Hands on With HP's Elite Dragonfly: A New Bar for Premium Ultraportables?

[Admin]

HP’s new premium portable impresses with a solid and pretty 2.2-pound shell, full-size ports, and a nice keyboard. About those 8th Generation CPUs, though...

Hands on With HP's Elite Dragonfly: A New Bar for Premium Ultraportables? : Read more

 

[nitrium]

What differentiates a "premium/business" laptop with a regular cheap ultra portable? Not RAM, CPU, battery or screen specs, that much is certain. Surely it must be more than just the "HP brand" and a fingerprint reader???

 

[warezme]

At $1549 the only thing premium is the price because the specs of 8GB of RAM, an Intel i5 and only a 1080p screen from 1990 don't. If you were really serious about security it wouldn't even be an intel process but an AMD. Hard pass on this mobile disaster.

 

[cryoburner]

What differentiates a "premium/business" laptop with a regular cheap ultra portable? Not RAM, CPU, battery or screen specs, that much is certain. Surely it must be more than just the "HP brand" and a fingerprint reader???

I think it mostly just comes down to build quality, like a shell made out of a solid block of aluminum alloy, for example, as opposed to plastic for the budget models. That can potentially result in improved durability, and the better heat conductivity of such materials may also allow the same hardware to be packed into a more compact form-factor. Of course, it also results in many of these devices being more or less unserviceable on the hardware side of things. You may also see better battery life, better keyboard and screen quality, and so on, that may not be obvious from the basic specs. From a value standpoint, the cheap ultraportable will likely be the better option, but these "premium" options are there for those willing to spend a lot more for something slightly better.

At $1549 the only thing premium is the price because the specs of 8GB of RAM, an Intel i5 and only a 1080p screen from 1990 don't.

Who had 1080p screens in 1990? 640x480 would have been considered the norm for new computers then. : P

While 1080p might not exactly be considered a cutting-edge resolution now, at 13.3", the pixel density is comparable to having 4K on a 27" display. The 4K option actually seems quite overkill at this screen size.

 

[Giroro]

What differentiates a "premium/business" laptop with a regular cheap ultra portable? Not RAM, CPU, battery or screen specs, that much is certain. Surely it must be more than just the "HP brand" and a fingerprint reader???

As far as I know, it is the CPU actually that puts it into the business category, specifically because it supports vPro.
The premium category is essentially "Increase profit margins by putting using a case that feels expensive", so basically anything inspired by Apple's business strategy... or what their strategy used to be before the competition blew past their hardware design and they started throwing subscriptions services at the wall to see what sticks. I was looking at a MacBook air yesterday and was pretty surprised to see how much thicker it felt compared to Costco's ultrabooks.

 

[DavidC1]

At $1549 the only thing premium is the price because the specs of 8GB of RAM, an Intel i5 and only a 1080p screen from 1990 don't. If you were really serious about security it wouldn't even be an intel process but an AMD. Hard pass on this mobile disaster.

It's a convertible and its super light. If you want it to be a convertible, the lighter the better, as it makes the Tablet function more useful and not just a feature to check off.

FHD screens are also superior to 4K displays in such laptops, because it also uses much less power. The 500-nit display on this device is also a 1W-display, the same thing Intel demonstrated more than a year ago. So that's further power savings. 4K displays also need to upscale everything and will cause slight blurriness in many applications that aren't running at 4K.

You can't have all the features and expect it to cost less. It just doesn't work.

The only issue is the use of Whiskeylake. Let's say by spring of 2021 we get Tigerlake on this thing and it'll be perfect.