The best laptop right now: Huawei Matebook X Pro | Hacker News Reader

The best laptop right now: Huawei Matebook X Pro

theverge.com

41 pointsApocryphon86 comments

Are they kidding? I know the Verge is run by strange people, but their top recommendation is a Chinese laptop with a design ripped-off of the MacBook Pro, made by a company that we are recommended to avoid right now because of questionable connections to Chinese government?

Edit: My perspective with this comment is American.

And it looks like they copied the crappy Macbook keyboard!

Looks like chiclet keys to me.

I first read the title as Macbook, even. The design is an absolute rip-off.

No, the X clearly discombobulates it for me :)

Verge yet again showing their incompetence.

Seriously though, I've heard good things about the Microsoft Surface Book 2, though I am an Apple user. Just can't go back to using Windows. Even with all my 2017 Touchbar MacBook Pro's faults, it sure beats Windows.

Meh... as a portable device optimized for scrolling endless social media streams with baby/cat pics - maybe... This or MBP, there's little difference, but phones and tables are way better for that anyway.

In the world of "best laptops" as in "devices we use to make stuff" it's awlays been Thinkpads competing against each other for the top spot. You can't be called even a GOOD laptop without [1] and [2]

[1] https://i.stack.imgur.com/zS1SJ.png

[2] https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-TTh3Xi4N6cw/WUGdgdnYjzI/AAAAAAABd...

Macbook trackpad >>> track point and physical buttons.

Oh how I disagree.

But I suppose that's the crux, it's subjective.

RE: Thinkpads though, the quality has been declining rather rapidly since 2011. For this specific feature (trackpoint) the Dell Business line (Latitude) has that: https://img.purch.com/o/aHR0cDovL2Nkbi5sYXB0b3BtYWcuY29tL2lt...

Rusty nails jammed into a parallel port to bit-bang cardinal directions >>> track point.

I prefer the track pad as well. It might be your delivery rather than the message which is being downvoted.

Vertical 5 button mouse and an OS that can actually handle it (Windows) >>> trackpad and Mac OS.

>In the world of "best laptops" as in "devices we use to make stuff" it's awlays been Thinkpads competing against each other for the top spot.

To make what stuff? Because most top-tier programmers whose stuff we actually use, use Macbooks -- just check the laptops of the headliners and speakers at any dev conference -- heck, even Linus has a history of them (running Linux in his case).

As for creatives (musicians, graphic designers, etc, there's no comparison what they use to "make stuff with").

>You can't be called even a GOOD laptop without [1] and [2]

Those are abominations in the eyes of all that's holy.

For cruising the web nothing beats a Chromebook. I came to that conclusion after seeing my latest cheap Windows laptop become unusable over time with slowdowns. Now when I travel and don't need to do any work, it's a Chromebook all the way. The one I got came with a wireless mouse so I don't have to worry about how good the trackpad is.

That is a very American perspective. American companies are not trustworthy either given what NSA and other American institutions have been doing. As a customer, you just get to choose your butcher but nothing more. The only solution in the long run is to design open hardware and use open software.

It doesn't necessarily mean they're wrong though. I have personally lamented that Dell or HP don't build a very similar machine, as I'd buy that in a microsecond. It really and truly looks to be the best hardware on the market right now... it's just a shame you can't trust the firmware not to be backdoored.

Dell is selling equally nice (IMO) laptops that actually run Linux out of the box. That's not a comment on security or anything, but it happens to be important to me right now.

I've been burned by their XPS 9350 and the TB15 that should really be recalled to trust Dell again :(

Sorry to hear that. I haven't heard any complaints. Were your problems specific to running Linux?

No, they were hardware related (coil whine, firmware upgrade rendering the laptop inoperable, TB15... Too long to list but also hw).

Yeah it's nice Dell is building Linux machines, but they're not equally nice by my measure. Dell's machines are usually made of lots of various bits of squeaky, often ill-fitting plastic, they usually still require barrel power adapters of various sizes that rarely match between models and have HUGE bricks you have to lug around, and the logic which they use to choose which machines have which display options available seems to be casting bones.

Dell really couldn't go wrong just taking the xerox machine to Huawei's machine. Aluminum body, USB-C power, 3:2 high-DPI display, new processors and maxed out memory, and it's pretty damned light at under 1.5kg. It even nicely hides the camera under the keyboard so you don't have to put obnoxious tape under the lid. It says a hell of a lot the biggest design change I'd make would be to put USB-C ports on both sides so you could charge it from either side.

> squeaky, often ill-fitting plastic

Are you talking about the 5520? Curious because I'm planning on getting one in the near future, but not if it has build issues.

>know the Verge is run by strange people, but their top recommendation is a Chinese laptop with a design ripped-off of the MacBook Pro

Review sites are always struggling to include or nominate some second-tier PC, to avoid having always a MacBook Pro or iPhone as the first choice -- even when the alternative is subpar.

