At CES 2026, HP is showing off its latest flagship consumer laptop: The Omnibook Ultra 14. It features an all-new super thin design that’s much tougher than it looks.
According to HP, the Omnibook Ultra 14 is the “world’s most durably slim 14-inch consumer notebook,” which is a somewhat convoluted way of saying the system remains quite portable — just 0.42 inches thick — while still passing 20 different military standard tests (MIL-STD-810) for things like shock resistance, drops and extreme temperatures. The whole system is crafted from aluminum, though instead of taking a unibody approach like you see on Apple’s MacBooks, HP opted for forge stamped manufacturing which is said to give the laptop added strength and bend resistance. The result is a notebook that’s both 52 percent lighter than the previous model at 2.8 pounds and five percent thinner than a 2025 M4 MacBook Air 13. And after seeing it in person, I have to say it looks pretty slick, too.
As you’d expect from a premium ultraportable, the Omnibook comes with a vivid 3K OLED display, up to 64GB of memory, 2TB of storage and your choice of either an Intel Core Ultra 3 CPU or a Snapdragon Elite X2 chip. That said, thanks to an exclusive partnership with Qualcomm, anyone planning on running a lot of AI-based apps on the Ultra 14 may want to go with the Snapdragon variant as it’ll come with a slightly more powerful NPU that maxes out at 85 TOPS (that’s trillions of operations per second) rather than the 80 TOPS you’d get from other OEMs. Furthermore, to help support strong sustained performance, the Ultra 14 is also the first Omnibook to feature a built-in vapor chamber.
Granted, as a pretty straightforward ultraportable, this thing doesn’t have a ton of special features. But even so, I appreciate that HP didn’t cut corners regarding its keyboard, which has a nice feel that’s not too stiff or bouncy and sits above a rather large touchpad. The company even found room for quad speakers and three USB-C ports that offer Thunderbolt 4, power delivery (USB PD 3.1) and DisplayPort 2.1.
My one small nitpick is that I would have liked to see an SD or microSD card reader as well, but considering HP’s emphasis on portability and toughness, I’m not surprised that it didn’t make it. The other thing I’m not so sure about is the Omnibook name in general. It’s been a little while since HP axed the Spectre branding for its top tier consumer laptops and I kind of wish HP would bring it back as it sounds better and feels more befitting of a flagship system like this.
Regardless, if you’re in the market for a premium 14-inch Windows laptop, the Omnibook Ultra 14 looks like it will be a very strong contender when it goes on sale later this month starting at $1,550.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/the-hp-omnibook-ultra-14-at-ces-2026-super-sleek-and-surprisingly-durable-170000330.html?src=rss
