I agree, call it for what it is. It sucks on performance, efficiency, and a horrible horrible display (which HP usually screws up on). I'm stuck with a different horrible EliteBook for work, and I want to set the thing on fire half the time.
Nope. 768px tall makes it like view webpages through a tank-slit.. 16:9 is a terrible aspect ratio made worse by low resolution. The 900px tall 16:9 screens are about the lowest that are really useful.
Besides you can get a tablet with 1080p or better for $400 these days. 1366x768 is inexcusable on a machine that cost that much anymore.
I hated a little bit on win8 when I didn't know how to do much. but not that I've learnt a few tricks here n there.. I'm liking it a lot more than previous windows OS' and definitely much better than OSX.
Generally speaking, any OS that still needs to be learned is a horrible failure these days. Time spent using the OS instead of your software is already wasted time, but time spent learning how to even use the OS is just inacceptable. GUIs were kind of invented to reduce the need for OS manuals, not as a pretty way of hiding functionality away.
The problem is when you start adding in more and more functionality. There is no need to constantly display these things in front of your face. So they created a search function. Then they made the search function faster and faster. Win 8, takes no time to search.
Here's the thing about business laptops. I can accept that some of them are thicker, I have a dell precision m4600, and I accept that its think because it has very good internals, cooling, battery, and upgradability. However, this laptop seems to have none of those things, except maybe good cooling, which isn't really that needed with a ULV chip.
Finally, I don't get why they put the i7 in there. To me, it would make much more sense to even put a 512GB SSD in there, which would lead to a much faster laptop overall.
What's preventing the use of a mSATA SSD in the WWAN slot? Is it just that the mounting screw is for half-length cards, or is the slot incompatible with SSDs?
HP normally employs a whitelist on their UEFI/BIOS for mSATA/mPCIe slots, which means that even if you found an mSATA SSD that fit in the tiny space, it wouldn't work because the UEFI BIOS wasn't explicitly told to allow that particular device.
There are ways around that, but it's a stressful process potentially ending in either a bricked laptop, one with curious intermittent problems, or one that works exactly like it should've in the first place.
That's the nub mouse (also known as a Trackpoint, although that term is technicalluy trademarked by IBM/lenovo).
When done well (like on thinkpads), it's one of the best pointing devices on a laptop. When done poorly (dell latitudes, hp, some toshibas, a few vaios), it can be horribly infuriating.
Even on thinkpads they are annoying. It's a legacy pointing device sitting in the middle of the keyboard looking ugly and tripping your fingers. The world has moved on to multi-touch pads, and they are much, much, MUCH better than the nubs of yesterday.
This is known as the Autonomy Accounting writeoff tax.
Olympus wrote off $2Bn for accounting fraud, and has been charging customers up to $100 for lens hoods, so maybe hp needs to inflate their margins too?
My steps for reaching the comments were as follows:
1) Click on article in Google Reader because it had "EliteBook" in the title. 2) Jump to the Display section of the review, scan the first paragraph and glance at the graphs. 3) Go straight to the comments to describe the facepalm I'm currently doing while typing this comment out.
i pop the insert key off of every keyboard i have ever owned and stick some folded up paper under it and pop it back on. no more word destroying for me! i also love how you slap the word business class on something and charge more for it. no wonder companies love serving enterprises.
There's nothing like typing a few sentences while glancing at documentation to the side and realizing that Insert has been happily gobbling up your words.
This seems like a lot to pay for a laptop with good cooling.
Maybe it's not that bad, it's an ultraportable with two damn SO-DIMM's! In a small formfactor, that's pretty sweet in of it self. I don't like the trend with like one soldered channel plus one DIMM. Ultrabooks aren't very good here.
Costs a lot customized though. Good to see business/corporate geared things though. You can even have it (with Core i5-3427U at least) vPro enabled, and it has DisplayPort, docking ports etc. I guess you could always buy if using it as a personal computer for yourself at about 1000 USD and put in another RAM-stick and change out the HDD to an SSD and get a decent machine. How would this with 8GB SO-DIMM, 250GB SSD for 1300 compete against the ultrbooks?
