HP is simplifying its lineup and adding “AI” laptops

Buying a laptop from a major maker like HP can be infuriating — mainly because there are too many options. HP and other laptop makers do this to give us all “choice,” but if you are the kind of person who uses “RAM” and “storage” interchangeably, those choices can be confounding — which might be one reason HP’s using today’s big AI and Windows on Arm moment to also clean up its whole lineup.

Gone are the Envys and Pavilions and Dragonflies, and in their places are the consumer-focused OmniBook and the corporate-oriented EliteBook and ProBook. In both cases, the idea is to simplify things for people who just want to buy a laptop.

Yet, you’ll still need a legend to fully decipher things. I’ll link the HP-provided charts below, but as an example, HP’s new “AI PCs” are called the HP OmniBook X AI and the HP EliteBook Ultra AI. Each of those is still a mouthful of a name. But boy, they’re some nice-looking laptops, too. The white OmniBook X AI is particularly eye-catching, and I found myself drawn to it the most when I got a quick hands-on with the laptops in New York City last week.

I was there to get a rundown on the new exercise in branding and talk about what exactly HP means when it says AI PC. (I also got a look at the new laptops, but they weren’t powered on, and I didn’t take photos.) That’s a phrase that you’re going to hear bandied about a lot as Qualcomm launches its new Snapdragon X Elite processors and Microsoft leans further into the AI fad.

For HP, the biggest distinction between an AI laptop and a normal one is the neural processing unit, or NPU. It needs to be capable of at least 40 trillion operations per second. The new OmniBook X AI and EliteBook Ultra AI laptops both include the Snapdragon X Elite 12-core CPUs, which Qualcomm claims are capable of 45 TOPS — hence why they get the “AI” name.

When I asked Pierre-Antoine Robineau and Cory McElroy — VPs of HP’s consumer and commercial portfolios, respectively — what that would actually mean for normal people, they were quick to note that the AI revolution, as it were, is in its early days and that a big part of the appeal of these new laptops and later AI PCs is futureproofing. But they also noted it would be useful for those who rely on AI workflows today and would be able to help with things like translation and accessibility.

Many of HP’s AI features are fairly mundane. You’ll be able to access a prompt window for ChatGPT-3.5 on HP’s AI laptops using its built-in AI Companion software. That software also includes AI-powered performance optimization for the computer, similar to what Nvidia has been doing for years with DLSS. There’s also a new app called Poly Camera Pro that leans on what HP’s learned from its Poly videoconferencing brand to give you a bunch of AI-powered camera controls like blurred backgrounds, filters, and auto-framing. Crucially, Poly Camera Pro should work with any webcam, not just the built-in one, and should work with most major videoconferencing apps, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Meet.

Beyond the new software features and Snapdragon processors, the OmniBook X AI and EliteBook Ultra AI are what you’d expect from HP’s high-end laptops. Both are thin (just 0.55 inches at their thinnest and 0.57 inches at their thickest) and pleasantly light (2.97 pounds). Both feature built-in webcam covers that are so nicely integrated that you wonder why they’re not standard on every laptop from every laptop maker. They both start at 16GB of RAM and have 14-inch, 2240 x 1400 touch displays — though the OmniBook maxes out at 32GB of RAM, while the EliteBook tops out at 16GB.

McElroy claimed they’re about 17 percent faster than a similarly specced MacBook Pro with an M3 processor. HP chose to compare its new laptops to the MacBook Pro instead of the Air because both the MacBook Pro and HP’s laptops use small fans to keep their Arm processors cool, while the Air uses passive cooling.

As for battery life, those claims were similarly impressive. They said they’re getting about 22 hours of battery life when just playing back Netflix and a whopping 20 days of standby battery life.

The OmniBook X AI will start at $1,199.99 with 1TB of storage and begin shipping on June 18th. The EliteBook Ultra AI will start at $1,699.99 and begin shipping the same day.

There are still a lot of unanswered questions for HP, Qualcomm, and Microsoft when it comes to these new laptops. Are they really as fast as what Apple’s doing? Will “AI PC” actually matter to people? We’ll get more clarity closer to the launch of these laptops when we review them.