This is the Huawei MateBook 14 2024 that ushers the lineup into the OLED realm. It’s a solid upgrade over the MateBook 14 2023 and the 450-nit OLED panel replacing a 300-nit IPS LCD screen is just one of them. This is also the first MateBook to be compatible with a stylus.
Last year’s model had an i7-1360P – this year’s model features a more efficient and much faster Core 7 Ultra 155H.
Huawei has also made this year’s model lighter than its predecessor.
The laptop comes with a 65W charger with a built-in USB-C cable, and you can spec the machine with an Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H with 16GB of RAM and 512GB or 1TB of storage.
Design and build quality
The MateBook 14 2024 has a classic, if somewhat forgettable, design. We have the Green model, which is probably the best choice: it’s fresh and interesting in a sea of silver and gray machines. Your other option is exactly gray.
The laptop is made of metal, which is nice. The Huawei logo on the lid is the only interesting element. We like the understated look and think it suits this machine well.
It’s also fairly light at 1.31kg and thin at 14.5mm.
When you open the lid you’re greeted by the nice OLED screen with fairly thick black bezels, the green deck and the black keyboard. The pre-installed green wallpaper completes the black and green theme.
There are no speaker grilles on the deck of the laptop (they’re on the bottom) and you don’t get an advanced webcam solution like on the Honor MagicBook Art 14 that we recently reviewed – there’s a conventional camera in the top edge here.
Screen, keyboard, camera and speakers
The biggest reason to buy the MateBook 14 2024 is the OLED display. It’s a big step up from the prettiest LCDs out there and a huge leap from the 300-nit IPS LCD you’d find on the previous generation MateBook 14.
This isn’t the same OLED panel you’ll find on the MateBook P3 coverage and 95% coverage of the Adobe RGB. These are excellent figures for photo and video work.
The panel can operate up to 120 Hz and can switch between 60 Hz and 120 Hz depending on the content.
We’ve always praised Huawei for its excellent Display Manager app (right-click on the desktop and then more options for the old context menu), as it lets you choose between P3, sRGB and a variety of other color gamuts.
We measured around 460 nits of SDR brightness (slightly lower in the centre) and a maximum of 550 nits in HDR mode. Those are a far cry from the 500+ nits MateBook X Pro 2024 (almost 1000 nits in HDR), but still solid numbers.
The high-contrast OLED screen looks much better than the average LCD screen, even at a slightly lower comparable brightness. PWM flicker is an issue on OLED panels and more sensitive users may notice some flicker at lower brightness.
The MateBook 14 2024 has the typical Huawei keyboard with an excellent 1.5mm key travel, a great layout, a two-row Enter key and a two-stage backlight. The only thing missing here is a Numpad, although this is a rarity on compact laptops.
We’ve long found Huawei and Honor keyboards to be excellent for long-term use and the MateBook 14 2024 is no exception.
The trackpad is a good size, but not nearly as impressive as the one on recent Huawei laptops we’ve seen. What we don’t like is the plastic surface – Huawei should have opted for glass at this price.
The surface is not so smooth that you can slide your fingers. Gestures work fine, but the experience is lackluster if you’ve gotten used to glass.
The power button is in the usual place in the top right corner. It includes a capacitive fingerprint scanner with caching, so it boots up and logs you in at the touch of a button.
That’s the only supported Windows Hello biometrics on this laptop: there’s no IR camera for facial scanning.
There’s a great choice of ports, but there’s one major drawback: no Thunderbolt 4. This omission could be a dealbreaker for some, so keep this in mind.
There’s a USB-C port (data, charging and DisplayPort), USB-A port (3.2 Gen 1), HDMI and a 3.5mm audio jack on the left side of the machine. On the other side is a single USB-A plug (3.2 Gen 1). It would have been a much more versatile device if there had been a second USB-C on this side, but alas.
Gates
The 1080p camera is located in the center of the laptop’s top edge. Only in terms of quality it is okay. Huawei’s PC Manager app offers a host of virtual backgrounds for the camera, as well as a beauty filter, auto-centering and the ability to simulate looking at the camera or disable it at the system level.
