Review: HP’s EliteBook Folio G1 is the MacBook as it could’ve been

Apple’s laptop designs used to feel like they were a few years ahead of the curve. When the company introduced things like the aluminum unibody MacBook Pros or both the first- and second-generation MacBook Air designs and even the 15- and 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros, they were impressive because none of the PC makers were doing anything quite like them.

That’s not so much the case in 2016, in part because designs like the MacBook Air and Pro have stood still as the PC OEMs have dramatically improved their own mid- to high-end offerings. You no longer need to buy a Mac to get good build quality, a nice-looking display, respectable battery life, or a non-terrible trackpad. And thanks in part to Windows 10, PCs are offering biometric authentication options and voice assistants that OS X and the Mac don’t have, even if the Mac is still much better at sharing data and interacting with the iPhone.

Apple’s latest laptop design is the MacBook, which is an impressively thin-and-light laptop that makes some key compromises in its pursuit of said thin-and-lightness. HP’s business-focused EliteBook Folio G1 isn’t the first MacBook-alike from the PC OEMs, but it might be the Windows laptop that best marries the virtues of the MacBook to the extra expandability and flexibility of a traditional Ultrabook. It’s on the expensive side, but it’s also the most impressive high-end laptop this side of Dell’s XPS 13.

Look and feel

I originally described the EliteBook as “a MacBook with two ports” and that description is accurate in a lot of ways. It’s a very thin aluminum and glass laptop, and it relies exclusively on USB Type-C ports for charging and connecting to wired accessories.

But HP’s machine makes a different set of compromises than the MacBook. Where Apple’s design sacrifices functionality in the name of making the laptop as thin and light as possible—its single port, its muddy 480p webcam, its low-travel keyboard and trackpad—the EliteBook improves on all of those features, making the laptop a little heavier (2.14 pounds vs. 2.06 for the MacBook) and larger (11.5 inches long and 8.23 inches wide compared to 11.04 inches long and 7.74 inches wide) in the process. The MacBook is thicker than the EliteBook at its thickest point, but the MacBook’s body tapers where the EliteBook’s body doesn’t.

The EliteBook’s design is also less sleek and clean, visually speaking. There’s an antenna cutout on the EliteBook’s lid, which Apple avoided by integrating the antennas into the laptop’s speakers. The EliteBook’s bezel, especially above and below the display, is quite a bit larger, presumably because the base of the laptop needed to be larger to fit in the ports and the battery and the extra room needed for the travel of the keyboard and trackpad.

So, yes, the MacBook looks a little better, and its engineering is more impressive. But HP’s laptop has the definite upper hand when it comes to actual usability. In practice it’s not so much larger or heavier that it makes a big difference when you’re lugging it around in a bag or using it on a plane. The improved webcam (plus the Windows Hello-compatible IR camera option) makes a big difference for video chat. And that second port means you can drive a display or plug in a USB accessory while charging the laptop at the same time. You’ll still need to own a big pile of special cables and adapters until we make it all the way through the Type-A to Type-C transition, but at least you’ll come out on the other side of it with a pair of really useful ports.

The other nice thing about the EliteBook’s USB ports is that they’re not just USB ports—they both support Thunderbolt 3, enabling 40Gbps of bandwidth and 10Gbps USB 3.1 gen 2 speeds. They also open up possibilities for external accessories like graphics cards, although that low-wattage Core M CPU won’t pair well with a $300 desktop GPU.

The bad thing about them is that HP’s systems so far haven’t played nice with other USB Power Delivery-compatible Type-C chargers, possibly due to concerns about poorly made adapters that don’t comply with the spec. This was an issue with HP’s Spectre X2, as well. HP’s adapter will charge many other USB Type-C devices, including all of the phones we plugged it into and Apple’s MacBook. But it seems like HP doesn’t trust others to manufacture power adapters that will work with its systems, which is too bad since Type-C and USB Power Delivery is eventually supposed to make all of these concerns go away.

Finally, let’s talk about the screen. The 12.5-inch 1080p panel in the base model is perfectly fine, and it comes in both touch and non-touch versions (the touch version, which includes the IR webcam for Windows Hello, adds about $122 to the base price according to HP’s site). Viewing angles, colors, brightness, and contrast are all good. There’s nothing to complain about, unless you look at the 1080p panel side-by-side with the 4K version of the screen. The 4K panel’s colors pop, its brightness and contrast are both better, and images and text are all sharper in apps that handle Windows 10’s scaling modes properly (not that a 1080p panel at this size isn’t sharp). It’s a really nice upgrade, but it comes at a significant cost—in actual dollars, in performance, and most importantly in battery life. More on that in the performance section.

