Corporate IT managers seeking to buy their executives well-built convertible laptops might think first of various Lenovo ThinkPad and Dell Latitude models, but the HP EliteBook x360 1040 G7 (starts at $1,649; $2,499 as tested) makes a compelling alternative. The seventh-generation successor to the G5 model we tested a couple of years ago improves upon an already excellent design by adding a unique electronic camera shutter for privacy, a choice of 10th Generation Intel processors with optional vPro remote manageability technology, and even longer battery life. Only some mildly irksome fan noise and a steep list price keep this EliteBook 2-in-1 from being a standout in a crowded field of great business laptops.
Lots of Flexibility, Minimal Weight
HP offers both clamshell and convertible designs under its EliteBook enterprise brand. The model numbers in the 1000s are the flagships, positioned above 800-series laptops like the recently reviewed EliteBook 840 G7. Convertibles carry the x360 label for their 360-degree screen hinges that let you flip and fold the system from laptop to tablet, easel, or tent mode; the x360 1030 has a 13.3-inch display while the x360 1040 seen here measures 14 inches diagonally.
The larger screen doesn’t bring much additional bulk. The EliteBook x360 1040 G7 measures 0.65 by 12.6 by 8 inches and weighs in at 2.9 pounds, which easily qualifies it as an ultraportable laptop. The x360 1030 is just a few ounces lighter at 2.7 pounds. The 14-inch system’s competitors are roughly the same size: The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 5 is 0.59 by 12 by 8.5 inches, while the Dell Latitude 9410 2-in-1 is 0.59 by 12.6 by 7.9 inches, and they weigh 3 pounds each.
While we generally consider 3 pounds the dividing line between an ultraportable and a desktop replacement, you can find 14-inch business notebooks that weigh even less, such as the 2.4-pound Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon. But those clamshells lack the rotating hinge of the x360 1040. It’s true that the added flexibility of a 2-in-1 shines in situations that don’t really apply to the homebound workforce in this era of social distancing. You’re not going to be propping your EliteBook up on a cramped airline tray table or setting it up, easel- or kiosk-fashion, at a trade-show booth anytime soon. Still, the versatility will come in handy once corporate life returns to normal.
Whatever physical orientation you plan to use your EliteBook in, the sleek exterior will let everyone know you mean business. The light silver chassis is made of aluminum and magnesium, and will help you stand out in a room full of boring black business laptops. This is a sleek machine, but it’s not an aggressively styled one. It’s also as sturdy as it is sleek: The display hardly wobbles when you tap it and there’s no discernable flex in the base when you’re typing. HP says the unit has passed its own low-level drop tests, though it doesn’t advertise it as passing more stringent MIL-STD reliability tests.
Inside, the EliteBook x360 1040 offers a dizzying array of up-to-date computing components for IT departments to configure as they please. The base model has an Intel Core i5-10210U CPU, 8GB of memory, a 256GB solid-state drive, and a full HD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) touch screen. These are relatively pedestrian components for the $1,649 list price, though volume buys usually mean significant discounts.
Our review unit adds $850 to that already lofty sticker, but it’s better equipped for a corporate flagship machine. It features a six-core Core i7-10810U with vPro support, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Like the base model, it comes with a 1080p touch-enabled display; you can opt for one of HP’s Sure View privacy-filter panels or an HDR400 screen with 4K resolution, but the latter is overkill for most business apps.
Plenty of Ports: USB-C and HDMI Included
A business laptop needs plenty of ports, and the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 does not disappoint. You’ll find a total of four USB ports—two of the older, rectangular Type-A variety with 5Gbps data transfer speeds and two USB-C ports that support Thunderbolt 3 speeds up to 40Gbps. There’s also a full-size HDMI 1.4b video output, essential for reducing the hassle of connecting to external monitors or conference room A/V systems. There’s no dedicated charging port; you’ll connect the 65-watt AC adapter to one of the USB-C ports.
On the left side of the EliteBook x360 1040 G7, you’ll find a 3.5mm headphone/microphone jack, as well as a SIM card slot for the optional LTE (not 5G) mobile broadband modem. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 round out the wireless connection options.
All models of the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 come with a three-year warranty, which contributes to the high list price but is a welcome improvement on the one year that is standard on consumer laptops.
Sufficient Screen, Comfy Keyboard
The EliteBook’s standard full HD touch screen is adequate for basic business tasks, though it can’t match the fine detail and crisp text of a 4K display. During a period of testing in a sunlight-flooded room, I found its rated maximum brightness of 400 nits to be slightly inadequate. Stepping up to the 3,840-by-2,160-pixel display would likely improve the viewing situation, as it offers not only four times as many pixels but rated brightness of 550 nits, though both would have a negative effect on the HP’s admirable battery life. The 1080p Sure View screen is rated at 1,000 nits, but much of the additional brightness is lost to the opaqueness of the integrated privacy filter.
The EliteBook x360 1040 can be used with an optional digital stylus, which attaches magnetically to the left edge of the laptop when you’re not using it.
Above the screen, the convertible has a 720p webcam. It’s fine for informal videoconferences, though picture quality does tend to get a bit noisy in dimly lit rooms. The camera’s signature feature is an electronic privacy shutter that can cover the lens and protect your privacy at the touch of a key in the top row of the keyboard. It’s an elegant alternative to sliding manual shutters or masking tape.
