This year’s HP Imagine event took place on the company’s Palo Alto campus, where HP invited press and analysts to witness its latest announcements. This event followed HP’s Imagine AI event in New York City which I also attended—and wrote about—earlier this year. The focus of the event in California was still very much on AI, even if the name didn’t designate it as such.
During the event, HP made announcements across many of its different business units including consumer and commercial PCs, printing, collaboration, gaming and workforce management. Given my areas of industry coverage, I’ll talk about all of those except for workforce management.
HP Launches The OmniBook Ultra Flip AI PC
The OmniBook Ultra Flip is a new product that was teased earlier at Intel’s Lunar Lake launch that I attended in Berlin. At HP Imagine 2024, the company officially announced the new laptop, which features Intel’s latest Core Ultra 200 series chips—boasting some of the best battery life ever for an Intel platform. The OmniBook Ultra Flip is a consumer product, but includes premium features including a 14-inch 3K OLED display and a 9 MP AI camera paired with Poly Audio. The OmniBook Ultra Flip is also the first consumer product to get HP’s Wolf Security, which I believe is a way for HP to provide added value to the highest-end consumers who want to feel like they’re getting real value. As someone who has reviewed the EliteBook Ultra and other HP enterprise notebooks, I believe Wolf Security is a great value addition, especially for people concerned about security.
While the OmniBook Ultra Flip is not yet a Copilot+ PC, it does have a 55 TOPS NPU, which means that by the end of November, it will get an update that adds some of the Copilot+ capabilities. The OmniBook Ultra Flip is available now starting at $1,599 before discounts.
HP’s New EliteBook X AI PC With AMD Ryzen AI Pro Processor
HP also announced the EliteBook X G1a at Imagine 2024. Besides that, it received a mention from AMD when the chip maker officially launched the Ryzen Pro line of processors at its Advancing AI event in San Francisco. This model is not to be confused with the EliteBook Ultra G1q, which features a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite processor. The EliteBook X is the first laptop under HP’s new naming scheme, and it slots in below the Ultra in HP’s hierarchy of products.
This system can be configured with up to 64GB of RAM, up to 2TB of storage and one of the three variants of Ryzen AI 300 series chips. It also comes with an LCD or OLED panel choice, a 5 MP standard camera and audio with Poly Studio. One of the most exciting things about this laptop is that it has two Thunderbolt 4 ports, which have traditionally been an Intel-only platform option; clearly, Thunderbolt is in enough demand that it’s now available on AMD platforms. This laptop will be available in December.
On-Demand GPU Solution: Z By HP Boost
HP is one of the world’s leading workstation providers for AI applications and has a comprehensive software suite in the form of the Z by HP AI Studio. Z by HP Boost allows a data scientist or other AI developer to easily access GPUs across HP AI workstations from any other HP PC. This means that someone could easily access up to four GPUs per workstation remotely for AI workloads from virtually anywhere, enabling more use of those GPUs for more users. This could help companies minimize their cloud GPU consumption and make better use of the hardware they already have.
One current limitation of this solution is that it is 1:1, so you can’t connect to multiple workstations and combine their GPU horsepower together to create a cluster. While GPUs may not be as scarce as they once were, there is still much demand for more secure solutions and more ways to maximize the investment made on things like AI workstations. AI models continue to grow in both size and complexity, so having a powerful enough workstation that can also be leveraged remotely seems like a great value-add for HP Z Workstations.
HP Print AI Brings Generative AI To Printing
Surprisingly, one of the best announcements at HP Imagine came from the printing division. HP Print AI was one of the best demonstrations of generative AI’s relevance that I’ve ever seen. Features like Perfect Output help to better translate what a user intends to see from a print rather than what is likely to come out, optimizing for what the user wants. A lot of this is “simple” formatting, but proper formatting can be extremely challenging in a lot of applications and sometimes borderline impossible to achieve.
HP says it will bring more Print AI features to market through 2025, but leading with Perfect Output gives me hope that HP understands its customers’ pain points. That said, I think that HP should address some of the existing user issues with printer drivers that still send their customers—including myself—running to competitors’ products.
Project Starline
During HP Imagine 2024, HP gave many people private demos of the latest generation of Google’s Project Starline. If you’re not familiar with it, Starline is HP’s commercialization of Project Starline, bringing holographic telepresence to reality with real 8K light field displays. Light field displays are designed to create an immersive 3-D experience that allows the user to focus on depth with their own eyes; the larger the light field display, the more immersive the 3-D experience becomes. Users sit in a booth in front of a TV, cameras and microphones and are able to communicate with someone in fully immersive ultra-high-definition, glasses-free 3-D. While the version at HP Imagine was not the complete and final product, HP showed us what the next iteration will look like and how the company plans to go to market with Starline. HP is Google’s primary partner for Starline and has worked on the design with companies including Herman Miller to make it feel like a real office product.
In terms of experience, Starline was unlike any volumetric video experience I have ever had. I got the sense that Starline is indeed a true light field display, and at 65 inches it is very much the right size for a 1:1 conferencing experience, so much so that you feel like you could reach out and touch the other person. The system does have a limited field of view and spatial volume, but the experience is designed to optimize for those limitations. That said, there is still room for better spatial audio to match the immersion of the video.
I believe that Starline could be one of the best ways for people to communicate with each other across the world, especially in scenarios where in-person communication would be preferred but simply isn’t possible. While it may seem like a neat toy for some, I could see this as an extremely powerful collaboration tool that doesn’t exist anywhere else. In particular, I could see Starline being offered as a service to be used on demand or as a product for executives to communicate more clearly with their direct reports.
While HP hasn’t nailed down the pricing or final launch plans, Starline is without a doubt intended for ultra-wealthy individuals or Fortune 500 corporations. Starline is still fundamentally an extremely high-end collaboration solution that leverages spatial computing technologies to enhance the experience. Hopefully, it will come to market soon, and more people will get a chance to experience the awe-inspiring Starline level of video immersion.
HP Elevates HyperX With Cloud Mix 2 Headphones
Last but not least, for its HyperX brand HP also announced a new pair of headphones, the HyperX Cloud Mix 2. I got a chance to try them out and was impressed with the design, comfort and sound quality. For the longest time, even before HP bought HyperX from Kingston, the brand was always about delivering value and not really going for high-end performance and feel. But with the Cloud Mix 2, it really feels like HyperX is trying to move up to a more premium offering.
The Cloud Mix 2 sports a low-latency 2.4-gigahertz connection for gaming applications, 110-hour battery life for minimal charging and the ability to connect via Bluetooth to virtually any kind of gaming device. The Cloud Mix 2 is already available for $199, and I am in the process of testing it out against my numerous gaming, collaboration and noise-cancelling headphones.
AI Continues To Dominate The Discussion
At HP Imagine 2024, HP made a strong case that it is very well positioned to take advantage of the rapid growth of AI. This doesn’t just mean selling AI-enabled PCs to enterprises and individuals; it’s also about enabling companies in the AI space to accelerate their pace of innovation through creative offerings such as Z by HP Boost.
I believe AI will be a part of every business, if it isn’t already. HP recognizes this and wants to ensure that companies using its products are well-equipped to grow with AI rather than get left behind. Products like Starline and Print AI have made it quite clear that HP is already quite a ways into the AI future and that it likely has many more excellent products up its sleeve.
