I tested the HP Omnibook Ultra 14 for a month — it's a mighty MacBook competitor, but the price is wrong

When I look at a premium consumer laptop with branding like “Pro” or “Ultra,” I expect a bit more than the average laptop experience. I don’t just want decent performance, a usable display, and at least 8-hours of battery life.

I expect a sleek aluminum chassis packed with high-performance components, more than all-day battery life, a powerful audio system, vivid OLED display panel, a keyboard that feels good to use, and enough ports to handle a variety of accessories.

I also expect to see a high price tag attached, because you don’t get an Ultra laptop for bargain prices. But once a laptop hits the $2,000 mark, it becomes hard to justify a device that's using only an integrated GPU.

But do the OmniBook Ultra’s cons outweigh its strengths enough to keep it off our best laptops list?

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Cheat sheet

• What is it?: The HP OmniBook Ultra 14 is a premium consumer laptop designed for users who want powerful performance, great battery life, and a slim, portable device.
• Who is it for?: The OmniBook Ultra is designed for power users and working professionals who demand a combination of extreme performance, fantastic power efficiency, and the ultimate in portability.
• What does it cost?: The starting price of the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 Snapdragon X2 edition is $1,899 while our top-of-the-line review model costs a cool $3,599.
• What do we like?: The new HP OmniBook Ultra chassis has a sleek modern design with chrome detailing, stellar performance, and a bright, vivid display.
• What don’t we like?: The OmniBook Ultra does leave a lot to be desired in terms of connection ports, and while its performance and power efficiency are fantastic, those come at a steep price.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: Specs

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: The ups

HP’s revamped Omnibook Ultra does quite a lot right. It looks and feels like a premium laptop with a sleek chassis, chrome detailing, a crisp keyboard, powerful speaker system, OLED display, combined with impressive performance and an all-day battery life.

Sleek modern design

The OmniBook Ultra has a new look this year with extra chrome detailing along the sides and back of the chassis along with a debossed brushed chrome logo on the top cover panel.

While this isn’t a huge break from the previous OmniBook Ultra design, it does feel just a bit more polished than previous generations.

This notebook also comes in two different colorways, a cool Stone Blue or dark Eclipse Gray for the aluminum body. Both colorways come with the same chrome detailing, so it pops a bit more on the darker Eclipse Gray but adds a great, subtle premium touch to either color.

HP kept portability in mind while crafting the 14-inch Ultra chassis, with a Z-height of just 0.42 inches and a total weight of just 2.83 pounds.

It’s not the lightest laptop on the market, but it is incredibly lightweight and thin, which makes it easy to carry to the office, the coffee shop, or on a plane. And you won’t even have to worry about back strain or whether the 14-inch ultrabook can fit in your bag.

Stellar general performance

Qualcomm has made a lot of performance claims about the X2 Elite CPU, and we’ve verified quite a few. Though that can change between laptop to laptop based on how the OEM configures the chipset for their thermal design.

So some variation will always be seen depending on the specific laptop in question. That said, I was still pretty impressed with the overall performance of the Snapdragon X2 Elite on the OmniBook, which put up quite a lot of multicore performance despite its ultra-slim design.

Whether it was photo editing, video calls, or just doing some light word processing, I ran into no slowdowns with the OmniBook, even when running 15+ Chrome tabs at a time with a few other programs like Spotify running in the background. And that’s backed up by our lab test results as well.

In terms of general CPU performance, the OmniBook Ultra 14 had more Geekbench 6 multicore horsepower than many of its competitors, including the Apple MacBook Air M5, Dell XPS 14 with Intel’s Panther Lake X7 CPU, and even the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x with the previous Snapdragon X Elite chipset.

The OmniBook Ultra even outpaced the Apple MacBook Pro M5 in both the Geekbench 6 multicore benchmark and Handbrake video encoding test, though the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air both outperformed the OmniBook on single-core performance. Though the Snapdragon X2 Elite CPU has closed that singlecore performance gap to just a few hundred points.

On the BlackMagic Disk Speed test, the OmniBook clocked 6922 write and 5607 read speed. That’s pretty similar performance to both Apple M5 laptops in terms of write speed, though it is a bit behind on reading speed. It also leaves the Dell XPS 14 in the dust.