Of course and it's about 1000 USD preconfigured with a 48Wh battery where this review model is only using a 30Wh battery (i.e. smaller than a Surface RT). Custom config for an large enterprise would obviously come down too. Simply because they want to win as a supplier. You already have a 25% rebate at HP to begin with with customized machines, so for an large corp the price isn't ridiculous and is less than 2000 with SSD, 8GB RAM and i7 cpu. A Dell or some other brand might be a better fit for many though.
I'm confused why this article doesn't say what's so obvious - that this laptop is an utter PoS and isn't worth the cost, by any means.
Frankly the conclusion is WAY too kind.
There is literally not a single good thing about this laptop compared to its competition. Price, screen, form factor, specs, battery life - you name it, it sucks. Hard.
I deal with 100-1000s of notebooks on a monthly basis, and by far and away HP has the highest fail rate (has been that way since maybe 06 or 07?). I wouldn't buy this if it was netbook priced. Dell's notebook reliability is actually really good (do seem to have some power / battery issues on current models), and Lenovo's is also fairly good. But for ultra-compact notebooks, I'd recommend people look at Panasonic's J10. Fujitsu's T580 or Q702 are also pretty decent - I haven't had personal experience with them, but I've never seen high fail-rates with Fujitsu's in the past or currently.
"...The essential gap that's materialized has been between the fast decaying netbook market (its death spurred on by Intel's Atom coupled with the high price of Brazos), ..."
When did Brazos become expensive? They are dirt cheap and sell by the MILLIONS as a result.
Secondly why would ANYONE buy this review PC when they could have a Trinity 17w CPU powered 11" that would embarrass this Intel powered mini and it would cost hundreds less? The only people who would buy these types of over-priced, under performing laptops are people too lazy to educate themselves.
There certainly is a market niche for 11" minis but they will be AMD powered if people do anything with them other than word processing.
Brazos netbooks go for a minimum of $400-$450. Brazos should be hitting the same market Atom did, but it's not, and it's encroaching on space occupied by systems with faster Intel chips.
I agree that they can't compete against the price point of Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge based Intel chips. Remember those are sub 100 USD chips already. Or barely above 100 USD for low-end Ivy.
Hondo, Jaguar core based Kabini or Samara will probably find it's way into some tablets and hybrid tablets, as it's not hard to compete against the price point of those devices though.
AMD's problem is largely that there just isn't any good AMD builds from the OEM's too. For the business segment like this product is geared to there just isn't anything to compete with Intel's full blown vPro/iAMT management solution.
On AMD there isn't even anything to compete with the Core i5 based Acer Aspire V5-171-6422 for 520 USD when it comes to 11.6" notebook. The 17W Trinity is also pretty weak overall. For the same money as they have appeared to be in the market you get Core i5, Ivy based stuff. Even if an AMD solution could hit the 450 mark Core i3's or Pentium/Celeron Intel stuff will be down to about 400.
You end up having something like Samsung NP535U3C compete against a Intel based NP530U3C and the price point between them aren't just gonna matter.
The 300 USD netbook market will just not exist. Except for 300 USD specially rebated notebooks.
AMD needs to get new chips out to compete in this space, as is they also is beaten by last gen Intel chips in price/performance. They obviously need to design a chip that performs well in notebooks and not designed for 4P servers with almost 20MB cache per chip. You can add performance enhancing stuff with L3 cache or whatever but the base performance with minimal amount of cache needs to be good first, it's a general computing processor after all.
Share a website with you , ( socanpower.ca) Believe you will love it. laptop battery,CPU fan,AC power adapters.DC power adapters and laptop keyboard. I bought two. Cheap, good quality, you can go and ship with there.
You also reviewed HP folio 9470m. Among these two HP 2170p and HP Folio 9470m, which one is ultimately the better one? These are the only two that the IT at work is offering, so need to choose one among the two. Which among these two is better? Which one is ultimately more preferable? Which one ultimately sucks less? :-)
I'm not a fan of the new Elitebook series. The previous Elitebook series was better especially in terms of durability and looks -- 6930p, 2540p for reference. The 21/25xx appear over-cooked. The readily accessible internals through the base turns me off slightly. Why should anyone need to get to the internals that quickly? There's not much more to do there once you've done the memory or disk upgrade, which will probably only be one or two times in the usage lifespan of the machine. The machine does indeed feel bulky, rather wide I should say because of the full blown, wide keyboard. Glad I wasn't the only one having misgivings about the new Elitebook series.
