Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

OVERALL: This is quite a nice all-in-one PC for the average consumer. It does many things well, but there are a few things that I would like to see changed. This is clearly modeled after and designed to compete with the iMac. In comparison to an iMac, it lacks some important features, but also has some extras that the iMac does not. For about the same price as this HP, you could get the 21.5" iMac, which might be a better option depending on which features are important to you. Although I don't think this PC excels in productivity tasks, it would be very good for someone who just wants a basic machine to set up and use right away -- it is great for basic browsing, photo/media sharing (and minor editing), etc. I view it kind of like a large tablet that has extra connectivity, is faster, and is capable of using Windows drivers and software if the other limitations don't bother you. That being said, I am still unsure of the target demographic given the somewhat strange (in my opinion) combination of price and features. In my opinion, the biggest limitation of this PC is the poor screen resolution (elaborated on below). If HP went for a 4k or even a 1440p display, they would have absolutely knocked it out of the park with this PC. As it stands right now, this PC is a somewhat strange combination of relatively high end consumer parts for an all-in-one PC (except for a graphics card), relatively high price, and low resolution screen. The parts selection for this PC seems geared towards productivity tasks and fast everyday usage, but the screen is severely limiting in my opinion. Although the screen is made by a good manufacturer (LG), the low resolution severely impairs it for heavy productivity usage -- you will not want to stare at this screen for many hours on end, even though the CPU is fast and the SSD makes for a snappy user experience. Yes, you can always hook up an external display to this, but that kind of defeats the purpose of an All-In-One PC doesn't it? Bottom line -- for productivity, I would recommend spending about half the cost of this PC on a much nicer screen, and the other half on a mini PC/NUC (or desktop depending on your available space) with an NVMe SSD, at least 16GB RAM, and an i3 CPU or better. Another potential demographic I considered is media consumption and editing. For media consumption, this is perfectly adequate as long as you're not streaming 4K video, which is becoming more and more common these days (in that case, just sit much farther back from the screen and unless you have extremely good vision it won't appear pixelated). For media editing, I am not sure I can recommend this PC. The CPU, RAM, and SSD are adequate for most editing tasks, but again the screen is not ideal. For photo editing, I would absolutely want a higher resolution screen -- modern cameras are capable of far higher resolution than this screen, and given that the screen appears pixelated to me when sitting about 2ft away indicates it does not portray an accurate representation of the image your camera captured. For basic video editing (such as GoPro or phone videos) this PC would likely be fine. Most cameras are capable of shooting in 4K these days, but many users still shoot in 1080P (this screen's resolution) for the space-saving attributes. In that case, this screen is perfectly fine, and the relatively quick CPU and SSD would prove beneficial here. However, keep in mind that if you're shooting 4K you will only be able to view a 1080P proof of your final edit. Also, there is no dedicated graphics card for extensive hardware encoding speedups. I tried using the Intel graphics to do some hardware encoding for some video exports, but it did not work well at all. I could probably tune it and find modified drivers to work better, but I decided it wasn't worth my time -- if you want to use hardware encoding, you really should be using a dedicated graphics card. You will not want to try grading, editing, exporting, etc. any RED camera footage on this PC, that's for sure! The type of media consumption/editing that could be done well on this PC could be done just as well on an iPad or Android or Windows Tablet, in my opinion. For productivity tasks, I think most people would be better off with either a different setup with a better screen, or a cheaper PC. MY USAGE: I picked up this PC intending to use it as a replacement for my current old Windows laptop, and I think it will work well for that. The rest of this review might seem highly critical of some potentially minor points -- my intention is to describe everything I've noticed about this PC so you can evaluate what matters for your personal use case and make an educated decision about whether or not this PC will fulfill your needs. If you found portions of this review helpful, I would appreciate if you mark it as "helpful". SCREEN: There are some pluses and minuses here. The screen is made by LG, which is a plus in my book -- LG makes some excellent panels and is the OEM for many of the top monitor brands. This screen is also a touchscreen, which does work very well. The screen is glossy, which is not my preference for a computer, but I don't think they can make a nice capacitative touchscreen with a matte finish (I could be wrong here, but I've never seen one that I can recall). Many people like the way colors "pop" on a glossy screen, but I find it can easily get over-saturated and I prefer the more natural look from a matte screen (and the reduced reflections is nice as well). I have not gotten around to it yet, but I will be dialing in the screen with an xRite calibrator in the near future to see how accurately it can reproduce colors. SCREEN ADJUSTMENT: This PC is not very adjustable to optimize the position of the screen. It does not rotate (unless you pick it up and rotate the entire machine and base); it does not adjust the height; it does not adjust the screen rotation (so you can't put it in portrait mode if you want to). The only thing you can adjust is the angle, and even with that there is not much range -- you can only adjust it from -5 to 25 degrees. Given that they have designed this with a touchscreen in mind, I think it would have been great if they allowed adjustment to a horizontal position (parallel to the table). This could then work well as a large tablet, would be more amenable to drawing/annotating, and