Honor MagicBook Art 14 innovates with a removable webcam – and backs it up with some impressive laptop specs

A laptop with a novel twist, but is it a good idea, or a foolish one?

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Honor has revealed a new MagicBook laptop which is a slick-looking device, and the notebook comes with a novel trick up its sleeve – a removable webcam.

The Honor MagicBook Art 14 (2024) is asvelte laptop(weighing a sliver over 1kg, and it’s 13mm thick), and its premium lines and a 14-inchOLEDdisplay with thin bezels aren’t troubled by having to fit in an integrated webcam.

That’s because, as mentioned, thewebcamis removable, and can be stored in a slot on the side of the laptop (as if it were a chunky SD card). As shown in an unboxing video highlighted byTom’s Hardware(see below), you simply pop out the webcam from its storage slot, and attach it to the top of the laptop lid (magnetically) – then you’re good to go.

The specs of the MagicBook Art 14 include theOLED displaysporting a sharp resolution of 3,120 x 2,080 (yes, it’s a 3:2 aspect ratio) and a 120Hz refresh rate.

The laptop also packs anIntelCore Ultra 5 125H or Core Ultra 7 155H CPU (Meteor Lake, 14 and 16-cores respectively) and a 1TB SDD, with speedy LPDDR5X system RAM. It’s no slouch, put it this way, but the downside is that as Tom’s observes, the Honor MagicBook Art 14 is only going to be on sale in China.

That said, it might come to other countries eventually, or more to the point, the idea for a detachable webcam that it ushers in could arrive on other laptops.

Analysis: Detachable reality

We always like to see a laptop with an innovative idea, and the webcam for the MagicBook Art 14 certainly qualifies in that respect.

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It’s a solution that has a few benefits. Firstly, when unattached, the webcam doesn’t spoil the premium look of the Art 14, as already mentioned. Secondly, in terms of privacy, you can be sure you’re safe from any prying eyes when the camera is removed and stored away (there’s no need for any unsightly black tape here). Thirdly, there’s the versatility of having a front-facing or rear camera at will, as you can attach the unit facing either way.

The obvious downside with this idea is that a removable camera is also a losable camera. That said, if you’re diligent and always put the webcam straight back in its storage slot after you’re done with the device, then it shouldn’t ever get lost. In theory, anyway.

Overall, we think this is a pretty smart idea, and it’ll be interesting to see if it catches on at all with other notebook makers out there.

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Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).

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