HP

A brief history

HP's roots trace to a Palo Alto garage in 1939, where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard built audio oscillators for Walt Disney's Fantasia and effectively founded what would become Silicon Valley. Over the following decades Hewlett-Packard expanded into calculators, instrumentation, minicomputers, and — through the 2002 Compaq acquisition — became the largest PC vendor in the world. In 2015 the company split: HP Inc. inherited the consumer PC and printing businesses, while Hewlett Packard Enterprise took the servers and services. HP Inc., which is the brand most consumers know today, has since rebuilt around three pillars — premium consumer PCs (Spectre, Envy), commercial PCs (EliteBook, ProBook), and the Omen gaming brand — while extending its long-running dominance in the printer market. The 2021 acquisitions of HyperX (from Kingston) and Poly (from Plantronics) added gaming peripherals and conferencing audio to the portfolio.

What HP is known for

HP's design language on premium consumer PCs has been one of the more distinctive in the industry. The Spectre x360 series — gem-cut chassis edges, dark-chrome or pale-rose finishes, OLED display options — moved the convertible category beyond utilitarian aluminum. The EliteBook commercial line shares similar build quality with stricter manageability features (HP Sure Click, Sure Start, Wolf Security) for enterprise procurement.

The Omen and Victus brands compete in gaming, with Omen Transcend representing HP's serious entry into the thin-and-light gaming-laptop segment. On the peripherals side, HyperX Cloud headsets and Pulsefire mice are recurring entries in gaming-gear comparison sets. Printer dominance — LaserJet for office, OfficeJet and DeskJet for home, Indigo for commercial — remains structurally important; HP still ships more units than any other printer brand globally, and the printer-and-supplies business funds R&D across the broader portfolio.

Where HP excels on vsMars

HP's consumer and business notebooks span the laptops category, with Spectre, Envy, EliteBook, and Omen entries on best laptops. Omen desktops compete in gaming PCs. HyperX gear, since the HP acquisition, appears across gaming headsets, keyboards, and mice.

Trade-offs to know

HP's biggest reputational drag is the printer side: aggressive firmware policies that block third-party ink cartridges, subscription-only Instant Ink terms, and HP+ activation locks have produced a steady stream of consumer-protection lawsuits and FTC complaints. On the PC side, lower-tier consumer SKUs (Pavilion, low-end Envy) carry heavy software preloads and have historically used slower SSDs and dimmer panels than the spec sheet suggests at a glance. Omen gaming laptops compete on price-performance but lag ASUS ROG and Lenovo Legion on speaker tuning and trackpad quality. Customer support quality varies widely by region and by product tier, with business EliteBook on-site warranty far more responsive than consumer call-center handling. Finally, HP's product naming is notoriously confusing — the same "Envy" or "Pavilion" badge spans wildly different price tiers and chassis qualities year over year.