Honor launched its first-ever laptop – the Honor MagicBook – for the Malaysian market back in April this year, and the Chinese company is set to introduce the successor here as early next week on 6 July. Sporting a sleeker design in a more lightweight chassis, the MagicBook 14 improves upon its predecessor quite a bit.

In fact, the MagicBook 14 was actually shown of here back in November last year before it was even made official. Compared to the first MagicBook, this updated model is a more compact laptop, thanks to the small bezels surrounding the screen. The bottom bezel is still quite thick, but that’s the case with most laptops in the market now anyway.

Besides that, the MagicBook 14 is also a more lightweight machine than its predecessor. It tips the scales at 1.38kg, making it ever so slightly lighter than the original MagicBook, which weighs 1.45kg. Not a huge difference, yes, but it’s always good to have a lighter, more compact laptop when you need to lug it around.

Honor Malaysia has not told us the MagicBook 14’s hardware yet for our local market, but the product page for the laptop is actually live on the company’s local website right now. According to the listing, it will be powered by the same AMD Ryzen 5 3500U processor as the previous model. Graphics are still handled by the integrated Radeon Vega 8 GPU as well.

Oddly enough, the product page also shows that the MagicBook 14 only features 256GB of SSD storage; that’s half of the first MagicBook’s much more generous 512GB SSD. Given the smaller drive capacity, it’ll be interesting to see exactly how much the laptop will be priced at, especially in comparison to the older model. Thankfully, it still ships with 8GB of RAM.

In the display department, the MagicBook 14 – as its name suggests – comes with a 14-inch 1920 x 1080 IPS screen. As mentioned, this laptop has slim bezels, and there isn’t even any space for the webcam. Instead, the webcam is hidden underneath the keyboard in a pop-up mechanism; a clever piece of engineering

Battery life of the MagicBook 14 is decent too: Honor promises that the 56WHr battery of the laptop can return up to 10 hours of use on a single charge.

The Honor MagicBook 14 will be launched in Malaysia next week on 6 July. We’ll find out then exactly how much the productivity laptop will be priced at for the local market.