HP has announced the OmniBook 5, a 14-inch laptop starting at $699.99 that puts an OLED screen on every configuration and lines up directly against Apple’s MacBook Neo. The HP OmniBook 5 ships in October 2026 in four colours, peony pink, starlit blue, smoke silver and soft honeydew, and runs on Intel’s Wildcat Lake chips rather than anything from Apple’s or Qualcomm’s side of the budget-laptop fight.
It’s the latest entry in a run of Windows machines built to answer Apple’s cheap aluminium laptop: Lenovo’s IdeaPad Vibe line, Dell’s XPS 13 and incoming 14S, and Acer’s Swift Air 14 have all turned up with similar pitches this year. The starting price matches Apple’s own, too: $699.99 lines up almost exactly with the point Apple set for the Neo, which is presumably not a coincidence given how directly every one of these launches is aimed at it.
What’s in the HP OmniBook 5 at launch
The base configuration pairs an Intel Core 5 320 or Core 7 350 with Intel’s integrated graphics, 8GB of soldered LPDDR5-6400 memory and a 256GB PCIe Gen 4 SSD. The 14-inch display runs at 1920 x 1200 on an OLED panel, with touch and non-touch versions both available. HP rates the 60 WHr battery at up to 42 hours, charged over USB-C with a 65W GaN adapter, and pairs it with a 1080p IR webcam for Windows Hello. At 2.56 pounds, it undercuts the Dell XPS 14S (2.65 pounds) and the Acer Swift Air 14 (2.62 pounds), though the MacBook Neo and the standard XPS 13 are both still lighter.
There’s no discrete GPU at any tier, only Intel’s integrated graphics, so this is a productivity and media machine rather than anything built for gaming, whatever the four-colour styling might suggest.
The catches the spec sheet doesn’t lead with
The $699.99 starting price is for the entry configuration, and HP’s own spec sheet lists several items that aren’t actually buyable at launch. The 12GB RAM option isn’t due until November 2026, the 1TB SSD tier arrives the same month, and a sharper 2560 x 1600 OLED touch panel doesn’t land until March 2027, according to the configuration table Tom’s Hardware published. All three memory tiers are soldered rather than socketed, too, so whichever amount ships in the box on day one is the amount you’re stuck with.
The 42-hour battery figure is also worth treating carefully: it’s HP’s own number, measured with local video playback, which is about the easiest workload available to make a laptop look efficient and nothing like a mixed-use independent test. None of this is unusual for a laptop launch, but it’s the actual list of catches that “plenty of catches” headlines tend to gesture at without naming.
What to watch next
The real test is what the OmniBook 5 does once reviewers get a unit in hand: independent battery results against that 42-hour claim, and whether the 12GB RAM and 1TB storage configurations actually ship on schedule in November. Until then, the $699.99 machine on shelves this October is the 8GB, 256GB model, not the one in the brochure photos.