One drawback to the EliteBook’s display panel? It’s incredibly reflective, since it lacks an antireflective screen coating like the one on the MacBook. The extra reflections don’t make a huge difference indoors, but if you’re sitting outside or with your back to a window you’ll appreciate Apple’s extra attention to detail.

Keyboard and trackpad

However you feel about the rest of the laptop’s design, both the keyboard and trackpad are excellent. The keyboard doesn’t use any weird switches or have silly layout decisions—it’s just a nice-feeling chiclet keyboard with good travel and firm keys. It’s satisfying to type on without requiring the breaking-in period that most people are going to need for the MacBook keyboard.

The keyboard’s only major feature/quirk is the function keys, which are overwhelmingly focused on “business” things and not multimedia playback as they sometimes are on these keyboards. F1 and F2 control picking up and hanging up calls made in Skype for Business and a handful of other video chatting apps, F3 launches your default calendar app, and F4 mutes the microphone.

The multitouch trackpad is also a pleasant surprise. Trackpads that follow Microsoft’s Precision Touchpad (PTP) spec are the ones that come the closest to replicating the MacBook lineup’s excellent trackpads—Dell’s XPS 13 uses one, Microsoft’s own Surface Type Covers use them, and happily the EliteBook includes one, too. This means it automatically supports all of Windows 10’s window management gestures, and it will automatically gain support for any new ones introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and beyond.

The EliteBook’s trackpad actually supports two modes of operation. PTP mode is the default and the one that I prefer, but you can switch to “GlidePoint Touchpad” mode in the drivers if you prefer the OEM drivers and customization options for whatever reason. We’ve heard from trackpad OEMs like Synaptics that PTP-compatible hardware could be made to run in either PTP mode or standard OEM mode depending on the firmware and drivers used, but the Alps touchpad HP is using here is the first time I’ve actually seen that decision left up to the user. Hopefully even systems that don’t use PTP mode by default will at least begin offering users the option, since it really does make using Windows with a trackpad nicer than it has traditionally been.

Software and Windows Hello

There isn’t a ton to report about HP’s loadout of Windows 10 Pro, except that it’s jam-packed with business-oriented HP apps that consumers (and even some businesses, depending on the services they use) might not care about. They’re easy enough for consumers to install, and businesses that don’t want them probably have their own Windows images to drop on them anyway. Out of the box, you lose about 17.5GB of disk space to recovery and diagnostic partitions and another 36GB to Windows itself and the various preinstalled apps—the largest separate partition, at 14.5GB, can at least be moved to an external USB drive if you want to reclaim that space.

One software-related thing I did want to mention was Windows Hello, Windows 10’s biometric authentication system. Most EliteBook configurations include an IR camera—it’s standard in the 1080p and 4K touchscreen configurations and optional in the 1080p non-touch version—and it’s the first PC I’ve tested that has supported Hello. PC makers have to use components that meet fairly strict accuracy requirements to use Hello, which is why it won’t work with just any old webcam or fingerprint reader.

As my introduction to Hello, the EliteBook’s IR camera was surprisingly great. When you sit down in front of the laptop, the IR lights blink to life, and I was fully logged in within seconds. If I had simply locked the PC rather than rebooting it, I was back into my account before I could even get my hands to the keyboard. To improve accuracy, you can show the camera multiple pictures of your face under different conditions—dim light, bright light, with glasses, without glasses, and so on—all of which is handled through Windows’ native Settings panels and not through any janky third-party apps.

To return to the MacBook comparisons for a minute—it seems strange that the Mac offers zero biometric authentication options, especially considering how successful Apple was with TouchID on the iPhone and iPad. Tech companies need to keep looking at ways to make better security practices easy for people to live with, and near-instantaneous biometric authentication seems like a great way to do it in laptops and desktops.

Performance

At this point in Skylake’s lifecycle, we’ve said all there is to say about its performance, and the Skylake Core M processors have all behaved more consistently than the Broadwell versions in all the systems we’ve tested. Core M today is where the U-series Ultrabook CPUs were four or five years ago: performance feels “good enough” despite the lower power requirements. Those 15W processors are still a lot faster, but Core M gets you thinner systems without fans.

