Honor MagicBook 16 well-worth laptop suitable for work and study

During the recent Chinese New Year online promotion period, I discovered that the Honor MagicBook 16 laptop has its selling price dropped to RM29xx. (This promotion is still available in some of the online shops, including the Honor official website, now at a slightly higher price of RM2999 and lesser free gift, until the end of February 2023)

I remember when it first launched last year, its initial selling price was at RM4299.

Without much hesitation, I have bought one with 18 months credit card interest-free instalment of RM163.68 per month, which does not affect much on my personal finance cashflow. I believe at this time, you can't find another new laptop with built-in 16GB RAM 512GB SSD and high performance CPU at such a value-for-money price.

I have recorded down a comprehensive list of specifications of this laptop, as detail as possible, as follow (click the image to enlarge it):

The information above is obtained by running several diagnostic applications on my laptop. I believe it is the most detailed one you can find in the Internet. Even Honor official website also not providing as much detail about this laptop.

The specifications are based on my Malaysia official set of Honor MagicBook 16. The same model of laptop sold in other regions might have a slightly different specs.

I have highlighted the background of the items in green for high specs, yellow for medium specs, and pink for normal specs. From there, you can see that this is a relatively good laptop with some nice components inside.

This kind of specs is commonly found in the flagship laptop during 2021. Now in 2023, the latest version of some of the components might be one or two generations ahead of this laptop, as indicated in the last column of the table above. Anyhow, none of the components of this laptop is deemed outdated, and it can still be used for several years without much performance or compatibility issue. In short, this laptop is future-proof!

This laptop comes with a high-spec AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, which is comparable with the Intel Core i7-11800H CPU. The performance of its built-in Radeon RX Vega 8 GPU is comparable with the standalone NVIDIA GeForce GT1030 GDDR5 version.

The chart below provides information on how to decode the AMD Ryzen CPU and determine whether it is of high performance, mid-range or low-end.

The laptop screen has a mixture of good and normal features. It has excellent colour gamut, game-level high refresh rate, and certified low blue light treatment. It also has above-average contrast ratio and brightness. However, it has ordinary screen resolution, PPI and view angle. Therefore, its screen is excellent for work and study, but might be a bit lacking for professional graphics/video designers.

One thing I like about this laptop is its WiFi AX support of connection speed up to 1.2Gbps. This speed is even higher than what the UTP Cat6 network cable can deliver.

My laptop comes with several free gifts. The most worthy one is 1 year subscription of Microsoft 365 Personal worth hundred over ringgit in the market. It comes in a sealed genuine envelop, which you can resell to others if you don't intend to use it. It also comes with a wireless mouse and a backpack, which you can use or sell to others. The market value of the mouse should be less than RM100, same to the market value of the backpack.

All in all, this is a relatively high-performance laptop with relatively new specs, no problem in handling the usage for work or study. However, it does not come with a standalone GPU, and might not be so ideal for heavy gaming or multimedia rendering.

In China market, and possibly some other regions but not Malaysia yet, there exist another model with almost the same specs and with GPU as well, called Honor MagicBook 16 Pro. That laptop comes with an NVIDIA GEForce RTX3050 display card, make it powerful enough to also handle gaming and multimedia rendering needs.

What I like about this laptop:

• Solid and classy casing with nice professional-looking colour.
• Big screen but light weight, good for reading document and/or working with multiple windows on the screen.
• Less harmful and less lethargic to your eyes, thanks to its high refresh rate and low blue light treatment.
• Its camera is located on top of the screen (unlike previous models of Huawei/Honor laptops with camera on the keyboard)
• You can share its charger with your handphone. When travelling, this allows you to bring fewer chargers in your luggage.
• It supports supercharging which can charge up its battery very fast.
• It's speakers can produce pretty good sound, after tuning with Nahemic tuner.
• It's mic is echo-cancelling and noise-suppressing, nice to use for conference calls.
• It can establish handy connection with your handphone, with features slightly better than Windows Phone Link.
• It has a fingerprint reading on/off switch, which is very convenient to use.
• It has a 4-points touchpad, which you can configure its touch gestures in Windows 11.

