In the world of business laptops, it can be hard to stand out. Nearly all of them are some shade of black, and over the years we’ve come to expect computer makers to skimp out on things like premium displays and speakers in favor of pure performance. But as consumer laptops have gotten insanely good at doing almost everything these days, it’s nice to see some companies building more well-rounded business laptops.

HP’s latest generation of ZBook Studio workstations combine sleek looks and powerful performance into a compelling package. Intel’s latest AI-focused Ultra series chips are running the show, and HP will let you pack your configuration to the gills for top-of-the-line performance. However, some key compromises like a lackluster keyboard and bad webcam, combined with an exorbitantly high price compared to its competitors, make it a tough sell.

About this review: HP provided us with a ZBook Studio G11 laptop for this review. It had no input in this article and did not see its contents before publishing.

Price, availability, and specs

Plenty of power, if you’re willing to pay for it

Being a squarely business-focused laptop, the ZBook Studio doesn’t come cheap. The base model starts at $2,043, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H vPro and Intel Arc graphics, 32GB of RAM, 512GB of storage, and a very underwhelming 1920x1200 WUXGA anti-glare display.

You can configure it with quite a bit more power if you’d like to opt for an Ultra 9-185H processor with an NVIDIA RTA 3000 Ada or RTX 4070 GPU, 3840x2400 WQUXGA display (with optional touchscreen), 64GB of RAM, and up to 4TB of storage. That was the configuration I was sent and, when you add in the $10 fingerprint reader, the price comes out to $7,213 at the time of writing.

That’s a lot of money to ask for a laptop; however, as HP is targeting businesses with these, I would hope there are some bulk discounts if you order that way.

Design and ports

Looks pretty nice for a business laptop, but it’s missing a couple of things

The silver aluminum chassis of the ZBook Studio stands out nicely in a sea of matte black business laptops. It’s also very thin, at 0.76 inches, and lightweight, starting at only 3.81 lbs. I was impressed with how much easier it was to carry and how much better it looked and felt than other business laptops I’ve used. It certainly looks better than Lenovo’s new P1 Gen7 workstations.

The port selection is a bit lacking, however, for a high-powered, business-focused laptop. On the left side is the 150W barrel plug charging port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right side is a Kensington Nano lock slot, a USB-A port, one USB-C 3.2 port, and what appears to be a microSD card slot but it's not yet available in current configurations. No HDMI or DisplayPort to be found. Personally, if they are going to remove the HDMI port, at least add a third Thunderbolt 4 port on the right side or something.

Something that did seem a bit strange is that the ports feel very tight. I noticed my USB-A adapters were more noticeably scratched after pulling them out of the ZBook than on other computers. No matter what element I plugged into which port, they all felt very tight.

There’s no 5G connectivity either, but the inclusion of Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 is nice for future-proofing it a bit.

Display, webcam, and audio

Don’t settle for the base display configuration

When I first opened up the ZBook, I was a bit worried that I had been sent the base 1920x1200 WUXGA display. Not the ideal screen, since that display is a matte, anti-glare display that tops out at 60Hz. For most basic tasks like web browsing, emailing, Slack, research and writing, it’s perfectly passable and even helpful if using it outdoors. Plus, the 16:10 aspect ratio is great for productivity.

However, if you need to do any sort of photo or video editing, or if you want to game on it at all (HP even calls it a “work laptop you’ll want to game on”), you should absolutely upgrade to the 3840x2400 WQUXGA display. You can also add a touch screen at the 3840x2400 resolution, but I personally don’t use touchscreens on my laptops much, so it’s not a big deal for me.

In 2024, on a business-focused laptop, we should expect more than a 720p webcam.

Sadly, there is no option to upgrade from the 720p webcam. It’s the only webcam offered, no matter which configuration you choose, which is really disappointing when you’re paying several thousand dollars for a laptop. Especially considering how video-call-centric most jobs are these days. I won’t really say it’s bad, it gets the job done, but it struggles in anything other than ideal lighting and I always looked washed out on my calls. In 2024, on a high-end business laptop, I expect more.

HP forgoes a numpad on the ZBook G11 which makes room for some very nice upward-firing speakers. Everything I listened to was full, rich, and had plenty of range. Whether I was watching a movie or gaming, I was never disappointed with the audio quality. The only thing I do wish is that they got a bit louder. Even at max volume, it seemed a tad quieter than other laptops I’ve used.

Keyboard and touchpad

Disappointing keyboard, but look at all the colors!

As a writer, it saddens me to say that the keyboard is the most disappointing part of the ZBook for me. It’s certainly not bad, but there are just too many compromises for me to really enjoy the typing experience. For one, it’s a bit shallow. It’s not nearly as bad as Apple’s ill-fated butterfly keyboard, but it’s still more shallow than many other laptop keyboards I’ve typed on.