Camera
There are two speakers on the bottom of the MateBook 14 2024. They offer a surprisingly loud and solid output. There’s even a more than reasonable layer of bass underneath, making this a very good laptop for media consumption.
Performance, battery life
The Huawei MateBook 14 2024 comes with a choice of Intel Core Ultra 5 125H or a Core Ultra 7 155H (in our unit) – these are last year’s 7nm Meteor Lake, which are now just being replaced by Intel’s latest Lunar Lake – processors. The 155H has a total of 16 cores with 6 performance cores with a peak clock of 4.8 GHz, 8 efficient cores and 2 energy efficient cores. There’s 16GB of RAM regardless of version, and you can have 512GB or 1TB of storage space.
The graphics are provided by the 8-core Arc GPU with a peak clock of 2.25 GHz.
The SSD on our laptop is a 1TB PCIe 4.0 unit with excellent performance.
Geekbench and disk speed
We ran our usual 1-hour stress test of the MateBook 14 2024 to see how it stacks up against the Core Ultra 7 155H in practice. The laptop had no problems cooling the processor under heavy loads and performed noticeably better than the Huawei MateBook with the Core Ultra 9 185H and the Honor MagicBook Art 14with the same 155H. While those machines quickly dropped to mid-20W, the MateBook 14 2024 kept its processor at 40W during the test.
That’s about 2.5 GHz without any problems. The fans were on throughout the test, but are barely audible in a typical office environment. This is a perfectly suited laptop for office work and can easily handle some more demanding tasks such as photo and video editing and even light to moderate 1080p gaming.
Thermal
The MateBook 14 2024 comes with a large 70Wh battery – the same size as the MateBook video loop at 400 nits and 80 dB volume, and a browser loop at 400 nits. The MateBook 14 2024 achieved an impressive performance 10 hours and 20 minutes in the streaming test and 9 hours and 10 minutes in the browsing test – more than solid impressions.
Conclusion
The Huawei MateBook 14 2024 is an excellent laptop for daily use. It is light, well made and very well equipped. You get a powerful Intel Meteor Lake processor, 16GB of RAM, up to 1TB of storage, great ports and an excellent OLED screen.
This configuration costs £1,199 (£999 at the time of this article) or €1,350, which is slightly less than mainstream rivals like the Asus Zenbook 14, Acer Swift Go 14 or the Lenovo ThinkPad E14. The 13-inch Apple MacBook Air costs €1,530 with 512 GB of storage and €1,760 with a terabyte SSD. That makes the MateBook 14 2024 the best value in the segment, and best equipped with the Core Ultra 7 155H and an OLED display.
However, Intel’s Lunar Lake chips promise huge gains in battery endurance, thanks to TSMC’s 3nm process. Performance-wise, Lunar Lake should be faster, although not as drastically; it’s mainly about efficiency.
AMD’s Ryzen AI 9 300 series are both faster and more efficient than the Meteor Lake chip in the MateBook 14 2024, but they’re also fairly new and coming in more expensive laptops. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon So these are the most likely devices that will turn away the MateBook 14 2024 buyer.
There is always a better deal around the corner. There are always discounts waiting. But for the here and now, the MateBook 14 2024 offers excellent value for money and is a great candidate for your portable laptop.
Huawei will start shipping the MateBook 14 2024 in the second half of October.
Plus points
- Above 400-nit OLED touchscreen with HDR support and a 120 Hz refresh rate
- Huawei’s convenient 3:2 aspect ratio
- Good battery life – 10 hours of video streaming
- Relatively light for a 14 inch device
- Great port selection: USB-C, two USB-A, HDMI
- Intel Core Ultra 7 155H with thermal headroom
- Fresh in Green
Disadvantages
- No Thunderbolt 4 is unforgivable
- Intel-only, rivals offer better performance
- And it’s Intel’s last generation Meteor Lake, while Lunar Lake is now available for purchase
- Plastic trackpad is a letdown
- No facial login Windows Hello, fingerprint only