CES next week and I need a laptop to go there with MacBook no good total junk
because macOS is garbage Dell XPS 15 fantastic laptop I don't want to be that
idiot that's sitting there in the corner having to charge their laptop while
writing down notes that's stupid instead I got this guy right here and I think
it's the best then and like laptop on the market oh look at this here we have
the HP dragonfly Elite G3 and I am
freaking stupid ever since I looked at the surface laptop 5 I have just wanted
to go back to that 3x2 display but the surface laptop just it isn't quite there
this though we looked at the old version and it was pretty good but it was just
kind of a bit too small because of the 16x9 display this one
is three by two now you might have noticed that here we have a really nice
like blue color on the box unfortunately I just got plain business silver but I
did have a fix for that I'm sorry HP but uh this thing went to dbrand before I
got it one problem of this MacBook that I
didn't bring up before is that it does not have a scorpion on the back I
absolutely love this right here turns a line is afraid of scorpions and and uh
we're leaning into it this time scorpion with a sword look at that I
absolutely love it the best thank you so much dbrand you've
made my day okay let's not get ahead of ourselves here what else is in the Box
power cord and the charger is
65 Watts I appreciate that because a lot
of devices in this class will only come with like a 45 watt charger or so and it
takes way longer to charge up the battery first thing that is awesome
about this is the weight this thing comes in at 2.8 pounds which is just
around 1.2 kilograms that's awesome because this is like deadly close to the
LG gram but it's nowhere near that in build quality this thing so well made
just for comparison XPS 15
4.3 pounds heaps more MacBook Pro 14 3.5
again heaps more very noticeable in your backpack this thing right here I don't
even notice it i o on this thing is also exceptional so right here we have
Thunderbolt 4. this right here is where a SIM card can go if you want Wireless
connectivity friggin Wicked also full
size HDMI is this 2.1 or just two
too boo we also have a full size type A
absolutely love it so many devices just don't have USB type A I have been
enjoying my life so much more now that I don't need dongles also another
Thunderbolt 4 and a Kensington lock to round it all out one of my absolute
favorite things about this though look at this look look at that it's rounded
who would have thought the the whole feel of this thing is just so incredibly
soft like it's the softest feeling laptop that I've felt since like the
surface laptop with the Alcantara on it it is just so nice HP has what they call
their pillow corners on it it's so stupid that on the XPS 13 plus I needed
to take a freaking deburring tool to the edge because it was so sharp everyone
just absolutely love it the star of the show here though is the
3x2 display and that's for two reasons so it's 13.5 inches and because it's so
tall it also gives you extra space for the track pad and just the Palm rest
this means that like a normal person with normal sized hands can just use it
and not have their hands like falling off the back so many 13-inch devices
like half of people will have their
hands just falling off the edge XPS 13s and like a lot of the other ones it'll
be like 45 of people are able to use it
comfortably stupid before we get into it though I need to
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line with the fix mat find it in the link down in the description for unlocking the laptop you have two
options first of all is facial recognition which is not working right
now but it's fine because there's also fingerprint reader
there we go starting off in the laptop we have the keyboard this is like one of
the best keyboards that I've ever used on a laptop
it's like probably the snappiest laptop keyboard
that I've ever felt and that's kind of it has its pros and its cons so if
you're sitting at a desk like this it's
an A plus like even an A plus plus one of the best laptop keyboards I've ever
felt problem is because the actuation force is higher than most laptops it's
kind of difficult to get the actuation quite right if you're holding it like
this not something most people do but given that I'm walking around at CES and
crap it's a thing you end up doing also this trackpad is freaking phenomenal it
is glass topped and I don't know how they did it but it is just so soft it
feels so good gliding your finger over this I might like it more than the
MacBook Pro it's that good personal preference decides which one of these
you like more but also it's a Windows laptop that we're comparing to a MacBook
Pro so that's like Mega win oh yeah I forgot before but the most
impressive thing about that weight is the amount of chassis Flex there is or
the amount of Chastity Flex there just is not nothing nothing at all that's how
they're able to get such a nice and snappy keyboard on a lot of laptop
chassis if you have keys with this much weight the whole thing would be flexing
and it'll be a terrible experience they're able to get away with it because
of just how freaking stiff this thing is okay I do have one annoyance I just
turned airplane mode on and it's something that I've done a couple of times by accident there's a there's a
button for it right here like one of your function keys is taken up by airplane mode there's no pause play you
can't pause or play your media there's an empty key right here HP F2 could have