>made by a company that we are recommended to avoid right now because of questionable connections to Chinese government?

That's really quite irrelevant.

Besides, have the US government also warned people not to use Facebook, Google, and co, because of their ties with it and its surveillance?

I think that says more about Apple that it appears that a open and unashamed clone manages to execute the concept better.

Really fed up with this. We have been buying american hardware and software for decades, and now you are offended because other producers are caching up?

I am also going to do my bit and stop buying, and recommending, anything american.

Nationalism cuts both ways, and you have started this "trade war".

No, not nationalism. Seemingly legitimate worries about security. I was just clarifying that I was speaking from an American perspective, where US government has published warnings against a specific set of manufacturers, not all Chinese products.

This moronic trade war is not relevant to that position, and I am not at all a fan of the current administration.

Doesn't the NSA and FBI collectively have backdoors on most major consumer hardwares? Wouldn't that be a security concern for the rest of the world?

No, they don’t have any institutionalized backdoors.

That you know of.

The US government still has credibility with you? I guess that is nationalism because it's not rational. You can't trust people who lie repeatedly.

Eh? Sort of like the NSA intercepting routers and flashing them?

Pretty hard to trust anyone at this point.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa...

The American government is absolutely not in bed with Apple and Apple has done a lot to distance themselves from the government (San Bernardino comes to mind). In fact, most American companies are at odds with the government, and if they do have a close relationship, it's because the government is just a cash cow.

They're not in bed with the FBI, but they are in bed with the NSA, hence their participation in the PRISM program.

The US government is big enough that it shouldn't really be thought of as a monolithic entity most of the time.

It's a really nice computer. You go buy Dell if you want American stuff, but this machine looks like its beating them.

How much innovation has Dell done lately? Or Intel? Or Microsoft? Or Apple?

We get maybe 10% faster cpus, maybe 10% better batteries, maybe a few less ports from Apple, maybe a few more guides in Windows... Its all pretty stagnated.

I welcome our new Chinese overlords. :)

My friend has one and it's really nice. I haven't used the new Macbook Pro yet, but the Matebook is one of the best laptop I ever tried for sure.

> but their top recommendation is a Chinese laptop with a design ripped-off of the MacBook Pro

Well, 'ripped-off' is too strong for this very case, as laptops now days looks more or less the same (Just like smartphones).

As a Chinese, I don't think I'll ever buy this Matebook thing (big Dell and ThinkPad fan here), but what I interested is how Apple would respond to all these 'ripped-off' products. Will they finally decide to design something that I don't resist to buy?

For example, the soldered SSD, that's a big NO NO for me. Especially when I realized that few drops of coffee can send me to the deep depression for a long while.

And also, the keyboard. I'm 100% admire those who can type on it all days and still managed to keep all their fingers at full length.

About the 'ripped-off' thing, I think it's fundamentally because one simple reason: It's not very hard to build laptops similar to Macbook anymore. Samsung, LG, ASUS etc, all started to make their own version of 'Macbook's (they call that Ultrabook).

To me, when you saw everyone is rolling out similar products, it's a sign of everybody is hitting a global glass ceiling. Only wonder is who can penetrate it first.

>> "laptop with a design ripped-off of the MacBook Pro"

All I want is a 2014 Macbook Pro with modern processors and a ton of ram. "A design ripped-off of the Macbook Pro" sounds absolutely ideal to me. That's a feature not a bug.

I don't understand why people continue to compare laptops with 15W cpus like the Huawei Matebook X Pro or Microsoft Surface Book 2 to laptops with 38/45W CPUs. On CPU intensive workloads an i7-8550U is going to under perform an i7-7920HQ pretty soundly, around 40-50%, particularly for sustained workloads where the i7-8550U is going to start throttling hard to stay within it's TDP boundaries.

If you're considering a laptop with an i7-8550U in it, it's doubtful you're in the target market for a Macbook Pro, at least certainly not the 15" model, the 13" is at least a little closer in performance depending on workload.

The i7-8550U seems like a great option in the 15W category and smashes previous 15W parts. But, it's not a competitor in the 'Pro' market if anything you do leverages the CPU heavily. It's also just a matter of time before intel releases quad core 38W parts which will pull laptops like the 13" MBP far ahead in performance again.

For comparison, The Wirecutter avoids a single "the best laptop you can buy right now" recommendation altogether, instead recommending various sensible choices depending on what you're looking to do with the thing: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-laptops/

This seems like a smarter approach to me, given the wide range of things people do with laptops.

I just bought one because Apple didn't refresh the MBP. It is nice - maybe I need to get used to it, but it's not a MBP. Continuity between my phone for everything - iMessage, clipboard, wifi networks - is something you begin to miss quickly. The Apple trackpad is also hands-down the best experience.

