Tecno MegaBook T14 Air Review: Is This MacBook Look-Alike Worth It?

Tecno might be a brand you’re not familiar with, yet it consistently ranks between the 4th and 5th place in the smartphone market, trailing behind giants like Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi. A few years ago, Tecno ventured into the PC market, aiming to offer accessible and reliable computers for everyday use.

Last year, we reviewed their first entry-level MegaBook K15s, priced around 500 euros. However, due to significant technical limitations at this price point, the device made too many compromises to be convincing.

Nevertheless, Tecno is persisting and intensifying its efforts in the French market by launching several devices in the highly competitive 700-800 euro segment. We are testing here the MegaBook T14 Air, an ultraportable weighing less than a kilo with promising specs on paper.

Technical Specifications

The PC was lent by Tecno for this review.

First Impressions

Tecno presents us with a chassis made of aluminum alloy (specifically metal and an aluminum frame), but our initial impressions are not entirely positive. The feel is similar to the K15s we tested earlier this year, feeling more plastic than metallic to the touch.

The PC is notably light, staying under one kilogram like many other ultraportables on the market. Tecno boasts about its one-hand opening feature (something Apple also promised with its MacBook Neo). While this is practical in use, it’s necessary to stabilize the rest of the chassis with another hand to tilt the screen beyond a right angle, which is a bit disappointing.

Our test unit was also unstable on a flat surface, being wobbly at one corner depending on whether the screen was open or closed. We attribute this to a lack of quality control on these initial samples.

The design remains classic and understated with its gray metallic shell, a two-tone aesthetic due to its black keyboard, and fortunately, very thin screen bezels. Speaking of the keyboard, it offers a dry typing experience with a rather pleasant rebound, although a bit stiff for our taste. However, it features adjustable backlighting across four levels for low-light use.

The trackpad, on the other hand, provides a fairly comfortable and pleasant gliding surface, despite a very dry and audible click. There’s no haptic feedback at this price point. In use, it’s not the most pleasant to operate, unfortunately.

The port selection is slightly more limited than on the K15s tested earlier in the year. On the left side, there are two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, an HDMI 2.0 port, and one USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, plus a 3.5 mm mini-jack for connecting wired headphones. The presence of three USB ports and an HDMI port is commendable on this format. Many students will appreciate being able to easily connect their device to an external display or even a projector for watching movies and series.

Fortunately, this MegaBook also includes Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.4. It’s always possible that a manufacturer might cut corners here to save costs, but users will not be shortchanged in this case.

A Well-Contrasted Screen, But That’s About It

Upon testing the display of the Tecno MegaBook T14 Air, it became clear where the Chinese brand had focused its priorities. The 14-inch screen provides a standard resolution of 1920 by 1200 pixels (16:10 ratio) with a 60 Hz refresh rate.

While it does not support HDR, its contrast ratio is surprisingly high, at around 1760:1. We repeated our measurements several times because this value was so unexpected. But it must be said that the panel is very well contrasted, comparable to an IPS Black panel, for example. The visual comfort is undeniable at this level, and it’s one of the strong points of this MegaBook.

Unfortunately, the brightness struggles to exceed 300 cd/m², which inevitably makes it less versatile, especially outdoors.

In terms of color, the screen covers 95% of the sRGB color space, a bare minimum for enjoying web content with fidelity. While color accuracy is not impeccable at 4.5, what’s more regrettable is a color temperature that is far too cold at 7,458 K. The display will inevitably lean towards blue, with no possibility of correction.

Whether it’s browsing the web, viewing photos, videos, or movies, this MegaBook T14 Air can do the job, if you can overlook its color temperature.

Performance and Battery Life

Tecno has confirmed to us that this first batch of MegaBook PCs deliberately uses an older generation Intel chip to secure supply and control costs. This MegaBook T14 Air version features an Intel Core i5-1334U processor and its iGPU Iris Xe Graphics, paired with up to 16 GB of LPDDR5 RAM at 5200 MHz. The storage, an NVMe SSD on PCIe 4.0, can go up to 1 TB.

We used the machine for several hours in a typical office configuration: about ten Chrome tabs open and a few background applications running (Spotify, Slack, Notion). We managed a full workday without any significant hitches or stubborn stutters, although we’ve seen better responsiveness at this level, especially regarding the behavior of certain applications or during the most demanding multitasking scenarios.

In terms of benchmarks, the MegaBook T14 Air performs similarly to a MacBook Air M1 (a 2020 machine, remember), which is still 5 to 6% more powerful than it in multi-core CPU performance. However, compared to the MacBook Neo, the Tecno has a considerable advantage in multi-core performance, about 38% higher.

However, the machine struggles in single-core tests compared to the competition, reflecting our less than perfect experience with the overall responsiveness of applications (launch times, navigation in the interface). It is the third slowest machine in our tests in this category, with a 25 to 40% gap observable in various single-core processor benchmarks compared to the MacBook Neo. Here, the dated Intel chip unsurprisingly limits the PC’s performance, without making it non-recommendable. It remains pleasant to use for everyday tasks, as long as you do not push it to its limits.

The SSD, on the other hand, proves to be much faster than many machines in its category, with sequential read (5.3 GB/s) and write (2.8 GB/s) speeds at the level of the PCIe 4.0 standard for a mid-range PC.

Disappointingly Short Battery Life

Unfortunately, it’s in terms of battery life that this MegaBook T14 Air falls short compared to the competition. Setting the machine to 50% brightness on Wi-Fi with simple office activities and music playback on a Bluetooth headset, we managed only 4 hours and 33 minutes.

This is far from the ten hours of the similarly priced MacBook Neo, even though the Tecno maintains significantly superior multi-core power, as seen earlier.

You might reach close to 6 hours by turning off Bluetooth, but that would be quite limiting if you’re used to listening to music while working. Here, the aging Raptor Lake architecture can’t work miracles.

Price and Availability

The Tecno MegaBook T14 Air is priced at 829 euros for the 512 GB storage version, and 879 euros for the 1 TB version.

This pricing pits the T14 Air directly against the MacBook Neo, whose price has recently increased: Apple now charges 799 euros for its cheapest laptop in the base version, and 899 euros for the 512 GB storage version with the Touch ID reader, compared to 699 euros at its launch in March 2026.