If I had a nickel for every time I went to an NYC press event and got blown away by a super-light laptop, I’d have two nickels over the last four months. The first would be when Asus unveiled the Zenbook A14 before CES 2025. The second would be now, with HP doing something similar with its sub-1kg (2.2-pound) OmniBook 7 Aero. Two nickels isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
Thin-and-light laptops are certainly desirable, and both of these designs are eye-catching. But there’s an important distinction between them. The Asus design uses an Arm-based Snapdragon X processor for incredible battery life, which might not be a great trade-off for those who want a lot of extra oomph. The HP design goes with AMD’s latest laptop processors, which makes it a powerhouse by comparison.
Michael Crider / Foundry
With a white (or silver) exterior and keyboard deck but a black bezel around the screen (I think of it as a reverse Oreo), the OmniBook Aero 7 most resembles the OmniBook X 14, which shares the “AI” badge below the keyboard indicating it’s a Copilot+ laptop. Sadly, the rather distinctive blue splash of a power button on that design is gone, not that the Aero 7 needs it to turn heads. The newer design is a brand-new magnesium alloy chassis with a 13.3-inch screen.
Otherwise, the laptop’s design doesn’t seem all that remarkable. As someone who pays special attention to keyboards, I appreciate that the Delete key is placed correctly by nudging the power button to the side, though I wonder if that might cause frustration until you’ve adapted to those being so close to one another. Note the lack of a fingerprint reader, though there’s a Windows Hello face scanner in the camera, which also has a physical privacy shutter. The IPS-LCD screen is generous at 2560×1600, but you’ll have to splurge for that as the default screen is only 1200p. Sadly, there’s no OLED option.
The super-wide central hinge, another point of distinction from the other recent OmniBook designs, might specifically be for letting the lid raise without also pulling up the lightweight main body. On the left side you get a single USB-A port kept company with a headphone jack, with a much more crowded left side housing two USB-C ports, another USB-A, and a full-sized HDMI port.
HP
The big shocker is the weight, of course. A super-light laptop isn’t unprecedented, as I said in the beginning. But a super-light laptop that doesn’t compromise on power is, if not exactly mythical, then very hard to find. You’re either looking at something of a splurge for aspiring C-suiters like the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon series or the aforementioned Zenbook and its lower power threshold. There are also laptops that go smaller than 13 inches, like the Surface Go Laptop or various Chuwi models (basically better versions of the old “netbook” category).
This is something different. The OmniBook Aero 7 uses full-fat AMD Ryzen AI 300-series processors—either an 8-core 350 or 6-core 340—and, according to HP’s promo materials, can offer up to 32GB RAM and 1TB of storage. That puts it on par with, if not quite at the same level as, something like the EliteBook X G1a. Not only will it be able to handle all the usual browsing and office tasks with aplomb, it should have some of the best gaming options of any laptop on the market using integrated graphics, maybe even some light media production duties as well.
Michael Crider / Foundry
HP’s representatives gave a battery life quote of 15.75 hours, with the usual proviso that it’s a video rundown test. The 12.25 hours of “mixed usage” claim raises my eyebrows a bit, especially considering the small-ish 43 watt-hour battery. But again, if you want a laptop that’ll last for a day and change, you can find them out there; if you want one that you can carry around in a backpack for hours without noticing and one that packs a serious processor punch, this is it.
I don’t have a release date or pricing info for the OmniBook Aero 7 yet. Based on previous hardware in the OmniBook series, I’d guess somewhere in the $1,100 to $1,300 range… unless HP doesn’t want to sell any. Presumably, it’ll hit shelves sometime later this year. I’d be surprised to see it before August, though.
