Huawei has not been in the PC game very long, but in just a short couple of years they certainly raised the bar for the competition in the Ultrabook category. Today we’re taking a look at the latest Huawei MateBook X Pro, and with this release, the traditional PC makers need to stand up and take notice.

The MateBook X Pro features a laundry list of features you’d look for in a new Ultrabook. The PC world has fully embraced the thin-bezel revolution, and Huawei has taken this to an impressive 91% screen to body ratio on their latest Ultrabook, which features just 4.4 mm bezels all the way around. The small jump from the previous generation’s 88% was achieved by relocating the webcam to the keyboard, which we’ll cover later. In addition to the thin bezels, Huawei has kept the fantastic 3:2 aspect ratio display as the MateBook X, but increases the display size and resolution, to 13.9-inches and 3000x2000 respectively.

The laptop offers pretty much every feature you could hope for in thin and light Ultrabook, with Intel’s 8th generation Core U series processors in the i5-8250U and i7-8550U, both of which are Kaby Lake Refresh with four cores and eight threads. The Core i7 model also comes with NIVIDIA’s GeForce MX150 GPU, with 2 GB of GDDR5 and 384 CUDA cores, which should offer substantially more grunt than the Intel HD 630. RAM is 8 GB of the Core i5 and 16 GB of LPDDR3 on the Core i7, which is the maximum amount of LPDDR3 you can fit in a U series laptop.

Huawei Matebook X Pro (2018)
		Core i7 With MX 150 (model reviewed)	Core i5 Without MX 150
Processor	CPU	Intel Core i7-8550U	Intel Core i5-8250U
	Cores	Quad Core with HT	Quad Core with HT
	Base Freq	1.8 GHz	1.6 GHz
	Turbo Freq	4.0 GHz	3.6 GHz
	L3 Cache	8 MB	6 MB
	TDP	PL1 = 15W	PL1 = 15W
Graphics		NVIDIA MX150 2GB GDDR5 384 CUDA Cores	Intel HD 630 24 EUs 300-1100 MHz
Display		13.9-inch 3000x2000 LTPS 100% sRGB 450 nits 1500:1 contrast ratio 10-point touch
DRAM		16 GB LPDDR3	8 GB LPDDR3
Storage		512 GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 x 4	256 GB NVMe PCIe 3.0 x 4
Wireless		Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8275 802.11ac 2x2:2 Dual Band
Connectivity		1 x Type-C (Power and Data) 1 x TB3 (Power and Data) 1 x Type-A 3.5mm TRRS
Camera		Spring Latch 1MP
Battery		57.4 Wh
Dimensions	H x W x D	304 x 217 x 14.6 mm
	Mass	~1.33 kg	< 1.33 kg
Price		$1499.99 USD	$1199.99 USD

But the fun hasn’t stopped there. Huawei has also outfitted the MateBook X Pro with two USB-C ports which both support power and data, and one of them is also Thunderbolt 3 enabled. For those that still need access to normal USB, which is most people, there’s also a USB-A port as well. There’s no SD card slot, which would be the one thing that might be missed, but it’s a small sacrifice.

The MateBook X Pro also ships with the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8265 network adapter, which is a 2x2:2 adapter with 80 MHz channels, meaning a maximum connection speed of 867 Mbps, and integrated Bluetooth 4.2. Since Intel added MU-MIMO support, it’s easily the adapter of choice with great performance and high reliability.

Huawei has managed to pack in pretty much everything you could wish for in an Ultrabook, but they’ve still kept a thin and light design which we’ll take a look at now.

Design

Huawei doesn’t seem to shy away from where they get their design inspirations, with the company proudly comparing it side by side with the latest MacBook Pro lineup. But they’ve still done some interesting takes on the Ultrabook design and have crafted a beautiful looking laptop with the MateBook X Pro.

Obviously one of the focal points is the display, which is surrounded by bezels just 4.4 mm on each side. This makes for a pretty stunning look, and Huawei took a design cue from Dell here by shrinking the top bezel as well. There’s no doubt that it makes the laptop look more balanced, but in order to do this the webcam had to be relocated from the top of the display. Dell tucks it under the display, but with Huawei using a taller 3:2 aspect panel, they’ve instead moved the webcam under a pop-up key cap between F6 and F7. Clearly this is going to have the same up-the-nose look of using an XPS 13 webcam, but if you do want to adjust the angle of the webcam you’d have to tilt the entire laptop base, which isn’t ideal. If you use a webcam all the time on your laptop, this one issue is likely a deal breaker, but on the other hand, by being able to tuck the webcam away, there’s definitely a privacy enhancement with this take. It’s a bit odd, but it all comes down to how much you rely on a webcam on your laptop on whether this is going to be an issue or not.