been pause or play how how many times a year do you guys use airplane mode
how many times do you use pause play
that's stupid HP this has made even worse by the fact that right here there
is a programmable macro key and you're able to do loads of things with it you
can program strings you can have it open programs you can have it do pretty much
anything under the Sun but do you know what's not an action that they have here
no pause play there HP come on
one thing about this that's sort of it's sort of good sort of knock great is the
display so this right here is a 1920 by
1280 screen so that's three by two love
that but the resolution that's a not
quite high enough like it's really noticeable like I can't easily have like
a script and emails open at the same
time on this there's just not enough real estate like I'd really like to have
it sort of like that like 125 there's
just not enough pixels to pull that off I need to go to 150. also you might have
noticed this is a matte display and the colors are fine it is color calibrated
from the factory so it is accurate and I do trust the display it's just nothing
special to look at like it's yeah you get used to it after a while but coming
from like a MacBook Pro or an XPS 15 with an OLED display it's not quite
there that said there is a 4K OLED panel
option for this that I'm sure looks spectacular
and solves all of the grapes that I have with it but also that sacrifices four
hours of battery life not worth it not worth it for me another huge problem
with this is the response times of these pixels they are freaking brutal like
it's probably like a good 40 50 milliseconds here like I don't know if
you can see uh even just the trails on
this mouse it's so bad like compare it to like an OLED it's very noticeable
even when you're using a trackpad even if you're just watching YouTube videos
like first of all you can just see the black levels there and I don't know if
you can tell the difference in response Times by me just doing this but like
this mess I can move so much faster and this one it's just uh
gross but I am more than willing to put up with that for the 15 hours of actual
battery life that this thing gets it's like a Macbook it's actually like a
MacBook with the MacBook air you can get like 17 Real World hours this is as
close as you can get I've had it set so that battery saver is always on and
that's kind of fixed my gripes with Windows modern standby I left it here on
Thursday it is now Tuesday I've lost
maybe 10 battery life that's how Windows modern standby should work and it seems
like if you just always have battery saver on it does help quite a bit that
said that comes with the complications that your laptop just always runs slower
while on battery and you don't get the full screen brightness and uh yeah it's
not a great hack but it does seem to work also one thing that I just realized
is that our Windows facial recognition did not work because our camera isn't
enabled when you press this button there's a little physical shutter that
goes over your camera it's nice it's just a little piece of privacy that I
appreciate in something like this all right let's have a look at the specs for
the processor we get an Intel i7 1265u
and it has into tell V Pro chances are you do not care about that but if you
work at a large company your it team very much does this allows just things
like Remote Management pushing updates from
somewhere else it also has features like BIOS Recovery so if your BIOS gets
corrupted because I don't know the sun got too horny that day but it's a real
thing Brandon it flips are a problem now the 1265u is not a particularly
powerful processor we do get 10 cores but only two of them are performance
cores this is great for a laptop like this because it allows you to have
all-day battery life it isn't so great if you want to do something that's
anything besides looking at a script but I don't care for RAM we get 16 gigabytes
of 48 megahertz ddr5 that means that in
theory you could have a sodium but in practice I'm sure that they don't we
also have a 512 Gigabyte SSD from WD Intel Wi-Fi 6E love it excellent Wi-Fi
chip for graphics we get the Intel Iris XE and this one has the 96 compute units
which means that it should actually be half decent for gaming but going back to
the response time of the pixels on the display uh doesn't matter gaming can be
terrible now that we have the camera enabled though let's just have a little
look here this camera seems like it's really great this is the 5 megapixel
camera that they introduced a little while ago I think it was even on the dry
I can fly line and it is one of the best
ones that you can get on a laptop I think it might be 1440p oh it is okay so
I can choose 1440p so uh you get more pixels on your webcam than you do on
your display with this config okay all right here we go
this does a fantastic job there's one thing that HP has done so well that's
just above and beyond everyone else and that's being able to expose for
someone's face on a webcam no matter the conditions like look at this light
doesn't matter look at this black it's not trying to compensate for any of that
it's only looking at my face and that's the only thing it's exposing for because
it's been around here wow this is like possibly the most challenging situation
you could have but my face is still exposed just fine it doesn't care that
this is all blown out doesn't matter we're only looking at my face excellent
job HP this might be the best webcam that there is on a laptop know that XPS