Our review units had 1.2GHz (3.1GHz Turbo) Core m7-6Y75 processors, though some versions come with slower 1.1GHz (2.8GHz Turbo) Core m5-6Y57 chips. All versions of the EliteBook include 1866MHz DDR3 RAM (Core M doesn’t support DDR4 like the other Skylake CPUs do), mostly-SATA SSDs with a 256GB NVMe drive available as an optional component, 867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 4.2.

Core M is pretty good at the light, “bursty” workloads for which it was designed to excel, as is visible in Geekbench. The Core m7 version, in particular, can match some of the U-series CPUs. Core M’s performance is still variable when it comes to sustained performance, which you can see in the Cinebench CPU scores. This test runs for longer, which gives the CPU more time to throttle down—it’s why the multi-core scores for the EliteBook’s normally faster Core m7 are actually pretty close to the score for the slower m3 in Asus’ midrange ZenBook UX305C. Intel’s low-power CPUs are better than they’ve ever been, but they’re not going to replace those faster dual-core CPUs for heavy workloads just yet.

The HD 515 is a decent GPU for desktop work, though in the 4K version of the EliteBook it definitely drops frames when you’re doing animation-heavy stuff like Task View. Don’t expect to play AAA console games on this thing (and even older and lighter games might not run at native resolution), but it’s considerably better than the GPU that shipped with Broadwell.

That said, notice that the ZenBook sometimes outdoes the EliteBook here, even when they’re both running at 1080p. It looks like Asus’ laptop can dissipate a larger amount of heat than HP’s, which leads to better performance for sustained workloads like photo editing or gaming.

HP gave us the version of the EliteBook with a SATA SSD III in it, and most configurations of the laptop ship with SATA instead of the lone 256GB PCI Express option. This isn’t the end of the world. But it’s been three years since Apple started shipping PCI Express SSDs in all of its laptops, and both built-in Intel chipset support and relatively widespread and affordable PCI Express SSD controllers make it easier to implement in PCs than ever before. SATA III has been a bottleneck on SSDs for years, and especially in a laptop that starts at $1,000, it’s far past time to start moving to PCI Express as the standard, not as a costly add-in option.

Battery life

The EliteBook’s battery life is pretty good, at least if you’re using the 1080p version. It lasted around 10 hours in our Wi-Fi browsing test, less than the MacBook by a fair margin but not bad compared to the rest of the field.

That’s not true of the 4K version of the laptop, which loses more than three hours of battery life in our test exclusively because of the screen (almost all the other components, including the CPU, were identical across models). It’s a very pretty display, but it might also be the difference between having a laptop that lasts all day on a cross-country flight and one that dies before you can get to the hotel.

Thin and light, fewer compromises

In some ways, the EliteBook Folio G1 feels like the MacBook that could’ve been, had Apple’s priorities been shuffled around just a little bit. It’s almost as small, almost as thin, and almost as light, but it’s got a keyboard that most of you will already be used to and a second USB Type-C port for added versatility. Those USB Type-C ports also provide Thunderbolt 3 support, so you have more bandwidth for external accessories if you want it. Apple’s laptop is better designed (and if you prefer OS X to Windows, it’s all moot anyway), but HP’s is perhaps more attuned to what current buyers (especially power users) want and need.

At the same time, it’s hurt by some of the same decisions that make buying a PC such a nightmare—there are four different screen options, and the 4K panel dramatically compromises the laptop’s battery life. Whether you get the Windows Hello IR camera depends on which configuration you pick, since it isn’t a standard feature. There are five different SSD options, and if you’re upgrading you need to make a choice between the largest one and the fastest one. It’s possible to go from a Core m5 CPU to a Core m7, but it costs $591 to do it. Buying a Mac is still refreshingly straightforward by comparison.

That aside, though, the EliteBook is a really great ultraportable laptop. It’s a dramatically improved version of the EliteBook 1020 that we came so close to liking a year and a half ago, and it’s easy to recommend if you want a MacBook clone that runs Windows or if you’re looking for something thinner, lighter, and quieter than the still-excellent Dell XPS 13. If the price is too much for you, there’s still the Asus ZenBook UX305C, which is larger and heavier and is missing a few bells and whistles but is still really affordable for the amount of laptop you’re getting.