While I wouldn’t use the OmniBook Ultra as a daily gaming laptop, it can handle some basic gaming on Medium graphics settings at 1080p.

And that’s a significant upgrade over the previous generation Snapdragon laptops which failed to even scrape past 20 fps on most games. I personally booted up Baldur’s Gate III and Final Fantasy XIV as both are well-optimized games that should play nicely on integrated graphics cards compared to some more GPU-heavy games like Black Myth: Wukong or Monster Hunter Wilds.

Baldur’s Gate III performed well on Medium to High settings at 1080p or 1200p settings, though the game really struggled with the graphics and computational load when run at the OmniBook’s native 1800p resolution.

Final Fantasy XIV was a bit more of a struggle on Laptop (High) and 1080p settings with frequent frame drops from 70fps to 50fps. Even when dropped down to Laptop (Standard) graphics settings, the OmniBook struggled with occasional frame drops, though they were less frequent.

It wasn’t enough to make the game unplayable but it was certainly frequent enough to be annoying. And FFXIV boots with AMD FSR on by default so serious frame drops shouldn’t be too common. Unfortunately, I can only assume this is due to the game putting a heavy load on Microsoft’s Prism emulation layer since FFXIV does not currently have a native client for Windows on Arm.

However, even with the frame drops on Final Fantasy XIV, the fact the Snapdragon X2 Elite could run both games at over 60fps for even some of the time is a massive improvement over the previous generation. And that’s more than playable enough for some casual gaming while on a business trip or vacation.

Bright, vivid HDR display

The viewing experience of the OmniBook Ultra is pretty top-notch, with a powerful quad-speaker array featuring HP’s PolyStudio tuning and a bright, HDR-capable OLED display.

In terms of raw numbers, the OmniBook Ultra’s OLED panel covers 87% of the DCI-P3 color gamut with an average max brightness of 414 nits with an HDR peak brightness of 847 nits.

This makes it both bright and vivid enough to be a great option for your next streaming binge. Combined with the powerful quad-speaker system that can easily fill a room, and the OmniBook is a proper entertainment machine.

That vivid OLED display and powerful audio also make it a great option for any photo or video editing you may need to do. Whether that’s adjusting images and video for work or tweaking your vacation photos to look their best on Instagram, the OmniBook has the audio-visual fidelity to tackle some serious editing.

Long-lasting battery life

Snapdragon laptops tend to have some impressive battery life, and the OmniBook Ultra isn’t much of an exception. However, it does trend to the lower-end as far as Snapdragon power efficiency goes. In our lab, the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 lasted a respectable 13 hours and 27 minutes on our web-surfing battery test.

While that isn’t the longest record we’ve ever seen, it is more than enough to last for even a demanding work day.However, the OmniBook Ultra’s competition really does blow it away on this one.

The Apple MacBook Air M5 lasted 15 hours and 37 minutes on the same battery test, while the MacBook Pro 14 M5 lasted 18 hours on the same test. Even the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x with the previous generation Snapdragon X Elite chipset lasted longer, with a battery life of 14 hours and 14 minutes.

Only the Intel-powered Dell XPS 14 under-performed compared to the OmniBook Ultra with a battery life of 12 hours and 23 minutes. Though, both the XPS and OmniBook have upgraded integrated GPUs which can help account for some of the increased power consumption on both laptops.

HP OmniBook Ultra 14: The downs

While the OmniBook Ultra deserves its name due to its usability and battery life, all those premium components come at a high price. Add on a sub-par port selection and some Microsoft Prism Emulation pitfalls, and the OmniBook’s faults start to weigh a bit heavy.

Port selection leaves a lot to be desired

While the OmniBook Ultra 14’s sleek design gives it a proper premium air with chrome detailing and a carry weight that’s beyond easy to carry, some sacrifices were made in the design phase. The biggest sacrifice made for the OmniBook Ultra’s sleek new chassis is its port array.

There are just three USB-C ports and one headphone jack on the 2026 OmniBook Ultra. That’s less than what you get on an Apple MacBook Pro, though it is one extra USB-C port compared to the MacBook Air.