Literally the only thing that matters to me when thinking about ditching my MBP is how well the computer works with linux. I have had such horrible experiences with linux laptops and honestly it seems like as time goes by it gets worse. This article doesn't mention linux at all but I suspect the experience is poor.

Unless it's officially supported, brand new laptops usually (read, in my experience) have a rough first year with Linux and things stabilize over the course of the second year.

I recently bought an HP Omen laptop and naturally installed Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on it. Surprisingly almost everything worked well out-the-box.

All it needed was to install NVidia drivers and configure action on lid closure (sleep).

I'm cautiously anticipating Lenovo's announcement of the P1 which will supposedly ship with the intel+Vega chip. Rumors are that same chip will be used in the next Gen MacBooks.

They're also working on some Ryzen cpu model equivalents to the t480, t580, etc. All of which will have better graphics performance than the equivalent Intel cpu.

What I really want is a Ryzen Thinkpad x1 2 in 1 with good Linux support, but maybe that's too much hopeful thinking. My t430 will suffice until I find something worthy to upgrade to.

Ryzen Based X1 would be so amazing. We need options to ditch Intel.

Stick to business thinkpads with intel graphics, they have worked very well for 15 years.

Or buy a laptop that comes with Linux out of the box. Dell sells several XPS and Precision models that way, and there's niche-ier vendors like System76 and Purism out there too.

Does the Dell require me to run some Dell-specific kernel still?

You should consider purchasing a device from a manufacturer who makes an effort to support Linux on their device. The two big ones at the moment seem to be Purism and System76. Dell also does, but, IIRC, you have to use their bastardized ubuntu kernel crap on their newer systems, at least until proper support has been upstreamed to the kernel (if they can still be bothered to do that.)

I just got a dell precision at work and had to reinstall for full disk encryption. Ended up ditching the dell distro and installing an Ubuntu 16 derived distro. Everything works fine 2 months in.

This article is clearly biased and written by Apple fanboys/fangirls: they publicize basically the whole Apple lineup and praise the top performer for being a mac-like laptop.

Now I am clearly (and admittedly) a ThinkPad-leaning guy but despite this it must be noted that Lenovo offers ThinkPads in 12", 14" and 15" versions but such laptops get no representation (same for Dell).

This article is basically bullshit.

I am looking for a laptop with 32GB RAM or higher. This "best" laptop appears to maxed out at 16GB RAM like current MacBooks.

Get yourself a Thinkpad p52. It supports 128GB of RAM and comes with mobile Xeon CPU

jesus christ that's a monster. What kind of sane person needs that kind of portability paired with those specs.

One with a database?

I use mine for PCB layout. Wish it was faster. Note: it has removable batteries so I bring a spare and swap it out.

Not convinced. I'd say the best laptop right now is still the 2015 Macbook Pro.

I have a mid-2014 and am terrified of something happening to it. Normally the idea of upgrading is exciting. Not as of yet...

You can still buy them new, which means you can extend apple-care on them and get replacements from the store.

I would do that; I actually did something similar last month with the (now aged) iPhone 5SE. If you buy Apple Care on it they will support it.. You're not losing anything by having a slightly older CPU realistically.

Since Apple hasn’t really lowered the price of those old models, buying them new isn’t exactly a viable option anymore IMHO.

I’m on the same path as GP, terrified that my MBP 2015 breaks. However, it will be my last mac. I’m fed up with apple’s bs when it comes to their pro laptops.

(edit: spelling)

Current models only have an integrated GPU, no discrete GPU. Big step down in performance. See my other comment in this thread.

While you are still able to purchase them, it's not exactly on the market as a new machine...

It's not wrong that this was probably one of the best hardware designs and Apple was wrong not to just keep upgrading the processors and memory and churning machines out... but since Apple decided Touchbars and shitty keyboards all for want of a few millimeters that nobody cares about is the way of the future, we're stuck looking elsewhere for hardware.

I have to personally admit that I have seriously contemplated buying one of these 2015 machines refurbed, as my 2012 MBP is on its last legs and I need to replace it... six months ago. I also looked at the machine in this article and really quite liked the hardware, but would never buy it from the company that's building it, which is another market fail.

(And it's also annoying to watch people call the machine in the article a Macbook clone, when it's really closer to being a Chromebook Pixel clone, all the way down to the 3:2 screen; I love the Chromebook Pixel too, but living with Chromebook hardware as a software dev is a high-level annoyance that I wouldn't wish on anyone for their daily driving experience.)

I too entertained the idea of the PixelBook but just this week I sold my 2017 15" MacBook Pro and bought a 2015. I couldn't care less about the TouchBar but there are some serious reliability problems with the butterfly keyboard.

