Huawei MateBook D16 (2024) Review
A productivity powerhouse
Verdict
The Huawei MateBook D16 2024 is a slimline, big-screen laptop with a powerhouse productivity performance, yet it’s still surprisingly affordable.
Pros
- Elegant thin-and-light design
- Large, high-quality IPS screen
- Great performance in mainstream apps
Cons
- Limited GPU horsepower
- QHD resolution would be nice
- Only one USB Type-C port
Key Features
- Slim, lightweight designWith its compact slimline body, the Matebook D16 is going right up against LG’s Gram 16 and 17 and Apple’s mighty MacBook Air.
- A big screen that’s great for multi-taskingCombine the squarer 16:10 aspect ratio and the 16-inch screen size, and you’ve got a display that seems bigger than it actually is, with ample room for running multiple apps.
- High-speed specWe’re not talking Intel’s latest or fastest mobile processors, but the Core i9 13900H in the high-end model can still run mainstream apps at impressive speeds.
Introduction
The Huawei MateBook D16 is the latest in the brand’s line of 16-inch productivity laptops; a range which has impressed us in the past for dishing out great specs and a high-quality screen at a price that undercuts the competition.
The 2024 version sticks to the general look and feel of previous efforts, with a similar aluminium body, large 1920 x 1200 resolution screen and 16:10 aspect ratio, but updates the spec with a 13th gen Core i9 CPU and a larger 70Wh battery, while cutting down the thickness and weight.
The result is a laptop that’s about as thin and light as 16-inch laptops get, but that’s still powerful enough to handle a wide range of tasks. What’s more, at £999.99, this spec comes in at the same price as the 2022 Core i7 variant, so on paper it sounds like cracking value. But how does it hold up in the flesh? I’ve been using the MateBook D16 for the last week to find out.
Design and keyboard
- Simple, aluminium build
- Good mix of connectivity ports
- Large, spacious keyboard
Huawei takes a somewhat iterative approach to its laptop designs, which is a polite way of saying that this year’s D16 looks an awful lot like the previous model.
The shell is aluminium, though it now comes in a choice of dark grey and light silver finishes, and the styling keeps things simple, with just the Huawei logo on the lid, thin bezels around three sides of the screen and a minimalist deck with the keyboard taking up the top half, a large, off-centre trackpad below and a power-button/fingerprint reader in the top-right corner.
This year’s model is 1.4mm thinner and 2g lighter than last year’s and at just 1.68kg with that weight quite evenly balanced, it feels light for a laptop of this screen size. Sure, it’s not as light as the magnesium alloy LG Gram 16 or the 15-inch MacBook Air, but I still wouldn’t have any problem at all carrying it around all day.
The benefits of this size and form factor kick in pretty quickly during everyday use. You’ve got a screen that’s big enough for comfortable multi-tasking, plus a fairly spacious keyboard with numeric pad and navigation keys. You’ve got enough space to rest your palms on the deck while typing, and the thin, slightly wedge-shaped profile gives you a comfortable typing angle. The D16 is big enough for all-day comfort when you’re working from home or from the office, but not so big that it causes any grief when you’re trying to get from A to B.
I think Huawei could make some improvements on the connectivity. It’s good to have two USB Type-A ports, but one only supports USB 2.0 while the other sticks at 5Gbits/sec USB 3.2 Gen 1, not the faster 10Gbits/sec USB 3.2 Gen 2.
Meanwhile, just the one USB Type-C port isn’t really good enough on a laptop that uses USB Type-C for charging, especially if you want to use it as a DisplayPort out. You could use the HDMI 1.4 output instead, but it cuts down your options.
You’re also left with Wi-Fi 6 rather than Wi-Fi 6E at a time when the faster standard is appearing frequently on quite inexpensive laptops. You can’t help feeling that the D16 isn’t quite keeping up with the latest tech.
I’m a little limited in what I can say about the keyboard because Huawei sent me a D16 with a German QWERTZ layout. I’ve still been working on it, anyway, as I have it set to a UK layout and I don’t look much at the keys as I type, but I was occasionally wrongfooted by the placing of some special characters and punctuation marks.
