The price of the newest 13-inch MacBook Pro is $1,299, but is it worth it? Are there other options? The answer is yes.
The Huawei Matebook D is a budget-friendly Ultrabook that somehow packs premium features and aesthetics into a much lower price tag of $629. You may be wondering what a Huawei is, but Huawei recently surpassed Apple and became the 2nd largest cell phone manufacturer in the world, according to CNN.com. Yes, their phones are successful, but so are their laptops.
Reasons This Is the One:
1. Lightweight:
Weighing around 3.3 pounds and being 0.6 inches thick, it's easy to tote back and forth from school or a coffee shop.
2. Fast:
Inside the laptop's high-quality aluminum chassis is an AMD Ryzen 5 2500U 2 GHz (Turbo up to 3.4 GHz) processor featuring Vega 8 mobile graphics, a 256GB SSD and 8GB of DDR4 RAM.
3. Long-Lasting Battery:
The battery lasts for about 8 hours on a full charge while doing light work, but much less when gaming or doing more intensive tasks.
4. Display:
It has a Full HD, 14-inch IPS touchscreen display built into a 13-inch chassis.
5. Connectivity:
It features a wide variety of ports, including 1 USB-C that doubles as a charging port, 2 x USB 3.0, HDMI and a headphone jack. That's a much wider array versus the newest 13-inch MacBook pros which feature only 2 x USB C and a headphone jack (and they cost over twice as much).
6. Speakers:
It features a 3D Dolby Atmos quad-speaker Sound System that offers crisp sound with little distortion at higher volumes.
7. Quiet:
It runs very quietly due to its lack of a mechanical hard drive and soft-spinning fans.
Reasons to Think Twice:
1. Style:
The Matebook D isn't a 2-in-1. It's a clamshell style, meaning it can't be folded backward and used as a tablet since it only folds 180 degrees.
2. Luxury:
The Matebook D is missing a fingerprint reader. Although, including a fingerprint reader would give it all the premium features expected from a laptop in a much higher price range.
3. Speakers:
Even though it has a quad-speaker setup, these speakers still lack in the bass department, but that's not standard on a laptop at this price-point.
The Bottom Line
If you want a premium laptop with few trade-offs at a budget price then this laptop may be your choice, but it's not the best for playing intensive video games; However, studying, video streaming and web browsing will be effortless and enjoyable.
