For years, the trend in executive notebooks was to put bigger screens into smaller form factors, resulting in today’s market, in which enterprise notebooks are dominated by 14-inch laptops in relatively thin and light packages. These include all the great workhouse enterprise laptops, from HP, Dell, and Lenovo. But some executives are looking for even smaller machines.
HP first got into this market with the original Elite Dragonfly with a 13.3-inch screen, introduced a couple of years ago. This was a standout blue laptop. But time has marched on, and we’ve seen other small machines, and HP has responded with the Elite Dragonfly Max.
Still with a 13.3-inch screen and starting at 2.49 pounds, the Elite Dragonfly Max offers a nice upgrade from the original Dragonfly. Gone is the striking blue color, replaced with a more professional black covering a magnesium case. And the product has been updated with better tools for video and audio conferences, an improved screen, and optional 5G support. There’s also better equipment for video and audio conferences, as HP says the new model is aimed at “professional collaborators.”
Measuring 0.63 by 12 by 7.8 inches, the Dragonfly Max is highly portable, with a solid feel. It’s also a 2-in-1 with a hinge that lets you flip the touch-screen display over for use as a tablet, which many people find useful. The keyboard has full-size keys and a nice, solid feel. I thought it was quite good to type on, although I found the arrow key placement (with two half-height up and down keys placed between the left and right arrows) a little awkward.
This machine only offers one display type, a FHD (1,920-by-1,080-pixel) screen with HP’s privacy-enhancing Sure View Reflect. With this display, hitting the F2 function key turns the privacy feature on and off; when on, it reduces off-axis visibility. The screen is rated at 1,000 nits, but doesn’t look nearly that bright with the Sure View feature turned on. Still, I found it quite good in normal use, and HP does have the best privacy screens I’ve seen, if that’s important to you. This screen also has an “eye ease” feature for emitting less blue light. The screen has very narrow bezels, and the webcam on the top of the screen has a physical shutter, which I personally prefer to a keyboard key.
On the left-hand side, you’ll find a single USB-A 3.1 port and a SIM slot for the cellular modem. On the right, it has two USB-C/Thunderbolt 4 ports (one of which you’ll use for charging), an audio jack, and an HDMI out. That’s a pretty good selection of ports for such a small machine.
For contrast, the ThinkPad X1 Nano, which measures 0.66 by 11.5 by 8.2 inches and weighs just under 2 pounds, has a 13-inch screen with a 2,160-by-1,350-pixel resolution, and only two USB-C ports and an audio jack. I do like having a USB-A slot and HDMI out—it makes it easier to connect an external monitor and keyboard without a dock.
HP’s big push with the Dragonfly Max is how well it works in video conferencing. To that end, it has two front-facing and two world-facing microphones (on the back) with “AI noise cancellation,” which seemed to work pretty well. Sound quality was decent as well, with both top- and bottom-facing speakers. One big plus is the 5-megapixel (2,560-by-1,440-pixel) webcam, which offers a good field of view and very sharp images. You may want to turn on the “enhancement” feature of your video-conferencing software.
It supports face-recognition, which I found worked quite well; and there’s a fingerprint reader if you prefer that kind of login.
Performance is good but in general, a tad behind what I saw with the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga, although the differences weren’t consistent.
The unit I tried had an Intel Core i7-1185G7 CPU, a 4-core, 8-thread processor with a base speed of 3.0GHz and Turbo up to 4.8GHz, and vPro support; along with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB Kioxia SSD. As I’ve seen with other machines, the 10nm Tiger-Lake U processors provide a nice performance boost over last year’s Comet Lake processors.
On my toughest performance tests, it took just 44 minutes to complete a large Excel model with a data table and Monte Carlo simulations, just a hair more than the 43 minutes for the X1 Yoga. But it took 60 minutes to execute a complex MatLab portfolio simulation compared with 47 minutes for the Yoga.
One interesting thing is that HP says the Dragonfly Max is context-aware, meaning that the laptop knows when it’s being used on a lap or on a table, and thus lowers the performance and temperature when it’s on your lap. I’ve seen a number of machines that get very hot to use in your lap, so this is a very nice feature. It seemed not to need the fan much when running on my lap, but when connected to a dock and two monitors, the fan was often noticeable. (I tried HP’s USB-C Dock G5 and OWC’s Thunderbolt Dock, using each to connect both a DisplayPort and an HDMI monitor; both worked great.)
Similarly, HP says it can detect when it is in a bag and can shift into hibernation mode; and when you take it out, it starts to wake up. This worked for me.
The model I tested had a Qualcomm Snapdragon X55 5G modem. In various locations around New York, I saw download speeds of between 18 and 85Mbps and upload speeds of between 5 and 27Mbps on AT&T’s network. This is perfectly good enough for most professional work, though not appreciably faster than what I would expect from LTE. HP also says it offers better Wi-Fi performance than competing notebooks, but in normal use, all the enterprise laptops I’ve tested in the past few years have been more than good enough for my internet connection.
The Dragonfly Max starts with a list price of $2,239 with a Core i5 processor and no WWAN; the unit I had has a list price of $2,789 with a Core i7 processor and a 5G card. Any way you look at it, that’s pricey; notably more than most competitors. For that, though, you’re getting a solid performer that’s quite small and stylish, and very easy to carry.
