HP EliteBook Ultra G1i review: a business laptop for everyone, at a price

The best business laptops are very well-made and robust, conservatively attractive, fast, and have great battery life. Those are feature that consumers look for, too, but manufacturers like HP add a ton of features that make business laptops more attractive to enterprises that require great management and security.

That makes them more expensive, which sometimes pushes them out of the range of many consumer buyers. That’s a shame with the HP EliteBook Ultra G1i, because it’s a great 14-inch laptop that all kinds of users would love — if only its price was a bit more palatable. But for businesses users, it’s one of the better choices.

Specs and configuration

As a business laptop, the EliteBook Ultra G1i is more likely to be purchased on a group contract. So, its prices listed in its web store (which are heavily discounted from list already) aren’t necessarily as indicative of what the target business customer will pay. However, right now, the EliteBook starts at $1,849 for an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V chipset, 16GB of RAM, a 256GB SSD, and a 14.0-inch 2.8K OLED display (the only option). For $2,432, you get a Core Ultra 7 268V, 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. That’s the confirmation I reviewed. There are other configurations available within that range.

So, that makes the EliteBook Ultra G1i a very premium business laptop. The similarly configured HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14, which is aimed at consumers, is quite a bit less expensive starting at $1,100 on sale and maxing out at $1,730 (also on sale). The Apple MacBook Air 13 (M4) is also less expensive, starting at $1,000 and maxing out at just over $2,000.

Design

I recently wrote an editorial about how Apple’s attention to detail has resulted in some of the best hardware around. But Apple isn’t the only company that manages to make a laptop that feels really great in hand. The EliteBook Ultra G1i is another. It’s one of those laptops that gives me an immediate impression of quality the moment I pull it out of the box.

First, it’s nicely sized. Its display bezels aren’t the smallest I’ve seen, but they’re small enough that the EliteBook Ultra G1i is quite compact with its 14-inch display. It’s also very thin, coming in at a maximum of 0.48 inches in the rear that’s almost as thin as the insanely thin Apple MacBook Air 13’s 0.45 inches (and the HP is even thinner up front at 0.36 inches). The EliteBook is also almost the same weight as the MacBook, so it has that kind of density that avoids a really light laptop feeling flimsy. And 2.63 pounds is plenty light enough to make it eminently portable.

The weight is also very well-balanced, so it’s comfortable to carry around, open or closed. The rounded edges also feel great — better than the MacBook’s edges that border on being a little sharp. The EliteBook’s hinge isn’t quite as smooth, though, and requires two hands to open the lid. Overall, the all-aluminum construction is solid with no bending, flexing, or twisting in the chassis, keyboard deck, or lid. This is a really well-designed and well-built laptop.

Aesthetically, the design is quite elegant with the usual contemporary minimalism but enough identity that it’s not mundane. The rounded edges help here, too, and HP has done a great job with the dark blue color way. My only complaint is the lighter blue color assigned to the function keys, and then the power button (with embedded fingerprint reader) that has a rather bright LED and yet another light blue color. That might be good for accessibility, something that HP has paid a lot of attention to in their recent designs. But I do think it takes away from the look a bit.

Beyond the EliteBook Ultra G1i’s physical design, it’s also a business laptop with several features that make it a great choice for businesses. Primarily, that centers around various utilities that can plug into enterprise management systems to provide enhanced fleet management capabilities and security. HP’s Wolf Security serves the latter function, offering up a host of capabilities that lock the EliteBook down on both a software and hardware level. I won’t go into the details here, but suffice it to say that if you’re looking for a laptop that’s easy to manage and highly secure, then the EliteBook Ultra G1i provides what you’re looking for.

Keyboard and touchpad

HP has been making great keyboards for a while now, starting with their Spectre laptops that were some of my favorites. That’s carried that over to its OmniBook and EliteBook lineups, and HP has maybe even made them a little better given the attention to accessibility I mentioned above. That’s reflected in the bold lettering and careful color scheme that will help the visually impaired. But even more so, the EliteBook Ultra G1i’s keyboard is just about perfect for me, equally as good as Apple’s Magic Keyboard that’s been my overall favorite. The keycaps are large and yet there’s plenty of key spacing with a very comfortable layout. And the switches are exactly as I like them — light and snappy yet with a precise bottoming action. I could type on this keyboard at full speed for hours (as in writing this review) without getting fatigued. Another simple keyboard test for me is whether I can type passwords from muscle-memory on the first try, and the EliteBook’s keyboard passed with flying colors.

The touchpad is equally as good. It’s a large haptic version that takes up all the available space on the palm rest, just like with Apple’s MacBooks. And it’s excellent, with responsive and consistent “clicks.” Windows 11 affords a ton of customization with haptic touchpads, and it’s all here. Apple’s Force Touch haptic touchpad has long been the industry standard for excellence, and it benefits from the Force Click feature where pressing a little “harder” kicks off additional functionality. But otherwise, the EliteBook’s touchpad is just as good.