What I dislike about this laptop:

• It has a relatively short battery usage life of 8~10 hours only. Would be perfect if its battery can sustain for 12 hours and above screen on time.
• Its screen resolution is at normal 1080p. Would be nice if it is 1440p or 2k.
• Despite its 16 inches size, its keyboard does not come with numeric keypad on the right.
• Its built-in camera is just normal. If you want high resolution, wide-angle, multi-focus and other more advanced features, better buy a webcam.
• It has a normal non-touch screen. You cannot write, sign or draw on its screen.

After all, you can't expect to get all the nice features in a laptop selling at price below RM3k, right?

Comparison among various Google One plans and Workspace Individual plan

Most Google users (including all Android phone users) started up with the free Google personal account.

The free Google personal account comes with 15GB of cloud storage shared among various Google services including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Photos, Android backup, etc. Certain 3rd party applications such as WhatsApp also make use of Google cloud storage to host your account backup data with them.

Soon, you will find that 15GB storage is not enough to be shared by all these online services. When the quota is used up, it will affect your Gmail sending/receiving, Android backup, WhatsApp backup, etc.

One way to handle this situation is to open multiple free Google personal accounts, so that you can get multiple of 15GB cloud storage. Then, you can make use of separate account to store your photos and videos, to host your WhatsApp backup copies, etc.

Another way is to expand your Google personal account's online storage space by paying subscription fee to Google.

Currently, there are 3 Google One subscription plans (Basic, Standard and Premium), and another Google Workspace Individual subscription plan, as follow:

The One Basic and One Standard plans are just storage expansion from the free 15GB plan, to 100GB and 200GB respectively. In addition, you can share your Google Drive storage with up to 5 of your family members under Google Family sharing plan.

Google has recently restricted the Google Meet session hosted by free accounts to 1 hour only. Your online meeting will be forced to terminate after the 1 hour time limit reached.

With One Premium subscription plan, you can not only enlarge your online storage space to 2TB, but also entitled to Google Meet premium service, which expands the online meeting duration hosted by you to 24 hours. Other Google Meet premium service features made available to you including the ability to have breakout meeting rooms for group discussion, ability to stream your online meeting live to Youtube, recording of the meeting session, background noise cancellation for better speech quality, etc.

However, there is also a big jump between the price of the One Standard plan and the One Premium plan.

In between them, there is another plan called Google Workspace Individual. This plan comes with 1TB online storage, the same Google Meet premium service as One Premium plan. In addition, it also comes with enhanced Google Calendar, with an appointment booking system for people to book appointment with you based on your availability as recorded in your Google Calendar. The appointments will be updated into your Google Calendar as well.

The Google Workspace Individual plan also comes with enhanced Gmail service, with increased outgoing email sending quota of 2,000 recipient email addresses per day. The enhanced feature also include ability to send out personalized email to a group of recipients using its mail merge function. You can also send out emails with nice design using the available templates.

As such, it seems that Google Workspace Individual plan is a cheaper alternative to Google One Premium plan, with lesser online storage space, but with better features in Gmail and Google Calendar. You get the same enhanced Google Meet in this plan too.

Apparently, the Google Workspace Individual plan is targeted to freelancers, SOHO users, start-up entrepreneurs, celebrities, artists, etc. with features to help them handle appointments with customers, and to send out personalized newsletters and marketing materials using the mail merge function.

Anyhow, even though you might not make use of all the available features in Google Workspace Individual plan, it is still quite a significant upgrade from Google One Standard plan, and a much cheaper alternative from Google One Premium plan. It is also the cheapest plan to get the premium Google Meet feature that extends the 1 hour meeting limit to 24 hours.

All the 5 plans mentioned above are for personal/individual usage, with a general @gmail.com account name and email address.

There are also business plans, at higher subscription price per account, with more features and functions, which you can make use of your own domain name instead of gmail.com.

There are also plans for education institutions, NGOs, etc. which comes with additional features and functions, yet can be free of charge to the eligible organizations.