The rest of the design is a lot less compromising. The all-aluminum chassis is great to handle, and comes in two colors depending on the model. The Mystic Silver is offered on the Core i5 model, and the Core i7 version is outfitted in a Space Gray color. The laptop is also very thin, at just 14.6 mm, or 0.57-inches, and the laptop comes in under 3 lbs at 1.33 kg / 2.93 lbs. The laptop feels a lot smaller than you’d expect for a 13.9-inch laptop thanks to the small bezels and squarer aspect ratio. It’s hard to believe laptops used to come with such enormous bezels when you get to see these latest breeds in person.

The review unit has a bit of a creak on the bottom left side when picking it up, but speaking to others that have used or are using this notebook, that doesn’t seem to be a widespread issue luckily.

Opening the laptop, we can take a look at the keyboard and trackpad. Huawei has gone with a very standard keyboard layout, which is very welcome. There’s the usual compactness of certain keys like the arrow keys, but that’s to be expected when the entire design is in such a small space. It’s a full six-row keyboard though, and other than the webcam being on the top row, it’s all well thought out.

Using the keyboard is above average, despite there only being 1.1 mm of key travel on this notebook. There’s a good amount of resistance when pressing the keys, so they feel better than you’d think for such a short throw. Despite Huawei definitely taking inspiration from Apple on the design, they’ve kept the traditional key feel here. Some extra travel would likely improve the keyboard a bit, and some contour to the key caps might help as well, but the balance is still quite good.

The keys are of course backlit too, but there’s just two levels of backlighting, and even at the brightest, it could stand to be just a bit brighter. In addition, Huawei doesn’t light up the backlighting when you use the trackpad, so when using the laptop in a dim room, it can be a bit more challenging to get lined up with the keys when you want to type. Most laptops do turn on the backlighting when you move the cursor, and this one should as well. It’s a small issue, but one worth pointing out.

The trackpad is a master stroke though. It’s oversized, but without being in your way like some of the other large trackpads, and it works very well. The trackpad material is incredibly smooth, and very responsive. The Surface Book likely has the best trackpad on a PC, and Huawei has arguably matched it.

On the keyboard deck is also two of the four speakers that Huawei has fitted in, with the second pair on the bottom near the front, and, incorporated into the power button is a fingerprint sensor for Windows Hello login.

Huawei has done an amazing job with the design. The thin bezels, coupled with the taller display, make for an incredibly compact 14-inch laptop, and despite the larger display size, it’s still very thin, and very light. There’s enough connectivity to get you by while still being plugged in, which isn’t something that can be said about all thin and light notebooks. As long as you don’t mind the webcam placement, there’s little to be upset about by the design of this MateBook X Pro.

System Performance

Huawei has outfitted the latest MateBook X Pro with Intel’s 8th generation of Core processors with either the Core i5-8250U, or the Core i7-8550U. Both offer four cores and eight threads. The Core i5 is 1.6-3.4 GHz with 6 MB of Cache, and the Core i7 is 1.8-4.0 GHz with 8 MB of cache. The Kaby Lake Refresh chips have been a welcome addition to the lineup, and we’re likely thankful to competition for bringing about this change, despite Intel having issues ramping up their new 10 nm process.

The MateBook X Pro review unit shipped with the Core i7 model, and we don’t expect too many surprised here. What’s more interesting is that Huawei pairs the Core i7 with an NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPU, which isn’t going to impact the pure CPU scores, but will play a part in the system tests like PCMark.

The MateBook X Pro was run through our standard suite of laptop tests, and comparisons are against similar models we’ve tested. If you’d like to compare the MateBook X Pro to any other laptop we’ve reviewed, please use our online notebook Bench.

