Huawei Upgrades Its MacBook Pro Clone With a Hidden Camera That Looks up Your Nose

Huawei is introducing a major upgrade to its MacBook Pro clone, the MateBook X, at MWC in Barcelona today. The company today introduced the MateBook X Pro, a new addition to the company’s MateBook X line with a significant power boost and improved design.

Looks wise, the new MateBook X Pro’s 13.9-inch display looks absolutely beautiful because of the tiny bezels surrounding it. The display has a 91% screen-to-body ratio, and it looks pretty neat when compared to the MacBook Pro where the bezels are still quite huge. The compromise? Well, due to the tiny bezels, Huawei can’t actually fit the webcam into the display portion of the device and has instead opted for an interesting position: the keyboard.

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Image by Vlad Savov for The Verge

The MateBook X Pro has a dedicated camera key on the keyboard and tapping on it will automatically open the pop-up webcam. This means the webcam will always be looking up your nose, although it’s actually an effective solution for those concerned about privacy. Moreover, this seems like a much better solution when compared to Dell’s XPS 13 devices where the webcam is placed in the bottom bezel of the device and deter the design of the laptop. And plus, this is probably more elegant than a notch.

Performance wise, Huawei has upgraded the processor of the device with an 8th gen Intel Core i5/i7 quad-core processors. The device now comes with a discrete NVIDIA GeForce MX150 GPU with 2GB of GDDR5 RAM which means it’s not fanless. And for the battery, Huawei promises to offer up to 14 hours of battery life with the 57.4Wh battery.

Prices of the MateBook X Pro start at €1499 for the base Core i5 (8GB RAM/ 256GB storage) model and goes up to €1899 for the i7 variant with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage — both available this Spring. The company is also launching two new Android tablets at MWC today.

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Conversation 9 comments

  • chrisrut

    Premium Member
    25 February, 2018 - 10:47 am

    <p>I hereby nominate this for "Best headline so far in 2018." </p><p>LOL on a Sunday morning… :-)</p>

  • Jeffery Commaroto

    25 February, 2018 - 1:22 pm

    <p>I would like it better if manufacturers started skipping the webcams altogether. Quality is always better on an external, angles are better and as we move away from bezels it would be one less thing to design around. I personally black tape the onboard and see more people doing that out in the wild.</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      26 February, 2018 - 2:17 am

      <blockquote><a href="#248489"><em>In reply to Jeffery_Commaroto:</em></a></blockquote><p>Exactly. I have had cameras on my notebooks since 2004, each has been taped over and never used. This is a waste of money and space for many users. If I actually need to do a video conference, I'll plug in an external camera with a decent lens and sensor.</p>

  • Purian23

    25 February, 2018 - 2:02 pm

    <p>Elevate the Conversation!</p><p>Join Thurrott Premium to enjoy our Premium comments.</p><p><br></p><p>Premium member comments on news posts will feature an elevated status that increases their visibility. This tab would allow you to participate in Premium comments with other premium members. Register to join the other Premium members in elevating the conversation!</p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p>What happened to getting rid of this crap and putting comments from "normal" people as one? From one standard user to all others. </p>

    • IanYates82

      Premium Member
      25 February, 2018 - 4:11 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#248502"><em>In reply to Purian23:</em></a></blockquote><p>Premium user here….</p><p><br></p><p>I agree!!</p><p>The separation of comments is unhelpful for everyone. By all means they can still put a nice background or something on a premium user's comments so they stand out, albeit I don't care if zero people read my occasional comments. </p><p>There's still plenty of crazy opinion, trolling and snark in the premium side so the gated aspect of it, where hopefully the dialog would be better, isn't working to its full capacity. Maybe I don't see the articles fresh and the standard comments are usually full of spam, helpfully cleaned up by the time I get here?</p>

      • SvenJ

        25 February, 2018 - 5:14 pm

        <blockquote><a href="#248543"><em>In reply to IanYates82:</em></a> Another thumbs up from a premie.</blockquote><p><br></p>

  • skane2600

    25 February, 2018 - 2:55 pm

    <p>While I understand the temptation to make everything about Apple, in the computer industry the word "clone" has a specific meaning. It doesn't mean "looks like" or "inspired by". It means "functions identically". Unless this computer is shipped with the MacOS, it isn't a clone.</p>

  • IanYates82

    Premium Member
    25 February, 2018 - 4:07 pm

    <p>The camera thing doesn't bother me. It is a pretty elegant solution. Sitting in a hotel room at the moment, typing on the laptop at a desk, I think the angle would be fine. If I was hunched over the machine then it certainly wouldn't work, but I wouldn't want to teleconference that way anyway.</p><p><br></p><p>The webcam is an important part of a laptop – it needs to remain. For the occasional Skype call it's perfect and it definitely wouldn't be worth carrying an external one around.</p><p><br></p><p>I'll check out their tablets too. Not in the market at the moment but it's nice to know what's coming down the pipe.</p>

  • SvenJ

    25 February, 2018 - 5:13 pm

    <p>Look at it this way. You can look down your nose at everyone else.</p>

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