The differences between Panasonic X-Premium (XU-XKH series) and X-Deluxe (XPU-XKH series) inverter R32 aircon

I have just retired all the old Panasonic non-inverter air-cons in my house, which had served my family for more than 16 years, to the current generation of Panasonic inverter R32 aircons powered by nanoe X technology.

Now, I can feel the advantages of using inverter aircon compared with the traditional non-inverter type, which are comfort and cost saving.

The inverter type of aircon can precisely control the room temperature at fixed level, so that it is not so warm and not so cold, just nice to feel "not warm" and comfort at around 25.5℃. Unlike the traditional non-inverter aircon which I always feel cold at midnight, and I always had to set timer to turn it off around 3am, because it just couldn't keep the temperature constant at 25.5℃ and might fall lower during midnight.

From the Panasonic Comfort Cloud app that linked with the aircons at my house, I can see that the aircon consumes more electricity when it first turned on and the difference between room temperature and my desired temperature is still having a gap. Once it reached the desired temperature, the electricity consumption will reduce a lot.

On average, my inverter aircon consumed about 1 to 2 kWh per day. I keep it on almost 24 hours per day, most of the time without aircon function but with air sterilizer function, and a few hours with aircon function.

I also noticed that my 1 HP aircon actually consumed slightly more electricity than my 1.5 HP aircon. I think this is because the lower HP inverter aircon needs to work harder to bring the temperature down to 25.5℃, while the higher HP on can do the same more effectively. Once it reached the desired temperature, the electricity consumption is almost the same regardless it is 1 HP, 1.5 HP or 2 HP aircon.

Based on this observation, I think it is better to buy inverter aircon that is one level higher than the traditional non-inverter aircon for the same room size, i.e. if you are using 1 HP non-inverter aircon for the room, you can buy 1.5 HP when changing to inverter one. That will most probably be able to save you more in your electricity bill.

Before I bought my new aircons, I had actually done some study to compare between the Panasonic X-Premium (XU-XKH series) and X-Deluxe (XPU-XKH series) inverter R32 aircon. I think my findings might be useful for you if you are also wondering which one to buy.

Their similarities:

• Both models use R32 gas.
• Both models are having the highest 5* energy star rating.
• Both models have ECO Mode with Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) that can save more electricity when turned on.
• Both models have built-in WiFi remote control, on top of using the normal infrared remote controller. You can install the Panasonic Comfort Cloud app in your handphone to link with your aircon and control its functions, as well as monitor its usage, temperature readings (indoor and outdoor) and electricity consumption.

• Both models have built-in nanoe-G ionizer that can produce 3 trillion negative ions per second. nanoe-G charges air particles (i.e. dust, dirt, smoke, liquid droplets, etc.) as small as PM2.5 with negative electricity and catches them with its air filter. The charged air particles not caught by the filter are also heavier and will drop on the floor by themselves. In this way, the air is cleaned up.
• Both models also have built-in nanoe X module that releases hydroxyl radicals into the air. This is able to kill bacteria, viruses & mould, and also deactivate pollen, allergens & PM2.5 dusts. In this way, it is able to sterilize the air and also remove odour.
• The nanoe-G and nanoe X functions can work independently without turning on the aircon function. Their electricity consumption is very minimal. Of course, they can also work when the aircon function is turned on at the same time.

Their differences:

• Although both the XU-XKH series and XPU-XKH series have nanoe X module, the one in XU-XKH series is Generator Mark 2, which is able to produce 9.6 trillion hydroxyl radicals per second, while the one in XPU-XKH series is Generator Mark 1, which is able to produce 4.8 trillion hydroxyl radicals per second. Therefore, the nanoe X function in the X-Premium series is double effective than the one in X-Deluxe series.

• Only the X-Premium series has iAUTO-X function, which can cool the air more faster.
• Only the X-Premium series has humidity sensor, that lets the aircon keep the room humidity at below 60% level at night for better sleep quality.
• The aerowings in X-Premium series have a new design that enable them to blow the cool air further more.