this is huawei's new macbook d16 a 16 inch laptop that is powered by intel's 12th generation chips
there are two models with the core i5 but this review unit here that huawei sent out to me it's a
loan unit 2 by the way does have the core i7 it's the 12700h and compared to the previous gen with
the 11th gen intels this is quite a big step up in performance so this model here comes with either
eight gigabytes of ram or 16 gigabytes which i do have and 512 gigabyte ssds which are pci e3
it's got wi-fi ax so that's wi-fi six a 60 watt hour battery and a backlit full-sized keyboard
it also does run windows 11 home so in this video i'm going to go over it in detail and i'll let you
know all the pros and cons now in my time which is a week of testing out the matebook d16 from huawei
in the box you'll find a warranty card our type c to type c cable which is of a good length
and then the charger so it's huawei's supercharge 65 watts type c charger will also work with other
huawei products and i really like just how small and compact it is laptop has a nice alloy finish
to it so this is the gray version you can also get a silver one and it is a matte paint finish
to it you can see here the embossed huawei logo the hinge does feel very good opening it up there
is a little bit of a lip here but as you can see i cannot open it up one hand you do need two hands
to open this one up we're presented now with a normal full-sized keyboard here with good travel
it's about 1.6 millimeters very comfortable to type on it is a backlit keyboard now pressing down
firmly there in the middle there really is not that much flex it's a very small amount that it
does have half size error up and down keys but we do get a full size uh numerical keyboard here
too so we've got the number pad which is great for those that want it now you will see that the touch
pad is off centered when you look at it but if you factor in the keyboard which is just in front it's
actually in the center so that's why they've moved it to one side because of our number pad
right here various different shortcuts we've got them along here you've got print screen
and by default we do have all of the controls up here so for example the screen brightness
our media controls huawei share by default if you needed f2 f3 then you have to push
the uh function key there for those so i like the keyboard the palm rest here is made out of
the same alloy which is brush that paint job and here our power button also has a fingerprint
reader for windows hello so very fast just to use this to log in instead of having to type
out a password this keyboard is also backlit so this is the first stage the first light level
and then the second which is the brightest it's evenly distributed so i don't see any dull patches
at all the touchpad on this model it does support windows 11 gestures as you'd expect and we have a
built-in left and right mouse button it's not super large but the size i do find is adequate
and i've got no complaints it is an accurate touch pad and even the finer movements the cursor does
not jump around all over the place it works really well now the underside of the mate book d16 still
has that alloy finish so it feels good we've got a little talk screws holding everything in place and
unfortunately because this is a lone unit i'm not allowed to open it up and show you the internals
we've got two downward firing speakers rubber feet at the front here and a larger rubber foot but it
does have this gap in the middle to help with the airflow so this is where the cooler air will be
sucked in and that is then blowing out the back and i'll cover the thermals in this review too
on the right side of the macbook d16 we do have a usb 2 port and usb 3.2 gen 1. so it's a little
unusual they put a usb 2 on here now i'll just be plugging my mouse into it so it doesn't really
matter but i do believe that two usb 3.2s would have been a little better but we do get two type c
ports here on the left status led right there now they both support power delivery but one of them
does support video out 4k 60. we've got hdmi 2.0 so not hdmi 2.1 which the hardware does support
however connecting up my lg 6 4k 120 hertz tv i can end up running 120 hertz 4k which is good
3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support quality out of this is loud it's clear there's no
annoying static so that's great and keeping with the tech that they've bought through originally
with the matebook x line we have now the four microphones at the front so i like the location
they bring the mics closer to you and the fact that there are four of them the sound quality from
these mics is definitely superior to other laptops that only have two either side of the webcam
looking at the laptop closely i can see that it just seems to have the
single cooling fan so not a twin setup like we see on the matebook x pro series so interesting to see
how this is going to fare the thermals especially in the performance mode the screen we have in the
matebook d16 is 16 inches even though the form factor and the size of the laptop is about that of
a 15.6 inch laptop so we have matte bezels around the outside there is a little plastic well rubber
lip around the edge here to stop it from scratching up when the lid is closed you can see
up the top here that's our 1080p ai camera there's a status led next to it the left and right bezels
are nice and slim we do have the huawei branding here that you can see so the screen itself it's
ips 1920x1200 is the resolution it's not super sharp but at normal viewing distances it does
still look fine i would have preferred 1440p at this size especially the 16 inches but i think for
most people it's still going to be adequate it's still fine and looks good when you look at it so
the screen here brightness they claim is 300 nits but measuring it with my spider x pro turns out to
be over their claim which is 317 its brightness so indoors with the anti-glare coating it does