13 two in one was also really good you guys can fight it out I don't care
they're both really good for speakers we do get the ones from B and O and HP
typically does a really good job with the speakers on their laptops I think
it's going to get murdered by the MacBook Pro though
foreign
like there's it's kind of staging which is nice
oh and it's got some speakers right here as well
dang that sounds good that sounds really good
I'll get murdered lightly maimed maybe but not murdered
okay HP elitebook dragonfly MacBook
I'm going to call that a draw the Mac has more bass but it's like super
aggressive so it's it feels a lot
muddier like you can hear a lot more definition in the bass in the HP and
also I think because of the down firing speakers the stage is way wider on the
elitebook like it sounds like it's this large whereas the MacBook sounds like
you have a speaker here and a speaker here so excellent job that's like the
first Windows laptop besides the XPS 15 that's like even come close but what
doesn't come close though oh this display not even close
In fairness the HP does get up to 400 nits but because it's a Mac display it
doesn't have anywhere near the vibrancy and yeah the black levels nowhere close
to the MacBook amount of color this thing's just srgb nowhere close not that
this is bad again it's color accurate so like I don't hate it you just get used
to the fact that like it's kind of boring looking anyway I guess we have to
game on it now it's gonna be a Slaughter oh one thing that I forgot to mention
about the display though there is an option for hp's sure View and that is a
panel where you like press a button and you can only see the screen when you're
straight on if you're looking at it from like here
nothing you can just see like garbage for most people I'd highly recommend
staying away from the sure view panel because it just makes everything look
awful just so bad but at the same time
if you are going to be working on like documents on planes or you need to go
out in public and so on yeah it does it it does the job as I'm sure you guys
guessed we will not be screen recording this uh she's gonna have enough trouble
on her own you know she's struggling when the menu is having trouble if we
can get low 720p I think I'll be happy
oh wow
okay 12 FPS in the menu
this is better than expected we are getting a very cinematic 24 FPS
sometimes dropping to like four 10 24 by
768 is as low of a resolution as we can get that got us to 26 27 FPS I don't
think you're gonna have a good time with this you don't even have to worry about the fact that the response times of
pixels are garbage because the response times of this GPU is even worse so don't
game on it that's my conclusion all right tear down time oh HP I really hope
you didn't put screws under this oh for HP good guys
oh wow look at that they didn't put screws underneath the
feet good job guys yep that's about what I expected uh it's mostly battery in
here so you get a 68 watt hour battery in this guy exceptional for a laptop of
this class it's like this thing's the same size as the surface laptop 5 that
has a 45 watt hour battery in it that's what makes this laptop why I want it
nice battery on a Windows machine it's not powerful so even if Windows modern
standby tries and screws you up it can't do too much of a dent there's only two
performance cores yeah that's a pretty anemic heatsink look at the size of
these fans they're just just little boys I'm not going to pull it off because
it's putting off a bit of a fight but the SSD is under this heat shield right
here so you can swap that out now looking in here we also have the fibo
com 5G module right there the antennas
if you look go up here and they
terminate I don't quite understand how
the antennas work in this thing I haven't had any issues but they're just
like in the chassis right here and I don't understand how that gets out
because this whole chassis is the whole
chassis is some sort of magnesium aluminum something that's all been CNC
machined we also have our little Intel chip here that you cannot replace but
also who cares you already have the best one looks like Rams up here under this
little heat spreader because this is a business laptop from HP there's a good
chance that everything in here can be replaced if you do screw it up like it
looks like battery comes out and then you can access the touchpad I don't want
to comment on the keyboard but there's a good chance you can replace it or your
Tech can replace it I don't think you really want to so there it is the HP
dragonfly Elite G3 this thing is
freaking exceptional as far as being a thin and like goes I don't think there's
a better Windows laptop on the market and I would absolutely love to just
recommend all of you go and buy it right now problem is you probably can't so the
dragonfly Elite G3 starts at two
thousand seven hundred and eighty dollars and this one as configured is
over three thousand seven hundred dollars that's oh that's a pricey boy if
you can find this thing on sale it is a fantastic laptop and I absolutely love
it if you can't find it on sale I hope you have a company that's willing to
give you something like this because it is a fantastic laptop I absolutely love
it and uh so it's going to CES with me see you there anyway if you like this
video hit like get subscribed I'm gonna try and get some more budget friendly
options on here the HP Pavilion we looked at that a little while ago maybe
go watch that video it's like the same laptop except eight hundred dollars
anyway have a great day