PCMark 10

We’ve been testing the latest version of FutureMark’s PCMark suite for a while now, and are now switching over to it for all future reviews. If you’re not familiar with PCMark, it’s a full system test which factors in all aspects of a machine in a couple of different test suites. Essentials is “everday ways people us a PC” and includes web browsing, video conferencing, and app startup times. Productivity tests office applications such as word processing and spreadsheets. Digital Content Creation focuses on photo editing, video editing, rendering, and visualization. The suite then combines the sub-scores into an overall result.

The Huawei MateBook X Pro scores about mid-pack overall, but compared to the other devices in its class, it is right where expected.

Cinebench

Cinebench lets us test just the CPU performance on rendering in both a single-threaded run, as well as a multi-threaded test. Once again the Kaby Lake Refresh does very well here, with great single-threaded performance, but the extra cores compared to last year’s dual-core CPUs provides a big boost for the threaded tests.

x264

Another CPU test, x264 encodes a video in two passes using the CPU, and it likes lots of cores and lots of frequency. The Huawei performs very well here again. This test is quite a long test, and it runs four times sequentially, and the laptop got its best results on the third and fourth runs, so early indications are that the heat management works well on this device.

Web Tests

All of our web tests are run using Microsoft Edge as the default browser, and unlike our other tests, the browser is never a static thing. Each update generally improves performance of the JIT compiler, so over time, devices tend to get faster.

We’ll be changing our web testing soon, since all of these tests are now dated, so if there’s some web tests you’d like to see us include in the future, please let us know in the comments.

Storage Performance

Huawei uses M.2 NVMe PCIe SSDs in the MateBook X Pro lineup, as you’d expect, and the review unit shipped with an LITEON CA3 512 GB model. The drive is a TLC model, which isn’t unexpected in this price range, and is rated at 2900 MB/s read, and up to 1200 MB/s write, with 260K IOPS.

We were able to hit 3084 MB/s sequential read, and 2039.1 MB/s sequential write, with close to 300 MB/s read and write at 4 KB Q32, which is pretty good for a TLC drive. This is with a system that’s fully patched for Spectre and Meltdown as well.

Huawei is multi-sourcing drives though since SSDs are a commodity at this point, so there’s no guarantee what you’ll have in any unit. We’ve seen Toshiba, Samsung, and LITEON.

Graphics Performance

Here’s where the Huawei MateBook X Pro stands out from the crowd. Most Ultrabooks rely on Intel’s UHD620 graphics, Huawei added in the NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPU to the mix. With 384 CUDA cores, and 2 GB of GDDR5, the MX150 adds a bit more punch and it’s the first time we’ve had a chance to test it in a notebook.

One of the biggest advantages of having a discrete GPU is that you’re no longer forced inside of the thermal envelope of just the CPU. NVIDIA doesn’t release the TDP figures of its mobile chips, but you can expect the MX150 to likely have at least 15-Watts to itself. This also helps the CPU by not having to clock down as aggressively as when the GPU is integrated. Of course, this also requires adequate cooling to keep both chips in check.

To complicate matters, NVIDIA offers two different MX150 parts set up for different TDPs. Since this is in a thin and light ultrabook, it's perhaps not surprising to see that it features the lower speed version which has a maximum boost frequency of 1038 MHz. The higher TDP version for thicker laptops can boost to around 1500 MHz.

We’re in the process of transitioning to a new suite of games for 2018 and beyond, but because this laptop isn’t a gaming laptop, the games in our existing suite are more than demanding enough. But first, the synthetics.

3DMark

FutureMark’s 3DMark offers several tests with a variety of GPU demands. Fire Strike is the most demanding, then Sky Diver, Cloud Gate, and finally Ice Storm Unlimited which is designed for smartphones and tablet-class GPUs.

The NVIDIA MX150 offers a significant performance gain from the integrated GPU alone, and the more demanding the test, the larger the benefit. Fire Strike is an impressive 143% faster on the Huawei MateBook X Pro than the ASUS ZenBook 3 with the same CPU but just the UHD 620 graphics. On top of that, the MX150 also squeaks past the AMD Ryzen 7 2700U powered Acer Swift 3 with its Vega graphics.

GFXBench

Kishonti’s GFXBench is a cross-platform test that uses OpenGL on the desktop, and since most new PC games don’t use OpenGL, it’s really just a chance to see how the OpenGL drivers are for a GPU. Once again the MX150 does very well here compared to integrated alone.

