HP’s OmniBook X 14 is a barely disguised business laptop

The freshman class of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has its battery champ, and it’s even a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop. But it’s also business-class boring, with a middling screen and subpar trackpad.

HP’s new OmniBook X 14 is one of the first laptops with Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the ones we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and stuffed with AI fluff. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD screen, 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD — with an optional upgrade to a 1TB drive for $1,200, though it’s often on sale for less.

Most of the other Windows laptops we’ve seen with these new Arm chips have bright, beautiful screens and other creature comforts. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is a near-clone of the HP EliteBook Ultra, a machine built for high-volume office deployment, and it shows.

At 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is about the same size as the 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the mark most of these Copilot Plus PCs are gunning for. And it does come closer to the battery life of my work-issued Air than any other laptop we’ve tested.

The OmniBook X lasts me up to 15 hours of my regular workload, which includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music and background Twitch streams, and taking remote meetings. It rarely stutters or slows down, even as my active Chrome tabs swell to over 20 or 30 across a few virtual desktops. It holds its charge well overnight — even going a whole weekend unplugged with its lid closed and losing only 10 percent battery.