For a business-focused computer, I would have expected it to be a bit deeper. I could type on it fine, but I was not as accurate as I am on other keyboards, and after about more than an hour, I began wishing for my other keyboard. Maybe I'm just spoiled coming from the fantastic keyboard on Lenovo's ThinkPad P1 Gen 7, but I still think there's room for improvement here.

The other annoying thing about the keyboard is the darn Copilot key. While other manufacturers are finding ways to add the Copilot key without removing too much functionality, HP straight-up replaced the right Ctrl key with it. There is no Ctrl key to the right of the spacebar, not even one hidden behind a function key. It’s just gone. As someone who relies on keyboard shortcuts quite frequently, it’s annoying.

The touchpad is also not without its issues. It is not a haptic touchpad, as you find on most other high-end computers today, and the amount of force required to physically click it is more than I expected - it almost became frustrating after a while. Thankfully, the touch response is accurate, but I did notice a bug where the touch input seemed to not register when I had a USB mouse plugged in.

The one upside of the keyboard is that it has per key RGB configuration, and you can set multiple profiles for it within the Z Light Space app. While fun for gaming, and nice to see on a business laptop, it still doesn’t make up for the lackluster typing experience.

Performance and battery life

Performance you would expect, mostly

A fully-specced out ZBook G11 can be equipped with an Ultra Core 9-185H and either an RTX 4070 or 3000 Ada, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, 4TB of storage, and a 3840x2400 WQUXGA LED touch display. With such top-of-the-line specs, the performance of the ZBook is about what you’d expect. It holds its own with other similarly specced laptops in our benchmark tests.

What’s interesting is that it beat out other laptops in some benchmarks, but fell behind in others. It scored better than the Acer Swift Go 16 with the same processor in Geekbench and Cinebench, yet fared worse in PCMark 10 and CrossMark. Yet the competing computer only had half the RAM.

While the benchmark scores are not bad overall, I found the real-world usage to be a bit mixed. For example, when editing a 7:37 4K video in DaVinci Resolve, it rendered it in a respectable 2:37. But when I was just going through my normal workflow of several browser tabs, Slack, email, writing, etc., it would slip up occasionally. I don’t know if I’d say it happened significantly enough to be a dealbreaker, but it’s something I noticed.

Annoyingly, the ZBook Studio G11 seems to suffer from the same fate as the ThinkPad P1 G7 (and many other laptops we’ve tested recently). In what I assume is an effort to maintain decent battery life, HP and other OEMs will significantly throttle the performance of these laptops when on battery power. While unplugged, the ZBook Studio scored 2,357 and 12,195 on Geekbench 6 single and multicore tests respectively, and 6,749 on the 3DMark CPU test. Even so, HP doesn’t throttle the ZBook nearly as much as Lenovo seems to have on the ThinkPad P1. While the ThinkPad saw as much as a 32% drop in benchmark performance from AC to DC (plug to battery) power, the ZBook only dropped by a max of 19% in my benchmark testing.

Gaming was interesting on the ZBook as well. While plugged in, everything I played ran fine, but I would notice some occasional stutters while on battery power. At one point while playing Borderlands 2, the stutters were so consistent I ended up plugging in, even though I still had plenty of battery power left - and the battery settings were even set to Performance. Granted, I was playing at the full 3840x2400 resolution at 120Hz, but still. While this is clearly not a dedicated gaming laptop, I expected it to perform a bit better while gaming, especially since HP specifically mentions the gaming chops of the ZBook Studio on its website.

Should you buy the HP ZBook Studio G11?

You should buy the HP ZBook Studio G11 if:

• You want a business laptop that doesn’t look like a business laptop
• You don’t care much about keyboard performance
• You want Intel’s latest Core Ultra processor

You shouldn’t buy the HP ZBook Studio G11 if:

• You want a great typing experience
• You need something on a budget
• You want a 2-in-1 laptop

In truth, it’s hard to say who should buy the ZBook Studio G11. On the one hand, it’s a refreshingly sleek and nice-looking business laptop in a sea of boring black clamshells. Plus, it’s got more than enough power to handle pretty much anything you can throw at it.

On the other hand, it makes some compromises that are really tough to square in a laptop that costs so much, especially since it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. At the time of writing, a similarly specced Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 7, arguably the epitome of a ‘workhorse laptop’, is less than half the price (and Lenovo’s odd pricing structure means it will most likely stay that way for a while).

However, if the lackluster webcam and mediocre keyboard don’t bother you, and if your company is footing the bill or you’ve got a stack of cash lying around, then sure, the ZBook Studio G11 is a really solid professional laptop.