Pros

Excellent OLED display is only $60 upgrade

Sturdy, all-metal design

Comfy keyboard

1440p webcam and Enchanced Lighting app are great

Cons

Terrible touchpad

Lousy speakers

Heavier than other 14-inch laptops

Battery life is hours shorter than that of Copilot Plus PCs

HP is shuttering the Pavilion brand in favor of the OmniBook name for its consumer laptops, but it’s going to be a slow transition. HP is still updating a few Pavilion lines as it fills out the new OmniBook series. Following a refreshed HP Pavilion Aero 13 I reviewed earlier this year is the slightly larger Pavilion Plus 14. In both cases, these laptops feature older CPUs; for the Pavilion Plus 14, it’s from Intel’s late 2023 Meteor Lake family and not the latest Lunar Lake line from last September.

With a Core Ultra 5 125H, the Pavilion Plus 14 competed well with laptops with newer CPUs on our application and graphics benchmarks. However, you see its deficiencies with AI performance and battery life. Still, it offers enough performance to justify its roughly $1,000 price (and you can frequently find it for hundreds less when HP’s rotating discounts land on it).

The Pavilion Plus 14’s chief attraction is a high-resolution OLED display, a rarity at its price. The baseline model features a 2.5K IPS display, and HP charges only $60 to upgrade to a 2.8K OLED panel. It’s a no-brainer upgrade but disappointingly paired with something that can’t be swapped out: a mediocre touchpad that feels loose and has a false click that you must push through to get to the actual click. Without a touchscreen display, you’re forced to use it. Either that or commit to carrying around a mouse. The Microsoft Surface Laptop 7 is a better choice; it lacks an OLED display but boasts a superior design and an awesome haptic touchpad. Or, for greater portability in a 14-inch OLED laptop, check out the incredibly lightweight Asus Zenbook A14.