HP ZBook Firefly G10 16-Inch Review

HP’s terrific ZBook Firefly 16-inch is a portable workstation aimed at productivity, photography, 2D, and light 3D workloads. It’s based on the business-class EliteBook 865 laptop but adds professional-class discrete graphics capabilities that are certified for Adobe, Autodesk, and SolidWorks. HP has offered both 14- and 16-inch versions of this product since last year, but with the new 10th-generation models, you can choose between Intel and AMD chipsets for the first time, albeit only in the 14-inch version.

Well, that’s a quandary, isn’t it? But after a bit of deliberation, I decided to review the 16-inch version, mostly because I had evaluated two 14-inch ZBook Fireflies in the past—this product line remains one of my all-time favorites—and I was curious how the bigger display would impact the experience. And while I will admit to a bit of reviewer’s remorse—after the fact, I discovered that the AMD chipset in the 14-inch ZBook Firefly is the first to include the firm’s AI engine—please don’t shed a tear: the 16-inch version carries forward everything I loved about the EliteBook 865 and adds some nice upgrades. It’s a perfectly balanced productivity monster.

Design

As with its business-class inspiration, the ZBook Firefly is a big slab of aluminum, but instead of the pedestrian silver of the EliteBook, it arrives in a darker gray color that telegraphs its portable workstation bona fides to HP fans.

But ZBook fans might be disappointed to know that the unique “Z” logo does not adorn the outside of the display lid. Instead, we now get the standard silver HP logo.

The look and feel are professional throughout, with the black display bezels and keyboard keys contrasting nicely with the dark gray body. The laptop is also well-made, with absolutely no flex at all on the keyboard deck despite its size. That’s impressive, as is its reported durability: HP says that the laptop has passed 19 MIL-STD 810h tests, so this is no homebody. The ZBook is designed to be used in the field.

Display

As we see elsewhere in HP’s premium portable PC product families, the ZBook has moved to 16:10 display panels, which is a welcome move. There are several choices available in a variety of resolutions and configurations, including HP’s vaunted DreamColor panel, which provides precision color accuracy for graphics professionals. But the review unit arrived with an astonishingly bright and crisp 2.8K (2880 x 1800) OLED panel that emits 400 nits of brightness—it feels brighter than that—and is blessedly free of any unnecessary multitouch capabilities.

Interestingly, the display in the review unit also offers high refresh-rate capabilities, so you can switch between 60 Hz and 120 Hz, a nice bonus. (And not sure about this feature’s availability across other panel options.) Put simply, this display is stunning, and it’s a big step up from the Full HD+ (1920 x 1200) display that graced the EliteBook 865 I reviewed earlier this year, with the same reasonably small bezels.

But the display doesn’t quite lay flat.

Internal components

16-inch ZBook Firefly buyers can choose between a long list of 13th Gen Intel Core U- and P-series processors. And while I assume that most would prefer a beefier P-series part, the U-series is a solid choice that probably helps keep the price down. Indeed, the review unit shipped with an Intel Core i7-1365U processor that proved more than adequate for the productivity and creator tasks I threw at it. Having 32 GB of DDR5-5200 RAM—upgradable to 64 GB—and an NVIDIA RTX A500 Laptop GPU with 4 GB of dedicated GDDR5 RAM doesn’t hurt either. Nor does the voluminous and speedy 2 TB of Gen 4 x4 NVMe M.2 SSD storage that came with the review unit. (Customers have a variety of choices between 256 GB and 2 TB of storage.)

I used the HP with all of my standard productivity apps—Brave, Word, Notion, Teams, and so on—as one might expect, but also with Adobe Photoshop Elements 2020 and Premiere Elements 2022. And while I installed but didn’t really use the full Visual Studio, I spent a lot of time with Visual Studio Code for both coding and productivity tasks. You shouldn’t be surprised to discover that the ZBook Firefly soared along with no hiccups, but I really enjoy how the larger display improves the experience for both productivity and creator apps.

The ZBook Firefly was quiet and cool in normal use. But given its thin frame and dedicated graphics, it’s reasonable to wonder whether certain workloads will heat up the PC, spinning up the fans and the noise. I don’t run the high-end engineering and creator apps that might trigger such a thing, but the only time I really heard the fan was during video rendering in Premiere Elements, and even that wasn’t objectionable.

