HP Pavilion Aero 13 Review: Great Package for the Price but Missing a Key Ingredient

7.6/ 10
SCORE

HP Pavilion Aero 13

Pros

• Affordable price for its overall performance and all-metal design
• Less than 2.2 pounds
• High-resolution 2.5K display
• High-resolution 1440p webcam

Cons

• Battery life is below average
• 13.3-inch display can feel cramped
• Plastic display bezels look cheap
• No USB4 ports

When we first looked at the HP Pavilion Aero 13 over three years ago, its nearly 11-hour runtime was impressive. Like the 2021 model, the latest Aero 13 features an AMD CPU inside a compact, lightweight magnesium-aluminum chassis. And it supplies you with similar battery life. These days, a runtime of 10 or 11 hours is less impressive for an ultraportable with which you’ll likely want to roam for long stretches without worrying about retreating to a power outlet.

The greatest improvement for laptops in the last few years has been battery life. The longest-running laptops currently are thin-and-light Copilot Plus PCs with ARM-based Qualcomm Snapdragon X CPUs that double the Aero 13’s battery life, including HP’s own OmniBook X 14 and Microsoft’s excellent Surface Laptop 7. There are other AMD-based models along with Intel chips that last hours longer. The Pavilion Aero 13 still offers steady performance and sleek looks for an unbeatable price, but its roughly 10-hour runtime now feels limiting.

HP offers one fixed configuration of the Pavilion Aero 13 in the US and a customizable model. The fixed config is priced at $1,000 (and has been on sale for $720 during the time I’ve been tracking it) for an AMD Ryzen 7 8840U CPU, 16GB of RAM, integrated AMD Radeon graphics, a 512GB SSD and a 13.3-inch non-touch display with a 1,920×1,200-pixel resolution.

We reviewed the customizable model (13z-bg000). It starts at $900 (discounted to $570) and features the same specs as the fixed config but with a step-down in CPU to the Ryzen 7 8640U. Our test system features the display upgrade to a 2,560×1,600 non-touch panel that adds $60 to the price. I think that’s money well spent for the shaper picture.

HP offers a pair of very similar CPU upgrades in the Ryzen 7 8840U or Ryzen 7 8840HS for $100 or $150, respectively. For an ultraportable with a fairly small screen and an integrated GPU, I doubt many buyers will use the Aero 13 for heavy lifting so I’d recommend sticking with the default Ryzen 5 chip. 

You can also double the storage to a 1TB SSD for $90, and swap the silver chassis for a color HP calls Sky Blue for $29. We received the Aero 13 in silver.

The lone HP Pavilion Aero 13 model available in the UK is on sale at the time of this review for £549. It offers the same configuration as our test system but with a lower-resolution display. There are multiple configurations starting at a sale price of AU$1,439 in Australia. 

HP Pavilion Aero 13 performance

Our Ryzen 5-based Pavilion Aero 13 turned in steady performance in lab testing. It wasn’t the fastest among a group of thin-and-light laptops with Intel Core Ultra or Qualcomm Snapdragon X processors as well as a Lenovo Yoga 7 14 Gen 9 that has the step-up AMD Ryzen 7 8840HS and the M3 MacBook Air. These competing systems, however, cost more than our $630 Aero 13 review unit. So, the performance it provides is certainly acceptable. It finished near the back of the pack on our application benchmarks but did manage to consistently beat the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4 that’s based on a Core Ultra 5 125U CPU. 

And you shouldn’t read too much into the Aero 13 topping the HP Omnibook X 14 and Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 on the 3DMark Time Spy benchmark. Those two Qualcomm Snapdragon X-based Copilot Plus PCs had to use an emulator for this test because Time Spy doesn’t run natively on ARM.

The most disappointing result for the Aero 13 occurred in battery testing. It lasted 10 hours and 12 minutes on our video streaming battery drain test. That’s 28 minutes shorter than the Aero 13 from 2021 lasted and 30 minutes shorter than the 2023 version we tested with an AMD Ryzen 5 7535U. All three systems feature the same 3-cell, 47-watt-hour battery, but the current system features the higher-resolution, 2.5K display, which is likely the reason for the shorter runtime. (More pixels to power results in a greater drain on battery resources.) 

That it offers no gains in battery life from its three-year-old predecessor is less dispiriting than when you put its roughly 10-hour battery life up against today’s laptops. HP’s OmniBook X offers nearly 2.5 times the battery life at more than 25 hours. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 and M3 MacBook Air offer nearly double the runtime of the Aero 13, while Lenovo ThinkBook 14 2-in-1 Gen 4, Acer Swift Go 14 and Lenovo Yoga 7 14 Gen 9 all can run for hours and hours longer. 

For such a compact and portable laptop, the Aero 13’s battery life is doubly disappointing. And given the lengthy runtime you can get with competing models, I’m surprised HP didn’t outfit the Aero 13 with a larger battery even if it meant adding a bit of weight to the system. Still, finding a laptop that weighs about a kilogram and is regularly less than $600 is not easy to find. 