As is, there’s not much to grumble about the spacing beyond a small and split left-shift. Meanwhile, the keys have 1.5mm of travel and what Huawei calls a ‘soft landing’, where the keys are designed to cushion the impact as you type, giving you a quieter, softer action that still feels nice and crisp.
As for the touchpad, it’s reasonably big at 12cm by 7.4cm and, while plastic rather than glass, feels smooth and precise in its tracking. However, there’s something about the off-centre positioning that can feel awkward, making your right hand move further left to move the pointer and making the left stretch further while you’re typing. It’s a subjective thing and nothing major, but it kept annoying me during everyday use.
Huawei makes up for it by including a fingerprint reader integrated into the power button to the top-right of the keyboard. It’s speedy and worked flawlessly in testing. Press once, leave your finger on the button, and you’re in.
The Huawei MateBook D16 comes in cardboard packaging with plastic foam inserts to protect it during transport. These are labelled as recyclable, but don’t appear to use any recycled content themselves. Huawei doesn’t make any claims about the sustainability of any materials used in the laptop, either, so if that’s a key concern to you you may want to look elsewhere.
Screen
- 16-inch, 16:10 display
- IPS panel delivers decent contrast and accurate colours
- Poor speaker quality at high volume
I think the 16-inch, 16:10 screen hits a sweet spot for many people. Weirdly, the extra vertical space makes it feel substantially larger than the equivalent 15.6-inch 16:9 display, even though it’s only taller. There’s more space to have multiple windows open and work fluidly between them, and it’s great for streaming video.
And while I’d like to see a higher 2560×1600 QHD resolution, that’s also going to drive the cost upwards. If you want that and have the bigger budget, the more expensive MateBook 16S may be more your thing.
This is an IPS display, so you’re not going to have the really vibrant colours and perfect contrast of an OLED screen. Put that aside, and it’s an excellent effort.
I measured the maximum brightness at 334.3nits, which is bright enough for use in most situations where you’re not in the path of bright sunlight, while it covers 99% of the sRGB colour spectrum, 72.5% of DCI-P3 and 69.7% of Adobe RGB, which is more than adequate for productivity work, browsing and entertainment, if a little too limited for serious video-editing or design work.
Colour accuracy is impressive, with an Average Delta-E of only 0.66. I didn’t have any serious concerns adjusting photos or browsing through my Google Photos albums on this screen, and it holds up well for watching videos on YouTube or Netflix.
I’d like to say that audio was as good, but the slimmer, lighter redesign appears to have impacted sound quality. At low volume levels it’s not too bad, with some bass and reasonable clarity and detail, but as you nudge the volume slider up the tone gets brash and overall output tinny. I’d want some headphones for anything beyond video meetings, background music and casual entertainment.
While we’re on the subject of video meetings, the original MateBook 16 notoriously placed its webcam in between the F6 and F7 keys on the keyboard, where it was guaranteed to capture your face from an unflattering angle. Luckily, the D16 series hasn’t made the same mistake, and this model has its webcam in the more conventional top bezel of the screen location. It produces clear, sharp and well exposed video, though it can struggle in gloomy daytime conditions or harsh artificial lighting, with some smearing if there’s much movement across the frame.
Performance
- Features an Intel Core i9 CPU and 16GB of DDR5 RAM
- No dedicated GPU, limiting 3D performance
- 1TB of fast storage for your files and apps
My test MateBook D16 uses an Intel Core i9 13900H with 16GB of DDR5 RAM – an 8GB Core i5 version is available at a £699 RRP, currently reduced to just £549. The 13900H is slightly old in 2024, having been superseded by Intel’s 14th generation CPUs, yet still delivers great performance and, I suspect, might have helped Huaweil build the MateBook D16 to meet its price point.
