What you say For users who want to discover the AI creative power of the new Microsoft Copilot+ PC, HP says with the new EliteBook Ultra G1q, “Why not bring it into the office?”
This is a business laptop through and through: a 14-inch clamshell in “atmospheric blue” (not black) with no design flourishes other than a silver HP logo on top and a row of half-height function keys in a rather light color. Oh, and there’s a baby blue power button, too. Don’t blame Hewlett-Packard for not knowing how to have a little fun, even in a corner office.
While the machine’s feature list is familiar to the Copilot+ PC market, the specs are surprisingly entry-level. The CPU is a slow Snapdragon X Elite X1E78100, with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB solid-state drive. The 14-inch touchscreen has a strange 2,240 x 1,400 pixel resolution, inferior to the 2,880 x 1,800 resolution that has become the norm for machines with a 16:10 aspect ratio. The port selection is also less impressive, with two USB-C ports (one specified at Thunderbolt-class 40 Gbps and the other at 10 Gbps) and one USB-A port. In contrast, the Asus Vivobook S 15 has two high-speed USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI, and a microSD card reader.
Photo: Christopher Null
At 18 mm thick, the machine has a svelte appearance, but at 3 pounds it’s on the heavy side for a 14-inch laptop. That’s no doubt thanks to a sturdy aluminum chassis made from 50 percent recycled materials and 50 percent plastic keycaps. It’s also clear that the laptop is designed to withstand some abuse, be it being tossed in a shoulder bag or on an airplane tray table. At the very least, the EliteBook feels sturdy enough to travel with without worrying about damage.
Unfortunately, the fairly low-end specs under the hood result in disappointing performance, and overall, the EliteBook posted the lowest benchmark scores of any Copilot+ PC I’ve tested to date. The differences aren’t huge — 2% slower than a Microsoft Surface Pro in a wide range of CPU-intensive workloads and up to 10% slower in most graphics tests — but they’re measurable and can be noticeable in tasks like Live Captions, which struggles to keep up with fast-moving speech. As expected, the EliteBook remains subject to the same compatibility issues as other Qualcomm Snapdragon-based laptops that utilize the ARM architecture, which we’ll cover in more detail here.