What I liked about the 2017:

- Great screen (the P3 does make a difference).

- Loud speakers (though over a certain percent the chassis would vibrate).

- Slightly smaller footprint.

- Slightly thinner.

- Weighs slightly less.

What I like about the 2015:

- Reliable keyboard.

- Stiffer LCD hinge (less wobbling, don't care about how hard it is to open).

- No branding at the bottom of screen.

- MagSafe power adapter with charging/charged LED status indicator.

- Storage can be self-upgraded.

- No accidental TouchBar taps resulting in play/pause or locking screen.

Also, the current 2015 model sold in stores doesn't have the discrete AMD GPU; that one was discontinued. What they sell today is an integrated, underpowered Intel Iris. The lackluster graphics performance is really noticeable with an external 4K display.

I do all my development at home on a dell chromebook with coreboot. I think it’s great. I would totally wish on anybody else. Super key is where caps lock should be which is not a big deal to me and the gallium os distro reuses the chrome os touchpad driver and feels every bit as good as my old MacBook Pro.

Has anyone tried running linux on one of these? How'd it go? It's not currently in any of the hardware compatibility lists that I am aware of.

Looks like it works well:

https://liliputing.com/2018/06/first-look-huawei-matebook-x-...

From your linked article: > It recognized touch input, allowing me to move an on-screen cursor and tap app shortcuts, among other things. But I noticed that tapping the “Show Applications” icon made the app list expand and disappear quickly. I think it’s registering single-taps as double-taps.

To me that's an annoying enough problem that I'd say it does not work.

That was the touchscreen, not the trackpad

Can you trust a Huawei, though?

I agree...it's also funny because The Verge in Feb wrote an article about not trusting Huawei phones.

> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/14/17011246/huawei-phones-sa...

Leftist news outlets are not known for their integrity or consistency.

Could you elaborate on that? For instance several right-leaning news sources such as FOX News have been known to misrepresent information, and it seems like journalistic integrity and a lack thereof supersedes any political bias.

Drop the leftist and you've got something approximating the truth.

It's refreshing to see the industry try aspect ratios other than 16:9. This 3:2 looks like it would be a lot more useful.

I think it is funny how the article compares laptops with tablets and phones and never mention desktops. I'm thinking of upgrading my 2014 MacBook Air and right now the iMac 27" seems to me like the best option every way, except if you really need portability (specially because it still has upgradable memory). I mean, it has a 4gb video card and a huge, beautiful retina display, and it's about the same price as the macbook pro.

Nah. I get the argument that maybe American laptop makers are complacent or that we shouldn't create borders within which to judge technology. To be fair, if Matebook is a rip off of the Macbook design, devices are getting to be a lot like cars. Ford & Toyota are both composited of parts made all over the world. The Macbook is probably just as Chinese by weight as a Huawei.

But compare the integrity & intangibles … If HN is a developer community shouldn’t we appreciate originality? Shouldn’t we depreciate a company that is heavily inspired by another & offers no credit where credit is due?

Apple’s designs aren’t the end-all-be-all & their software lags well behind the innovations we’ve seen in their hardware through the years. But they & any company that does something original enough deserves some credit.

"The Mac option: Apple MacBook Pro” should actually say: "The Original option: Apple MacBook Pro” … and all of the scores should be weighted against that original. (Why is that section the second section? Would making it the last make it stand out more?)

In fact, I don’t think it’d be out of line to rate every other device by how well they copied the form factor from Apple, how well they varied and added to the number of ports, what they did differently than Apple & how that impacted usability and security among other things.

There’s a really objective way to gage devices … I know I’m biased but at least I know I am. The Verge is as clueless as most sites I’ve seen that rate laptops like each one was an original idea that coincidentally all happen to look alike.

Note that there's supposedly some nasty coil whine on these machines: https://twitter.com/jcs/status/1000117326728060929

It's funny that a rip-off of 2015 MacBook Pro is hailed as better than the latest MacBook Pro, just because it didn't follow Apple's latest arrogant missteps.

Keeping non-squashed keyboard and USB-A is all that MacBooks needed to stay on top.

Consider instead the Xiaomi probook, another macbook clone. It works well with linux.

> Consider instead the Xiaomi probook, another macbook clone.

I haven't had a chance to try the Huawei Matebook, but Xiaomi's trackpad is rough and doesn't come anywhere close to Apple's.

Just from the first image I can already tell that keyboard will feel horrendous.

I've noticed this hunk o' junk being shucked all over the internet.

The title should be "The best laptop marketing team right now".

Looks like a nice machine. Could you elaborate on "hunk o junk".

See the other post in this thread for explanation.

Sounds nice I guess, the 3kx2k display sounds good.

Other than that, I don't really want Huawei hardware tho

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