HP ENVY 13

Design

Envy 13 adds some original touches that make it stand out. The matte aluminum lid has a small incline in the back that covers the hinge, giving it clean, sleek lines. The shiny HP logo in the middle of the lid really pops while the tapered shape of the chassis makes the entire system look slim and sexy. A smooth bottom surface is made from magnesium alloy.

Opening the lid reveals an attractive aluminum deck, completely with silver keys that match the aesthetic (MacBooks break the color scheme by using brown keys). The side bezels around the 13.3-inch screen are relatively thin, but no one would mistake this display for one of the nearly edgeless offerings on Dell’s XPS 13 or Lenovo’s Yoga 920. HP also offers the Envy 13t in a “Silk Gold” color.

Display

The 13.3-inch, 1080p touch screen on the Envy 13t offers decent image quality. When I watched a trailer for Thor: Ragnarok, colors like the green in Hela’s cape, the purple on a statue and the red behind the Marvel logo all seemed fairly accurate but they didn’t “pop” like they do on pricier competitors like the Dell XPS 13 and HP’s own Spectre 13. HP also offers the Envy 13t with an optional 4K display, which may be brighter and more vibrant (we haven’t tested one).

Performance

Aside from a minor design tweak or two, the biggest change in the HP Envy 13 this year is in its performance. HP has, of course, switched from using 7th-generation Intel CPUs to 8th-gen. This represents quite a shift, as Intel doubled the numbers of cores in this generation. Our Envy 13 has an Intel Core i5-8250U CPU, with four cores clocked at 1.6GHz and a 3.4GHz Turbo mode. But you can jump to a Core i7 if you want.

It’s a shame the Envy 13 doesn’t have the even newer Whiskey Lake CPUs, a minor 2018 refresh that’s still part of the same generation, but the performance difference is minor anyway. And the laptop arrived before those CPUs did, so we can’t blame HP.

Performance is great, comparable with a much more expensive laptop. You can run demanding apps, edit photos and even video on the HP Envy 13. These kind of jobs are one of the best reasons to choose the higher-end Envy 13 with more RAM. But if such work is your day job you should probably seek out something closer to a desktop replacement laptop anyway.

Ports

For a notebook this thin, the Envy 13t has a fair selection of ports, which includes two standard USB 3.0 connections and two USB-C ports, with one of each on either side. There’s also a 3.5mm audio jack and a microSD card slot. The USB-C ports can be used for charging, data and video out, but you they can only accept power from an HP branded charger. The device itself comes with a proprietary, non-USB charger.

Battery

HP rates the Envy 13 with a maximum battery life of 14 hours, but we find most run time estimates dubious, especially when the numbers are attached to undefined ‘mixed usage.’