Even after its $100 price increase in late June, Apple’s MacBook Neo remains one of the easiest laptops to recommend to students, casual users, and budget-conscious buyers. HP’s latest OmniBook 3 is now making a strong case for itself as a Windows alternative.
As spotted by NotebookCheck, the HP OmniBook 3 costs $599.99, undercutting the MacBook Neo by $100 while offering an OLED display, a bigger battery, and a Snapdragon X processor for the price. It is also temporarily selling for even less at Best Buy, making the deal particularly attractive right now.
HP makes some very different display trade-offs
The OmniBook 3 (14-hz0488nr) gets a 14-inch OLED display with a 1920 x 1200 resolution and 100% DCI-P3 coverage. The MacBook Neo sticks with a smaller 13-inch IPS panel, but its 2408 x 1506 resolution is noticeably higher.
Apple also has a clear advantage in brightness, rating the Neo at 500 nits compared with 300 nits on the OmniBook. HP, however, gets the deeper blacks and higher contrast that come with OLED, which could make it the more appealing option for watching movies or working with darker content.
Even on the performance front, the priorities are different. The HP uses Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X X1-26-100, an eight-core chip with a 45-TOPS NPU. It reportedly performs better than the A18 Pro in multi-core workloads, while Apple’s chip remains ahead in single-core and graphics performance.
HP has a lot more room for ports and battery
Battery capacity heavily favors the OmniBook 3 on paper. HP fits a 60Wh battery inside and claims up to 41 hours and 45 minutes of use. The MacBook Neo has a much smaller 36.5Wh battery and is rated for up to 16 hours of video streaming or 11 hours of web browsing. The manufacturers use different tests, however, so those figures are not directly comparable.
HP is also considerably more generous with connectivity. The OmniBook 3 includes two 10Gbps USB-C ports, two USB-A ports, HDMI 2.1, and a headphone jack. Apple gives the Neo two USB-C ports and a headphone jack, with one USB-C connection limited to USB 2 speeds.
Both laptops start with 8GB of memory and 256GB of storage, though Windows 11 is generally more demanding on RAM than macOS. Microsoft has finally started working on reducing the operating system’s memory footprint as the RAM crunch gets worse, which should help affordable Windows laptops like this in the long run.
The OmniBook 3 is currently available to preorder on Amazon, while Best Buy has it discounted to $499.99 as part of its 60th Anniversary Sale through August 24, 2026.
