HP’s OmniBook Ultra 14 seems to be the clearest signal yet about where Copilot+ PCs are going: thinner, faster, and cooler with meaningful performance improvement for on-device AI. After the early hands-on impressions started floating around in advance of the unveiling, this brand-new 14-inch flagship looks to be a reference design for its category, delivering performance even with a lightweight chassis while offering both an NPU that can pump out power and a first-for-OmniBook vapor chamber to make sure all that power is sustained.
Quality design without fragility in a slim aluminum build
The forged aluminum shell, at 2.81 pounds and 0.55 inches thick, lands within an ultraportable sweet spot: light enough for daily commuting, rigid enough to resist deck flex when you hammer out a harder bit of prose.
- Quality design without fragility in a slim aluminum build
- Ports, thermals, and everyday practicality for mobile work
- Snapdragon X2 power with 85 TOPS of on-device AI headroom
- A screen that can refocus when you do, with bright 120Hz OLED
- The Copilot+ features that genuinely help on Windows 11
- The competitive read and what to watch as AI PCs mature
The Qualcomm version sounds cool, and the Stone Blue paint job on it is a subtle step above boring without looking flashy, and that anti-smudge coat does what it says: fingerprints are less in-your-face than on plain old anodized aluminum.
Intel versions come in Eclipse Gray and Silk Sand, offering purchasers an unambiguously tiered visual decision linked to silicon.
The little things that go into everyday usability show up in HP’s attention to detail. The haptic touchpad includes smart edge gestures for volume and brightness, and despite the keyboard’s field-repairable design, nothing feels compromised; travel is nicely crisp with the plate staying firm. The chassis is MIL-STD 810H rated, which has become more of a table-stakes standard at this price tier, but still important if your “office” is basically a backpack.
Ports, thermals, and everyday practicality for mobile work
All three 40Gbps USB-C ports offer power delivery and DisplayPort output across the board. The Intel versions include Thunderbolt 4 support, but the Snapdragon ones have more USB4-class connections. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack included—always good in this heyday of premium laptops with the courage to act as though Bluetooth latency and codec support are nothing to worry about.
Cooling is where the Ultra justifies its name. HP’s first compact vapor chamber in the OmniBook line is used instead of traditional heat pipes to more evenly spread out the thermal load, a factor that should maintain clocks during long AI runs or heavier multitasking. Combined with a 70Wh battery and a 65W GaN adapter that recharges to nearly half full in about 45 minutes, the platform is very clearly focused toward mobile creators and knowledge workers who move between meetings and models.
Snapdragon X2 power with 85 TOPS of on-device AI headroom
It’s the Snapdragon X2 Elite option (all the way up to 18 CPU cores and peak clocks of 5GHz) that gets you the big story: an NPU capable of running at a blistering 85 TOPS. Microsoft established 40 TOPS as the baseline for Copilot+ certification, meaning HP and Qualcomm are providing more than double the amount of on-device AI budget. That counts in straightforward ways — running bigger diffusion models locally, speeding up vector database queries in productivity apps, or taking on multi-stream background tasks such as transcription and noise suppression without spiking fan noise.
Configurations top out at 64GB of LPDDR5x and 2TB of PCIe Gen5 storage, with the familiar trade-off: that memory is soldered. The Intel choice is for people who absolutely need Thunderbolt-based workflows or want to run certain x86-optimized apps like video games, but the Qualcomm build makes no bones about that — it’s definitely an AI-first player. Industry followers predict that AI PCs will soon outpace all other shipments, and this is the kind of spec sheet that makes it happen.
A screen that can refocus when you do, with bright 120Hz OLED
The 14-inch 2,880-by-1,800 OLED touch panel, protected with Gorilla Glass that spans corner to corner, delivers pop without being oversaturated. HP rates it for up to 500 nits in SDR and up to 1,000 nits for HDR, with a variable refresh rate that hits 120Hz. The upsides are clear: smoother inking and scrolling, cleaner HDR video scrubbing, and plenty of brightness to defeat harsh lighting in modern offices and studios.
It’s also well suited for AI-assisted photo and video work, where on-device models can improve functions like noise reduction, color matching, and smart masking. You’re not grading footage without a discrete GPU, but it’s an appealing middle ground of OLED with high refresh and NPU acceleration for travel rigs and hybrid workflows.
The Copilot+ features that genuinely help on Windows 11
As a Copilot+ PC that runs Windows 11, the OmniBook Ultra 14 can also tap into the full array of on-device features that bypass the network hop: live captions and translations, Microsoft Studio Effects for webcams, and reduced-latency image generation in creative apps. HP layers on Look to Move (which keeps the cursor close to where you’re looking using the webcam) and Camera Gesture (you can pause or switch media with hand motions). Vitally, they run on your local machine, which makes them more responsive and provides much greater privacy controls than cloud-only features.
The competitive read and what to watch as AI PCs mature
The target is clear: Apple’s MacBook Air and Microsoft’s line of Surfaces. Apple is still ahead on single-threaded efficiency and battery life stability, but HP outdoes with a higher NPU ceiling, default-faster OLED, and broader I/O flexibility. For Windows fans, the more interesting comparison may come between the Snapdragon X2 and the latest Intel Core Ultra chips when developers start tuning apps for NPUs rather than GPUs.
Two open questions remain. “The vapor chamber is also where you put the clocks,” Cutress writes, “so that the cards can sit and have high continuous AI performance, rather than just burst speed.” First off: How well does this hold true for clocks over long periods of time (i.e., not sleep, but extended AI inferencing)? And second, can the 70Wh pack provide all-day stamina with VRR and AI features turned on? Assuming sustained performance matches the paper specs, the OmniBook Ultra 14 not only joins the Copilot+ club — it sets a bar for what an AI-first ultraportable should feel like in daily use.
