Hot on the heels of launching the Intel-powered MagicBook Art 14, Honor has now announced a Snapdragon variant of its new laptop. Powered by the Snapdragon X Elite chipset, the Honor MagicBook Art 14 is an AI-focused laptop, but it also delivers premium performance and power efficiency. Plus, it retains all the design elements of the Intel version, including the magnetic webcam.

Disclaimer: Honor sponsored my trip to IFA 2024, including lodging and transportation.

Similar design, new processor

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon keeps all the same design elements that the Intel version introduced. The laptop is mostly made of a magnesium and aluminum alloy, and it's just 10mm thick, on top of weighing just 1 kilogram, making it one of the lightest laptops of its kind. However, instead of the more colorful versions available for the Intel model, the Snapdragon version comes in a much simpler silver colorway.

The laptop is packing a 14.6-inch display, which is fairly large for an ultralight laptop. It's a 3.1K resolution panel with touch support, and the laptop had a screen-to-body ratio of 97%, which means the bezels are absolutely tiny, and as a result, there's no built-in webcam on them. Instead, the laptop houses a magnetic webcam in the base, which can be attached whenever you need it, and even used in reverse to point at what's in front of you.

The only major difference with this model is the processor, since it now comes with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite chipset rather than Intel Core Ultra Series 1. That kind of makes this new version the best by default, since it's a Copilot+ PC on top of offering much better performance and efficiency.

Honor-specific features

On top of the usual benefits of a Snapdragon processor, Honor has also built some technologies to leverage the hardware that much more. One example is the Honor Hotspot Library, a set of optimizations for specific x86 apps that are aimed at improving load times and performance when running them on Arm. Honor says it has optimized 14 of the most used apps in categories such as browsers (even though most browsers are Arm native now), office productivity, media, and more. The company says it has seen an improvement of up to 16% in boot-up times thanks to these optimizations.

On the AI side of things, the Honor MagicBook Art 14 can also use the AI Eraser feature from the Magic V3 smartphone thanks to the MagicRing connection, This is a low-power ecosystem connection that links up Honor devices to provide a more seamless interconnected experience, with AI Eraser being one example. You can also use this feature to use your mouse and keyboard to control multiple devices, or even use your smartphone camera with your PC.

Honor hasn't said when the MagicBook Art 14 Snapdragon will be available or how much it will cost, though the Intel version is already available in select markets around Europe.