This inexpensive laptop is banned from sale in the United States

There’s one laptop out there that costs over $ 1,000 and goes through benchmarks almost as quickly as a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro. There is only one major downside to potential US buyers: it is currently banned from selling in the country.

The Honor MagicBook Pro is a sensational laptop, by far the best mid-range laptop I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it will no longer be available in the US anytime soon, as Honor is owned by Huawei – the company that has been banned from selling devices in the US since May 2019.

This is a major shame for US laptop buyers, as you can hardly ask for more from a laptop that costs £ 850 (about $ 1,100).

Let’s start with this achievement. It is powered by an AMD Ryzen 5 six-point, six-core processor. If you read my recent article on what to look for in new laptops, you already know that AMD is currently wiping the floor with Intel when it comes to mobile processors.

Im PC Pro In the magazine’s benchmarks, which test processing speed in a number of real world applications like Microsoft Excel and Adobe Photoshop, the MagicBook Pro was just behind a top-of-the-line MacBook Pro 16 (2019 vintage) that costs a little less £ 4,000 ($ 5,225). It’s incredibly fast, and it’s backed by 512GB of SSD storage, which is among the fastest on the market.

It doesn’t have a dedicated graphics chip, so it doesn’t compare to the MacBook when gaming, but it’s also out of the question. In my tests, Fortnite ran at 60 frames per second on the Full HD screen after lowering the graphics settings to medium.

In terms of design, it is definitely based on Apple. The aluminum housing and the black keyboard correspond to the classic MacBook look. The metal body is shinier than that of the MacBook, but it’s classy and solid and everything you’d expect from a laptop that could be spinning around in a family home or laptop bag. At 1.7 kg and a compact USB-C charger, it’s not particularly heavy, even for a 16-inch laptop.

The screen is definitely not Retina quality – the Full HD resolution (1,920 x 1,080), which stretches across the letter-wide display, fluctuates grainily, but is anything but uncomfortable. It’s bright, evenly lit, and the colors aren’t oversaturated, as is often the case with inexpensive laptops. And look at these slim bezels. Apple take note. It’s just a shame that there isn’t a touchscreen option on a Windows device.

The keyboard is okay, as is the touchpad. The speakers don’t rattle on your windows, but they’re passable. There’s no Wi-Fi 6 and only a USB-C port, which could disappoint future-proofers, but few people will care now. The only serious disappointment is the placement of the webcam – it appears in the row of function keys at the top of the keyboard. That makes it peek up the nose rather than eye level, and when you’re as tall as me it’s hard to get a shot at all with the laptop at desk level. Normal zoomers require an external webcam.

It’s a great laptop either as a general-purpose family device or for working from home. It’s just a shame US customers can’t buy it … at least for now, not.

Deferment of honor?

It was the Trump administration that added Huawei and its subsidiaries to the Entity List, preventing devices from being sold in the US since 2019. That ban was further tightened earlier this year when the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) banned Huawei from using U.S. software and chip designs in its processors.

However, it has been suggested that a Biden government could de-escalate the trade war with China and possibly relax the ban on Chinese firms like Huawei / Honor from selling consumer goods in the US while maintaining the infrastructure ban.

Should this happen shortly after the inauguration, the cheapest laptop of 2020 could even hit the US in 2021.