Connectivity

As one should expect, the ZBook Firefly provides modern and speedy connectivity capabilities, including Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 on an M.2 combo card. 5G cellular connectivity is also available as an option, though it wasn’t included in the review unit. Here, again, I experienced no issues, with the Wi-Fi pulling down almost exactly 500 Mbps off of my 1 Gbps Internet connection.

Ports and expansion

Despite its thin chassis, the ZBook provides a reasonable mix of modern and legacy ports that should satisfy most users.

On the left, you will find a full-sized USB Type-A port (with a slow 5 Gbps data transfer rate but device charging capabilities), an HDMI 2.0b video-out port, and two Thunderbolt 4/USB4 Type-C ports (with 40 Gbps data transfer, USB Power Delivery, DisplayPort 1.4, and HP Sleep and Charge capabilities), plus an optional smart card reader (that was included on the review unit).

And on the right, there’s a headphone/microphone combo jack and then another full-sized USB Type-A port (with a slow 5 Gbps data transfer rate and no device charging capabilities).

This isn’t fatal, but I’d like to see faster USB-A ports in 2023, and it’d be nice to have at least one Thunderbolt 4/USB4 Type-C port on each side.

Audio and video

The ZBook Firefly provides surprisingly decent Bang & Olufsen downward-firing speakers, and they sound particularly good when used on a desk or other hard surfaces. There’s no Dolby Atmos immersive sound support, sadly, but the speakers sound great and never distort, even at 100 percent volume, with both video and music content. Indeed, it can fill a decent-sized room with sound. (And I like that the bundled HP Audio Control app can be configured to automatically optimize for the content you’re enjoying rather than forcing you to manually choose between music, movie, and voice.)

For the hybrid workers in the audience, the HP ships with dual array microphones with conference and person modes and, as with the speakers, it offers configurable and AI-based noise-reduction capabilities (also via HP Audio Control). There’s also a high-quality 5 MP webcam with an 88-degree viewing angle, terrific low-light performance, and auto-framing.

These capabilities are configured via a utility that can only be launched from the myHP app for some reason. As can the PC’s multi-camera capabilities, though I did not test that.

Keyboard and touchpad

HP’s premium PCs have long had the best portable keyboards in the industry, and the ZBook Firefly continues this trend. Its full-sized, backlit, and spill-resistant keyboard provides short, snappy key throws, great feedback, and absolutely zero flex. It’s nearly ideal.

The only niggle here—for me, at least—is the numeric keypad, which shifts the main keyboard over to the left and was hard to adjust to, with the Power and Delete keys no longer at the top right. This may just be me, I am a messy typist, but I have accuracy issues with these keys and others along what is normally the right side of the keyboard, like the Right arrow key. And as HP explained to me, a numeric keypad is useful for architects and engineers, and the 14-inch model, which doesn’t have the numpad, might be a better choice for me and others who don’t need this functionality. Fair enough, but in an imaginary and perfect world, we’d get a choice of keyboard.

Beyond that, I have no major issues. There’s a microphone toggle key on the keyboard, which I like, but the webcam is toggled using a hard-to-find manual shutter above the camera, which is less than ideal, especially at this price point.

The glass touchpad is large and accurate enough that I never needed to disable three- and four-finger gestures, which is rare for me. Also good, I had no issues grabbing items on screen for drag-and-drop. With lots of touchpads, especially larger units, you have to really position your fingers on the far left of the touchpad for this to work accurately. But this one was perfect.

Security

The ZBook Firefly provides Windows Hello facial recognition and fingerprint recognition capabilities, at least optionally, which is my ideal configuration, though the fingerprint reader is an old-school square sensor on the far right of the wrist rest and not located inside the keyboard. As noted above, you can toggle the microphones and the webcam on/off, the latter manually.

As with other premium HP PCs, the Firefly also shipped with the company’s comprehensive Wolf Security suite, which provides hardware-backed protection against offline firmware attacks and deep learning-based protection technologies in addition to the usual malware protections. But this product is aimed at managed businesses with lots of HP hardware and might be overkill for individuals.

Sustainability

The HP ZBook Firefly contains 60 percent post-consumer recycled plastic. And the laptop’s packaging is sustainable too: the outside box and corrugated cushions are 100 percent sustainably sourced and recyclable, and the molded paper pulp cushion inside the box is 100 percent sustainably sourced and recyclable.

