HP enters the competitive sub-£700 laptop market with the new OmniBook 5 14 AI, promising long battery life and premium display options tailored for students and early-career users, potentially setting a new endurance benchmark.
HP is moving deeper into the crowded sub-£700 laptop segment with a new OmniBook 5 14 AI PC that starts at $699.99 and is pitched at students and early-career buyers who want portability, long battery life and a premium display without paying flagship prices. The company says the machine will arrive later this month through HP and Best Buy, and it is positioning the model as a more affordable alternative to the Snapdragon-based OmniBook 5 it launched earlier this year.
The new version replaces Qualcomm silicon with Intel’s Wildcat Lake processors. Entry models use a Core 7 315 chip with six cores, split between two performance cores and four low-power efficiency cores, plus six threads and a boost clock of up to 4.4GHz. HP will also offer Core 5 320 and Core 7 350 variants, which raise the maximum boost clocks to 4.6GHz and 4.8GHz respectively. The base specification includes 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive, which should keep the sticker price down but may limit heavier multitasking.
Display options are a key part of the pitch. The cheapest version uses a 1,920 by 1,200 panel without touch support, while a touch-enabled 2K option will also be available. HP says the top configuration, a 2,560 by 1,600 OLED panel with a claimed peak brightness of up to 620 nits, will not arrive until March 2027. All versions cover 100% of the DCI-P3 colour gamut, which should help with photo and video work, and the laptop weighs just over 2.5 pounds, keeping it firmly in ultraportable territory.
Battery claims are equally ambitious. HP says the OmniBook 5 14 AI PC can last up to 42 hours when streaming video, although that figure will depend heavily on the display, chip choice and workload. On HP’s current Snapdragon-based OmniBook 5, the company already advertises up to 34 hours of battery life, while PCMag’s own testing of that earlier model found a real-world result of 34 hours and 48 minutes. If the Intel version comes close to its headline figure, it would set a new benchmark for endurance in this price band. HP is also preparing a higher-end ProBook 4 G2iS 14 AI PC for November, with the same CPU family, a 3K OLED screen at 2,880 by 1,800, a 120Hz refresh rate and support for up to 32GB of RAM, although pricing has not yet been disclosed.
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