HP's consumer and enterprise divisions are effectively separate companies (and, in fact, were acquired from separate sources.) The enterprise "workstation" laptops are some of the best-put-together, simplest-to-repair, most-natively-well-supported-without-needing-drivers, and otherwise most "obvious" in their design machines I've ever had the pleasure of refurbishing.

The EliteBook line is the one laptop where seeing inside actually made me want to own it more. (And I did buy one, and it was an excellent machine that served me well for years and would still be decently competitive today.)

Other neat thing: the EliteBooks I was refurbishing tended to be 2007 models—but they came with fully-working UEFI, hidden under a "this is only a prototype implementation" warning. It was fun playing with 64-bit Windows 8 on them; none of the other machines in the shop could make heads or tails of the W8 install discs.

They also tended to come with fingerprint sensors. I got used to unlocking my laptop with my thumb long before TouchID was a thing.

> HP's consumer and enterprise divisions are effectively separate companies

Bingo. This seems to be the pattern across the market. I have heard time and again that Acer laptops are crap. But at the same time i have seen at least one of their enterprise models survive basically decade of use with just the cooling fan needed replacing.

The only thing that makes Macbooks "special" is that they are effectively enterprise grade products sold to consumers.

That the article author balks at getting a Thinkpad because of the Superfish debacle shows a lack of research. No Thinkpad was found to have that installed, it was strictly limited to their Ideapad range.

A 2007 (maybe 2006) HP EliteBook was the last non MacBook Pro laptop I had. I loved that thing and it was incredibly easy to add my own RAM and an SSD to. Pretty sure it maxed out at 8GB.

I'm sure they're sleeker now but that thing was pretty thick and the batteries on them seemed to wear down and die very fast. Bonus points for having an AWESOME dock that worked near flawlessly in Windows 7 for me, not so much, but not bad with Ubuntu 10 Desktop. Also you could get extended batteries and the batteries swapped easily, so I had a pair that could get me through a day at a client's site with no power if I needed.

I can't imagine I'll go back, I love my MBPs, but I would check out the latest EliteBooks if I was going that way again.

The EliteBooks aren't even close to Macs in engineering. They're probably the closest thing I've found, but there are teething issues with all of them - like poor speakers, or noisy 3.5mm jacks, or poor display, or iffy keyboards, or poor trackpads.

Apple get all of this stuff right almost all the time, in almost every machine they build.

In fact, I only say almost above because it seems like they would have at least one lemon, but I can't think of what it is.

I have to agree 100%. My work computer is an EliteBook and the headphone jack has constant static, the fan runs high even on simple tasks, and the trackpad is downright terrible. I prefer my older MacBook Air's hardware by far.

That's a good point. I forgot how magical the trackpad is on the MBPs compared to every other laptop I've ever touched. I couldn't imagine bringing a travel mouse with me but I used to ALWAYS have one with my PC laptops.

Like around seven years ago, I bought a tablet PC from HP. An Touchsmart TX2. 2h max if batery and usage if plastic, but durable. I don't have any problem with it except the disappointed 3d performance (I expected more from it), AMD stoping of update the graphics drivers, and very very rare freeze on boot (like one time every 3 months). Also, an OS update to Windows 8 was an really improve on performance (even using beta drivers from AMD)

How ever, I know friends with HP's that breaked very easy. One give small electric shocks. Other had an previous version of the same tablet PC that me, and it ended generating smoke (Old touchsmart TXs have a tendency to overheat)

We bought 120 HP netbooks and had almost 90% drive failure (Seagate) and their firmware only for service contract customers has really soured me on HP. I find SuperMicro makes better servers, so I am pretty much out of HP now.

90% over how long?

2 - 3 months from the purchase

The HP consumer and enterprise lines are vastly different in terms of quality.

By the way, upon first boot of an HP laptop you will be prompted to burn recovery DVDs. $10 is actually pretty reasonable compared to what others would charge you.

My anecdotal evidence points the other way. My own Ho dv6 gave me a good 4 years of running.

- Yes, the crapware is unavoidable. but who doesn't ship with that?

- For me the system restore worked like magic. I tried it a bunch of times on my own machine and those of some friends. The machine was virgin again with just a click of a button.

- It's also very easy to get into. Very helpfully labeled; tons of guides available online. It's like its designed to be opened and hacked around. When it finally died, I scavenged it for parts and ported to my new desktop machine

> Yes, the crapware is unavoidable. but who doesn't ship with that?

Well Apple for one (unless you count their superfluous apps, but I find those much less intrusive)

I think the crapware is inexcusable. If almost every car manufacturer places a fresh pile of dog poo on your brand new car seat would you be okay with it just because everyone does it?...

Crapware is usually found on consumer machines, where installing crapware pays for the OS and reduces the price. Pro machines from Dell and HP generally don't have crapware apart from anit-virus), in my experience.

However, they may have "useful" extra software, which I could do without. (Dell Data Safe backup etc. Lenovo is the worst.)

But you can download a crapware-free version of Windows 7 or 10 from Microsoft and do a clean installation.

> Yes, the crapware is unavoidable. but who doesn't ship with that?

Microsoft's own-brand surface line, for one. Even MS has realised that the crapware situation is out of control.