HP Laptop for Business and Student, 15.6″ HD Touchscreen, Intel 6-Core i3-1215U Processor, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, lntel UHD Graphics, Windows 11 Home, with Microsoft Office…

Make no doubt about it, this is a budget PC. In the pictures it looks like all other HP laptops. And being in IT for the past 10 years I have ordered dozens and dozens of HP laptops for our employees. But I personally needed a budget PC and decided to give this one a try. And while I do believe it to be a good value, one has to be prepared to get what you pay for. While you do save money, you have to be content with getting less in certain areas. From a computational perspective this laptop does the job just fine for your basic streaming and application processing – just be prepared for it to be quite noisy when the fan kicks on to keep things cool. The case, and especially the keyboard, is quite cheap. It will get the job done but it is a far cry from the business class HP laptops I’m use to working on. There is no key backlighting which I have grown fond of over the years in upper level models. The display is lower resolution (1366 x 768) which can be challenging when filling out online pop-up forms where the form is taller than your display! The display itself, while plenty bright, is hampered by a very reflective coating which can act more like a mirror than a display if you’ve got windows or bright lighting behind you. The display also has a narrow viewing angle – get much outside a straight-on view and the displays grows quickly dark. The sales page states there is a privacy shutter for the webcam but there is none. Selling points for me were the HDMI port, headphone jack and smart card reader. And one of the biggest reasons I purchased this deal was to have the Office 2021 lifetime license. I did have one question I posted to the seller and to my surprise they responded in under 24 hours. Good stuff! For the price, you do have to make some concessions but if you’re willing to give up some for the keyboard and display, I think you’ll find this a good deal. And only time will tell if the lower price ends up effecting its service life.

I’ve had a MacBook for nearly 9 years that still works great, but I wanted to get a new laptop before that one dies, but really didn’t want to spend so much since I’m only needing to use it for general browsing, paying bills, and writing. I struggled to decide if spending the money up front for apple knowing it would last a long time was the way to go vs. getting a less expensive windows laptop w lifetime office installed would be better, especially factoring in paying for antivirus every year or two, etc. Historically my windows laptops haven’t lasted more than 2-3 years before they’re not reliable anymore. Opted to give this one a try, figuring if I only get a few years out of it, then I will know at that time to go back to apple.

When it arrived, set up was simple. Amazon did the most pathetic job of packaging this thing ever- put a laptop box into a much larger Amazon box with ZERO padding, so the manufacturer packaging must be exceptional to survive banging around for the entire trip to my house to deliver the laptop inside seemingly unscathed.

I thought at first that I was missing the lifetime Office suite, because nothing was in the box, and I wasn’t prompted to do anything for it during set-up- in fact I turned down a popup offer for a year license. It took a lot of maneuvering the Amazon site to finally find a way to message the actual seller about it to see if they could send me Office, since Amazon customer service was telling me I could only return or replace the laptop, which seemed stupid given I had set it up and it was working as it should. The sender responded within just a couple of hours explaining how to access it where it was pre-installed in the laptop, and I was easily able to access everything once I knew where to look, which was awesome.

Size-wise, this laptop is about 1.5inches wider than my 9 year old MacBook Air 13inch, but the same height and depth. Weight feels about the same.

The keyboard for the HP doesn’t feel the same as the Mac- keys feel a little firmer I would say, but they are far quieter- the Mac is very clicky sounding in comparison, but the keys feel a bit softer. The HP keys aren’t backlit, and I kind of miss it, but it’s not a huge deal. I appreciate having the numerical keypad built in- it’s one of the most annoying things I’ve found with laptops compared to desktop machines, because I use it so much, and I have always found it really annoying to have to go without on my laptop.

The screen is bright and the display is very crisp. It responds quickly to touch, and I’m finding I like the feature more than I anticipated- it’s nice to resize a Word document with a quick swipe, or tap to close a window or switch to another. It cuts down on how much you need to tap the track pad, and if you’re like me, track pads make you want to throw your laptop sometimes. I’ve never liked them or found they respond well, but that may just be me.

I haven’t put it through a full workout yet, but so far the battery life seems good, it isn’t getting hot, and it hasn’t been loud. I will try to remember to come back later and update, but if you are considering this, I would say it’s worth the chance.