I bought one for like $140 used on ebay. Come to find out that the upper memory slot doesn't work in mine. I noticed in your pictures that you don't have a memory stick in your upper slot, WTF?
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jabber - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
....lemon.cbrownx88 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Agreed.secretmanofagent - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I agree, call it for what it is. It sucks on performance, efficiency, and a horrible horrible display (which HP usually screws up on). I'm stuck with a different horrible EliteBook for work, and I want to set the thing on fire half the time.fic2 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I would never spend $1k on a laptop with a 1366x768 display.Mumrik - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Seconded.I feel so out of contact with whatever market it is that doesn't care about resolution...
BellaLohan - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
what Karen implied I'm shocked that a mom able to make $8024 in four weeks on the network. (Click on menu Home more information)http://goo.gl/EeD3j
retrospooty - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
"I would never spend $1k on a laptop with a 1366x768 display."I wouldnt spend $100 with a display of that res. Seriously HP 1366x768 must die!
ArteTetra - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
A resolution of 1366x768 is fine on a 11.6 inch display.A resolution of 1366x768 is fine on a 11.6 inch display.
A resolution of 1366x768 is fine on a 11.6 inch display.
Midwayman - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
Nope. 768px tall makes it like view webpages through a tank-slit.. 16:9 is a terrible aspect ratio made worse by low resolution. The 900px tall 16:9 screens are about the lowest that are really useful.Besides you can get a tablet with 1080p or better for $400 these days. 1366x768 is inexcusable on a machine that cost that much anymore.
jabber - Wednesday, December 5, 2012 - link
Yeah 1440x900 should be the barest minimum on any laptop under 15" today.DiscoWade - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
It does have one thing going for it: no Windows 8. (Before you start: My hatred for Windows 8 comes from actually using Windows 8.)sigmatau - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
So you don't know how to use Windows 8? Got it.greenbackz - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
lol.I hated a little bit on win8 when I didn't know how to do much. but not that I've learnt a few tricks here n there.. I'm liking it a lot more than previous windows OS' and definitely much better than OSX.
tayb - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
You meant to say that your hatred for Windows 8 comes from your inability to learn how to use Windows 8.ShieTar - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
Generally speaking, any OS that still needs to be learned is a horrible failure these days. Time spent using the OS instead of your software is already wasted time, but time spent learning how to even use the OS is just inacceptable. GUIs were kind of invented to reduce the need for OS manuals, not as a pretty way of hiding functionality away.afkrotch - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 - link
The problem is when you start adding in more and more functionality. There is no need to constantly display these things in front of your face. So they created a search function. Then they made the search function faster and faster. Win 8, takes no time to search.ajp_anton - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
I was so hoping this would be the resolution, despite the odd numbers, or even a small typo of the resolution...Also I doubt this computer is 265mm thick =).
SodaAnt - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Here's the thing about business laptops. I can accept that some of them are thicker, I have a dell precision m4600, and I accept that its think because it has very good internals, cooling, battery, and upgradability. However, this laptop seems to have none of those things, except maybe good cooling, which isn't really that needed with a ULV chip.Finally, I don't get why they put the i7 in there. To me, it would make much more sense to even put a 512GB SSD in there, which would lead to a much faster laptop overall.
Voldenuit - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
What's preventing the use of a mSATA SSD in the WWAN slot? Is it just that the mounting screw is for half-length cards, or is the slot incompatible with SSDs?arthur449 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
HP normally employs a whitelist on their UEFI/BIOS for mSATA/mPCIe slots, which means that even if you found an mSATA SSD that fit in the tiny space, it wouldn't work because the UEFI BIOS wasn't explicitly told to allow that particular device.There are ways around that, but it's a stressful process potentially ending in either a bricked laptop, one with curious intermittent problems, or one that works exactly like it should've in the first place.