Light as air-o

The chief attraction to the Pavilion Aero 13 is its thin, light and compact magnesium-aluminum chassis. The 13.3-inch display is smaller than that of the 13.6-inch MacBook Air and 14-inch Windows models such as the HP OmniBook X 14 and Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441, but the sacrifice you make in screen size results in a lighter weight. The Aero 13 weighs just 2.16 pounds — or just under 1 kilogram. That’s a half a pound lighter than the 2.7-pound MacBook Air, which is also an excellent travel companion. Most 14-inch laptops are about 3 pounds — the  HP OmniBook X 14 weighs 2.9 pounds, and the Dell Inspiron 14 Plus 7441 at 3.2 pounds is more than a pound heavier than the Aero 13. 

There is some flex magnesium-aluminum enclosure — it’s not as solid and rigid as the MacBook Air — but the Aero 13 still threads the needle of being extremely light without feeling flimsy. It certainly looks more expensive than its price. The only part of the design that hints at its budget status is the plastic display bezels. They don’t look nearly as polished as the edge-to-edge glass displays you get with the MacBook Air or OmniBook X 14.

The biggest change HP made to the Aero 13 since we last looked at it was ditching the silver, low-contrast keyboard for one with dark gray, easy-to-read keys. It’s a big improvement. HP also did away with the right-most column of Home, End, Pg-up and -down keys to make the keyboard slightly roomier. The keys themselves offer springy feedback that I enjoyed. The typing experience on the Aero 13 is better than it has a right to be given how compact and thin the laptop is. 

The touchpad is a bit undersized but is one of the better mechanical-click touchpads I’ve encountered. Its click response isn’t as lively (and customizable) as you get with the haptic touchpad on the MacBook Air or Surface Laptop 7, but such a luxury is out of reach for the low-cost Aero 13. And its touchpad offers a fairly consistent click response across its surface; clicks near the top feel only slightly firmer than toward the bottom of the touchpad. 

Most laptops have shifted from 13.3-inch and 15.6-inch displays to 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, but HP sticks with a 13.3-inch screen for the Aero 13. It still has a taller 16:10 aspect ratio than the widescreen 16:9 ratio usually found on 13.3-inch and 15.6-inch panels. However, the Aero 13’s display definitely feels more cramped than a 14-inch, 16:10 display, but that’s the tradeoff you must make for its extreme portability. 

Side-by-side multitasking is a challenge on the Aero 13 — there’s just not a lot of room to juggle multiple windows. Working with Google Docs and Sheets and using Gmail felt fine, but I would want to connect to an external display if I were buying the Aero 13 as my primary work computer. On the flip side, it’s a great choice if your job has you on the go each day. And its lightweight and low price make it a good fit for students.

Our Aero 13 test system featured the display upgrade to a 2,560×1,600 panel, and it’s well worth the $60. That’s a reasonable sum for a crisper image — text and images looked super sharp. Both the standard ful-HD and step-up 2.5K display options are rated for 400 nits of brightness, which is considerably more than the 250- and 300-nit panels you often find at the Aero 13’s price. And the 2.5K display on our test system proved to be even a bit brighter than its rating. I measured a peak brightness of 444 nits with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter. Color performance was merely good for its class, with 99% coverage of the sRGB gamut but only 79% of P3.

The speakers are predictably terrible. It’s difficult to include anything more than a pair of tiny stereo speakers on a laptop as thin and compact as the Aero 13, but its speakers produced tinny, underwhelming sound.

The webcam is the opposite of terrible. It’s a 5-megapixel camera that can capture 1440p video. Its picture looked sharp with a well-balanced exposure and accurate color. It’s certainly up to the task for regular Zoom calls and Teams chats. And the Ryzen 7 8000-series processor has a neural processing unit (NPU) that gives access to some but not all of the AI-assisted Windows Studio Effects. You get the automatic framing, eye contact and background effects but not portrait light or creative filters that require a more advanced NPU with a higher TOPS count. The webcam also features an IR sensor for facial recognition logins, and there’s a physical shutter you can slide across the lens to protect your privacy.

The Aero 13 offers a decent selection of ports, but none of the USB ports are fast. The two USB-C ports offer only 10Gbps speed, which is only a fraction of the 40Gbps you’d get with Thunderbolt 4 or USB4. Our test system features Wi-Fi 6, but you can upgrade to Wi-Fi 6E for only $10 more — that’s a no-brainer for access to the faster 6GHz band.

Is the HP Pavilion Aero 13 a good laptop?

With better battery life and performance that’s more competitive with today’s long-running laptops, the HP Pavilion Aero 13 might have kept the Editors’ Choice award it received back in 2021. As it stands, however, this current version falls short of the award. It’s still an excellent little laptop, especially at its low price. The Aero 13 offers a great mix of extreme portability and sleek looks with a high-resolution if slightly undersized display. Ultraporable shoppers on tight budgets — particularly students looking for a lightweight laptop to tote across campus — will find lots to like about the Aero 13.