HP could design some family type games that would work well with that layout. Another notable omission is the lack of any VESA mounting options. If there was a standard VESA mount on the back, I could just pop this on any number of good monitor stands and all adjustment issues would be eliminated. RESOLUTION: This PC is only able to support 1920 x 1080 resolution. In the current era, I think this is the absolute lowest that is acceptable for a screen of this size. 1440p has been the norm for a while now (especially in a 27" screen), and many manufacturers are moving to 4k and 5k resolutions for 27" screens. I have no idea why HP stuck with a 1080p screen, and am quite disappointed by this. In my opinion, this severely limits the productivity capabilities of this PC. I started using a 1440p 27" screen for productivity tasks about a decade ago, and was never able to get used to the reduced resolution of a 1080p screen after I made the switch. It is so much less fatiguing to read and write text with the increased resolution. Some basic video editing will probably be ok on this 1080p screen, but 4k is already becoming quite common for consumer cameras to shoot. In my opinion, the low resolution is the biggest limitation of this PC, especially when comparing to an iMac. SOFTWARE: I was somewhat disappointed to see that HP has included a fair bit of bloatware. It came to me with shortcuts in the start menu to websites like Booking-dot-com, Netflix, Amazon, a VPN service, a trial version of McAfee (which never even opened successfully), and a whole suite of HP utilities. I removed most of these. Despite including all this unnecessary fluff, they did not include the Microsoft Office suite! There is only a 1 month trial included; after the trial you have to purchase it yourself. Additionally, the modern Windows OS reports a ton of information about you and your habits to both Microsoft and HP by default. Pay attention during the setup process so you can disable all the reporting that you don't want -- if you quickly click through you can miss it and have it all enabled by default. The setup process was relatively quick and easy -- the Windows setup process has gotten much better since the last time I went through it a few years ago. Now there is a very friendly voice assistant (because every large Tech company has to have their own voice assistant these days...) walking you through all the steps. I can see this being very nice and helpful for people who might not be super familiar with/enjoy playing around with tech. However, this wouldn't be Windows without giving me a BSOD during my very first run through the backlog of Windows Updates, haha. At least they have made the BSOD prettier, as I'm sure I'll be seeing more of it in the future... PERIPHERALS: The included mouse and keyboard are fine, but nothing all that special. They are quite clearly modeled on the Apple products. I am not super picky about the way my keyboard and mouse feel, so I'm not the best judge of these, but they feel fine for me. The keyboard does have the full number pad, which I actually don't like. Desk space is always at a premium for me, and I have become so accustomed to entering numbers using the numerals above the letters that I prefer the more compact layout without a separate number pad. The mouse also seems fine to me, but I am not a gamer so I am not that picky about the mouse. Both the keyboard and mouse use 2 AAA batteries, which I was a bit surprised by. They are clearly trying to go after a more premium market and are following in the trails of Apple, so I would have thought they would make the peripherals rechargeable. I got tired of switching out the batteries on my Mac keyboard and trackpad, which caused me to upgrade to their newer models with rechargeable batteries instead -- it is a minor thing but all the little things do add up to give certain product lines a more premium feel. HP was trying to make a cool premium feeling feature on the mouse, but ended up failing a bit -- they attached the top of the mouse with three magnets, but the magnets and steel screws they stick onto don't line up very well, and it is not all that easy to get it apart and back together. Interestingly, I could not initially find the USB receiver for the mouse and keyboard. I thus assumed they were bluetooth, until I started disassembling the computer and found the dongle hidden inside the machine (see disassembly section below). The built in camera is perfectly acceptable, and the image quality is as good as I'd want for any sort of web conferencing. It won't win any awards for the image sensor, but you don't need an ultra high quality sensor for regular PC use. I also like how you pop the camera in and out of the body to completely block it when you're not using it. This is a manual process, and it would have been cool to have it motorized (but that would be an item I'd worry about breaking over time). CONNECTIVITY: The connectivity is fine for a basic all-in-one machine, but again nothing that special. I am somewhat surprised that there is only one USB-C port -- most of the modern devices are moving almost exclusively to USB-C, so I thought a brand new PC from HP would include at least 2-3 USB-C ports. Instead, HP elected to include four USB-A ports and only one USB-C. Although I have not tested or confirmed this, I don't believe the USB-C port is capable of the thunderbolt protocol, which is also somewhat disappointing. Although Thunderbolt and the modern high speed USB protocol both operate over USB-C, Thunderbolt is fundamentally different because it exposes the PCIe bus. The peripherals you can attach using Thunderbolt is practically limitless, and much greater than what you can do with USB, even if the connectors and data rate are similar. I do appreciate that they put one of the USB-A ports on the side of the machine for easy access. The Amazon listing also mentioned a "3 in 1 media card reader", but I only have a full-side SD card slot on the back of this machine. Obviously, you can just use a micro-SD to SD adapter if you want to read a micro-SD card, I was just surprised by the number of errors in the Amazon listing. Another example is the Amazon photo showing the ports -- they have the power port labelled as a headphone/microphone jack... The headphone jack is actually on the side of the machine just above the side-mounted USB-A port. NETWORKING: There is