HP Chromebook 13.5" Elite DragonFly Enterprise Multi-Touch 2-in-1 Review

Let's talk about the HP DragonFly Chromebook. This isn't your kid's school laptop. It's a premium, feather-light ChromeOS machine built for people who live in a browser and need to do it from anywhere. At 1.3kg and with a 93rd percentile score for compactness, it's designed to be thrown in a bag and forgotten about until you need it.

Who is it for? Honestly, it's for the ChromeOS believer who's willing to pay a premium for a fantastic physical package. If your entire workflow lives in Google Workspace, Slack, Figma, and a dozen browser tabs, and you prize portability above all else, this gets interesting. The 13.5-inch 3:2 display is great for documents, the keyboard is backlit, and it has Thunderbolt for fast connections.

What makes it interesting is the price tag. At over $1,500, you're paying MacBook Air money for a Chromebook. That's a big ask. You're buying into a specific philosophy: maximum simplicity and cloud-first work, wrapped in a superbly portable chassis. Whether that's worth the premium is the whole question.

Performance is where things get real. The Intel 1245U CPU lands in the 30th percentile. For a Chromebook, that's actually plenty for most tasks. You'll breeze through dozens of tabs, run Android apps, and handle video calls without a hiccup. But remember, you're comparing it to all laptops, and at this price, competitors are in a different league for raw power. The 8GB of RAM and 128GB SSD are in the 10th percentile, which is the real bottleneck. That RAM is fine for ChromeOS today, but it leaves zero headroom for the future.

The integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics score in the 18th percentile, and gaming is its weakest area at a 2.1 out of 100. That tells you everything. This is not a machine for anything graphically intensive. It's for getting work done. The 50Wh battery is decent for the size, but don't expect all-day endurance if you're pushing it. Performance here is about 'good enough' for the ChromeOS environment, not about winning benchmarks.

The value proposition is the toughest sell. At $1554, the DragonFly Chromebook costs as much as a well-equipped MacBook Air or a premium Windows ultrabook. You are not buying raw power or storage here. You're buying an opinion: that the ultimate in portability combined with the simplicity and security of ChromeOS is worth a premium.

Compared to other Chromebooks, it's in a league of its own in terms of build and features like Thunderbolt. But compared to the broader laptop market, the price-to-performance ratio is steep. You have to really, really want this specific combination of light weight and ChromeOS to justify the cost.

Stack it up against its natural competitors, and the trade-offs are clear. The Apple MacBook Air (M3) is a direct rival in price and portability. For similar money, you get a vastly more powerful chip, double the storage, a stunning screen, and macOS. The catch? No touchscreen, and you're leaving the ChromeOS ecosystem.

The Lenovo ThinkPad P14s is a more direct workhorse comparison. For less money, you'd get a more powerful CPU, options for way more RAM and storage, and the full flexibility of Windows or Linux. It'll be heavier, but it's a proper professional laptop. The ASUS Zenbook Duo offers a completely different take with its dual-screen innovation at a comparable price, trading the DragonFly's simplicity for multitasking power. The MSI and Gigabyte gaming laptops aren't even in the same conversation; they're for entirely different users.

So, who should buy this? If you are a dedicated ChromeOS user—maybe in a company that's all-in on Google Workspace—and your top priority is having the absolute lightest, most premium Chromebook experience money can buy, this is your machine. The portability and build quality are fantastic.

For everyone else, it's a hard recommendation. Students, casual users, and most professionals will find far better value and longevity in a MacBook Air, a Windows ultrabook, or even a higher-spec Chromebook for half the price. The DragonFly is a niche product executed very well, but that niche is small, especially at this price.