Honor unveils a rival to Apple's MacBook Pro at a third of the price

(Image credit: Honor)

Honor has unveiled its latest top-of-the-range laptop, the MagicBook Pro, which clearly has Apple’s MacBook Pro firmly in its sight.

The device, which was presented today during Honor’s press conference at IFA 2020 in Berlin, shares a number of features with its Apple rival.

Both machines have a 16.1-inch full HD screen with 100% sRGB color gamut, a space gray aluminum alloy finish, a 512GB SSD and the same amount of system memory (16GB DDR4 in dual-channel configuration).

The Ma(gi)cBook Pro rival

The MagicBookPro, however, opts for an AMD Ryzen 5 4600H processor - a six-core CPU based on the Renoir architecture that offers 12 Zen-2 infused threads. It also integrates a Radeon RX Vega 6 integrated graphics unit with 6 CUs and clocked at up to 1.5GHz.

Given its power dissipation stands at 45W, it is not surprising the device also features a powerful dual fan, dual heat pipe setup to keep temperatures down.

The laptop will go on sale from September 8 in the UK, France and Germany for just under £850 (roughly $1,150). Plus, for a limited time, early buyers will receive a free Honor MagicWatch 2 42 sports watch worth £130 on its own. 

In comparison, the MacBook Pro costs £2,399/$2,399 (nearly three times the UK price), albeit with four Thunderbolt 3 ports, an AMD Radeon Pro 5300M discrete GPU and its unique Touch Bar feature.

We are currently testing the MagicBook Pro, and it already ranks as one of the fastest mobile workstations we’ve tested to date based on pure compute benchmarks.

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Desire Athow
Managing Editor, TechRadar Pro

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.