a high speed wifi chip in this PC, which is what I suspect most people will use. I can't keep up with all the new generations of 802.11x these days, so I am not positive which versions this chip is capable of. However, I was able to connect to my network without any difficulty and the speeds are good. Whenever I want a fast and low latency connection, I always hardwire instead of relying on WiFi. I am glad HP still put an RJ45 port on this PC, but I am a bit disappointed it is only capable of 1Gb transfer rate. 10Gb connections have been at prosumer friendly prices for a couple years now, and I really would have liked to see them add 10Gb capability. Ideally, I would have loved an SFP connection so I could swap modules and hook up with either fiber or copper, but that is usually only a capability you get with an add-on network card (which you could connect via Thunderbolt if they made the USB-C port Thunderbolt-capable!). POWER DRAW: ALl these measurements were taken with a Kil-A-Watt device, which isn't exactly the epitome of accuracy. However, it's usually within the right ballpark. While sitting at idle with the screen on, I measured a power draw of between 20W and 30W. While actively downloading and installing Windows Updates, I measured about 55W. The power supply is only rated for 120W, so even if you really stress this PC it won't draw a whole lot of power. When the computer was asleep, the power draw fluctuated between 0.4W and 0.8W, which is very impressive! With the computer powered down, I measured between 0.0 and 0.4W of vampire draw. These newest generation Intel processors are very good with power management, and it shows -- these are great power draw numbers. COMPONENT QUALITY: Overall HP used good quality components from very reputable OEMs. While I question some of their product choices (like networking speed, connectivity ports, screen resolution, etc.) they always sourced parts from reputable manufacturers. The SSD was sourced from Intel, the HDD was from Western Digital (they even went for the Caviar Black line), the RAM is from Samsung, and the screen panel is from LG. I use many of the same manufacturers in my servers, just usually a more datacenter specific product line. DISASSEMBLY: I wanted to see how serviceable the internal parts are, so I started trying to disassemble this machine. Despite HP advertising the RAM is user-swappable, I couldn't find any information on their website or in the product documentation for how to get this PC opened up. Google search was not much help either. Eventually, I started to cautiously pry apart panels. The shell of this PC is all one piece, and to disassemble the PC you need to pop off the speaker grill first. It is held in place with a few plastic tabs. I managed to get the grill off without breaking any of these tabs, because they were actually designed to snap apart properly (unlike many other devices that the manufacturer does not want you to open up). Once the speaker grill is off, there are three philips screws attaching the bottom of the screen to the shell. I would have preferred Torx, but that's a relatively minor complaint. After these three screws are removed, the rest of the screen can pop out of the shell (it is also held in with plastic tabs around the perimeter). Before you do this, make sure you have a raised support for the screen to rest on, otherwise you will pull on the monitor cables. With the screen flipped out, you can easily access the HDD and memory slots. You can also access the CPU, which does seem to be socketed and not soldered on (a positive feature in my opinion). If you want to get to the SSD, you will have to remove the metal shielding cover at the bottom of the PC (another 5 screws, and you have to unplug the monitor cables first). I do appreciate that HP has marked the size of almost all the screws at the point where they are inserted. This makes it easy to identify which screw goes where if you weren't organized during the disassembly. It isn't super easy to get in to the machine and change parts out, but it's nowhere near as difficult as it is on the iMac (where you have to remove/replace adhesive and take out the entire logic board just to replace the memory). SHELL MATERIAL: The shell is a white plastic labelled internally as PC + ABS - (FR40). I believe this indicates polycarbonate with ABS and a fire retardant additive. It's definitely not as nice as the aluminum shell on the iMac, but I think it's fine. The shell does feel quite flexible and flimsy when the screen is not supporting it, however. This PC isn't meant to be very portable, so there probably won't be all that much wear on the housing, but it might have been nice to see some glass fiber or glass bead reinforcing in the plastic for added durability and stiffness. As it is right now, the thin glass screen seems to provide more structure and support for the plastic shell than the other way around... SPEAKERS: HP advertises their speakers and how they are designed by B&O. I don't think they're all that great. B&O makes some great speakers, but these aren't in that category. In my opinion B&O is really diluting their brand with these types of collaborations. These are better than standard laptop speakers, but they aren't anything special. They get loud, but don't sound all that great. I do have relatively high audio standards, so perhaps most people will find these enjoyable, but I do not. WIRELESS CHARGING: There is a menu option on the on-screen display to turn on and off wireless charging, so I was intrigued by this. In some HP models, there is a wireless charger built into the base, which I think is a very good use of space. I was excited to give this a try, but I don't think this model has the capability. Even though I have it turned on via the OSD, I could not get an iPhone to charge (yes, I tested with a newer phone that I know has the capability). If you look at the stock Amazon listing photo, you can see there is a small LED in the front of the base -- this is supposed to be the status LED for the wireless charger. However, the computer I received does not have this LED. Thus, I am forced to believe there has been either a serious QC error and this machine was incorrectly assembled without the wireless charger, or the listing photos are not entirely accurate. This PC does seem to be a brand new model so I was not able to get exact specs from the HP website either.