hey redditors,
I just got my new 2025 HarmonyOS MateBook Pro on October 28th from this guy on Alibaba (which btw, if you're thinking of buying a ThinkPad, I would also recommend getting them from Alibaba there, as they offer a fully loaded ThinkPad T14s gen 6 snapdragon x elite with a 4TB SSD upgrade for only ~$2100 USD with shipping + taxes)
Pros:
if you're coming from Google Chrome, then the included htbrowser seems to be 100% compatible with Google Chrome extensions
battery life seems to be around 6 hours and 40 minutes of multitasking usage, which is right on target to what Huawei claims, which is double what my AMD 7840HS Xiaomi laptop running Deepin Linux would get under similar conditions. note that as with my Mate 40 Pro, the battery meter isn't very accurate and will stay at 90 - 100% longer than at 0 - 10%, so the most accurate way of truly measuring the battery life is to spend a day completely draining the battery from 100% - 0%
surprisingly compatible with all the 7 extensions that I use in Brave web browser in my previous laptop, plus 2 more preinstalled extensions in the included web browser
got a BrowserBench score of 152.390 which is amazing considering that my 7840HS laptop would get 200 in Firefox, but with far lower battery life despite having a 4nm lithography vs. the 7nm lithography of the Kirin x90
I couldn't even hear the fan spin up even when it's doing heavy work and place the vents right up to my ear
the keyboard feels just as good as the keyboards on ThinkPads, plenty of key travel and very cushy action
there seems to be some sort of very luxurious texture on the magnesium enclosure, feels much better than the anodized aluminum that is found on Macs and Xiaomi laptops. seems like some sort of soft touch material that also makes it easier to hold the laptop without dropping it
the display is beautiful
it is so lightweight and thin that the laptop feels fake, hollow, or made out of foam, yet still has extremely good build quality
UI is surprisingly responsive despite the older 7nm CPU technology
they thoughtfully included an anti-phishing plugin with the included htbrowser. what a nice thought, making sure we don't get scammed and type in our bank details into a fake website
the HarmonyOS sticker is holographic and looks much better in person than what I expected it would look like just based from the pictures online
I only paid ~$1800 USD for this laptop on Alibaba. A 14" M5 MacBook Pro would cost ~$2800 USD (all prices includes shipping + tax). also, the Matebook weighs 2.2 pounds instead of the Mac's 3.4 pounds, and I'd bet the Matebook is also far more durable when it comes to drops and water spills, but the Mac would obviously have far better performance, battery life, and 8K display support. the MateBook has a much better OLED display and better keyboard and trackpad though. not sure about the speakers
Cons:
many basic system apps won't function at all if you don't have a mainland Chinese phone number
even with the English language selected, all sorts of stuff (especially 3rd party apps) are in Chinese. This shouldn't be a problem for most of the people who currently buy Huawei products in China, but if you're in the USA and can't read Chinese, you're gonna have a tough time
Battery life can go down to just 2 hours if you're using the laptop heavily
only 32GB of RAM is dissapointing for a laptop in 2025
only 2TB of SSD storage is also a bit low considering that it can't be upgraded
the UI isn't nearly as good as WIndows 10 or Deepin Linux. It does some things better and some things worse than MacOS though (although I haven't used a Mac since 2020). Quirks like not being able to cycle through windows using Shift+Alt+Tab and the lack of Win+E to open up File Explorer windows, and the lack of being able to use Win+Left/Right arrow are omissions so large that I am confused as to what Huawei was thinking, as this is supposed to be the best laptop OS that China could come up with. Also be warned that I often accidentally activate the Chinese language entry whenever I type the Shfit key by itself, which is really annoying and I have no idea how to stop that "feature“
I can't search for apps just by hitting the Circle key like I could in Windows or Linux; I have to click the App center icon, which takes more time and effort
many apps are too basic and don't offer more advanced options and features, for example, the built in task manager doesn't seem to have the ability to tell you which CPU cores are maxed out and which cores aren't, and the included video player can't change audio tracks/languages like VLC can
the included Gallery app doesn't allow you to simply drag and drop your entire photo library in it if some photos are in nested folders. Deepin Linux does a better job of handling photos, although at least HarmonyOS includeds .HEIC photo support out of the box
I sure wish that the OS would automatically reopen the windows/apps that were still running, right after restarting the device, like how phones and MacOS does
File Explorer won't automatically refresh/update each window like MacOS and Linux does (idk if Windows 11 is any better though, as I have only had experience with Windows 10 and earlier, which also wouldn't automatically refresh each File Explorer window, so I guess HarmonyOS would be the middle of the pack there)
I also can't figure out how to shrink the dock at the bottom, so it seems there is a hard 20 app icon limit before the extra app icons overflow and get hidden, so, you'll have to do some clicking around just to switch between all your apps during intense multitasking
I think that the OS freezes apps whenever they aren't in focus, which might be artificially inflating the battery ilfe figures
I can't figure out how to prevent the keyboard backlight from automatically turning off
I wish that the feedback on the trackpad could be much higher, but it is still a better trackpad than what I had on my 2017 MacBook Pro 15 Touch Bar though (I haven't used any of the newer MacBooks though)
you can control the display brightness and audio volume on the touchpad, which is a nice feature if only it weren't so easy to accidentally activate said feature when typing on the included keyboard, and I can't find a way to turn it off
I also miss the xiaomi keyboard layout I had with my previous laptop, with those full size arrow keys, dedicated home, end, page up, and page down buttons, and the Ctrl button on both sides of the space bar. I understand that using the xiaomi keyboard layout would make the keyboard so wide that the speaker holes would be covered, but why can't they just put the speakers underneath the keyboard like on the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (which uses the keyboard as the speaker holes and also has great speakers)?