Dota 2

Valve’s Dota 2 is one of the most popular arena games around, and the engine is dynamic enough that it can be run fairly well on even low-end machines, making it a great game to test on an Ultrabook. The MateBook X Pro does very well on this test, easily outclassing the integrated GPUs on both the Intel and AMD laptops. The gap over the AMD Vega mobile likely has a lot to do with Dota 2 being a fairly CPU limited game, and having a separate TDP for the CPU and GPU like the MateBook does is a nice benefit.

Tomb Raider

Although several years old now, the original reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise can still be punishing to laptop GPUs. At low to medium settings though, the MX150 does very well on this game, and is more than just playable. It once again edges the Ryzen 7 2700U in the value settings where the CPU is a bigger factor, but that gap closes once the GPU is taxed a bit more in the medium settings. At our Enthusiast levels, no Ultrabook is playable.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

The sequel to Tomb Raider is even more demanding, and at our value settings is just averaging 30 FPS, meaning you’d really have to turn this game down to even have a chance to play it on an Ultrabook.

Civilization VI

This game can normally be played with framerates that aren’t anywhere near a First Person game, thanks to the turn-based design of Civilization VI, but there were difficulties getting the game to run at our 16:9 resolutions we normally use, and the game was almost unplayable at even 1366x768. This is one of the issues you run into with an aspect ratio on the display which isn’t standard.

Bioshock Infinite

Like Tomb Raider, this game is several years old now but can still bring laptops to their knees, and we see that again with the MateBook X Pro. At low resolutions, it does very well, but on our enthusiast levels you’d not be able to play the game.

GRID Autosport

This game is heavily CPU bound, and you can see the gap between the MateBook and the AMD Ryzen 7 2700U powered Swift 3 is quite large. Once again, having separate TDPs helps, as does the extra performance from the Kaby Lake Refresh CPU.

GPU Conclusion

It was great to finally get a chance to test a laptop with the NVIDIA MX150 GPU inside, since Pascal has been such a big update on the bigger GPUs, it only makes sense that it’s also a big update over the GT 940 and other low-end GPUs NVIDIA offered previously. Offering this GPU in the MateBook X Pro provides it significantly more GPU power than Ultrabooks which rely on just the integrated Intel graphics, and it even outperforms the Vega GPU in the Acer Swift 3. There’s no free lunch here though, and Huawei would have had to pay extra for the GPU, and the bill of materials would also have to include the extra space and cooling required.

The MateBook X Pro isn’t a gaming laptop by any means, but with this small increase in GPU performance, it does at least give you the option.

Display Performance

Huawei has outfitted the MateBook X Pro with a 3000 x 2000 resolution IPS display featuring low-temperature polycrystalline silicon to provide better power consumption. The 3:2 aspect ratio matches what Microsoft started offering, along with the same resolution as offered in the Surface Book 13.5, but this is a 13.9-inch display so it’s a bit larger, but still offers a solid 260 pixels per inch. Huawei has stated the display covers 100% of the sRGB gamut, and offers 1500:1 contrast along with 450 nits brightness, so we’ll see how well they do there.

The move to 3:2 is something all notebooks should look into, because for most use cases, the extra vertical resolution is very beneficial when doing almost any task, with the exception of TV and movies, which are 16:9 or wider. The aspect ratio is a great compromise between widescreen and the older 4:3 though.

So without further ado, let’s dig into the display performance. We measure displays at 200 nits brightness using SpectraCal’s CalMAN suite with a custom workflow. Contrast and brightness measurements are done with an X-Rite i1DisplayPro colorimeter, and color accuracy is tested with an X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer.

Brightness and Contrast

Huawei has certainly delivered on some of their claims. The MateBook X Pro review unit achieved an eye-searing 557 nits maximum brightness, but at the same time offered great black levels, with contrast well over their 1500:1 target. Every device is going to be somewhat different, but it’s great to see this unit well over their goals. With such a high brightness, the MateBook X Pro should be fairly usable outdoors as well.

Grayscale

SpectraCal CalMAN

Huawei has done a very solid job at the factory with this display, with a grayscale average error level of only 1.8, and with no tested points even going over an error level of 2.5. The primary colors are also pretty solid, with blue being a bit too high but only slightly. By default the gamma is a bit too low as well coming in at an average of 2.05, with a big drop near 100% brightness. Still, it’s a very good start.

