The Laptop Wars: How Good Is the Huawei MateBook?

The Laptop Wars: How Good Is the Huawei MateBook?

In terms of market positioning, Huawei’s MateBook is mainly aimed at the upper mid-range segment. Its product style, market positioning, hardware configuration, and even pricing are all highly similar to Microsoft’s Surface Book, making it a strong competitor to the Surface line both in China and globally. Huawei and Microsoft both entered the laptop industry relatively late, especially at a time when the entire notebook market was already in gradual decline, with traditional manufacturers such as Lenovo, Dell, and HP all seeing continued weakness in this business. Under such circumstances—particularly when there is little fundamental difference in hardware and software systems—any newcomer that wants to secure a place in the market must offer enough innovation and distinctive features.

The modern push to reinvent the laptop began with Microsoft’s Surface. After the Nokia phone business Microsoft had acquired failed to deliver, the company tried to open up the market with the larger-screen Surface. Conceptually, the Surface borrowed from the strengths of both the Apple iPad and the Mac. While the first two generations of Surface were not major sales successes, they laid the foundation for a new kind of Windows laptop that combined work and entertainment. At the same time, the Surface models that directly competed with the iPad—those running embedded hardware and the tablet-oriented version of Windows—failed completely, and Microsoft also abandoned some of its earlier software-and-hardware ambitions. By contrast, Surface’s competitive advantages over Mac laptops became more and more evident. Lighter, more powerful, and more flexible, the Surface line gained popularity with each generation. In addition to the Surface Pro, the newer Surface Book also gradually entered the market, and with the natural advantage of the widely accepted Windows ecosystem, plus Apple-like attention to design and craftsmanship, it began to carve out market share.

What makes Huawei different from Microsoft is that Huawei has also achieved real success in smartphones. Although its laptop business can be accused of learning from—or even imitating—Microsoft, Huawei’s success in phones undoubtedly gives its laptops strong brand support. This helps compensate for the fact that, unlike Microsoft, Huawei does not have its own operating system. Compared with Microsoft, Huawei’s slightly lower pricing also makes its products appear more cost-effective. Of course, while the mantis stalks the cicada, the oriole waits behind: behind Huawei stands Xiaomi, watching closely. Xiaomi named its laptop lines Air and Pro, much like Apple, and their appearance is also more similar to Apple’s products, making its ambitions perfectly obvious—and not in a negative sense.

In terms of performance, the Huawei MateBook is fairly average. Technically, in addition to learning from pioneers such as Microsoft and Apple, it also draws on Huawei’s experience accumulated in smartphones. Overall, however, considering that Huawei’s laptop business is in effect leveraging the brand premium built by its phone business, its value for money is not especially high, even though its prices are lower than Microsoft’s full product line. By comparison, the MagicBook under Huawei’s sub-brand Honor has become more popular thanks to its lower pricing strategy.

As for target positioning, both the Surface and the MateBook are business laptops, featuring long battery life and solid performance, but they are weaker—quite weak, in fact—when it comes to gaming and heat dissipation. They are better suited to office work, programming, and other business or technical applications, and are not ideal for graphic design professionals or heavy gamers.