The first generation of Windows Copilot Plus PCs has the best battery life, and is even a few hundred dollars cheaper than Microsoft's new Surface Laptop. But it's also a dull one for the business class, with a mediocre display and a mediocre trackpad.
What's new from HP x“>OmniBook x 14 The Lenovo Yoga 920 is one of the first laptops to feature Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon x Elite processor. Like most we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and packed with ai. It starts at $1,150, with a 14-inch LCD, 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 displays and other amenities. The OmniBook, on the other hand, is almost a clone of the ai-pc%3Fmatchtype%3Dp%26adid%3D704994793626%26addisttype%3Dg%26jumpid%3Dps_com_nb_ns%26utm_medium%3Dps%26utm_source%3Dga%26utm_campaign%3DHP-Store_US_BRA_PS_BPS_OPEX_Google_All_SEM_All_SMB-Notebooks-DSA%26utm_term%3D%26matchtype%3D%26adid%3D706230022015%26addisttype%3Dg%26gad_source%3D1%26gclid%3DCjwKCAjwzIK1BhAuEiwAHQmU3inzCBn0T0rdjB8nF3gbBlekLleuNL2IOQa_WEZZqD1VCjvKFvmXDRoCs-wQAvD_BwE%26gclsrc%3Daw.ds%23techSpecs”>HP EliteBook Ultraa machine designed for high-volume office deployments, and it shows.
At 2.8 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 goal of most of these Copilot Plus PCs. And it comes closer to matching the battery life of the Air I was given at work than any other laptop we've tested.
The OmniBook x lasts me up to 15 hours of my typical workload, which includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music and Twitch streams in the background, and holding remote meetings. It rarely stutters or slows down, even when my active Chrome tabs swell to more than 20 or 30 on some virtual desktops. It holds a charge well overnight, even spending an entire weekend unplugged with the lid closed and losing only 10 percent of the battery.
This is the first time in a long time I’ve used a Windows laptop that doesn’t give me battery anxiety. It’s a welcome benefit of the Snapdragon x’s efficiency combined with the OmniBook’s generous 59Wh battery. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have larger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 60Hz, 16:10 IPS LCD uses less power than their brighter, faster OLED counterparts (more on that in a moment).
If battery life is more important to you than anything else, the OmniBook is worth considering. It's certainly a more concrete benefit than any of the overhyped ai features that make it a Copilot Plus PC. But the hardware it inherits from the EliteBook Ultra (like the touchpad, speakers, and display) makes those long hours away from the plug a torture.
The trackpad is fine enough, but its top-hinged clicking mechanism means you feel more resistance as you click along the top of the panel. It doesn’t feel as good as the modern haptics on MacBooks or the Surface Laptop, which let you click anywhere with ease. And two-finger right-clicks too often result in an unintentional left click. The only thing worse than something that doesn’t work is something that doesn’t work consistently.
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But that brings me to the speakers, who are consistent. badThey’re useful for video calls, but their downward orientation toward the front of the case makes music sound tinny when the laptop is on a desk. Place it on your lap, and it sounds like it’s underwater. The upward-facing speakers on many other laptops, including those beneath the MacBook Air’s keyboard, are far superior. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds slightly better, and the OmniBook’s only advantage is that its two speakers are about seven inches apart to give you a modicum of sonic headroom. But that position also means your wrists frequently block the speakers when you type.
The 14-inch LCD touchscreen with a 2240 x 1400 pixel resolution looks sharp and plenty colorful, covering the entire sRGB color space and 78 percent of DCI-P3 in my tests. The display’s claimed maximum brightness of 300 nits (337 nits in my tests) is fine indoors but pretty dim for outdoor use. If you sit by a bright window or go outside, you may feel like you’re trying to work in a mirror. Its refresh rate is a similarly modest 60Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD is twice as fast, gets nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, and supports HDR — for a similar price.
On the sides of the OmniBook, there are a total of four ports: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40Gbps and one 10Gbps, each capable of sending DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor), and on the right, a single USB-A (10Gbps) port alongside a 3.5mm headphone/mic combo jack. The chiclet-style keyboard feels nice to type on for long hours at a time, and it has a Copilot button that I bet you’ll use as little as I do. My only real complaint with the keyboard is the tall left and right arrow keys. I wish they were the same height as the down arrow, as it makes it a lot easier to find the keys without looking.
Windows support on Arm is already in a much better place than it was a few years ago now that the Snapdragon x is here and the first batch of Copilot Plus PCs are out in the wild. But if an app you absolutely need isn’t supported, the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) isn’t a good choice. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator are still either absent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a deal breaker. I hate editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely reorganized layout and shortcuts. App support should continue to improve, but you should never buy something now based on what it offers. can do in the future.
The OmniBook’s ai features are mostly boring and inconsequential, especially since Windows Recall remains behind schedule. These consist of the “ai Experiences” included with Copilot Plus PCs, plus HP’s ai Companion app. It’s basically bloatware — just another ChatGPT wrapper along with some hardware performance monitoring. (You can also download drivers. How innovative!) The current beta limits you to eight follow-up messages for each query, which I’m betting is to reduce the chances of hallucinations.
You can also send documents to ai Companion, which will attempt to summarize them. At an initial briefing with HP, a representative demonstrated how a hiring manager can upload three resumes and ask the ai to compare the candidates. I can't stress this enough: this is something You shouldn't do it.
A good display, touchpad, and speakers are staples of a modern laptop. Compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11 with high-refresh-rate displays and touchpads, the OmniBook x is mediocre, with the exception of its excellent battery life.
But the reason the OmniBook is a bit boring is because it’s a business laptop in disguise. Aside from the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s nearly identical to the EliteBook Ultra, which is the kind of “BoringBook” that corporate IT departments are churning out. The corporate world isn’t interested in giving you a bright, smooth OLED display or booming bass; it just wants you to feed the beast and get its job done with tools that are adequate and not too expensive.
If you really love battery life, then maybe the OmniBook is fine. But there’s no reason to pay a thousand dollars of your own money for this screen, those speakers, or that trackpad. You might be able to use the OmniBook x for 15 hours straight, but for roughly the same price, you can get something like the Surface Laptop, with a much better trackpad, screen, and speakers — even if you have to plug it in a little sooner.
Photography by Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
