A few years ago, we ranked the coolest laptops of all time. However, new additions to it have been few and far between. MSI has been one breath of fresh air in this space, thanks to its epic Dragon Tiamat gaming laptop which was designed to look like an ancient Babylonian tablet. But, at Computex this year, we were introduced to MSI’s new Artisan Collection of laptops which had a traditional, Japanese lacquered finish. It was spearheaded by the Prestige 13 AI+ Ukiyo-e Edition and, well, just look at it!
We’ve since seen it draw crowds at various trade shows but recently High Performance Laptops teamed-up with MSI to tell you what it’s like to actually live with.
The Most Prestigious Prestige
If you’re going to make a drop-dead gorgeous, desirable laptop then it makes sense to base it on the bones of a premium model and that’s just what MSI has done. We’ve been fans of the Prestige range for some time thanks to its business-class, robustness, ultraportability and power. Particularly notable models include the bright pink Prestige 14 A10SC which even sported a discreet GPU for gaming. But the Ukiyo-e leaves them all in the dust.
The exterior has been crafted by Yamanaka, a Japanese artisan company whose OKADAYA lacquerware uses gold leaf powder, multi-layer printing techniques and traditional, inlayed maki-e artistry (that has a 400-year-old legacy) to produce an instantly-recognisable scene inspired by Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa.’ This juxtaposes with MSI’s ultra-modern lightweight, magnesium-aluminium alloy chassis to produce an ultraportable laptop that’s sumptuous in its look and feel, and robust and lightweight at just 990g. Each laptop has even been signed by the artist that hand-decorated it.
The result is something that is essentially a piece of art that turns the head of everyone who sees it.
Quality You Can Feel
The design elements carry through to the interior. Opening it up reveals a black palm rest and gold-renderings of both the modern MSI moniker and its old geometric logo. However, the star of the show is actually the keyboard. Each key has a black, lacquered finish that transforms each dull, stark, hard-lined, mundane tile into a smooth-textured, polished gem that’s organic in nature. Far from being a form-over-function gimmick, the keys feel particularly comfortable and accurate to type upon owing to their tactile, silky-smooth finish and, in all seriousness, we kept catching ourselves, ahem, stroking them.
Regular readers will be aware of our intolerance of squished arrow keys which erupts into hatred when combined with squished Page Up and Page Down keys but, get this, the finish, the spacing and the layout mean that choosing which of these tightly grouped buttons to press is intuitive and accurate to a degree that opens-up new productivity gains.
Oh, and these glossy black jewels also have gold backlighting to make everything look even awesomer. It’s the best-looking and maybe even the most comfortable and accurate keyboard we’ve ever used. The neighbouring trackpad (and its smooth, quiet button actuations) partners it well.
Drawbacks? Nope
It would be fair to assume that there are compromises that come with such a laptop but, the rest of the features and ergonomics are also top-drawer. The 2,880 x 1,800 Samsung OLED display provides plenty of desktop real estate on the diminutive 13-inch screen – which we used comfortably at multiple magnifications according to whether we were working on text documents (where we appreciated the larger fonts) or large spreadsheets (where we needed to see as much information as possible.
Being an OLED means that colours are vibrant, contrast total and blacks are true, but it’s also HDR compliant which further improves detail reproduction in bright and dark areas (simultaneously). Both colourful and monochromatic transitions are rendered smoothly without stepping or artefacts. It’s colour accurate to the point where it displays 100 per cent of the tricky DCI-P3 colour space, too.
Above the screen is a high-resolution, 1,440p webcam plus a microphone array that supports 3D noise reduction for premium web-conferencing. It has a hardware privacy slide plus Smart Guard technology that checks whether anyone is sneaking a look at your screen. It’s also partnered by an infra-red module for Windows Hello facial log-in and there’s a fingerprint reader (embedded in the power button) that does likewise.
Two, 2-Watt speakers reside within the svelte 13mm-thick chassis and provide, surprisingly, well-rounded, punchy audio.
Connectivity includes two Thunderbolt 4 ports, a USB-A 3.2 Gen 1 port, an HDMI 2.1 port, a 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD card reader. Inside there’s Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4. There are plenty of large, premium laptops that don’t carry such a complete connectivity complement.
Portable Performance
MSI hasn’t scrimped on the power, either. The Prestige 13 AI+ Ukiyo-e Edition is powered by one of Intel’s best laptop processors, the Intel Core Ultra 9 288V. This is partnered with 32GB of low-powered LPDDR5-8533 RAM and a large, 2TB NVMe hard drive. While our engineering sample didn’t warrant our rigorous benchmarking procedures, we can attest to the fact that it happily performed office tasks, web browsing and multimedia editing in a manner that we’ve come to expect from such hardware. Even more impressively, it did so without getting warm or noisy.
We also couldn’t properly test the battery life, but can again attest to the fact that it survived a full day unplugged at a conference, performing the above tasks, without dropping below 60 per cent (thanks to the sizeable 75Wh battery).
There’s no doubt that you’ll need to treat the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Ukiyo-e Edition better than a regular laptop, but, you’ll want to. The smart microfibre cloth case helps in this regard as it can also be used to wipe-away any fingerprints. We also recommend using the keyboard-covering cloth that it comes with, to ensure the non-uniform keys don’t imprint upon the screen. But aside from the kid gloves, not too that it’s also a business-class laptop that’s military-grade MIL-STD-810H certified for toughness – just treat it like it isn’t.
Other accessories include a small, glossy, wireless mouse with matching colour scheme; a large complimentary mouse mat; a matching ID badge holder; and a smart, presentation case. Another addition is the special MSI Center S laptop-management app which has been given a facelift so that the software matches the hardware in appearance.
We review a great many laptops at High Performance Laptops and I suspect that if we manage to fully review the MSI Prestige 13 AI+ Ukiyo-e Edition, we’ll be just as gushing… there’ll just be some additional hard data to back everything up. At the end of the day, it’s a superlative ultraportable – even without all the decoration.
Right now, we’re figuring out how to tell MSI that they can’t have it back. While the price hasn’t yet been announced, we expect that it might be one of those super-rare tech items that holds its value, making the inevitable premium well worth paying. If you’ve got the means and want a high-performing ultraportable laptop, that will very likely put every rival to shame by almost every metric, buy one of these before they’re all gone.
Related: Check out MSI’s Black Friday Laptop Sale
Last Updated on 17 November 2025 by Nick Ross