ACSK - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Yup - same thing for wireless cards.Penti - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
mSATA uses SATA so it should accept everything it does accept on any other SATA-port shouldn't it?Penti - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
I.e. whats really preventing any one is that the WWAN slot isn't an mSATA slot and has no SATA-connection at all. You have to get by using a 2.5" SSD.SunLord - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Whats the black circle thing in between the g, h, and b keys?Voldenuit - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
That's the nub mouse (also known as a Trackpoint, although that term is technicalluy trademarked by IBM/lenovo).When done well (like on thinkpads), it's one of the best pointing devices on a laptop. When done poorly (dell latitudes, hp, some toshibas, a few vaios), it can be horribly infuriating.
bji - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
Even on thinkpads they are annoying. It's a legacy pointing device sitting in the middle of the keyboard looking ugly and tripping your fingers. The world has moved on to multi-touch pads, and they are much, much, MUCH better than the nubs of yesterday.Tchamber - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
That should be a mouse joy stick, we don't see this much at all these days, but once you get used to it it's very efficient.Subyman - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Wow, $2000+ for no SSD and 4GB of ram? I've heard of the Apple tax, but never the HP tax.Voldenuit - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
This is known as the Autonomy Accounting writeoff tax.Olympus wrote off $2Bn for accounting fraud, and has been charging customers up to $100 for lens hoods, so maybe hp needs to inflate their margins too?
r3loaded - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
My steps for reaching the comments were as follows:1) Click on article in Google Reader because it had "EliteBook" in the title.
2) Jump to the Display section of the review, scan the first paragraph and glance at the graphs.
3) Go straight to the comments to describe the facepalm I'm currently doing while typing this comment out.
jonjonjonj - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
"Insert" (destroyer of worlds)i pop the insert key off of every keyboard i have ever owned and stick some folded up paper under it and pop it back on. no more word destroying for me! i also love how you slap the word business class on something and charge more for it. no wonder companies love serving enterprises.
arthur449 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Thanks for the laugh.There's nothing like typing a few sentences while glancing at documentation to the side and realizing that Insert has been happily gobbling up your words.
This seems like a lot to pay for a laptop with good cooling.
kenyee - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
An HP Elite used to mean a nice high-res IPS screen, 4 memory slots, and a fast graphics chip :-PThis is like a jewelry laptop...pretty to look at (not even that pretty w/o a hires screen) but not useful for regular work :-)
policeman0077 - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
fit a 1600*900 panel in it....Penti - Friday, November 30, 2012 - link
Maybe it's not that bad, it's an ultraportable with two damn SO-DIMM's! In a small formfactor, that's pretty sweet in of it self. I don't like the trend with like one soldered channel plus one DIMM. Ultrabooks aren't very good here.Costs a lot customized though. Good to see business/corporate geared things though. You can even have it (with Core i5-3427U at least) vPro enabled, and it has DisplayPort, docking ports etc. I guess you could always buy if using it as a personal computer for yourself at about 1000 USD and put in another RAM-stick and change out the HDD to an SSD and get a decent machine. How would this with 8GB SO-DIMM, 250GB SSD for 1300 compete against the ultrbooks?
XnoX - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Also, what the review can't tell you is the actual price an enterprise would pay for these (usually around 60% of listed price).Penti - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
Of course and it's about 1000 USD preconfigured with a 48Wh battery where this review model is only using a 30Wh battery (i.e. smaller than a Surface RT). Custom config for an large enterprise would obviously come down too. Simply because they want to win as a supplier. You already have a 25% rebate at HP to begin with with customized machines, so for an large corp the price isn't ridiculous and is less than 2000 with SSD, 8GB RAM and i7 cpu. A Dell or some other brand might be a better fit for many though.PR0927 - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
I'm confused why this article doesn't say what's so obvious - that this laptop is an utter PoS and isn't worth the cost, by any means.Frankly the conclusion is WAY too kind.
There is literally not a single good thing about this laptop compared to its competition. Price, screen, form factor, specs, battery life - you name it, it sucks. Hard.