look good and i find it perfectly acceptable this brightness i would have of course preferred to
have brighter but it's actually perfectly fine for most people and even in direct sunlight with the
anti-glare coating you can still make it out so the color coverage here the gamut srgb is 97 ntsc
that is 69 adobe rgb 74 and p3 coverage is also 74 it's all up it's a good screen but not quite
definitely not at the level of what we get on their more expensive matebook x models
and here we are in windows now normally with my reviews i would show you the bias
but really there's nothing to show you with huawei machines because it's locked down so
you can't adjust power limits you can't really make any changes apart from boot order and secure
boot you can disable that too so it does run windows 11 home we've got the 16 gigabytes of ram
of which most of it is available to us they've dedicated a tiny little bit to the iris xe
graphics but that will scale up automatically anyway now the general performance of this laptop
is very good it's exceptionally quick and fast so there's no need for me to show you document
spreadsheets browser performance because that is all really quick everything's instantaneous
there's no lag when you pop up the menu anything like that on lower spec machines that i do often
cover in my channel now you'll see here that it's listed as quad channel ram but it's not actually
now what they're using is low powered ddr4 ram and it can actually clock itself right up to
two 4200 and sixty seven megahertz but they haven't gone with ddr5 which is a
little interesting with this now you will see here too we've got iris xc graphics
uh now this does have 96 executional units and it's not bad graphics at all
for integrated that is at least so the cpu which is of course the core i7 the 12700h
very potent it's got a lot of cores there's six performance cores and it can
clock up to 4.7 gigahertz eight efficiency cores so that is why when you look here too
in the device manager which i'll quickly bring up you'll see that hang on there's 20 processors
listed here well 20 cores that's because of the threads too so in total we've got 20 threads it's
an absolute monster as you see with benchmarks later on the 12th gen is a huge massive step up
from 11th gen and i'm so glad that huawei finally does have it so it's a very potent cpu there
general performance very good i'll just quickly show you what it's like at video playback so this
is the 1080p sorry 4k demo file that i always do play and i'll just play this with films and
tv now it always does this for some reason windows is a bit of a start at the beginning it's a very
demanding bitrate too 140 megabits per second it's when you resize it or first play it but after that
it's really smooth and no problems with it and the sony swordsmith so this is 4k
60 video playback you'll see a game that this one very very quick and initially it does that little
pause for some reason so performance of that is great so anything you throw at it it can handle it
when it comes to video files the spec of pc then a few benchmarks here you can see the
performance as i mentioned before is impressive so the single core score here with cinebench r23
really high they've made a big step up intel with the 12th gen with this and then the multi-core
score here this could actually be a little bit better now i did run it in the performance mode
but after 10 minutes of it looping the score slowly ends up dropping down a little bit
because we do have some thermal throttling that is taking place now i've been running this here in
the background to monitor those thermals and you can see it ended up hitting 100 degrees so that's
why it's not quite as good then after 10 minutes because it ended up throttling down a little bit
so we also have the geekbench 5 score here which is impressive so that's when it is performing
without throttling now this is when i use the function p i'll just show you can swap between
here a balanced mode and a performance mode now in balanced mode it doesn't end up throttling
but with the performance mode it does but however you get slightly faster speeds increases increases
that power limit up to 54 watts so that's a very strong score there and the ssd that they have used
is a 512 gigabyte one in this model that i have and you see that this is clearly pcie 3.0 speed so
they didn't again use a pci for spec ssd which of course this 12th gen does support now i don't know
why they've done that but well we probably know what the reason is it's probably cost saving why
they didn't go for ddr5 ram or a pci4 ssd to keep the price of this down then our included
software we do get with the macbook d16 so there is this which is huawei's pc manager now this is
not what i would classify as bloatware and in fact is very handy so you've got here your devices that
are paired up to your huawei account other huawei devices you can connect up there huawei shares so
i have covered this before in my other reviews it's very handy way of seamlessly connecting up
your say huawei p50 pro you can transfer files over you can also answer text messages and things
like that all wirelessly you can set it up as a second display if you've got a tablet too so very
handy and you've got some tips troubleshooting there quick services but for me this is the best
optimization so you can sit and update here all of the drivers now i did have two bios updates
that it comes through already and i updated all of the drivers here so one spot very easy to do
which is great and you also do have this which is performance tuning so you can set it to balance
which is by default or performance but that also works as i mentioned before with the function
p shortcut so you can go over then into the balance mode or the performance performance
does increase the power limit really does boost the speed but the trade-off is more heat generated
the fans will come on a little bit more as you would expect there is this then too the control
