HP 14" OmniBook X 14.0" Qualcomm Review

The HP OmniBook X is a battery life champion with a compatibility asterisk. It's a fantastic budget MacBook Air alternative, as long as you never need to run an old .exe file.

The HP OmniBook X is a fascinating experiment that mostly works. It's a Windows laptop built on a phone chip, and the headline is simple: you get MacBook-level battery life and instant-on responsiveness for less than $900. That's the one thing to know. This isn't your dad's HP laptop. It's a sleek, fanless machine powered by the new Snapdragon X Elite, and it feels like a direct shot across Apple's bow. For everyday browsing, office work, and media, it's shockingly fast and lasts forever. But you have to be okay with living in the 'mostly compatible' lane of the Windows app world.

The performance story is a tale of two chips. The CPU is a monster. In our database, it's in the 98th percentile, meaning it's one of the fastest laptop processors you can buy right now for general tasks. Apps open instantly, and the whole system feels incredibly snappy. The surprise is the GPU, which lands in a disappointing 36th percentile. It's fine for video playback and basic graphics, but it's the reason this thing scores a dismal 16.6 for gaming. Don't even think about running anything modern. The 16GB of RAM is top-tier, but the 512GB SSD is just average for the price.

At $899, the value is hard to argue with if your needs align perfectly. You're getting near-MacBook Air performance and battery life for several hundred dollars less. But that 'if' is doing a lot of work. You're trading away guaranteed app compatibility and any semblance of graphics power. For the right person, it's a steal. For the wrong person, it's a paperweight.

This laptop has two clear competitors. The Apple MacBook Air M3 is the obvious one. It offers a similar fanless, long-battery-life experience but with flawless app compatibility, a better screen, and stronger build quality for a few hundred dollars more. The other is the Microsoft Surface Laptop Copilot+ PC. It runs the same Snapdragon X chip, so performance and battery are similar, but you pay a premium for the Surface design and brand. The HP undercuts it on price, making it the budget pick in the new ARM Windows world.

If you're a gamer, a video editor, or a software developer who needs to run x64 virtual machines, this isn't it. The GPU is weak, and app compatibility is a minefield. Go get a Lenovo Legion or a Framework laptop with an AMD Ryzen chip instead. You'll get less battery life, but everything will just work.

We recommend the HP OmniBook X, but with a giant asterisk. Buy this if you live in a web browser, Microsoft Office, and streaming apps, and you desperately want all-day battery life on a budget. It excels at being a modern, portable productivity machine. For anyone else—gamers, creative pros, people who rely on niche Windows software—this is an easy skip. The compatibility headaches and weak GPU are dealbreakers.