Our prestigious best laptop of CES 2025 selection goes to HP this year for its outstanding ZBook Ultra G1a.
This is largely driven by the AMD Ryzen AI Max chipset found inside, our pick for the Best in Show for CES 2025. While we'll have to get it in our labs to see precisely how it stacks up against the typically 7+ pound competition in the workstation market, there's every indication that the HP ZBook Ultra G1a will hold its own, weighing under 4 pounds.
HP's putting the MacBook Pro 14 M4 on notice with this release, offering Windows users their own portable powerhouse for creative and AI endeavors.
Best Laptop of CES 2025: HP ZBook Ultra 14 G1a
Why it wins
We cannot often praise a workstation laptop as the best of CES. Windows workstations are typically a niche product category, and innovation between generations often just means iterative hardware updates and increased panel options.
However, this CES had an absolute gem of a powerhouse workstation that offers incredible power thanks to its AMD Ryzen AI Max chipset in a compact form factor. The HP ZBook Ultra 14 g1a weighs less than 4 pounds, but thanks to its Ryzen AI Max chipset, the ZBook 14 can run intense Black Magic DaVinci Resolve workloads like auto-transcriptions in just moments.
While the HP ZBook Ultra 14 is an AI PC workstation with access to Copilot+ AI, the true beauty of this machine is not just its AI capabilities but its massive on-package memory that can boost performance across all three hardware accelerators.
Release and availability wrap-up
HP has not released pricing or availability on the ZBook Ultra 14 G1a yet, but we expect to see models available by March 31, 2025.
