Laptop and phone vendor Honor recently released a new line of phones and laptops, with the MagicBook Art 14 2024 thin-and-light notebook receiving fanfare. The specs suggest it's a wonderful productivity machine, but the real interesting gimmick is its fully removable camera.
That's right, Honor's MagicBook camera will spend most of its life not staring at the user but hiding away in an SD-card-like push-push tray. The camera can be reversed for front-facing or rear-facing needs and appears to have a firm magnetic grip on the top of the laptop when deployed. However, as seen in the unboxing video below, the privacy win of a removable camera may be circumvented by its incredibly high risk of loss. Removable camera footage starts at 1:21.
The unboxer above, which almost lost the camera to the void when it misfired out of its holding bay, was a very effective demo of the risks associated with MagicBook Art 14's novel privacy solution. Honor gets to avoid random accusations of CCP-spying from its camera but at the cost of several likely replacement requests. Honor and its former parent company, Huawei, are no strangers to wacky hidden camera solutions, with this one perhaps taking the cake.
The MagicBook Art 14 has plenty of other features to get legitimately excited about for Tom's Hardware readers in China, the only market where the laptop will be sold. The MagicBook is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H, with 14 or 16 cores, respectively. The laptop has a 1TB SSD and LPDDR5X RAM at 7,467 MHz. The 3120 x 2080 OLED display has a 3:2 aspect ratio, even taller than the blessed 16:10. It also displays at 120 Hz, though the front page of the product website will tell you 4,320 Hz.
This unusual number is thanks to Honor's adoption of PWM Dimming on its recent displays. This new tech seeks to be a healthier-for-the-eyes mode of simulating brightness by strobing an image at up to 4,320 Hz, with the gap between its on-and-off states making the image appear brighter or darker. Honor and many other phone/laptop vendors are moving to this new tech, with Honor naming it the "Honor Oasis Eye Protection" system. Honor describes it as a risk-free way to lessen eye strain and prevent messed-up Circadian rhythms, though a fraction of users of other PWM Dimming devices have complained of increased eye strain. The tech is ultimately too new to make any clear-cut judgment calls.
The Honor MagicBook Art 14 will sell for 8000 yuan, or $1,100, exclusively in China. Honor is best known for its former status as the badge of Chinese tech giant Huawei's budget phone line. Honor enjoyed a positive reputation for excellent quality cheap smartphones; I even owned one in 2018. After Huawei was added to the U.S. Entity List in 2019 and further sanctions were added in the following months, Honor was sold off in 2020 and has been building a brand in the folding-phone market since.