However, with the price of the OmniBook Ultra, I’d expect it to compete more with a higher-end Mac chassis in terms of features. And while the OmniBook Ultra does win on the OLED front, the port selection is just a little too short.

Sure, you can fix the port array by getting a dock or using Bluetooth accessories. But on a high-powered premium laptop, I’d at least like to get an SD or MicroSD card reader to truly take advantage of the X2 Elite’s powerful CPU and GPU combo to do some light photo or video editing without needing to use a clunky dongle that’ll slow down large file transfer speeds to a crawl. But ultimately, this isn’t even the worst of the OmniBook’s problems.

Microsoft Prism emulation doesn’t solve everything

My biggest issue with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon laptops has always been the app support issue. And Qualcomm has essentially tried to pretend there isn’t an app support issue while relying on Microsoft’s Prism emulator to close most of the app support gaps between Windows on ARM and Windows on X86 computers.

To Qualcomm and Microsoft’s credit, most of the common applications are native on ARM now, and most others can be run through Prism’s emulation layer.

The problem is all the niche cases. While your average laptop user will have no major problems with Windows on ARM, there are still sizeable software gaps becomes a problem when it's time to outfit an entire business or school with laptops.

That's because some highly-specific software suites like much of the AutoDesk suite, either cannot run on ARM-based systems at all. Or require heavy use of Prism, which causes a severe slowdown due to the computational load of such intensive programs.

While you might expect most AutoDesk users to utilize dedicated workstations, the workstation and premium PC market now have some serious overlap.

Intel and AMD have been closing the gap between entry-level discrete graphics and their integrated GPU solutions to the point that some lightweight workstations eschew discrete GPUs entirely.

So while your average OmniBook Ultra customer won’t have much issue with Prism emulation vs Arm-native applications, anyone with any kind of fringe application in their daily rotation should take a hard look at the list of Arm-native applications before deciding on a Snapdragon PC.

All that performance comes at a high price

Any piece of tech that requires DDR5 RAM is currently significantly more expensive than it would have been a year ago, and the OmniBook Ultra is no exception. However, the OmniBook Ultra 14 (2026) has a starting price of $1,899 while our review unit costs $3,599.

While the starting $1,899 price tag is a bit high compared to last year’s OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 ($1,499) is a bit high, it falls in line with the standard RAM shortage price hike and is somewhat forgivable in that light.

The upgrade cost for our review unit is prohibitive. Even with the sale HP has going on the OmniBook Ultra right now, the price only comes down to $2,959 which is still egregious for a 14-inch ultrabook.

For $3,599, I could get a Razer Blade 16 (2026) model with an Intel Core Ultra 9 386H and Nvidia GeForce RTX 5070Ti with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and an OLED display and still have $100 left over.

Or I could save even more and get an M5 Pro Apple MacBook Pro 18-core CPU and 20-core GPU with 24GB RAM, and 1TB of storage for about $2,699. Both options would have better raw performance, more graphics horsepower, and more ports for less than the cost of the HP OmniBook Ultra 14 with the Snapdragon X2 Elite CPU.

Verdict

As far as premium laptops go, the OmniBook Ultra 14 does most things right. It’s got a sleek new chassis in a crisp Stone Blue or sleek Eclipse Gray colorway with premium chrome detailing on the edges and debossed modern HP logo.

It’s got more than enough horsepower to crunch through demanding workloads, though the app support gap can still be a bit of an issue for certain users, and it’s got enough battery life to make it through a full work day without needing a charge.

But the OmniBook Ultra isn’t a perfect laptop. Even for those with the budget to afford either the pricey base model or the exorbitant amount for our over-specced review unit, there are a couple of major downsides.

While over 13-hours of battery life is great for an average laptop, it’s a bit below the average for a Snapdragon laptop and there are plenty of laptops on the market with significantly better battery life. Including laptops by Qualcomm’s main competitors: Intel and AMD.

However, the real detriment is the port selection. A premium portable laptop that needs a dock to be fully functional is never going to be as Ultra as the name suggests. If you never need to move the OmniBook Ultra, that’s fine.

But if you want it to be your portable work and play powerhouse, having just a handful of USB-C ports and an audio jack isn’t sufficient. Having at least an onboard SD or microSD card reader would at least put it in MacBook Pro competitor territory.