The HP Dragonfly Pro is a great laptop with some odd extra stuff

As far as I know about computers, HP has been known for its labyrinthine customer service. A computer I used to work well over 10 years ago at his store, new employees were forced to call HP as a harassment ritual. Nonetheless, the company is focusing on software and services this year, likely after his PC sales have plummeted in the past few months. The company’s roadmap for 2023 includes positioning as a “solution provider,” as Alex Cho, president of systems for individuals, told me recently.

The HP Dragonfly Pro ($1,399 for a test unit with 16GB RAM / 512GB storage) gives us a glimpse of what it might look like on the consumer side. It comes with a few additional customer support features and services that are mentioned as often in workshops and publicity materials as performance and battery life. ‘s tagline abounds throughout the website. “24/7 support” is at the forefront. HP wants you to buy this laptop. TRUE i want to fix it for you

This is a really nice device. But as a symbol of HP’s “solution” focused roadmap, I’m not convinced.

I have few complaints about Dragonfly Pro itself. A 5-megapixel camera provides sharp, detailed images for video calls. The speakers aren’t exactly the quality of his MacBook, but they sound pretty good. The (1920 x 1200) touch display looks great and is sufficiently bright, reaching 412 nits in our tests. The keyboard is very comfortable, with HP’s signature row of hotkeys on the right side. HP had to press the backspace key a bit to make space, but I guess that’s something you get used to. The (haptic) trackpad is fine too. The build quality is very high and the elegant styling is very similar to earlier members of the premium Dragonfly line.

The port selection consists of only 3 USB-C, 2 of which are USB-4 and 1 of which is 3.2. That’s right – no headphone jack. Boo. come now

This is the first AMD Ryzen 7000 laptop I’ve been able to test this year (with a Ryzen 7 7736U) and the performance did not disappoint. In our benchmarks, it outperformed Apple’s M2 MacBook Pro in multi-core Cinebench tests and came pretty close in single-core tests. Gaming performance was also very close, averaging only 2 frames per second slower. Shadow of the Tomb Raiderhighest setting. I use his M2 Air and M2 Pro a lot and for everyday office work I don’t see any noticeable performance difference with the Dragonfly. However, Dragonfly is noticeably slower in Adobe Premiere Pro, which is AMD’s particular weakness.

Battery life was a sigh of relief. I averaged him doing 12 hours and 46 minutes of continuous work. After spending most of the past year testing 4 hours of Intel machines, I can’t put into words how awesome it is to see a day’s battery life for him on a Windows machine. more than this!

This AMD processor really seems like a dream come true. Unfortunately, I mentioned this last year for a number of AMD machines that were no longer available for purchase shortly after release. So let’s hope that doesn’t happen here.

HP describes the target audience for Dragonfly Pro as “freelancers.” Self-employed, mobile and very much an online professional. These freelancers claim in HP documentation: Tech headaches and getting support is frustrating and downtime costs them. ”

For the ostensible purpose of serving this tier, Dragonfly comes with (optionally) what HP calls “24/7 Pro Live Support”. The first year is included, after that it’s $10.99 per month. A specific button on the keyboard etched with two small speech bubbles directly opens the service. (Busy freelancers, as you know, don’t want to waste time launching apps from the taskbar.) This is no small function key. This is a large, highly visible dedicated key.

On first boot I was told that this key cannot be remapped. I was constantly complaining about this fact in my hands-on videos.Since then HP seems to have changed their minds and now you can Remap this button. wonderful! We don’t yet see an option to remap in the myHP app on our review unit, but HP says it will be available shortly after launch.

I just need to say right away that I’m not buying this pitch. I was alone at one point in my life. These are people who know how to google things. They can troubleshoot the issue on their own. And most importantly, they are the people who buy laptops with the expectation that they will. workit doesn’t always break down and you don’t need to call customer service often. on my keyboardThere is a possibility that I made a purchase mistake. I’m sure the real target audience for this package is like my grandparents who need help figuring out how to unmute in Teams.

I know I don’t have access to the market research that HP does, but I had to take it off my chest.

But I digress. HP markets this service as such a huge, essential benefit that I thought I should give it a try. My experience has been mixed. First, the large support hotkeys are not particularly responsive. I had to tap an average of 4 times to open the app. Sometimes it wouldn’t open at all. Most of the time, just opening the app from the taskbar saved me time.

When I finally opened the app, it was also frustratingly unresponsive. I had to click different buttons over and over to see different spinning wheels. I submitted a question through the form. (My speaker was a little rickety, so I asked how to fix it. This is what I normally do with Google, but I wanted to know how the live chat worked. .) I (very kind) agent walked me through all the steps to update my audio driver slowly and carefully.

It wasn’t terrible customer service, but it wasn’t exceptional enough to recommend paying $130 a year to use it from time to time.

Ultimately, I think this Dragonfly is great hardware. It’s a shame it doesn’t have a headphone jack, but the combination of performance and battery life is better than anything we’ve seen on a Windows PC in quite some time.

It’s a shame that HP, through both marketing and the literal design of the keyboard, is trying to take advantage of such a great device to sell a subscription service that isn’t great and simply isn’t needed.$500 Pavilion If you buy a , you may need such a subscription service because it can break from side to side. If he’s paying $1,300 for a premium PC, he definitely shouldn’t.