Customer Ratings & Reviews

There are a lot of ultra lightweight laptops on the market now, and they are more powerful than ever with the new 7000 U series from AMD. Don't take these lightly just because they are in a small form factor, they really pack a punch in performance. I would not be exaggerating when I say I would take this over the large and heavy workstations at my work for developing. Since there are a lot to like about this laptop, I will go over a few that stands out to me. For starters, keyboard feels great to type on, and your palm does not accidentally trigger the touchpad when doing so. Battery life is extremely good, I can work with this all day only needing to charge at the end. It is extremely quiet, the fan will kick on occasionally depending on what you're doing. If you are just browsing the web, it will rarely ever be on. For video calls, the webcam isn't the best but does the job. The microphone is also decent as far as laptop mics go. The speakers are top facing and are better than some gaming laptop speakers I've had in the past. Overall, the laptop feels solidly built even if it does not feel like a metal body. There are also things that could be improved though. For instance, the extra 4 HP keys on the right side of the keyboard. One of them you can reprogram which is great, but the other 3 opens the hp help application which is pointless. How many times do you need the help app that they need to be on their own keys? The backlight of the keyboard does not stay on by default, you'll have to manually press the backlight key every time after the laptop comes back from sleep. Other than these couple of minor things, there really isn't much to complain about the laptop. At lot of the ergonomics comes down to preference and how you'll use it. Overall, this is a decent powerful laptop that comes in a small lightweight package. It can't game, but it can do everything else including being used as a supplement to your work laptop. If you're looking for something to travel with and great battery life, then this is hard to beat.

[ SUMMARY ] CPU and memory offer amazing performance for an ultraportable laptop. Great construction quality. Good battery life. Bright and vivid display but only FHD 60Hz. Great camera. Sad keyboard. Decent speakers. Stingy port selection. Soldered SSD feels abusive. The last point especially pushes this into ‘not recommended’ territory for me. [ PERFORMANCE ] The AMD Ryzen 7 7736U (basically a reiteration of the 6800U) is the star of the show, and is among the best–if not the best–CPU you can get in an ultraportable laptop (at time of writing) between performance, features, and battery usage optimization. Paired with DDR5 6400 MHz RAM, this laptop performs extremely well at every task you could reasonably expect to do with an ultraportable. Of course, without a discrete GPU, this can’t be compared to gaming laptops (which don’t fall in the ultraportable category anyway). But when playing older 3D games or some newish games with more modest settings, the integrated graphics performed surprisingly well in my testing. Full benchmark data is out of scope of this review, but if interested, do a little searching and I can’t imagine you’ll be disappointed. [ CONSTRUCTION ] The magnesium alloy base and frame seem extremely sturdy and resistant to bending. The aluminum back cover is less so, but still great. Both appear to have an oleophobic coating applied that does well at resisting fingerprints and smudges. Both have a very mildly textured surfaces (not as smooth as flat aluminum, for example). Magnets hold the display overly firmly to the upper frame when closed, making it annoying to open. [ DISPLAY ] This display is likely the brightest (at max setting) of all laptops I’ve had, and very decently vibrant and good color representation, though with plenty of glare thanks to the glossy finish. I didn’t have any issue with touch sensitivity or accuracy. The 16:10 aspect ratio is a decent compromise between 4:3 and 16:9. Where it falls short is merely having FHD resolution and 60Hz refresh rate; there are plenty of non-gaming laptops out there that do better at one or both. [ CAMERA ] The camera is quite good, handling a wide range of lighting conditions brilliantly, even in low-lighting conditions. I was able to record 2560x1440 video at 15 FPS and 1920x1090 video at 30 FPS. Windows Hello login/unlocking is supported. The electronic shutter, while better than nothing, gives a me a little less confidence in privacy compared to either an electronic shutter that is clearly visible, or better, an external and manually/mechanically activated privacy slider. [ KEYBOARD ] I’m disappointed with the keyboard. I’ve been spoiled by the top-tier laptop keyboards of a certain other competitor. The key travel is *extremely* shallow. While key actuation is pretty snappy, the tactile feedback in general just wasn’t doing it for me. The macro keys did not seem responsive for me, I’d usually have to press them multiple times or hold them down for them to trigger. For whatever reason, they only made one of the four macro keys programmable, which seems to be a disappointing waste of space. Both fingerprint reader and power buttons are implemented as faux keyboard keys in the function row, but they aren’t meaningfully aligned. Because of this, I have to spend a little extra time and effort to hunt them down. Simply moving them both one position to the right could have negated some of this inconvenience. [ TRACK PAD ] Super annoyingly, mostly due to the addition of the column of macro keys, the touchpad is off-center relative to the main keys by a significant margin. Unlike the rest of the laptop, it is a fingerprint and smudge magnet. But it is large, and it seems to be some variant of their pressure-sensitive line. It has force feedback and some useful gestures not found in most other laptops, including my favorite, the one-finger click and drag. [ OTHER / MISC. ] - While I didn’t manage to get close to the advertised battery life, it still seemed quite good when compared to other laptops I own. I played with the brightness and audio volume a lot, but it seems on average, streaming a medium-quality video full-screen for an hour using the built-in speakers while having a Bluetooth mouse connected but not being actively used consumed about 11% battery charge. - Very stingy port selection; Thunderbold/USB-C only. No USB-A, no headphone jack, no HDMI or DP. Soldered RAM and SSD. I can ignore the former, but the latter is plain wrong considering how prone storage devices are to failure (even SSDs). - The SSD benchmarked for me at 3552 MB/s read, 3478 MB/s write. The write speed is decent enough, but the read speed is rather lackluster. I can notice the difference in app and OS load times compared to a faster SSD. - The speakers are decent, but offer neither the loudest nor clearest sound among laptops I own, whether of the same size/class, or even among Bang & Olufsen sound setups. - Has extremely minimal Insyde EFI firmware.