panel which is some pretty obvious straightforward shortcuts there instant hotspot another handy one
audio devices and then configuration for that 1080p ai camera which i'll give you a sample of
now with those four microphones the webcam is 1080p and when you're using it in the standard
mode right now it is 30 frames per second the audio you're listening to recorded on those
four front facing microphones so this is tech that they've pulled through from the matebook x line
the more expensive line into the more affordable d series here now i'll just change the background to
show you that it's actually going to work it's a global setting so it's going to work with any apps
and right now this is what they call the living room background which looks rather nice and we've
got the meeting room the office and then blurry so that's another one if you wanted to for example
hide all your mess in the background you can blur it now you can see the stitching at times won't
be perfect now that's normal can see how when i put my hand up okay it's stitching that out all
right but if i move around too fast it could look a little funny now they do have the auto centering
mode but that does not work with the ai background removal so it's centering in it's cropped in a
little bit you'll notice that the quality has yes dropped off a little bit however if i move
over to this side you'll see that the camera will then follow me which it's doing and keep me in
the frame centered so quite good the features they do offer here especially nowadays with the
needs of many of having of course better higher quality webcams so i really like the background
stitching effect that i can blur them out and over i think the matebook d16 does have an excellent
webcam and i like these ai features and then the loudspeakers so as i showed you before with the
webcam sample that the microphones sound really good but does it have the speakers to back it
up well they're not bad but they're not amazing either they're certainly not at the level that
we do get with the matebook x pro for example much more expensive than this model they're reasonable
speakers so here's a sample of them at 100 volume there's a little bit of bass there's some
treble there but there's nothing that's really going to blow you away the adequate speakers
and just how is the 12700h then at video editing so this is a very light basic
4k edit they are 100 bit files playback it's not dropping any frames but i only have it
set to a quarter playback resolution there now without a dedicated gpu complex video
edits will eventually depending if they're very large the size of them will eventually run into
some slow down and lag but something basic like this the core i7 12th gen can definitely handle
then export times very quick so i have one minute of footage here which is the youtube 4k preset and
you'll see that it rips through that really quick only taking about 39 seconds to export one minute
of footage that's an excellent result so can a game well it's not a gaming laptop but older
titles at lower resolutions so this for example this is the witcher 3. 720p on low settings
is playable here you can see around 40 just over 40 up to about 47 frames per second which is not
bad even 50 here and this is in the busy town which does have a lot of the game has a lot of
graphics to render and also all the npcs and everything but it is dipping down a little bit
but yes you can play older titles counter-strike uh gta 5 half-life 2 things like that will all be
very playable even at 1080p on this 12th gen with the iris xc graphics and it's 96 executional units
and what kind of fan noise can you expect to out of the laptop so when i'm doing something
demanding like gaming for example you hear it it's on all of the time if you're doing
something light you don't really hear the fan that much here is a sample of it under full load
i did do a quick test boot here of linux and i ran into some difficulty with the touchpad drivers so
that's one thing you're going to have to sort out if you do intend to run linux on the matebook d16
then our battery run time so just the brightness set at 30 office tasks on this so documents
spreadsheets uh youtube browsing six hours and 55 minutes was what i was able to achieve out of
it which is all right for a 60 watt hour battery but of course if you do something very demanding
it's really going to bring down that battery life there so the things i like about the matebook d16
well the build quality very good really good keyboard backlit good touchpad great screen really
good webcam very good microphones that brought that through from the more expensive macbook
x pro series that i've also covered and reviewed too in the channel and it does have quite a bit of
features features packed into it with the huawei share we've got type c ports on them but we don't
have thunderbolt 4 with this and it doesn't use ddr5 ram and it does not have a pcie 4.0 spec
ssd so using last gen with some things but we do have the 12th gen now why have they done that
it's obvious they're trying to keep down the cost of it to deliver a lower price point so i really
hope that with a future model they could probably bring it out with also thunderbolt 4 but you need
to at this point get the more expensive matebook x pro line which will have that and the faster
ram and i do hope they start using pcie 4.0 spec ssds the only real con that i did encounter was
if you push it really hard in the performance mode which is increasing the power limit from
45 watts to 54 watts you ran into thermal throttling doing something very demanding
like running cine bench which i was looping there for 10 minutes it got up to 100 degrees celsius it
throttled it lowered the clocks and it did lower the performance a little bit apart from that it is
a fantastic 16-inch laptop that is really in the form factor of a 15.6 inch one with a great 1.7
kilo weight to it thanks a lot for watching this review do hope to see in the next one bye for now