HP’s new OmniBook 3 emerges as a compelling, budget-friendly rival to Apple’s MacBook Neo, featuring an OLED display, impressive battery life, and expanded connectivity, now available at a discounted price.
HP’s OmniBook 3 is emerging as a more convincing Windows rival to Apple’s MacBook Neo for budget buyers who want more than the usual entry-level basics. Priced at $599.99, it undercuts Apple’s machine by $100 and, according to NotebookCheck’s spot, combines an OLED screen, a larger battery and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X platform in a package that is now being discounted further at Best Buy. That puts it in sharper value territory than HP’s own first pricing suggested.
The display is where the two laptops diverge most clearly. HP fits a 14-inch OLED panel with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution and full DCI-P3 coverage, while Apple keeps a smaller 13-inch IPS screen with a higher 2,408 x 1,506 resolution and a brighter 500-nit rating. Reviewers at PCWorld and WIRED have noted that the OmniBook 3’s panel delivers strong colour and deep blacks, although brightness is not a standout and the display trade-off is more about contrast than raw specification.
Performance is also split by priorities. HP uses the Snapdragon X X1-26-100, an eight-core chip with a 45-TOPS neural processor, which gives it solid multi-core capability and good efficiency. PCWorld said the machine can run for nearly 22.5 hours in testing, while other reviews have described battery life as one of its main strengths. HP’s stated figure of up to 41 hours and 45 minutes is not directly comparable with Apple’s quoted video-streaming and web-browsing ratings, but it does underline how aggressively the company is positioning the laptop on endurance.
Connectivity is another area where HP is more generous. The OmniBook 3 includes two 10Gbps USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1 and a headphone jack, whereas the MacBook Neo offers two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, with one of the USB-C connections limited to slower USB 2 speeds. Both systems start with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage, although Windows 11 generally puts more pressure on RAM than macOS. That may matter less over time if Microsoft succeeds in trimming the operating system’s memory use, but for now the OmniBook 3 looks strongest as a practical, well-connected option for students and mainstream buyers. Best Buy is currently selling it for $499.99 as part of its 60th Anniversary Sale through August 24, 2026, while Amazon is taking pre-orders.
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