Pre-COVID, Huawei hiding the webcam inside of a pop-up function key on its MateBook X Pro laptops was a clever idea. Nobody used webcams! Nobody cared about the quality of webcams! Nobody cared if they looked like Jabba the Hutt with the webcam aimed up their noses!
One mega contagious virus strain later and Huawei has changed its tune. Its new MateBook X Pro (2022), announced at MWC 2022, has a webcam in the correct place: in the bezel above the display. Makes sense Huawei would ditch the pop-up-webcam-in-keyboard given how Zoom, FaceTime, Teams, etc. are now more popular than ever.
A bad low-res webcam or a poorly placed one (in a key or in the bezel below the display) is unacceptable in a new laptop. Sure, you could buy an external webcam like the Opal C1 or Dell UltraSharp 4K webcam, but when you wanna travel light, packing a bulky webcam is the last thing you wanna do. Huawei did good... almost. The 2022 Mate X Pro’s webcam is only 720p HD resolution. A baffling decision now that laptops with 1080p webcams are the norm.
Laptop itself seems fine otherwise —
I own the original MateBook X Pro and I still use it. I hate the webcam placement, but I think it’s an otherwise modern-looking computer. (My friend Perry, however, has had nothing but a terrible experience with hers and I regret recommending it to her if only because the troubleshooting is a nightmare.)
But I digress, the new 2022 MateBook X Pro has a 14.2-inch display (3,120 x 2,080) with bezels that measure 0.23 (6mm) thick. The laptop is basically all screen — LCD, not OLED, and 90Hz only. Huawei’s 2022 MatePad E has an OLED. More on that in a sec.
Other features that impress on the 2022 MateBook X Pro: six speakers, four microphones, a “Shark Fin” cooling system,” four USB-C ports, a headphone jack, fingerprint reader, and 90W fast charging.
Weirdly, the 2022 MateBook X Pro is powered by a 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1195G7 processor and Intel Iris Xe Graphics — not the latest 12th Gen Intel Core chips announced at CES 2022. The laptop’s got 16GB of LPDDR4X RAM, and 1TB of PCIe SSD. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1 round out the specs. The laptop runs Windows 11 Home.
The 2022 MateBook X Pro is priced at €1,899 (about $2,129 at the time of this writing.)
Other new Huawei tech —
Huawei also announced a new 2022 MatePad E tablet with 12.6-inch OLED display that connects to keyboard and supports a stylus. There’s also the international release of Huawei’s all-in-on desktop PC, the MateStation X, with 28.2-inch 4K touchscreen, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, 16GB of RAM, and up to 1TB SSD.
