Hands-on: A quick look at the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook [Gallery]

Ben Schoon | Jan 6 2023 - 12:42 pm PT

The HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook might be the next “flagship” for the platform, and at CES 2023, we had the pleasure of checking it out in person.

Coming soon, the HP Dragonfly Chromebook is a bit of an oddity in the ChromeOS world. It’s a flagship-tier Chromebook with high-end specs, a 14-inch display, and an aim at professionals. Yet, at the same time, it also ships with an RGB keyboard which feels oddly out of place – more on that shortly.

HP announces the even more premium Dragonfly Pro Chromebook with all USB-C, RGB keyboard

In person, the Dragonfly Pro is a stunning machine to look at. The white finish on the demo unit HP had at Pepcom was thin, lighter than expected, and felt well-built too. Its design was also good-looking yet quite practical across the board.

The Dragonfly Pro also picked up the best feature from 2022’s Elite Dragonfly Chromebook, the haptic trackpad. Like the trackpad on Macbooks, the one on Dragonfly Pro is also a solid-state surface that simply mimics the feel of pressing with haptics. The benefit this provides is that you can click anywhere on the trackpad and get the same click, instead of needing to keep your focus on the bottom half. I already loved this on the Elite Dragonfly, but on the Pro it’s even better thanks to a better, smoother glass surface.

The screen is also stunning, with its sharp 2560×1600 resolution and 1,200 nits of brightness. It should be a pleasure to work on both indoors and out based on our first impressions.

But what stands out at first glance is really that keyboard, which is just so odd in a machine like this.

The choice to go for RGB in this design, especially in the white model we tried out, is just bizarre to look at. I’m absolutely not a fan of it, but it’ll be interesting to see if the rest of the package can rise above this odd choice when we get longer to test it out in the coming months.

HP pitches the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook as a machine for freelancers and, as someone who loosely fits that description, I’ve got to say it hits all the right notes. It’s powerful and well-built, but doesn’t lock anything behind enterprise purchasing. As much as I loved and still adore the HP Elite Dragonfly Chromebook, that laptop is a mess to purchase unless you work for a company willing to buy it for you.

With the Dragonfly Pro, it really all comes down to pricing.

HP has yet to say how much the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook will cost, but it certainly won’t be a cheap machine. With 16GB of RAM, a powerful Intel chip, and this high-end hardware, $1,200 seems like the absolute bare minimum we’ll see this cost. Will that still be worthwhile for HP’s target market? We’ll have to wait and see.