HP Dragonfly Pro Review | PCMag

The line between professional business laptops and premium consumer models is blurrier than ever these days, and that gray area is right where HP wants to plant its flag with the prosumer- and freelancer-oriented Dragonfly Pro (starting at $1,399). Made to square off with the likes of the Dell XPS 13 Plus and the 14-inch Apple MacBook Pro, the Pro is a slim machine packing plenty of AMD-powered performance with a premium build and unique features such as built-in macro keys and exclusive customer service. Unfortunately, HP commits some design faux pas by dropping useful connections like the headphone jack while sticking with a full HD display even as rivals embrace higher resolutions. Add disappointing results in our battery life test, and the HP Dragonfly Pro makes for a fine laptop for independent entrepreneurs, but one that falls short of Editors' Choice honors.

HP Dragonfly Pro Configurations

While the selection isn't not overwhelming, HP does offer a few Dragonfly Pro variations. The $1,399 base model seen here teams an AMD Ryzen 7 processor with 16GB of memory and a 512GB solid-state drive. If you want more memory and storage, HP sells a 32GB/1TB step-up model that's otherwise identical for $1,549.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

You can also check out the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook, which we've reviewed separately. Its differences go beyond an alternate operating system; the Chromebook has a similar design but drops the customizable macro keys while adding RGB keyboard backlighting and a sharper 2,560-by-1,600-pixel touch screen for $999.

Slim, But Not Ultraportable

Available in Ceramic White or Sparkling Black, the HP Dragonfly Pro is built to impress. The chassis is made of aluminum and magnesium alloy and measures a trim 0.72 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches (HWD). Despite its svelte dimensions, the laptop has no noticeable chassis bending or flexing when lifted by a corner, and no give in the deck when hammering away at the keyboard.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

It's also quite light at 3.5 pounds, though half a pound over our definition of an ultraportable and as much as a pound heavier than some 14-inch competitors. Still, the machine doesn't feel heavy when you pick it up or carry it in a bag or briefcase; it feels sturdy without leaving me wondering why it's so heavy.

The compact design comes thanks to a smaller-than-average motherboard, but that comes with trade-offs like soldered memory and storage, so you'll have no opportunity for upgrades or user repairs after purchase.

Virtual Meeting Virtuoso: Display, Sound, and Webcam

The Dragonfly Pro is a slick-looking machine in daily use thanks to its 14-inch, 1,920-by-1,200-pixel touch screen with the increasingly popular, slightly taller 16:10 aspect ratio. Protected by edge-to-edge Gorilla Glass, the IPS panel lets you get a bit more hands-on than you can with, say, a MacBook Pro, which lacks touch capability.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Matching the high-quality display are four Bang & Olufsen speakers—two up-firing and two down-firing—providing rich, robust sound. As mentioned, it's a good thing those speakers sound so full, because there's no headphone jack onboard. If you want to listen without sharing your audio with the entire room, you'll need either Bluetooth headphones or a USB-C-to-3mm audio adapter. And unlike Dell, which pulled the same move, HP does not include an adapter in the box.

Above the display is a 5-megapixel webcam, which includes IR face recognition for Windows Hello logins. In testing, I found its images to be a little washed out, though it captures far sharper detail than any lowball 720p webcam. HP doesn't provide a sliding privacy shutter, though you'll find a camera toggle at the top of the keyboard. The webcam has a small LED to tell you when it's active, just as the toggle key has one to tell you when the camera is turned off.

The Good and the Bad: Keyboard, Trackpad, and Ports

The large square tile keys of the Dragonfly Pro's keyboard make for easily legible lettering, and an adjustable white backlight boosts visibility even in well-lit rooms. The half-size, top-row function keys are marked with prominent icons for their various shortcuts. Whether it's adjusting screen brightness and audio volume or finding the fingerprint reader next to the power button, it's easy to see which key does what.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

HP's keys don't provide much travel, but shallow keys are par for the course among slim laptops, and the typing feel isn't terrible. The experience doesn't match the category-leading experience of Lenovo's best keyboards, but it's no worse than you'll get with comparable laptops from Apple or Dell. Accompanying the keyboard is a large, buttonless touchpad. The haptic pad feels generously roomy without resorting to the goofy borderless approach seen with the Dell XPS 13 Plus.

A feature unique to the Dragonfly Pro is a column of four built-in macro keys. Positioned along the right edge of the keyboard, these keys are preprogrammed to launch the MyHP support app, display controls for webcam and video chat sound, and access HP customer support (the last one is customizable to perform just about any function). As a heavy macro user, I appreciate any opportunity to get some added customization and shortcut capability in a laptop. The user customization goes a long way toward making the macro buttons feel like a genuine value-add instead of a sly opportunity to sell you a subscription service.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Unfortunately, the port selection isn't robust, with just three USB-C ports comprising the entire I/O selection. Of the three, two support Thunderbolt 3 functionality—since AMD doesn't natively support Thunderbolt 4—and all three can be used for connecting the AC adapter or charging external devices. If you want ports like USB Type-A, HDMI, or Ethernet, you'll need to bring USB-C adapters or pick up a docking station.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

My biggest frustration with this skimpy port selection isn't so much a monitor or USB-A port as the lack of a headphone jack. The usual justification for ditching this jack is thin design, but it's hard to argue that a 3.5mm jack would add much bulk to the 0.72-inch-thick chassis, especially considering that the thinner and lighter HP Elite Dragonfly G3 has one. At least wireless connectivity is well supported with both Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2.