ACSK - Saturday, December 1, 2012 - link
I deal with 100-1000s of notebooks on a monthly basis, and by far and away HP has the highest fail rate (has been that way since maybe 06 or 07?). I wouldn't buy this if it was netbook priced. Dell's notebook reliability is actually really good (do seem to have some power / battery issues on current models), and Lenovo's is also fairly good. But for ultra-compact notebooks, I'd recommend people look at Panasonic's J10. Fujitsu's T580 or Q702 are also pretty decent - I haven't had personal experience with them, but I've never seen high fail-rates with Fujitsu's in the past or currently.Beenthere - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
In the opening this line makes no sense at all:"...The essential gap that's materialized has been between the fast decaying netbook market (its death spurred on by Intel's Atom coupled with the high price of Brazos), ..."
When did Brazos become expensive? They are dirt cheap and sell by the MILLIONS as a result.
Secondly why would ANYONE buy this review PC when they could have a Trinity 17w CPU powered 11" that would embarrass this Intel powered mini and it would cost hundreds less? The only people who would buy these types of over-priced, under performing laptops are people too lazy to educate themselves.
There certainly is a market niche for 11" minis but they will be AMD powered if people do anything with them other than word processing.
Dustin Sklavos - Sunday, December 2, 2012 - link
Brazos netbooks go for a minimum of $400-$450. Brazos should be hitting the same market Atom did, but it's not, and it's encroaching on space occupied by systems with faster Intel chips.Penti - Monday, December 3, 2012 - link
I agree that they can't compete against the price point of Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge based Intel chips. Remember those are sub 100 USD chips already. Or barely above 100 USD for low-end Ivy.Hondo, Jaguar core based Kabini or Samara will probably find it's way into some tablets and hybrid tablets, as it's not hard to compete against the price point of those devices though.
AMD's problem is largely that there just isn't any good AMD builds from the OEM's too. For the business segment like this product is geared to there just isn't anything to compete with Intel's full blown vPro/iAMT management solution.
On AMD there isn't even anything to compete with the Core i5 based Acer Aspire V5-171-6422 for 520 USD when it comes to 11.6" notebook. The 17W Trinity is also pretty weak overall. For the same money as they have appeared to be in the market you get Core i5, Ivy based stuff. Even if an AMD solution could hit the 450 mark Core i3's or Pentium/Celeron Intel stuff will be down to about 400.
You end up having something like Samsung NP535U3C compete against a Intel based NP530U3C and the price point between them aren't just gonna matter.
The 300 USD netbook market will just not exist. Except for 300 USD specially rebated notebooks.
AMD needs to get new chips out to compete in this space, as is they also is beaten by last gen Intel chips in price/performance. They obviously need to design a chip that performs well in notebooks and not designed for 4P servers with almost 20MB cache per chip. You can add performance enhancing stuff with L3 cache or whatever but the base performance with minimal amount of cache needs to be good first, it's a general computing processor after all.
batguiide - Sunday, December 9, 2012 - link
Sharea website with you ,
( socanpower.ca)
Believe you will love it.
laptop battery,CPU fan,AC power adapters.DC power adapters and laptop keyboard.
I bought two. Cheap, good quality, you can
go and ship with there.
john12345p - Monday, October 14, 2013 - link
You also reviewed HP folio 9470m. Among these two HP 2170p and HP Folio 9470m, which one is ultimately the better one? These are the only two that the IT at work is offering, so need to choose one among the two. Which among these two is better? Which one is ultimately more preferable? Which one ultimately sucks less? :-)HP - Friday, June 27, 2014 - link
I'm not a fan of the new Elitebook series. The previous Elitebook series was better especially in terms of durability and looks -- 6930p, 2540p for reference. The 21/25xx appear over-cooked. The readily accessible internals through the base turns me off slightly. Why should anyone need to get to the internals that quickly? There's not much more to do there once you've done the memory or disk upgrade, which will probably only be one or two times in the usage lifespan of the machine.The machine does indeed feel bulky, rather wide I should say because of the full blown, wide keyboard. Glad I wasn't the only one having misgivings about the new Elitebook series.
nicemachines - Tuesday, November 14, 2017 - link
I bought one for like $140 used on ebay. Come to find out that the upper memory slot doesn't work in mine. I noticed in your pictures that you don't have a memory stick in your upper slot, WTF?