The HP Dragonfly Professional is a superb laptop computer with some odd additional stuff | Digital Noch

For so long as I’ve identified what computer systems are, HP has been identified for its labyrinthine customer support. On the laptop retailer the place I labored properly over a decade in the past, new workers had been compelled to name HP as a hazing ritual. However, the corporate — maybe within the wake of plummeting PC gross sales over the previous months — has pivoted arduous towards software program and providers this yr. Its 2023 roadmap entails positioning itself like, as president of private programs Alex Cho just lately put it to me, a “answer supplier.”

The HP Dragonfly Professional ($1,399 for our take a look at unit with 16GB RAM / 512GB storage) is an early glimpse of what that can seem like on the buyer aspect. It comes with some additional buyer help options and providers which, regardless of being optionally available, have been talked about in HP’s displays, workshops, and publicity supplies about as typically because the efficiency and battery life. Catchphrases like “simplify” and “don’t fear about something” are throughout its web site; “24/7 help” is entrance and middle. HP needs you to purchase this laptop computer, and it actually needs to repair it for you.

This can be a very nice system. However as a logo of HP’s “options”-focused roadmap, I’m not offered.

I’ve only a few complaints concerning the Dragonfly Professional itself. The 5MP digital camera delivers a high-quality and detailed image for video calls. The audio system aren’t fairly MacBook high quality however do sound fairly good. The (1920 x 1200) contact show seems to be good and is sufficiently vibrant, reaching 412 nits in testing. The keyboard is sort of snug, sporting HP’s signature column of hotkeys on the precise aspect — HP’s needed to squeeze the backspace key a bit to be able to make room, however I think about that’s one thing you get used to. The (haptic) trackpad can also be high-quality. Construct high quality is sort of good, with a chic fashion fairly much like earlier members of the premium Dragonfly line.

Okay, so there’s one nitpick I can drudge up: the port choice consists solely of three USB-C, two of that are USB-4 and one in all which is 3.2. That’s proper — no headphone jack. Boo. Come on now.

This was the primary AMD Ryzen 7000 laptop computer I’ve been in a position to take a look at this yr (it’s acquired the Ryzen 7 7736U), and its efficiency didn’t disappoint. In our benchmarks, it beat Apple’s M2 MacBook Professional on multicore Cinebench checks and got here pretty shut on single-core checks. It was fairly shut on gaming efficiency as properly, averaging solely two frames per second slower on Shadow of the Tomb Raider’s highest settings. I take advantage of the M2 Air and M2 Professional very often, and I don’t see a visual efficiency distinction on the Dragonfly in my day-to-day workplace work. The Dragonfly is noticeably slower in Adobe Premiere Professional, although, a specific weak spot of AMD’s.

Battery life was a sigh of aid. I averaged 12 hours and 46 minutes of steady work use. I can’t let you know how good it’s to see all-day battery life on a Home windows machine after having spent many of the previous yr testing legions of four-hour Intel machines. Extra of this!

This AMD processor actually looks like a dream come true. Sadly, I stated this about quite a lot of AMD machines final yr solely to see them turn out to be unattainable to purchase pretty rapidly after launch. So let’s hope that doesn’t occur right here, I assume.

HP describes the Dragonfly Professional’s goal demographic as “freelancers” — self-employed, cell, extraordinarily on-line professionals. These freelancers, HP argues in its documentation, “want their PC to work persistently since they depend on it for his or her livelihood. Tech complications and getting help is irritating and downtime prices them.”

In an ostensible purpose to serve this demographic, the Dragonfly comes (optionally) with what HP calls “24/7 Professional Dwell Assist.” The primary yr is included, after which it’s $10.99 per thirty days. A particular button on the keyboard, etched with two little speech bubbles, opens the service instantly. (Busy freelancers, as I’m positive you already know, don’t need to waste time pulling up the app from their taskbar.) This isn’t a teensy perform key; it’s a massive, very seen devoted key.

I used to be instructed on the preliminary launch that you may not remap this key, a indisputable fact that I complained about incessantly in my hands-on video. HP since seems to have modified its thoughts and now tells me that you just can remap this button. Nice! I’m nonetheless not seeing an choice to remap it within the myHP app on my evaluation unit, however HP tells me that it’s coming shortly after launch.

I simply must say off the bat that I don’t purchase this gross sales pitch. I do know loads of busy, cell, extraordinarily on-line freelancers. I’ve been one at factors in my life. These are individuals who know find out how to Google issues. They’ll troubleshoot issues on their very own. And most significantly, they’re individuals who purchase laptops anticipating that they’ll work, not that they’ll break down on a regular basis and require frequent calls to customer support. If my laptop is screwing up wherever close to typically sufficient that I want a large tech help button on my keyboard, it’s doable that I’ve made a buying mistake. I’m satisfied that the true goal demographic for this package deal is like, my grandparents who need assistance determining find out how to unmute themselves on Groups.

I do know I don’t have entry to the market analysis HP does, however I simply needed to get that off my chest. Thanks for listening.

However I digress. HP is promoting this service as such an enormous, integral profit that I figured I ought to attempt it out. My expertise was blended. First, the large help hotkey shouldn’t be notably responsive. I needed to bang it a median of 4 instances to be able to get the app to open. There have been events the place it simply didn’t open in any respect. In virtually each case, merely opening the app from the taskbar would’ve saved me time.

Once I lastly did open the app, it was additionally frustratingly unresponsive. I needed to click on varied buttons a number of instances and watch varied spinning wheels. I submitted my query by way of a kind. (My audio system had been a bit crackly, and I requested find out how to repair that — that is usually one thing I’d simply Google, however I wished to see how the reside chat labored.) I used to be put in a queue for a number of minutes earlier than a (very good) agent walked me, slowly and punctiliously, by way of each step to updating my audio drivers, which concerned downloading some stuff and giving them distant management of my system.

It wasn’t horrible customer support, but it surely wasn’t so distinctive that I’d advocate paying $130 a yr to often use it, and it didn’t appear properly tailor-made to the hurried, tech-savvy freelancer.

In the end, I believe this Dragonfly is nice {hardware}. The dearth of a headphone jack is a disappointment, however the mixture of efficiency and battery life that it provides is healthier than I’ve seen from a Home windows PC in fairly a while.

It’s a disgrace that HP is, each by way of its advertising and the literal design of its keyboard, attempting to leverage such a terrific system to hawk folks subscription providers that aren’t nice and that they simply don’t want. Possibly you want a subscription service like this if you happen to’re shopping for a $500 Pavilion that’s going to be breaking left and proper. When you’re paying $1,300 for a premium PC, you then actually, actually shouldn’t.