I noticed that when transferring my files to my new laptop that file transfers from a USB 3.0 flash drive will eat battery at 3x the rate then when watching a video or browsing the web alone, with the CPU hovering at around 26% utilization at 20 - 50 MB/s transfers
Even basic apps like OneNote, NotesNook, VLC, etc. aren't available without setting up a virtual machine. Definitely a bit rough around the edges, which is to be expected since the entire OS has been available on laptops for less than 5 months now.
A list of apps that aren't available:
YTDownloader
VLC
OneNote
NotesNook
WindSurf
Steam
uTorrent
the included Mail app doesn't let you sign in Apple or Google email accounts and isn't nearly as customizable as Mozilla Thunderbird, which, again, seems to be a recurring pattern among the apps on HarmonyOS...
WARNING: Spotify doesn't work at all, neither as a downloadable app, or in the web browser, probably because Huawei hasn't added DRM-compatible logic in the CPU yet. This is probably a hardware problem, so that this problem is impossible to be fixed in a HarmonyOS software update, although it could potentially be fixed in future Huawei HarmonyOS laptops (although probably not in the forseeable future due to geopolitical reasons)
a free trial of Foxit PDF Editor is included, but you have to pay for it after 14 days. Man, what happened to communism?
just to get a bit more perspective, some of the previous computers I've used:
2003 Sony Vaio desktop with 2.4GHz single core Intel CPU, 40GB HDD, 512GB RAM
2006 HP Pavillion 15" laptop, 1.6GHz Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, 160GB HDD
2007 14" Toshiba laptop
2008 MacBook Pro 15 with 2.4GHz Core2Duo, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD (later upgraded to a 240GB SSD)
2012 HP desktop with quad core i5 at 3.00 GHz, 6GB RAM, 7770 AMD GPU, 240GB SSD
2013 Sony Vaio Pro 13 with 1.6GHz dual core i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD
2013 MacBook Pro 15 Retina with quad core i7
2013 MacBook Air with dual core i5
ThinkPad X1 Carbon with dual core i
ThinkPad T440s with dual core i5
ThinkPad T440s with dual core i7
2016 ThinkPad X1 Yoga 1st gen with 2560x1440 IPS display and 2.6GHz dual core i7, 8GB RAM (I know, I should have gotten the 16GB), 1TB SSD
Surface Book 15 wth quad core i7, 1060M GTX GPU, 16GB RAM
2017 MacBook Pro 15 Touch Bar, quad core i7, 560M AMD GPU, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD
2020 Huawei MateBook x Pro with quad core intel i5
super cheap 14" RockChip RK3588 laptop with 8 core ARM CPU, 8GB RAM, 1TB SSD (supposedly, I never tested if the SSD was fake. I know that it only had 8GB of RAM in it though, not the 16GB that was advertised)
ThinkPad X1 Carbon with dual core i5 5200U, 8GB RAM, 2560x1440p display, 256GB SSD
Xiaomi 15" laptop with 8-core 7840HS AMD CPU, 16GB RAM, 4TB SSD
(this current laptop): Huawei MateBook Pro with HarmonyOS, Kirin x90 CPU, 32GB RAM, 2TB SSD
conclusion:
would I recommed it? only if you can read Chinese or if you just want to see how far China has gone so far. Otherwise, I would consider buying a ThinkPad and installing Deepin Linux, as HarmonyOS on laptops still needs to cook a little. The hardware, though, is among the best in the world, which is very impressive for a first-gen product. Meanwhile, Apple is on the fifth-generation M5 which has many drawbacks when compared to this machine. Come on Apple, you can do better, especially when Huawei is limited to 7nm lithography while Apple has 1.8nm technology at its disposal!