Premium Support for Pros

Part of the Dragonfly Pro's prosumer package is its inclusion of HP's 24/7 Pro Live Support. Built with freelancers and work-from-home professionals in mind, HP aims to fill the void left by the lack of IT staff with convenient one-button access and a year of free service after purchase. The company boasts that Pro Live Support connects you to support reps that specialize in the Dragonfly Pro, so you needn't wade through arcane model identification before getting help. The app also lets you connect with help via chat or schedule an in-person call around the clock. HP positions this as an outcome-focused service, with reps trained to help you get working again rather than pushing to get through a script and finish a call.

After the first year, you can extend this support for $10.99 per month for up to three years. The subscription also gets you extra protection for accidental damage, giving you repair and replacement options for mishaps like drops or spilled drinks on the keyboard (for one incident per year).

Using the service is extremely convenient. I was in touch with Pro Live Support within moments of pushing the dedicated key and was presented with several support options including both phone and chat for connecting to a live agent. Plenty of other resources are displayed such as user manuals, community support pages, a virtual repair center, and even a portal for warranty disputes. An option for virtual support can walk you through troubleshooting, while an automated hardware diagnostic can help spot problems you may not even be aware of.

It was significantly easier to work with all of these resources in one place rather than shotgunning across a range of support pages via a Google search, and the live help was quick and convenient. For your first contact you'll need to set up an HP account with your serial number, but the service portal saves that info so it's only a one-time chore. From there, it seems to deliver the best parts of a quality support experience, with knowledgeable technicians, helpful advice, and none of the tedious customer service rituals of finding a model number, confirming account information, or being shunted off to different departments to spend all day on hold.

Testing the HP Dragonfly Pro: Professional Performance in a Consumer Design

With an AMD Ryzen 7 7736U CPU and 16GB of RAM, the Dragonfly Pro aims at premium prosumer laptops like the Dell XPS 13 Plus and Lenovo ThinkPad Z13. While it's heavier than competitors like the Apple MacBook Air or Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon, it's an interesting update to the Dragonfly line, presenting a different paradigm than the already excellent Elite Dragonfly G3 we reviewed last year.

Across all of these systems, potent Ryzen 7 and Intel Core i7 CPUs come standard, integrated graphics reign, and memory and storage are all in the same general range. While all are considered premium models with prices over $1,000, you'll see plenty of room for price variation and the $1,399 sticker of the HP seems reasonable.

Productivity Tests 

Our most important single benchmark, UL's PCMark 10, simulates a variety of real-world productivity and content-creation workflows to measure overall performance for office 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.

Three more 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 Geekbench 5.4 Pro by Primate Labs 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). 

Finally, workstation maker Puget Systems' PugetBench for Photoshop 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 that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving images to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The Dragonfly Pro proved itself more than able to handle everyday work tasks and even many creative applications, if not professional graphics work requiring a discrete GPU. Its AMD Ryzen 7 processor went toe to toe with its Intel competitors, even posting the fastest HandBrake time in the group, and the system sailed well past the 4,000 points that indicate excellent productivity in PCMark 10.

Graphics Tests

First, 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.

It's not in the same ballpark as a gaming laptop with a potent Nvidia or AMD GPU, but the Dragonfly Pro showed solid graphics performance and even led its Intel-based rivals across the board. For office work and even light photo and video editing, it's a capable choice.

Battery and Display Tests 

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel(Opens in a new window)) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off. 

Under normal circumstances, one or two runs is enough to get a trustworthy battery result. In the Dragonfly Pro's case, we're less sure. Our test results were hours short of what HP estimates for similar uses, and even three tries were still far from what we expected. We'll continue testing the machine and update this review if we can find an error or setting that improves our observed runtimes.

We also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and 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).

Again, an observed battery runtime of just under eight hours isn't terrible but is definitely short of what we expect from a slimline laptop nowadays, let alone the nearly 16 hours that HP predicts when playing local video (12 hours when streaming video).

At least the Dragonfly Pro's 14-inch display delivers excellent brightness and color representation, matching its advertised 400 nits and delivering near-workstation-class color accuracy. While we'd like to see higher resolution, the 1,920-by-1,200-pixel panel provides excellent readability and is well suited to the business entrepreneurs HP targets with this laptop.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Verdict: A Solid Prosumer Laptop in Need of Polish

While we still have some unanswered questions around battery life, we know what we do and don't like about the HP Dragonfly Pro. Despite being positioned as a rival to popular ultraportables, the Dragonfly Pro is a little thicker and heavier. Its display is decent—even excellent for everyday apps—but its resolution is topped by several competitors. Worse, the minimal port selection leaves a lot to be desired, especially the unaccountable lack of an audio jack. That said, the Dragonfly Pro is otherwise a fine performer, and the inclusion of unique features like macro keys and dedicated 24/7 support distinguish it as a sound choice for freelancers and prosumers. Ultimately, it's an attractive laptop with helpful features at a fair price, but its generally high quality makes the rough spots stand out.