As good, it’s simple to remove the bottom panel of the laptop for serviceability, and you can replace or upgrade the SSD, RAM, and other M.2-based components. (HP told me that its larger ZBook Fury laptops have even simpler tool-less designs.)

Portability

With its 0.78-inch thinness and a curb weight of just 3.88 pounds, the ZBook Firefly is about as thin and light as a 16-inch laptop can get, so it’s interesting that it doesn’t skimp on the availability of full-sized expansion ports and dedicated graphics. There are two battery options, 3-cell 51-watt-hour and 6-cell 76-watt-hour, and a choice of USB-C power adapters, one a traditional 65-watt unit and the other a slightly bigger (but not at all large) 110-watt brick. Both support HP Fast Charge capabilities, so you can charge the device to 50 percent in just 30 minutes in any configuration.

Unfortunately, the review unit came with the smaller battery (and the smaller, 65-watt power supply), and the battery life came in a bit lower than I had hoped at an average of 3:30 (three and a half hours). Granted, the discrete graphics and power-sucking OLED display are probably responsible for that, and other configurations would likely get you closer to what I experienced with the EliteBook 865 (an incredible 9 hours of uptime).

For those that want to micromanage the battery, HP provides a Power Manager app that lets you configure how the system utilizes the battery in use and while charging. I left this set to “Let HP Manage My Battery,” a setting that enables HP’s intelligent charging, which learns how and when you use the PC and dynamically adjusts the charge level. But you can configure this to your liking.

16-inch laptops aren’t particularly portable compared to the more typical 13- and 14-inch laptops that most people use. But for those who need the more expansive display, this is a far tradeoff, and I had no issues carrying this around in my medium-sized HP Renew backpack.

Software

The ZBook Firefly can be configured with Windows 11 Home, Windows 11 Pro, or Windows 11 Pro Education, and the review unit shipped with Pro, which I feel is the most obvious choice. There are 11 HP-branded utilities, three Intel utilities, two NVIDIA utilities, and two superfluous Start menu icons, for Adobe offers and TCO Certified. HP also pinned myHP and HP Audio Control to the Taskbar. So it’s not completely crapware-free (Adobe offers? Come on) but not objectionable either.

Pricing and configurations

The HP ZBook Firefly normally starts at about $2000, which isn’t out of line for a portable workstation of this caliber. But that said, it’s on sale as I write this, with prices starting at just $995 (!). For that low price, you get a Core i5-1335U processor, Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, a Full HD+ display (1920 x 1200, anti-glare, 250 nits), 16 GB of RAM, 256 GB of storage, and Windows 11 Pro, but no fingerprint reader, NFC, or smartcard reader.

That is more than reasonable, so I was curious what the review unit configuration would cost. And here, the 2 TB of storage (a $995 upgrade) is what made it unobtainable (to me) at a bit over $2400. But then I wouldn’t configure this laptop with that much storage. A version with the same processor and OLED display but no discrete graphics and just 16 GB of RAM and 512 GB of storage brings the price down to $1517 (which is over $3000 when not on sale).

If you’re in the market for this laptop, move quickly: these are incredible prices for this much power.

Recommendations and conclusions

With its incredible range of processor, RAM, storage, and 16-inch display options, the HP ZBook Firefly G10 can meet the needs of anyone in the target market. And that includes those who might usually shop over in the EliteBook aisle, as this machine provides significant upgrades for certified discrete graphics, display choices, and more. Combine that with the professional design, excellent keyboard and touchpad, hybrid work capabilities, and HP optimizations, and you’ve got a winner here. The ZBook Firefly is highly recommended, though I will remind potential customers to seriously consider all the buy-time customization options. And remember that there’s a 14-inch model for those who prefer a smaller display and no numeric keypad.

At-a-glance

Pros

• Business-class elegance
• Nearly perfect keyboard and touchpad (albeit with numeric keypad)
• Incredible range of processor, graphics, RAM, storage, and display choices
• The OLED display is terrific, with bright, vibrant colors and deep blacks
• Modern connectivity capabilities with 5G cellular data option
• Surprisingly strong audio
• Excellent hybrid work capabilities

Cons

• Can get very pricey
• Slow USB Type-A ports
• Battery life in the review unit bogged down by graphics, OLED display, small battery