p webcam is average, there isn’t much more you can say about it, but Huawei’s PC Manager app enables virtual backgrounds, beauty filters, and auto-centering.
The MateBook 14 2024 is great for watching movies, with speakers at the bottom that channel strong audio with good bass.
Performance and Battery Life Of Huawei MateBook 14
The MateBook 14 2024 is powered by Intel’s Meteor Lake architecture, a new Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, available with the Intel Core Ultra 5 125H. Its Core Ultra 7 155H has 16 cores (6 performance cores, 8 efficiency cores, 2 low power) with 4.8GHz peak clock speed. It also offers 8 8-core Arc GPU 16GB RAM capable of smooth performance in various tasks. 512GB or 1TB SSDs with PCIe 4.0 performance are available as options.
Under stress tests, the laptop ran great, keeping a constant 40W output power with little to no throttling. The MateBook 14 2024 is well suited for office work, photo and video editing, and even light 1080p gaming.
Battery life is great, as the 70Wh battery is bigger than competitors. For a thin-and-light laptop equipped with a quad-core Core i7 processor and 12 gigs of memory, that’s impressive video and unproductive Web playback of more than 10 hours and close to 9 hours, respectively.
Conclusion
As an allrounder Huawei MateBook 14 2024 is excellent: the performance is good, the build quality is upmarket and the display is stunning. Where it starts at £1,199 (€1,350) it not only matches some of the laptops it’s up against, but its Intel Core Ultra 7 155H and OLED screen give it more value.
That’s not to say more efficient (read: cheaper) newer processors like Intel’s Lunar Lake and AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 series won’t make the MateBook 14 2024 slower and more expensive, but at this price, it is one of the very best overall value options on the table today. If you’re looking for a powerful, feature-rich rich, and well-priced laptop, the Huawei MateBook 14 2024 is a current frontrunner, with deliveries scheduled to begin in the second half of October.