Whatever the case, the MateBook D16 sits comfortably ahead of Core Ultra 7 slim and light laptops like the Asus Zenbook 14 OLED or the Acer Swift Go 14 in Geekbench 6 and beats the former in PC Mark 10. It’s also slightly speedier than its stablemate, the 2023 Huawei MateBook 16S, though the Acer Swift Edge 16 has the, ahem, edge on both. It even acquits itself well in some more demanding creative benchmarks. A score of 12778 in Cinebench R23 is nothing to be sniffed at. Running office apps and productivity apps on this thing isn’t really using it to its full potential.
Gaming is another matter. With their integrated Intel Arc GPUs the Core Ultra 7 laptops can run rings around the MateBook D16 in the TimeSpy 3D benchmark, as can anything with a dedicated GPU. I tried to run Returnal, but couldn’t even get it up and running. Stick to older games or less demanding RPG or strategy titles and you might have more luck, but this wouldn’t be my choice of laptop if I fancied the odd game after working hours.
Overall, the MateBook D16 performs like a more expensive laptop, and you get plenty of speedy storage too. In tests, the 1TB SSD posted sequential read speeds of 4907.99MB/sec and write speeds of 3943.14MB/sec.
Software
- Pre-installed apps work with Huawei cloud services
- Integration with Huawei tablets, smartphones and more
Huawei doesn’t go overboard on pre-installed software and my test MateBook D16 came relatively free of obnoxious bloatware. The main inclusions are Huawei Mobile Cloud and Huawei PC Manager. The first combines an app for using Huawei’s cloud storage service with cloud-based notes and photo gallery features.
The second is a weird kind of multi-function device management app, adding features to use an Android tablet as a second screen or share files with other Huawei devices, along with tips, troubleshooting features and diagnostics and optimisation tools. The most useful bits are a feature to check and update drivers, and tools to switch between the normal Balanced and a faster Performance mode, at the usual cost of shorter battery life and extra noise.
Battery life
- 70Whr battery promises improved battery life
- Recharges by 30% in 30 minutes with 65W charger
Want all-day battery life? You’ve got it. The bigger 70Wh battery of the Huawei MateBook D16 (2024) improves on the miserable six hours and 21 minutes we saw from the 2022 model to take us all the way to twelve hours from a single charge, though working at full brightness level or running more demanding apps will see that dip.
It’s not particularly fast to recharge, however. A 30-minute charge with the bundled 65W charger took the battery back up from zero to 30%, but nowhere near the 50% we’re seeing with some fast-charging laptops.
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Should you buy it?
You should buy if you want a big screen on a budget
The Huawei MateBook D16 can’t give you the full 15-inch MacBook Air experience for half the price, but you’re getting a powerful, well-built and lightweight laptop with a good 16-inch screen for significantly less.
You should not buy if you pine for more performance
This is a fast machine, but gaming performance is limited by the integrated GPU, while a higher resolution screen would have been a great improvement. But if you want more power, you’ll have to pay more.
Final Thoughts
The Huawei MateBook D16 (2024) might not be anyone’s dream laptop, but with its big screen, slimline style and powerful CPU, it’s a very decent option for anyone needing a machine they can work on all day long, but still need everyday portability. And while the Core i9 variant doesn’t come in at the same low price as the Core i5 version, it still gives you a lot of performance for what’s still a very reasonable price.
True, Huawei’s thinner, lighter laptop can’t quite match the premium quality of the 15-inch Macbook Air or the lightweight finesse of the LG Gram 16, but it gets you a lot of the way there on a lower budget. For anyone struggling to justify spending more than £1000, that’s going to be more than enough. Otherwise, check out our Best Laptop guide for more options.
How we test
Every laptop we review goes through a series of uniform checks designed to gauge key factors, including build quality, performance, screen quality and battery life.
These include formal synthetic benchmarks and scripted tests, plus a series of real-world checks, such as how well it runs popular apps.
Used as our main laptop for two weeks during testing.
We test the performance via both benchmark tests and real-world use.
We test the screen with a colorimeter and real-world use.
We test the battery with a benchmark test and real-world use.
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FAQs
No, the Huawei MateBook D16 (2024) does not feature a touchscreen.
While the Huawei MateBook D16 (2024) is capable of light gaming, it’s not really suitable for AAA games due to its relatively weak GPU. There are better options at this price.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
