There’s a lot of mysticism and technical lingo that goes into buying a notebook nowadays, with the kicker at the end always being a high price tag for a PC and the lingering feeling that you’re paying for something you may not want, may not need, or for nothing but a fancy brand name. To help you through that process we’re going to use the Huawei MateBook D series of notebooks to explain some of the concepts of notebook buying, and what you should look out for.
The Huawei MateBook D comes in two flavours – the D 14 and D 15. Some manufacturers use numbers in their notebook names to convey the sizes of the devices’ screens. In this case the D 14 has a 14inch screen, and the D 15 has a 15inch one.
Screens are measured diagonally from corner to corner. Converting to centimetres as that’s what we use in South Africa, that means that these notebooks have screens which are 35.56 and 38.1 centimetres respectively.
This size is one of the first things you should consider – a larger screen means more to look at, but more weight to carry around. While a larger size may mean more money at other companies, Huawei is charging the same for both of these notebooks – R13 499, which is extremely competitive when you consider the rest of the features, and the other notebooks on the market.
At the heart of every notebook is a central processing unit (CPU). If you’ve ever sat down at a notebook or desktop and found webpages taking ages to load, documents freezing, and a general sense of frustration, you’re likely using a CPU that is too slow or too old to do even the simplest of jobs.
Inside the Huawei MateBook D range is the AMD Ryzen 5 3500U. While that name alone may not mean a lot, this CPU is a recent processor that manages to balance performance while not sucking up all your battery power. This CPU has four cores and eight threads. While there’s a lot more technical information about cores and threads and how they work, you usually want more of each.
In notebooks, however, increasing these counts usually means sapping more power, so this CPU is a great choice for solid performance while leaving the battery in your notebook available for more hours. In that regard the MateBook D impresses again, with the smaller D 14 offering 9.5 hours of use from a full charge, and the larger D 15 at 6.5.
As for memory there are two types: random access memory (RAM) and storage. RAM can be seen as the short term memory of a device – what it can hold in the moment and work on. Storage is the long-term memory and is what is kept on your device permanently – your files, pictures, videos and more. RAM will always be a much lower number compared to your storage.
With these both more is better, and the MateBook D offers 8GB of RAM and 256 gigabytes of storage.
What makes those numbers more impressive is what kind of memory are used. The RAM here is the latest, fastest kind (DDR4) and the long-term storage is a PCIe SSD. The latter, again, the fastest and most reliable kind of permanent storage. This beats out not only mechanical, spinning hard drives, but also other kinds of solid state drives (SSDs).
Those are the most important internal parts of any computer, but you don’t want them packaged into something too large or unsightly. The MateBook D once again delivers with sleek metallic bodies, small bezels around the screen, and overall light weights even on the larger D 15 model.
Again both version of this notebook are available in South Africa for R13 499. While this is already a great deal a current promotion is offering the notebook, plus a mouse and a backpack provided for free, with these accessories valued at R1 598.
