Thin and sleek design. Beautiful, color-accurate OLED display. Great performance and battery life. Surprisingly full speakers.
TIRED
More expensive than the MacBook Air. OLED display is overly reflective. Limited configurations.
The MacBook Air remains hard to beat. With every new Windows laptop in this category I test, I'm always looking for the device that can truly challenge its dominance. Some laptops undercut it in price to achieve a better value, such as the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 5x. Others, like the HP OmniBook Ultra 14, try to go toe-to-toe in every aspect.
And while the OmniBook Ultra still falls short of knocking out the MacBook Air as the best overall laptop, it's one of the most compelling Windows alternatives I've tested in a long time.
Strong but Stylish
The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is a beautiful laptop. Refreshingly, it doesn't attempt to be a MacBook Air look-alike. It has its own distinct style, though it bears a strong resemblance to the 2026 Dell XPS 14—especially in its zero-lattice keyboard and haptic feedback trackpad. Those elements aren't just there for the minimalist aesthetic, either; they are tactile, responsive, and every bit as high-quality as the XPS 14 and MacBook Air.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The build quality is on point, too. While there's slightly more give in the lid than on a MacBook Air, it feels sturdy and premium. It opens easily with one finger, features an all-aluminum chassis, and feels great in the hand. It's also highly portable, giving it a distinct edge over the Dell XPS 14. Not only is it slightly thinner and lighter, but it's also much cheaper. Unfortunately, the retail price is now $1,900 despite initially launching at just $1,250.
For that price, you get an OLED display, 16 GB of RAM, 512 GB of storage, and a Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus processor. The catch? A MacBook Air with similar memory and storage configurations starts at $1,099 and frequently drops to $950 on Amazon. I'll dive deeper into that comparison later, but it's an important baseline to keep in mind.
Like its competitors, the OmniBook Ultra keeps things minimal with only USB-C ports and a headphone jack. There are two USB-C 4 ports on the right side and one on the left, all three of which support power delivery, display out, and 40-Gbps bandwidth. I appreciate being able to charge or connect from either side of the laptop—a nice advantage over the MacBook Air.
Confusing Configurations
Photograph: Luke Larsen
The excellent display is one of the first things you'll notice. It reaches up to 447 nits of brightness, and while the default sRGB mode feels a bit narrow for an OLED, switching to the dedicated “Photos & Video” mode delivers near-perfect color. I measured a Delta-E of 0.72 for color accuracy, which is among the best I've ever tested. My only real complaint is the highly reflective glass. While the screen is bright enough to overcome glare in most settings, you may find yourself cranking up the brightness more often than you'd like.
The model I tested isn't the base configuration, which only features a 1920 x 1200 display. While that's perfectly usable, the $60 upgrade to the 2880 x 1800, 120-Hz display is a no-brainer. Unfortunately, HP forces you to also upgrade the CPU to at least the 12-core Snapdragon X2 Elite to get it. It's a frustrating limitation, as the ideal configuration sits somewhere in the middle. This pricing structure is especially tough to swallow when HP sells budget laptops like the OmniBook 5 and OmniBook 3 with OLED displays for half the price. In fact, this configuration pushes closer in price to the base M5 MacBook Pro, which also includes twice the storage.
The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 Plus easily holds its own. Graphics performance received a massive improvement over the previous generation, even matching the M5 MacBook Air in benchmarks like 3DMark Steel Nomad Light. While that doesn't always translate to great real-world gaming, there is a lot more power here than you might expect. Multicore performance outpaces the M5, which is a huge plus for heavy multitasking. Paired with excellent color accuracy, this CPU power makes it a dream for photographers and graphic designers—even if the lack of a dedicated GPU keeps hardcore video editors at bay.
Photograph: Luke Larsen
Battery life is impressive, lasting 24 hours on a single charge with local video playback. This is comparable to both the latest Intel laptops and MacBooks.
The Snapdragon X2 Elite model adds even more multicore performance (with up to 18 cores), but it costs a lot more and doesn't add more battery life.
Regardless of the configuration you choose, the laptop comes with four built-in speakers and a 5-megapixel webcam. The speakers are surprisingly good, delivering a full sound that makes listening to music enjoyable—putting them right on par with the 13-inch MacBook Air. The webcam, however, isn't quite as impressive. While the 5-megapixel sensor ensures a sharp image, it struggles with harsh lighting. When I tested the camera with an open window nearby, it completely blew out the highlights and struggled to keep much detail on my face.
The MacBook Air remains tough to beat. It's cheaper while still being incredibly well rounded. The screen is sharper than the base version of the OmniBook Ultra, too. If you're ambivalent about choosing between macOS and Windows, I'd still recommend the MacBook Air.
However, the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 gets away with its higher price because of how it compares to comparable machines like the Dell XPS 14 and Surface Laptop 7th Edition, which are hundreds of dollars more. While I like all three options, the OmniBook Ultra 14 is more versatile, has a lower starting price, and is currently the only one to feature Qualcomm's next-gen chips.
Luke Larsen is a product writer and reviewer at WIRED, covering laptops, PCs, Macs, monitors, and the wider PC peripheral ecosystem. He’s been reporting on tech for over a decade, previously at Digital Trends as the senior editor in computing, where he spent seven years leading the publication’s daily coverage. ... Read More
<small>Source: Wired</small>
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