Living with the HP Dragonfly Pro

Freelancers make up a larger part of the economy than ever, so I was intrigued by HP's new Dragonfly Pro laptop. It is being marketed as designed specifically for freelancers with improved audio and video controls and dedicated support for that market. It's an interesting concept, and the machine does have several nice features, including impressive performance and a particularly good built-in webcam. Unfortunately, to my mind, the execution falls a bit short of the concept, with a few issues that take away from the overall experience of using the machine.

Measuring 0.72 by 12.4 by 8.8 inches (HWD) and weighing 3.4 pounds (just over 4 pounds with the included 96-watt charger), the Dragonfly Pro is neither the lightest nor the heaviest 14-inch notebook I've seen lately. It has a good, solid feel with an aluminum base. The model I used had a professional-looking black color; it is also available in white.

It has a 14-inch 1920-by-1200 IPS display in the 16:10 ratio that is now commonplace on high-end laptops, and the screen seemed bright at 400 nits. Just as importantly, it comes with a touch screen standard, which I find very convenient. The display looks quite nice, though it does not support pen input, and there are no options for higher-resolution displays or for HP's excellent privacy screens.

The Dragonfly Pro has a large, responsive haptic trackpad. But it doesn't have much in the way of ports, only two USB-C ports on the left and one on the right, which makes it convenient to plug in from either side. There's no USB-A, no HDMI, not even an audio jack. While you can get USB-C port dongles for any of those functions, that is awkward.

The backlit keyboard is decent if not exceptional, and stands out for having four special keys on the right side, which bring up the myHP app, tech support, video options, and an application of your choice. I like the concept, but in practice, I accidentally hit the myHP key too often when aiming for backspace.

One big selling point of the Dragonfly Pro is that it is designed for freelancers who spend a lot of time on video calls. It has a 5-megapixel webcam, which generally looks great. HP offers a separate video control application, which can also be accessed from the myHP application or a dedicated key. Options include face-framing (in wide, portrait, or tight settings), adding a background or a background blur, and setting several adjustments for low light conditions or image enhancement. These controls can be used to improve your picture in third-party applications, such as Teams or Zoom, but note you need to choose the HP Presence Camera (as opposed to the normal HP Camera X) to get it to work. (HP's tech support gave me the wrong information when I was testing, telling me it wouldn't work in third-party video applications.)

For audio, it has a Bang & Olufsen sound system with two up-firing and two down-firing speakers; HP claims it can get up to 80 decibels without distortion. To me, it sounded quite good. However, I sometimes could feel a rumble on the keyboard when audio was playing, which was a bit disconcerting.

Another big differentiator for the Dragonfly Pro is the 24/7 Pro Live support. HP correctly notes that freelancers don't have an IT service desk like enterprise users. The Dragonfly Pro has a dedicated support key that connects you with an application to text or call a support technician.

I tested this out, but because this was before units were widely available, I'm not sure how representative my results were. For some questions, I got good and correct answers, such as dealing with OneDrive settings and repairing the myHP application. However, I couldn't resolve an issue with inconsistent mouse movements – it turned out that a USB hard drive plugged into an adjacent USB port on an HP Thunderbolt Dock was interfering – and I received unhelpful and incorrect information regarding using the video controls feature with Zoom.

The Dragonfly Pro comes with a year of 24/7 Pro Live technical support, with additional support costing $10.99 a month for up to 36 months.

As the first machine I've tested with an AMD Ryzen 7 7000 series processor, the Dragonfly Pro did quite well in performance. The Ryzen 7 7736u has 8 cores and 16 threads, with a base speed of 2.7 GHz and a maximum turbo speed of 4.7 GHz, using the Zen 3+ cores with Radeon 680M graphics, produced on TSMC's 6nm process. The unit I tested had 16GB of DRAM and a 512GB SSD.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

HP says it tuned the system and processor for overall responsiveness, negating the need to switch to a balanced or performance mode, while keeping the machine as cool and quiet as possible. It did seem to run quietly, and benchmark performance generally looked good.

On most of my general tests, the current AMD processor is notably faster than the current Intel Alder Lake processors, particularly in tasks that are heavily multitasked or involve graphics. It was also faster than most systems I tested with the previous generation Ryzen 6800 series as well. This still isn't a gaming laptop, but it's much better at that than most of the previous machines in this class.

On my toughest tests, it took 33 minutes and 45 seconds to run a complex MatLab simulation, compared with 34 minutes and 37 seconds on the lightweight machine (the Ryzen 6850U-based Lenovo ThinkPad Z1, previously best in class). Current Alder Lake-based systems take 38-42 minutes. Doing a large video transcode in HandBrake took an hour and 9 minutes, much better than the hour and 31 minutes on the ThinkPad Z1 or the nearly two hours on most Intel-based systems. I was impressed.

However, the one exception to the great scores came in my Excel test, where it took 47 minutes to complete a large Excel spreadsheet that current Intel machines can complete in about 37 minutes. This is similar to the number I saw with last year's AMD-based machines. My guess is it's because Excel doesn't take advantage of the additional cores, and so reflects the slower clock speeds of the AMD cores compared to the current Intel “performance” cores.

The machine has a 65 watt-hour battery, which lasts over 15 hours on PCMark 10's “Modern Office” test. However, I needed a BIOS fix to ensure that the machine went to sleep properly; previously it would heat up in my travel bag. HP says this has been applied to all shipping units. Even after that fix, sometimes I found I would get less battery life than I expected if the machine sat in my bag overnight.

It also charged relatively quickly due to the 96-watt charger, which is beefier than what I see on most business laptops. This plugs directly into a wall outlet, as opposed to most charging bricks, which has its pros and cons. HP says you can charge the battery to 50% in 30 minutes.

The Dragonfly Pro has two USB-C ports that support 40 Gb/s transfer and which seemed to work great with a Thunderbolt dock, plus one other USB-C that supports 10 Gb/s, as well as support for Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.2. I was surprised that it didn't offer a wireless WAN (cellular data plan) option. I know this isn't the most popular laptop option, but it seems like it might make sense for many freelancers who will be working in different locations.

Also, one unusual thing I noticed is that the bottom of the machine is very magnetic, much more so than I've seen on other laptops lately. I'm not sure how much of an issue this is, but it is disconcerting.

The HP Dragonfly Pro has a list price (which matches the current website price) of $1,399 for a unit with 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD (which is what I tested) and $1,549 for 32GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This is a quite competitive price for a relatively thin machine with very good performance for most applications and a year of technical support.

In the end, I like a lot about the machine. But there are other things that leave me questioning it, such as the lack of an audio jack, the inconsistent battery, and several missing options that at least some freelancers will want such as a higher-resolution display or cellular data. Tech support still feels like a work in progress. In other words, it's close to being a great solution for freelancers, but just misses the mark.

Here's PCMag's full review.