CES always kicks off before it ever officially starts, and CES 2021 is no different. HP announced today a whole slew of upcoming products, including the HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8, one of the lightest business laptops around.
The HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8 doesn’t have any pricing available right now, but the laptop is slated to launch sometime in March 2021.
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EliteBook 840 Aero: What you need to know
What the EliteBook 840 Aero has over its siblings is that it’s lighter, and therefore, much more portable. And while it is a standard clamshell laptop, the aluminum chassis still looks sturdy and sleek with its silver lid flaunting an aggressive HP logo.
The interior features more of the same finishes with a silver deck housing a fingerprint reader on the right side, two top-firing speakers surrounding the black keyboard, and a large touchpad at the bottom. As with most EliteBooks, the side bezels are very narrow, but the top bezel manages to take up a chunk of space.
At 2.5 pounds and 12.7 x 8.5 x 0.7 inches, the EliteBook 840 Aero not only has a small footprint, but it’s incredibly lightweight. Despite its slim nature, the EliteBook 840 Aero has a decent number of ports. The left side features a security lock slot, two USB Type-A ports, a headphone jack and an optional smart card reader slot, while the right side features the power jack, an HDMI port, two Thunderbolt 4 ports and an optional nano-SIM card slot.
You can outfit the EliteBook 840 Aero with either an 11th Generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processor. There’s also an option to include Intel vPro as well. You can go up to 64GB of RAM, a 2TB SSD and a 14-inch, 1080p panel with 1,000 nits of brightness.
We don’t have any information about the EliteBook 840 Aero’s durability testing, but we’ll find out more closer to launch. As far as security goes, the EliteBook 840 Aero can be outfitted with Intel vPro for remote management, a fingerprint reader, a smart card reader, a privacy display, an IR camera for Windows Hello with a privacy shutter and a TPM 2.0 security chip.
We don’t have any estimated battery life numbers, so we'll wait for our benchmark testing to determine how long the EliteBook 840 Aero lasts on a charge. However, we do know that the laptop features a 3-cell, 53 Wh Li-ion polymer battery.
Outlook
It's hard to judge whether this laptop will be a worthy business laptop because we not only haven't seen it yet but also we don't know the price. Most business notebooks have inflated price points that have more to do with their "business" labels than the actual components, so we'll see in due time where the HP EliteBook 840 Aero G8 lands.