The power button is also mounted on the keyboard, which is more familiar to most users but means you won’t be able to easily power up the EliteBook x360 in tablet mode with the keyboard folded behind the display. HP and other manufacturers can’t seem to decide whether it’s better to place the power button on the keyboard or on the edge of 2-in-1 convertibles. (It was on the side of the x360 1040 G5.) The easier access to the side-mounted button in tablet mode is tempered somewhat by the fact that you could accidentally power up the laptop if you grip the sides too tightly.
Typing on the EliteBook’s keyboard and tapping on its touchpad are enjoyable experiences, for the most part. The touchpad is bigger than it was a few generations ago, and clicks land with a satisfyingly solid thud. I also appreciate the typing comfort, and the simple font of the key labels improves readability in low light when the backlight is turned on.
Audio quality from the upward-firing speakers is adequate for videoconferencing, which matters more to most EliteBook owners than playing music or watching movies. A total of four microphones help filter out background noise, which should help you be heard better on the other end of the conference as well.
Plenty of Performance for Office Essentials
Mainstream corporate business laptops should offer solid everyday performance, and the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 does not disappoint. Our test unit made short work of basic office productivity tasks, and I noticed no lag or sluggishness when installing and launching apps and browsing the web.
Unfortunately, even during these basic tasks I heard the cooling fan spool up frequently. It was even audible once when the HP was powered up but had its lid closed, likely performing a system update. The company says it has redesigned the cooling system to include thinner fan blades for more effective cooling, as well as tweaking the fan algorithm and adding thermal sensors in an effort to improve acoustics. Despite these improvements, I still found fan noise to be a frequent issue. (See more about how we test laptops.)
Our benchmark tests offer a closer look at how the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 performs compared with its fifth-generation predecessor (a 2019 model that’s a likely candidate for a corporate replacement) and some abovementioned competitors. You can see their basic specs in the table below.
Our first and most important benchmark is UL’s PCMark 10, which assesses overall system performance for office-centric tasks such as word processing, spreadsheet analysis, web browsing, and videoconferencing. Any score above 4,000 indicates first-rate productivity, which these laptops achieve. PCMark 8, meanwhile, has a storage subtest that we use to measure the speed of the system’s boot drive; today’s speedy SSDs offer near-equal excellence in this test.
Next is Maxon’s CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads. Cinebench stresses the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC’s suitability for processor-intensive workloads.
While the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 does significantly better than its predecessor on this test, business users aren’t likely to be crunching workstation-size datasets or rendering complex 3D images, so they needn’t worry that the EliteBook is slightly inferior to the ThinkPad X1 Yoga here.
Cinebench results often predict those of our Handbrake video editing trial, another tough, threaded workout that’s highly CPU-dependent and scales well with cores and threads. In it, we put a stopwatch on test systems as they transcode a standard 12-minute clip of 4K video to a 1080p MP4 file. Lower or faster times are better. In this event, the x360 1040 G7 proved slightly quicker than the ThinkPad.
We also run a custom Adobe Photoshop image editing benchmark. Using an early 2018 release of the Creative Cloud version of Photoshop, we apply a series of 10 complex filters and effects to a standard JPEG test image, timing each operation and adding up the total. The Photoshop test stresses the CPU, storage subsystem, and RAM, but it can also take advantage of most GPUs to speed up the process of applying filters, so systems with powerful graphics chips or cards may see a boost.
As with 3D rendering, complex photo editing isn’t a job that corporate users are likely to undertake that often, and all of the systems here performed roughly equally in our image editing trial.
Lackluster Gaming, Great Battery Life
The gaming capabilities of these laptops aren’t anything to salivate over, either. That’s somewhat unfortunate these days, since many homebound workers might be using their work laptops to indulge in a bit of gaming after hours. Our Superposition and 3DMark gaming simulations challenge a system to render and pan through detailed 3D scenes. Neither the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 nor any of its competitors managed to reach the 30 frames per second (fps) minimum that we generally consider to indicate acceptable gaming performance in the Superposition test.
Battery life, on the other hand, is a bright spot for the EliteBook x360 1040 G7. It managed to last for more than 20 hours in our unplugged rundown test, which involves playing a locally stored video file at 50% screen brightness and 100% audio volume with Wi-Fi turned off. This is an exceptional result, though it can’t quite match the 24-plus hours of the Latitude 9410 2-in-1.
An Even Better EliteBook
The HP EliteBook x360 1040 keeps improving generation after generation. The G7 model seen here is a consummate corporate workhorse that will power through productivity tasks all day long without needing a charge, and look good while doing it.
It competes in an exceptionally crowded market, however, which means that its few drawbacks draw outsize attention. Although its list price isn’t necessarily higher than that of a comparable Latitude or ThinkPad convertible, it’s still painful when you consider that you can get an equivalent consumer-focused 2-in-1, minus vPro and a few frills, for nearly $1,000 less. The persistent fan noise is also a slight mark against. Nevertheless, the EliteBook x360 1040 G7 occupies a firm perch among the better business convertibles you can buy.
