Cheap kitchen appliances for professionals

Keyboard and touchpad
A bright, reflection-scattering screen adds a lot of credibility to the Honor MagicBook 16 as a serious work machine. But as you can tell from a quick glance it doesn’t have a serious deep-dish Lenovo ThinkPad style keyboard to match.

As in so many other areas, this keyboard takes inspiration from Apple MacBooks, but thankfully the more recent style. Apple “invented” the contentious ultra-shallow keyboard, but has since rolled back, introducing a more substantial one in the MacBook Pro 16.

The Honor MagicBook 16’s keyboard is still on the shallow side. Its feel is fast rather than meaty, but the key depress does at least seem more like a clonk than a click.

There’s no NUM pad to shift the keys away from the centre of the frame, but we did take a couple of days to bed into its layout. Compared to a Dell XPS 15, the left-most row of keys is compressed, hemmed in by those big black speaker grilles. A few thousand words and a few dozen typos/CAPS lock incidents later, though, we are locked in to its style.

It’s still not our favourite for long-form typing, but is OK. The Honor MagicBook 16 also has a nice-looking two-level backlight.

The keyboard gets an accepting shrug, but the reasons we didn’t fall in love with it are the result of deliberate choices. Its touchpad cheapens the laptop as a whole, though.

Pricey laptops have glass touchpads. This one is plastic. Some plastic pads can get close to the feel of glass by using a lightly textured surface. Fresh out of the box the Honor MagicBook 16’s is tacky and creaky, far less smooth than the Acer Vero we had in at the same time.

It’s not a great pad. The one saving grace is that – and this may sound gross – natural grease from your fingers eventually takes the judder out of glides across its surface. A Honor MagicBook 16 pairs well with a pack of Walkers. Or a mouse.

Apple MacBook Pro 14in (M1 Pro)
Putting the ‘pro’ back in MacBook Pro, Apple’s M1 Pro processor is a serious piece of silicon. For basic tasks, it’s more than most people will ever need. But provided you work in a field that can take advantage of the Pro’s power – and you’re flush enough to foot the bill – it’s proof that Apple knows how to make a hot chip.

Borne out by benchmarks and real-world use, the MacBook Pro 14in is leagues ahead when it comes to tasks that benefit from boosted multi-core performance and GPU grunt – think video production and 3D rendering. It’s also blessed with reliable all-day battery life and a proper wish-list of ports.

Chunkier and heavier than its 13in predecessor – with an extra 200g on the scales – it’s a solid package that clearly means business. The trackpad is massive but reliable, while the keyboard is a joy to type on. With the menu bar spanning the screen notch up top, you’re left with a full 16:10 display area below. And what an area that is: with rich blacks, vivid colour and up to 1600 nits of brightness for HDR content, the mini-LED panel is gorgeous. The six-speaker system has oomph to match, too.