Gamut

SpectraCal CalMAN

Once again this display performs very well, covering almost the entire sRGB gamut with igh levels of accuracy. The blue is only slightly under where it should be at 100%, but the overall dE2000 is a mere 0.85 which is fantastic.

Saturation

SpectraCal CalMAN

Whereas the Gamut test only does the 100% levels for the primary and secondary colors, the saturation sweep tests the entire range in 4-bit steps to make sure there’s not deviation anywhere on the range, and the MateBook X performs admirably here as well, with one of the best error levels we’ve seen.

Gretag Macbeth

SpectraCal CalMAN

This final test moves off of just testing the primary and secondary colors, and tests important colors such as skin tones. Once again the MateBook X Pro provides a great result, with none of the individual colors even having an error level over 3.0, with almost all of them well under the 2.0 level.

Colorchecker

Here’s a sample image of the relative color errors on this display, with the bottom half of the image showing the target color, and the top half of the image showing the display output. Please note this is a relative test though because any errors in your own display will vary both the target and output.

The MateBook X Pro offers almost perfect color accuracy, and clearly Huawei has taken the extra time and cost to color calibrate the displays at the factory. For most people, the level of error is small enough that you’d never notice it unless you were doing color critical work.

Display Conclusion

What’s not to like about the MateBook X Pro’s display? It’s a high resolution display with a great aspect ratio for working. It offers incredible brightness, great contrast, and Huawei has color calibrated it to the sRGB gamut almost perfectly. There’s not much else to say other than this is a fantastic display.

Battery 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.

Wireless

Huawei has outfitted the MateBook X Pro with the Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 8275 NIC, which is a 2x2:2 solution with 80 MHz channel support and Bluetooth 4.2. Over the last couple of years, the Intel wireless solutions have offered the best reliability in our testing, and with the latest couple of generations Intel has added MU-MIMO support and increased performance as well.

Performance of the MateBook X Pro in outright bandwidth wasn’t the highest we’ve ever seen, but it could still hit over 500 Mbps.

For those that are eagle-eyed, they may have spotted that this is the Intel 8275 and not the 8265 which we’re more familiar with. The 8275 version is not an M.2 card, and is directly soldered onto the motherboard, so it’s a good thing they’ve chosen a quality unit. Not once in our testing did the Wi-Fi give even a hint of trouble.

Speakers

The MateBook X Pro features four speakers in total with Dolby Atmos support. As with all Ultrabooks, the low end of the spectrum is always going to be lacking due to the inability for such small speakers to produce low frequencies.

There’s two speakers on the top by the keyboard, and two additional speakers downward firing in enclosures at the front.

Sound quality is quite good, with decent lows and highs. The sound isn’t exceptionally loud at just around 80 dB(A) measured over the trackpad, but for a small laptop, it’s pretty solid.

You can also customize the Dolby Atmos using the application to set your EQ levels, sound type, and more.

Thermals

Any thin and light laptop is going to throttle at some point, but the question is generally where did the manufacturer try to strike a balance. Huawei has also stuffed in a GPU which is also going to need proper cooling in order to not throttle too badly.

To first check the CPU situation out, we ran a stress test using Intel’s Extreme Overclocking Utility to monitor temps and power usage. Huawei has been fairly conservative here targeting a CPU temp of around 70°C, so the CPU power limits to slightly under the 15-Watt TDP in order to achieve that target. During the stress test, the CPU bounced between 11-Watts and 14-Watts to keep the temperatures at 70°, but even with all four cores running at 100%, the CPU was still able to turbo up to between 2.2 and 2.7 GHz during the test, which is well over the 1.8 GHz base clock.

To test the GPU, we ran the system on Tomb Raider at the medium settings to load up the GPU but still keep the framerate up at a playable level of around 60 FPS. The GPU temperatures peaked at 83°C and the GPU was able to maintain generally between 1000 MHz and 1050 MHz for the duration. Once it got up to its peak, the MateBook X Pro was able to maintain those temperatures indefinitely.

At full load, the internal fans can get fairly loud at about 50.5 dB(A) measured just over the trackpad, which is to be expected when gaming. The laptop also gets quite warm, with a surface temperature close to 50°C so you’d not want to be doing this in your lap if you could help it.