You can also opt for a touch-enabled display. A great haptic touchpad makes that less attractive for me, personally, but it’s available if you want it.

Connectivity and webcam

Connectivity is pretty good, with three USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support and a USB-A port for legacy devices. I say that’s just pretty good because some 14-inch laptops have more connectivity, with an HDMI connection being fairly common. There’s also no SD card support, which I’d like to see. Wireless connectivity is fully up-to-date with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4.

The webcam is HP’s usual 9MP version, so it provides excellent image quality. It’s backed up by a fast Lunar Lake Neural Processing Unit (NPU) that runs at a very fast 48 tera operations per second (TOPS), easily exceeding the 40 TOPS requirement for Microsoft’s Copilot+ PC AI initiative. That means it will power on-device AI processing more efficiently than relying on the slower CPU or GPU components. HP partnered with Poly Studio to offer the Poly Camera Pro suite of videoconferencing features with enhance background, spotlight, auto-framing, and other functionality, much of it AI-powered using the NPU. There’s probably not another laptop available with quite the same breadth and depth of AI-powered features in addition to what’s provided via Copilot+.

Performance

You can choose from several Intel Lunar Lake (Core Ultra Series 2) options with the EliteBook Ultra G1i, all of them 8-core/8-thread chipsets available running at 17 watts.  Lunar Lake is focuses more on efficiency than pure performance, with speeds falling between the previous-generation 15-watt U-series and 28-watt H-series Meteor Lake chipsets. As a business laptop, Intel vPro is a natural option that enables the EliteBook’s excellent manageability and security.

All Lunar Lake versions give similar performance in CPU-intensive tasks, because they only vary by clock speed. And, they’re considerably slower than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets, the other Windows efficiency option. AMD;s Ryzen AI 9 and Apple’s M4 chipsets are also considerably faster. The Core Ultra 5 226V has a slower Intel Arc 130V integrated graphics, but the faster Intel Arc 140V in the Core Ultra 7 268V isn’t much faster.

Overall, the EliteBook Ultra G1i is a fast laptop for demanding productivity users, including business users, but gamers and creators will want to look elsewhere.

Battery life

As I mentioned above, Lunar Lake is aimed more at battery life than pure performance. And generally speaking, that’s been the case in the laptops I’ve tested. Some are impacted by power-hungry high-res OLED displays, while those with more efficient IPS displays compete better with Apple’s highly efficient Apple Silicon chipsets that remain the most efficient overall.

The EliteBook Ultra G1i has a relatively small 64 watt-hour battery to go with a 2.8K OLED display. That shouldn’t be a recipe for the best battery life, even with Lunar Lake. But, the EliteBook does pretty well. Its results in our video looping test was very good at over 15 hours, and it was competitive at almost 2.5 hours in the demanding Cinebench R24 test. It didn’t do as well in our web browsing test, but I had to change the tool we use for testing due to our previous tool being deprecated by Google. Using our older tool, the EliteBook would likely have scored closer to the HP OmniBook Ultra Flip 14 with basically the same chipset, display, and battery capacity and that managed two hours longer.

These are very strong results for a laptop with such a gorgeous display. You’ll get a full day’s work, which isn’t quite as good as Apple MacBook Air (M4), but still much better than previous Windows laptops.

Display and audio

There’s just one display option for the EliteBook Ultra G1i, and it’s a 14.0-inch 16:10 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED display running at up to 120Hz. Like almost every OLED display, it’s spectacular out of the box, with bright, dynamic colors and inky blacks. As I mentioned above, there’s a penalty in battery life, but the EliteBook still manages very good longevity.

My colorimeter liked this display quite a bit. It’s not the absolute brightest at 397 nits (most displays I’ve tested lately are greater than 400 nits), but it’s till a lot brighter than displays were a few years ago. It has perfect blacks with extremely high contrast at 27,780:1. And its colors are very wide at 100% of sRGB, 97% of AdobeRGB, and 100% of DCI-P3, with excellent color accuracy with a DeltaE of 0.58 (less than 1.0 is indistinguishable to the human eye).

It’s a great display no matter what you’re using it for. It’s not fast enough for demanding creativity work, but it provides a great media experience to go.

Audio is provided by a quad-speaker setup, and it sounds pretty good. There’s good volume and clear mids and highs, while bass is somwhat lacking as is typical with laptops. I’d rate the MacBook Air’s audio to be better, but it’s not a night and day difference.

An excellent laptop for businesses, but a little expensive for most consumers

If you’re a business user looking for a well-built laptop that feels great in hand and looks just as good, with decent productivity performance and great battery life, the EliteBook Ultra G1i is a great choice. Toss in a spectacular OLED display for good measure.

In fact, those are qualities that many consumers are looking for. However, the EliteBook comes with a host of business features that most consumers don’t need, which pumps up the price. So, if you have money to burn, then it’s a great laptop for consumers — but I suspect most buyers will be businesses.