HP’s newest ultraportable—and its lightest consumer laptop at 2.2 pounds—looks like one of its upscale Envy or Spectre models, but it carries its bread-and-butter Pavilion label. Moreover, the 13.3-inch Pavilion Aero starts at $749.99, with our test unit ringing up at $999.99. That’s not a cheap laptop, but it compares favorably to the multiple-award-winning Dell XPS 13: Spend the same amount for the Dell, and you’ll get half as many processing cores, half the memory and storage, and fewer ports than the HP. The Pavilion Aero doesn’t quite rank with the XPS 13 OLED and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon as one of the finest laptops in the world, but it richly deserves an Editors’ Choice nod as a terrific value in a midrange clamshell.
Colors at Extra Cost
Base models of the Pavilion Aero carry a six-core AMD Ryzen 5 5600U processor and, like the XPS 13, Apple MacBook Air M1, and Razer Book 13, a display with a slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio instead of the more common 16:9. The screen’s resolution is an attractive but unexceptional 1,920 by 1,200 pixels, the same as entry-level Dell and Razer models. An extra $30 buys you a sharper 2,560-by-1,600-pixel panel. Both display options are non-touch screens with IPS technology.
Our $999.99 test unit (model 13-be0097nr) has the base screen but steps up to an eight-core, 1.9GHz (4.4GHz turbo) Ryzen 7 5800U chip, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB NVMe solid-state drive. Its magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis is in a neutral color HP calls Natural Silver; spending another $20 lets you choose a Warm Gold, Pale Rose Gold, or Ceramic White finish.
The Ryzen’s AMD Radeon integrated graphics serve in lieu of a discrete GPU. The webcam lacks face recognition but a fingerprint reader saves you from having to type passwords. Oddly, the keyboard isn’t backlit. (That’s another $20 option.) Memory can’t be expanded beyond 16GB, but a 1TB SSD is available.
At 2.2 pounds, the Pavilion Aero undercuts the non-touch version of the XPS 13 (2.64 pounds), though it’s a bit bigger (0.67 by 11.7 by 8.2 inches versus 0.6 by 11.6 by 7.8). Another competing ultraportable, the Lenovo ThinkBook 13s Gen 2, is 2.78 pounds with a 16:10 touch screen. There’s a bit of flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck, but the machine doesn’t feel flimsy.
As an AMD system, it lacks the Thunderbolt 4 ports of its Intel rivals, though it has the external monitor and USB Type-A connectors the Dell omits. One USB-A (5Gbps) and one USB-C (10Gbps) port join an HDMI port and an audio jack on the left side, with another USB-A and the power connector on the right. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 are standard. HP forgot the SD card and security lock slots.
A Pleasing Productivity Partner
Sound from the bottom-mounted speakers isn’t very loud, and you can barely hear overlapping tracks, but it’s clean without being tinny or distorted. B&O Audio Control software offers microphone noise cancellation; music, movie, and voice presets; and an equalizer with pop, rock, jazz, and country settings. The 720p webcam captures reasonably well-lit and colorful images with a bit of noise or static.
I make a living complaining about HP laptop keyboards’ arranging the cursor arrow keys in a row instead of the proper inverted T, with hard-to-hit, half-size up and down arrows stacked between full-size left and right. Except for that perennial plague, the Aero’s keyboard is comfortable, with a snappy typing feel and dedicated Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys, though there’s no microphone mute key. The buttonless touchpad glides and taps smoothly, with a slightly stiff click.
The screen doesn’t tilt back far enough for those who like extreme angles, but offers good brightness and contrast as well as wide viewing angles. White backgrounds are nicely pristine instead of grayish or dingy. Colors don’t exactly pop but are rich and well saturated; fine details are clear and small text looks sharp.
HP backs the Pavilion Aero with a one-year warranty; three years’ coverage with accidental damage and theft protection will cost you $310 extra. HP Support Assistant software centralizes diagnostics, fixes, updates, and optimization while HP QuickDrop transfers files from your smartphone. The Windows 10 Home preload also includes McAfee, Dropbox, ExpressVPN, and LastPass trials (and a slew of online games you’ll probably want to purge).
Performance Testing: One Potent Processor
For our benchmark charts, I compared the Pavilion Aero to four other compact laptops. The Apple MacBook Air M1, the Lenovo ThinkBook 13s Gen 2, and the Asus ZenBook 13 are in the same size and price ballpark, with the ZenBook featuring the same Ryzen 7 CPU as the HP. The larger-screened Asus VivoBook S14 is just over the ultraportable weight limit at 3.09 pounds, but costs less at $699.99. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Productivity Tests
The main benchmark of UL’s PCMark 10 simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheeting, web browsing, and videoconferencing. We also run PCMark 10’s Full System Drive test to assess the load time and throughput of a laptop’s storage. (The MacBook Air is exempt from this and other Windows benchmarks. See more about how we test laptops.)
Three benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon’s Cinebench R23 uses that company’s Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Primate Labs’ Geekbench 5.4 Pro simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).
Our final productivity test is Puget Systems’ PugetBench for Photoshop, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe’s famous image editor to rate a PC’s performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It’s an automated extension (not compatible with M1 Macs at present) that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.
The Aero finished a close second to the ZenBook in PCMark 10, but that’s pretty academic—all four Windows systems hurdled the 4,000-point score that indicates excellent office productivity. The Ryzen 7 5800U systems crushed our CPU tests—not surprising since eight-core processors are usually found in high-end gaming laptops and workstations, not ultraportables. The ThinkBook’s Core i5 was an overachiever in Photoshop, as the Apple M1 was in Geekbench.
Graphics Tests
We test Windows PCs’ graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL’s 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).
We also run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.
The MacBook Air dominated our GFXBench tests. The Pavilion Aero trailed the field, though we’re not too disappointed since none of these laptops is really meant for graphically demanding games—their after-hours pastimes will likely involve casual games and streaming audio and video rather than blazing arcade action.
Battery and Display Tests
We test laptops’ battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of SteelTears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100% until the system quits. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.
We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its software to measure a laptop screen’s color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).
The ZenBook’s OLED panel aced our display tests, but the Pavilion proved more than bright and colorful enough to satisfy most users. Its last-place battery life is more concerning, but 12 hours of unplugged runtime is hardly bad—you should have no trouble getting through a full day of work or school plus an evening of Netflix.
With a Backlit Keyboard, It’d Be Sensational
There are several fine laptops priced at $1,000, and there are some brilliant, desirable ultraportables, but most of the second group cost way too much to join the first. The HP Pavilion Aero not only meets both criteria, but weighs less than most of its rivals and has a processor that’s downright overpowered for everyday tasks.
It’s a bummer that our test configuration lacks the backlit keyboard that every laptop over $700 should have, and it’d be nice to see a higher-resolution OLED display—though that would change the system from an affordable Pavilion to a premium Spectre. But the Aero easily earns a place in our Editors’ Choice lineup.