The cooling system will run completely silently though at low loads, and if you adjust the power slider to best battery life, you’ll rarely hear the fans unless you’re doing something with a very high demand.

The MateBook X Pro delivers fairly good cooling considering the inclusion of a discrete GPU, and there’s no sign of thermal runaway that would force the CPU or GPU to significantly reduce the frequency and voltage to compensate.

Software

Huawei ships the MateBook X Pro with a very clean install of Windows, with really the only additional software being the Huawei PC Manager application.

The tool lets you check for driver updates, run diagnostics, as well as connect to your phone. It’s simple enough to use, and Huawei has made it fit in well with the design of Windows 10. The app sits by the notification status icon waiting for use. You can of course remove the shortcut if you prefer.

Final Words

What’s perhaps most surprising about the Huawei MateBook X Pro is that the company is a fairly new entrant to the PC market, but they’ve delivered one of the best Ultrabooks you can buy in only a couple of iterations. There’s a lot of good, very little bad, and Huawei is practically sitting on an island when you talk about value.

The company seems to be unabashed about where they’ve gotten their design inspiration from for the MateBook X Pro, but despite it having a distinct MacBook Pro look to it, Huawei has delivered their own take, with amazingly thin bezels on this 3:2 display. They’ve incorporated the fingerprint reader into the power button, but there’s still an actual row of function keys too. From a design standpoint, the Huawei MateBook X Pro is one of the nicest looking Ultrabooks you can buy.

Huawei also stepped into the future with both USB-C and Thunderbolt 3, but also kept a USB-A port as well for those of us with legacy devices, which is almost everyone. It’s expansion done right. There’s no loss of device thinness either by including the USB-A port, and it sure makes life easier when you want to do almost anything. USB-C is the future, but that doesn’t mean you need to ignore the present. And for those that are still solidly in the present, Huawei ships the MateBook X Pro with a USB-C dongle with USB-A, HDMI, and somewhat strangely, a VGA connector, and even another USB-C port so you don't even lose the original port. That's a nice touch.

Huawei has delivered a good keyboard as well, despite the limited amount of key travel. They’ve done a great job on the switch resistance to make it feel like a solid keystroke. The oversized trackpad is not so oversized as to make it too easy to accidentally bump it, and it is one of the smoothest trackpads we’ve ever seen on a PC.

There’s plenty of performance as well, with the same CPU performance you’d expect in a current generation Ultrabook featuring Intel’s 8th generation U series processors, but Huawei has also added in a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPU with 2 GB of GDDR5. It’s not a gaming system by any means, but the extra grunt from the MX150 does allow you to perform tasks that would bring the integrated UHD 620 GPU to its knees, and the combination of MX150 and Core i7-8550U outperform the Ryzen 7 2700U thanks to the CPU not sharing a TDP with the GPU.

Huawei is also one of the few PC makers to truly deliver an excellent display. The 3000x2000 resolution panel is crisp, and offers one of the highest brightness levels we’ve seen, but also some of the best contrast. The display accuracy isn’t quite class leading, but it’s close, and far better than pretty much any PC OEM other than Microsoft.

The only major complaint is the webcam placement, which is hidden under a fake function key, but depending on your needs, this could not be a real issue at all, and the ability to hide the webcam is certainly a privacy benefit. Ian has been using the MateBook X Pro as well and his experience hasn’t been as positive, with some issues with hesitation that he’s not had a chance to dig into, and he’s used the MateBook X from last year as well and prefers it to the new Pro.

With all of these features, you’d expect the MateBook X Pro to be competitively priced against a Dell XPS 13 or Microsoft Surface Pro, but that’s the real kicker. The Huawei MateBook X Pro is priced hundreds of dollars less than most of the competition, while providing a superior product to most. The value here is undeniable, even though it’s hard to think of a $1500 laptop as a value product. The base model with a Core i5-8250U, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD is just $1200, but unlike most laptops, the higher end model is an even better deal. For just $300 more, you bump the CPU up to a Core i7-8550U, double the RAM to 16 GB, double the SSD to 512 GB, and add in the GeForce MX150 GPU. That’s an impressive upgrade for not much more money.

Other PC makers need to stand up and take notice. The MateBook X Pro has arrived.