The new Windows Copilot Plus PC is the battery champion and costs hundreds of dollars less than Microsoft’s new Surface Laptop, but it’s a boring business-class machine with a mediocre screen and a subpar trackpad.
HP’s new OmniBook X 14 is one of the first laptops to feature Qualcomm’s Arm-based Snapdragon X Elite processor. Like most of the models we’ve seen so far, it’s a thin and light machine aimed at productivity tasks and packed with AI features. It starts at $1,150 and comes with a 14-inch LCD screen, a 12-core processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. An optional upgrade to a 1TB drive costs $1,200, but it’s often available for less.
Most other Windows laptops powered by these new Arm chips have bright, beautiful screens and other niceties, but the OmniBook is a near-clone of the HP EliteBook Ultra, a machine made for mass office deployment, and it shows.
Pros
Great all-day battery life and standby time Overall solid performance for productivity tasks Great chiclet-style keyboard White finish looks and feels great
Cons
Windows on Arm compatibility issues, screen not bright enough for outdoor use, some of the worst speakers I’ve heard recently, frustratingly unstable two-finger right-click, stiff hinges that make it difficult to open one-handed, and AI features that are still mostly just marketing hype
Weighing in at 2.97 pounds and just over half an inch thick, the OmniBook X is roughly the same size as a 13-inch MacBook Air, which seems to be the goal for most of these Copilot Plus PCs. It’s also closer to the battery life of my work-issued Air than any other laptop I’ve tested.
The OmniBook X lasts up to 15 hours with a typical workload that includes lots of open Chrome tabs, listening to music, a background Twitch stream, and remote meetings. There’s virtually no stuttering or slowdown, even when the number of active Chrome tabs swells to 20 or 30 or more across several virtual desktops. A charge lasts through the night, and the battery only drains to 10% even when left unplugged and with the lid closed all weekend.
It’s been a while since I’ve had a Windows laptop where I didn’t have to worry about battery life, so the efficiency of the Snapdragon X combined with the OmniBook’s massive 59Wh battery is a welcome bonus. Other Copilot Plus PCs, like the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x and Samsung Galaxy Book4 Edge, actually have bigger batteries, but the OmniBook’s 16:10 60Hz IPS LCD uses less power than brighter and faster OLED displays (more on that later).
If battery life is paramount, the OmniBook is worth considering — a more tangible benefit than any of the overhyped AI features that make it a Copilot Plus PC — but the hardware inherited from the EliteBook Ultra, including the trackpad, speakers, and screen, make extended use away from a power outlet a pain.
The trackpad is mostly fine, but the top-hinged clicking mechanism means there’s more resistance the more you click the top of the pad. It’s not as comfortable as the newer haptic trackpads on the MacBook and Surface Laptop, where you can click anywhere with ease, and two-finger right-clicking often results in unintentional left-clicking. The only thing worse than one that doesn’t work is one that doesn’t work consistently.
1/3
But speaking of speakers, they are consistently bad. While they are usable for video calling, they fire sound downwards towards the front of the case, making music sound thin when the laptop is on a desk. When placed on your lap, they sound underwater. Many other laptops’ upward-firing speakers, including those under the keyboard on the MacBook Air, are much better. Even my iPhone 15 Pro sounds a little better, with the OmniBook’s only advantage being that the two speakers are spaced about 7 inches apart, offering just a tiny bit of sound field. But that placement also means that my wrists frequently block the speakers when typing.
The 14-inch, 2240 x 1400-resolution touchscreen LCD is sharp and fairly colorful, covering the full sRGB color space and 78% DCI-P3 in my testing. The screen’s maximum brightness is 300 nits (337 nits in my testing), which is fine indoors but quite dim for outdoor use. If you sit next to a bright window or go outside, you might feel like you’re working in a mirror. The refresh rate is a similarly modest 60 Hz. By comparison, the new Surface Laptop’s LCD screen is twice as fast, nearly twice as bright, has more accurate colors, supports HDR, and costs the same.
The OmniBook has a total of four ports on its sides: two USB-C PD ports on the left (one 40Gbps, the other 10Gbps, each capable of DisplayPort 1.4a output to a monitor), and one USB-A port (10Gbps) and a 3.5mm combo headphone/mic jack on the right. The chiclet-style keyboard is comfortable for hours of continuous typing, and it also has a Copilot button, though I expect you’ll use it as infrequently as I do. My only complaint about the keyboard is that the left and right arrow keys are high. I’d prefer them to be at the same height as the down arrow key, so you can easily find the keys without looking.
With the Snapdragon X now here and the first batch of Copilot Plus PCs in circulation, support for Windows on Arm is much better than it was a few years ago. But the OmniBook (or any Arm PC) is useless if the apps you absolutely need aren’t supported. Programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Illustrator are either nonexistent or limited to emulation for now. For me, the lack of Adobe Lightroom Classic is a killer. I hate editing photos in Lightroom CC, with its completely reorganized layout and shortcuts. App compatibility should continue to improve, but you shouldn’t buy something now based on what it will be in the future.
The OmniBook’s AI features are mostly boring and inconsequential, especially since Windows Recall has lagged behind. These include the “AI Experience” that ships with the Copilot Plus PC, and HP’s AI Companion app. It’s basically bloatware; it’s just a ChatGPT wrapper with added hardware performance monitoring (you can also download the drivers – how innovative!). The current beta version limits each inquiry to eight follow-up prompts, which I think is to limit the chance of hallucinations.
You can also input a document into the AI Companion, and the AI will try to summarize it. In an early briefing with HP, we described how a recruiter could upload three resumes and have the AI compare the candidates. We can’t stress enough that this is something you should never do.
A good screen, trackpad and speakers are must-haves for any modern laptop, and compared to competitors like the new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro 11, which have high-refresh-rate displays and haptic trackpads, the OmniBook X is lackluster, except for its excellent battery life.
But the OmniBook is a bit ordinary because it’s a corporate laptop masquerading as such. Apart from the color options, Wi-Fi card, and Bluetooth radio, it’s pretty much the same as the EliteBook Ultra, the “boring book” that corporate IT departments churn out. The corporate world isn’t interested in entertaining you with bright, smooth OLED displays and booming bass; it just wants you to feed the beast and get the job done with the right, not-too-expensive tools.
If you really worship battery life, the OmniBook will do the trick, but you don’t need to shell out $1,000 of your own money for this screen, those speakers, and that trackpad. The OmniBook X might last 15 hours straight, but for about the same price you can get something like the Surface Laptop, which has a much better trackpad, screen, and speakers, but you’ll have to charge it a little faster.
Photo by Antonio G. Di Benedetto/The Verge
