The HP OmniBook Ultra has everything you tell yourself you want from a laptop—the pretty screen, clear audio, and strong performance with a top-end Intel chip. It comes in a shell so thin and light that I’d describe it as “frisbee-like,” except that I have no desire to remove this sturdy all-aluminum chassis from my lap, let alone toss it anywhere. (Though it definitely wouldn’t shatter if I did.)
Now, if only HP would stop shoving endless bloatware into its goddamn laptops and desktops, I could actually wholeheartedly recommend this product. I mention the eye-roll-inducing software bloat—such as the insistence that every one of these laptops needs an HP Smart printer app—because if there’s anywhere HP’s top-end OmniBook falters, it’s in annoying little features like this, which are characteristic of laptops that (used to) cost thousands of dollars less. The keyboard is fine to type on, but “just fine” doesn’t cut it when this laptop, configured with the Intel Core Ultra X9 388H and 2TB of SSD storage, as my review unit was, costs $2,400 from Best Buy (and more if you buy directly from HP). The lowest-end Intel Core Ultra 7 356H configuration of the OmiBook Ultra starts at $1,200, but you can get the laptop for closer to $2,000 with only 512GB of storage and the same chip. (We hate to see such a high price for such a limited SSD.) There are also several Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 variants, but they’re not that much less expensive.
