Review: HP EliteBook Ultra G1i

EliteBook is HP’s business laptop brand—“real power for real work”—and a quick peek at the price reveals a fairly universal truth about business-focused hardware: It’s more expensive than consumer-grade gear. Considerably so. With a $2,429 MSRP (though already discounted to $1,999), the EliteBook Ultra G1i is the priciest laptop I’ve tested in over a year, except for Apple's MacBook Pro, which had its specs blown out.

The EliteBook Ultra G1i has relatively tame tech under the hood, a modest configuration that would barely merit a raised eyebrow amongst its Windows competitors. So what are you getting for that outsized outlay?

The big sell is security: HP Wolf Security for Business adds several extra layers of protection on top of existing anti-malware features, and it's hard not to notice them right away. For example, one feature of Wolf emerges when you attempt to install any software. Wolf pops up to alert you if the software is not on its authorized list (nothing was, during my tests), and asks if you really want to install it. It’s similar to Microsoft’s User Access Control system, except you can’t bypass this through the Control Panel.

Additional features of Wolf Security include anti-phishing protection, a BIOS tamper-prevention feature, Windows OS hardening/resilience features, and much more, with extras geared toward IT fleet management. I tested as many of the security features as I could and was impressed that they were wholly effective at blocking any of the bad stuff I could turn up. Much of this is overkill for the consumer, but if your business needs this kind of protection and added manageability, well, you probably already know it.

Beyond all that, there’s the actual hardware, which is buttoned up. Matte black, with curved corners but generally crisp edges, nothing about the design will surprise any user who’s worked on a corporate laptop in the last decade, save perhaps for the screen, which opens to a lie-flat 180 degrees. The magnesium cover has a moderate amount of give, but the thinness does help keep weight down to a svelte 2.6 pounds, and thickness at 19 mm.

Specs are not bare-bones but are far from luxe; the 14-inch touchscreen has a 2,880 x 1,800-pixel resolution, and the system is powered by an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V CPU. That’s a few steps up from the basic processor model, but still a step down from higher-end options you typically find at this price. The 32 GB of RAM is fair, but the 512-GB solid-state drive feels chintzy for the money, though perhaps that’s an acknowledgement that most business users will be leaning heavily on cloud or server-based storage instead. Ports are acceptable: three USB-C with USB4 support and a single USB-A port (with a flip-down cover). You’ll need one of those USB-C ports for charging.

Given the above specs, I was surprised that performance was generally on the low side, more in keeping with a true entry-level configuration than what the G1i includes. None of the benchmarks I ran were any more impressive than I’ve seen on slower, cheaper machines running Intel Core Ultra 7 Series 2 processors, and many of the scores I saw were below even those uninspired levels, albeit only slightly. I suspect the overhead from the Wolf Security features is giving the unit a slight performance hit that, while not severe, may be more noticeable when putting the laptop under heavy loads.

Battery life on a full-screen YouTube playback hit just over 14 hours, a decent score, and I was impressed by the completely silent operation of the laptop; I couldn't get the fan to kick in, no matter how heavy a load I put on the device. The speakers are fine, and the screen looks good enough, but neither blew my socks off. I did appreciate the keyboard on the device, which has just enough travel and responsiveness to make for easy data entry, while also being fairly quiet. The touchpad is spacious but just short of being too large.

As with most laptops today, AI is a major focus for the EliteBook line, and HP’s AI Companion, the company’s own GPT-4o skin, is preinstalled on the unit. AI Companion purports to let you take fuller advantage of the onboard neural processing unit, though it requires an active internet connection to work and wasn’t any faster than any online tools available. You’re also getting double AI duty here, as pressing the Copilot button on the keyboard still brings up a standard Microsoft Copilot interface.

The temporary sale price of $1,999 makes the EliteBook Ultra G1i a better deal, but it still doesn’t measure up on a price-to-performance basis against competing systems. It does, however, provide a much stronger value proposition for its security and manageability benefits, though again, I doubt many of these features have much utility outside of large, corporate environments.