HP Unveils $700 OmniBook 5 With 14-Inch OLED as MacBook Neo Price Climbs

Q: Can Intel's stripped-down Wildcat Lake processor truly justify the ambitious AI PC label on HP's affordable new laptops?

Not really—at least not if “AI PC” is taken to mean the full Copilot+ class of on-device AI machines. Intel’s Wildcat Lake chips were built for affordable laptops, not for premium AI performance. They do include an NPU, but the figures reported for higher-end parts such as the Core 7 350 are about 17 TOPS on the NPU, well below Microsoft’s 40-TOPS requirement for Copilot+ certification. Even combined AI numbers cited for some Wildcat Lake systems, around 24 TOPS using NPU plus graphics, still fall short of that benchmark. That does not make the label meaningless. Wildcat Lake can still run lighter local AI features, including background blur, noise suppression, basic transcription, and Windows ML workloads that can split work across CPU, GPU, and NPU. Intel’s broader aim with Wildcat Lake is to bring some of the battery-life and AI offload benefits of Core Ultra designs into the $600 to $800 class. HP’s OmniBook 5 and ProBook 4 G2iS fit that strategy: thin laptops, OLED screens, long battery claims, and enough performance for web, office, and everyday productivity. But buyers should read “AI PC” here as a marketing umbrella, not a promise of high-end local AI capability. Benchmarks and platform disclosures suggest Wildcat Lake is a trimmed-down design with fewer CPU cores, weaker graphics, and a much smaller NPU than Core Ultra chips. For HP’s target customers, that may be acceptable. For anyone expecting Copilot+ level AI, it is not.

3 articles · Updated · CNET · Oct 1

$700 is HP’s starting price for the new OmniBook 5 14 AI PC, which goes on sale in October through HP and Best Buy as a budget-laptop challenger.
14 inches and 2K OLED are its headline specs, paired with HP’s claim of up to 42 hours of local video playback—well above the 13 hours cited for Apple’s MacBook Neo.
8GB of RAM, 256GB of storage and an Intel Core 5 315 anchor the base model, while the port mix is sparse with two non-Thunderbolt USB-C ports and no USB-A.
Apple’s MacBook Neo launched at $599 in March, but supply-chain pressure and higher memory costs have pushed its current starting price to about $700, creating room for rivals from HP, Dell and Lenovo.
Alongside it, HP also introduced the ProBook 4 G2iS 14 AI PC, a slimmer business model due in October with no price yet disclosed.