Huawei MateBook 14s(2022)

A premium laptop that offers superb performance and excellent battery life, but the webcam robs it of an award

SCORE ✪✪✪✪*

PRICE £1,083 (£1,300 inc VAT) from consumer.huawei.com/uk

A year ago, I was highly taken by the Huawei MateBook 14s (see issue 327, p62) aside from one thing: the webcam. It was awful, with smudgy results that were entirely out of character for an otherwise stunning machine. This year, Huawei has repeated the same mistake. Insert your own facepalm emoji here.

It's all the more frustrating because, webcam aside, Huawei gets so much right. For a start, it's fast. Incredibly fast. Thanks to the Core i7-12700H's six high-performance cores (which can hit 4.7GHz) and eight efficiency cores it chomps through any task that uses threads: consider its 12,950 multicore result in Cinebench R23 and 11,690 in Geekbench 5. It also smashed the PC Pro benchmarks with a score of 364. All three results are roughly twice that of the previous MateBook 14s with a six-core i7-11370H inside.

That's all the more impressive when you consider that the rest of the specification is almost identical. You have 16GB of LPDDR4-3733 memory, sadly soldered onto the motherboard. My test unit came with a 512GB Gen3 SSD, but shipping units include a 1TB Gen4 drive. Undo ten Torx screws and you can replace this yourself.

Doing so also reveals the 60Wh battery, which kept the MateBook going for almost 12 hours in our tests. That's down on last year's 13 to 14 hours, but it's an acceptable compromise when you consider the extra power on offer.