HP’s Omen Transcend 14 is a gaming laptop meant to do double duty as a normal one

theverge.com:

By Alex Cranz, managing editor and co-host of The Vergecast. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years. Her work has also appeared in the WSJ and Wired.

Gaming laptops, as a rule, look like gaming laptops. They usually have RGB lighting, a splash of vibrant color, and a hyper-stylized design. At a glance, you can almost always tell a gaming laptop from a regular one — and that’s before you even consider less visible but crucial features like discrete GPUs and superfast displays. But many of us, as much as we love to game, do not need to announce that we love to game every time we crack open our laptop, and HP’s new Omen Transcend 14 is supposed to cater to us.

This new 14-inch laptop is designed to bridge the gap between gaming and normal usage. That means more subtle flashes of color and RBG lighting that can switch from bright colors to all white in a few clicks.

The new laptop comes in either black or white. I got to spend a little time with the white version and was immediately charmed. With the RGB lighting off, it looks like a solid general-use laptop that wouldn’t be out of place on a work trip or in a college lecture. There aren’t significant eyesore thermal solutions, and the keycaps, while rocking a stylized font, don’t look so stylized as to be embarrassing for people who might normally shy away from the gamer aesthetic.

Inside, you can get from a Nvidia GeForce RTX 4050 to a 4070 and either an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H or an Ultra 9 185H. There’s an option of 16GB or 32GB of RAM and up to a 2TB SSD. The display is a 14-inch OLED with a 2880 x 1800 resolution and up to a 120Hz refresh rate. And as with a lot of laptops announced during CES, it supports Wi-Fi 7.

Power-wise, it has a 71WHr