What do you do if you like the look and feel of an Apple MacBook Pro, but you need a Windows-based environment for work purposes? Sure, there are plenty of ways for you to load Windows Vista onto a Mac, but wouldn’t it be nice if you could get something like that right out of the box? The company may not own up to it, but this concept seems to the motivation behind the recently announced HP Envy 13 and Envy 15 notebooks.
The designs for these new HP laptops are clearly reminiscent of laptops from the MacBook Pro line, boasting similar aluminum construction and similar black-and-silver color schemes. You get the sense of a higher end product, but the HP Envy 13 and the HP Envy 15 are quite affordable with prices starting at $1,699 and $1,799, respectively. These aren’t entry-level budget notebooks, to be sure, but they’re not $3,000+ behemoths either. The screen sizes are also in line with what you get with a MacBook Pro 13 or MacBook Pro 15.
The smaller of the two is the Envy 13 and it gets a 13.3-inch widescreen with a 1366×768 pixel resolution. You get an edge-to-edge glass screen, a 0.8-inch profile, a tiled keyboard, and multi-touch glass touchpad (without a separate mouse button). There is no optical drive, but the optional extended battery can provide up to 18 hours of continuous use.
The 15-inch HP Envy 15 notebook comes in your choice of a 1366×768 or 1920×1080 screen. Other highlights include a one-inch thickness, Intel Core i7 processor, up to 16GB of DDR3 1066MHz RAM, and ATi graphics. Like its 13-inch counterpart, the Envy 15 does not have an internal optical drive. You can opt for the external Blu-ray drive to take advantage of the 1080p screen though.
Both the Envy 13 and Envy 15 will come powered by Windows 7. Look for them in late October.
ATVs for Sale
September 25, 2009 11:13 am
Up to 16Gb of ram?? Damn, that’s awesome. Here I’m used to 1 or 2Gb. It does look like they are trying to compete with the macbook pro, but I am sure it falls behind in actual quality. HP has a history of producing somewhat unreliable hardware.
Chris Pollard
October 8, 2009 1:41 pm
Sorry, they dropped the ball on these, shorting an optical drive. You put a 1080P screen on that thing, and then give people NO way to take advantage of it on trips? How many folks are going to tote along an external BR drive on an airplane to watch an HD movie?
Don’t get me wrong, they’re nice looking units. And an i7 with 16GB of RAM would rock something fierce. But without an optical drive, you’d have to rip BR movies and transfer them to what, SDHC cards and use the card reader? Sorry, I’ll put up with the lack of an optical drive on a netbook, but this isn’t a stripped down companion machine. It’s meant to be a freakin’ computing powerhouse with that kind of hardware under the keyboard.
Fail.