HP EliteBook 865 G10: The Shoe Fits

About 6 months back I purchased an eBay refurbished HP EliteBook 865 G10 and here is how I feel about it:

TLDR:

Pros:

• Battery life is great.
• Keyboard & trackpad are very good.
• Top tier Linux support out of the box.
• 7840u is a beast.
• Actually repairable (and parts are available all over the internet) & non-soldered memory.

Cons:

• Build is solid, but not inspiring.
• Expensive, especially new.
• Speakers are... Fine

A quick summary of my previous laptops

So... I have owned an unfortunate amount of laptops in my days. I'm gonna do a quick summary:

• Lenovo T440p: Absolute chunker with horrible battery life. Loved the repairability (it even had a socketed CPU!), but had to move on for better battery.
• Some ASUS Chromebook: Wonderful battery life (like 10+ hours!), but I was limited by the locked down OS and lack of performance. That processor was slooooow.
• Asus G14: Beast of a laptop. Slim, performant, and full of firmware bugs. I had this horrible bug where the dGPU would wake and pull 40w+ at idle, just watching Nextflix. It was never fixed as it was an ACPI bug and that would have required actual effort from ASUS. They fixed it in the 2021 model, but I was sour enough at that point to move on.
• Lenovo Slim 7 AMD gen 6: Much better battery life. I actually really loved this laptop even if the linux compatibility was rather jank. But an unfortunate series of events (out of my control) forced me to flip it for something else.
• ASUS TUF A16 Advantage: Incredible and consistent 10+ hour battery life. Solid performance, a good screen. I really liked this laptop. Buuuut unfortunately it was made by ASUS and was a 1st gen product so it had horrible stability issues.
• Framework 13: Basically perfect, if not a bit small. The thing killed itself though and I moved on.
• Lenovo T14s gen 3 AMD: Horrendous (4 hour) battery life, abysmal speakers, and an unusable trackpad. No wonder Lenovo people are Stokhomed into liking a trackpoint.
• HP Dragonfly 14 G10A: Wonderful little guy which are plentiful on eBay. Unfortunately mine had this issue where it would just randomly reboot every couple hours. Had to return it.
• HP Elitebook 865 G10: This is where I'm at now and I'll talk about it!

I also have a Macbook for development, but it's not my primary machine so I'm not gonna put that here.

Wait what happened to your framework?

Soooo, this isn't the happiest of story.

I purchased a Framework 13 AMD in December of 2023. I was very excited to try out and experience a new kind of laptop, one build to last. I was impressed and wrote a very positive review where I basically praised everything except the price. Still, even at that price, I bought it and loved it. It lasted 14 months. After that, it started to run into a problem where the screen would have horrible artifacting. It became more and more common to the point where I couldn't use it more than half an hour before it became unusable. After some digging, I found that this was an issue with 7000 series Ryzen chips. Sometimes the memory traces just... failed. I reached out to Framework and they said it was 2 months out of their warranty window and I'd just have to purchase a new mainboard. This was understandable but still sucked considering a now 2 generation old mainboard went for over $400 at the time.

When I did the math at that time I came to an impasse. I knew I could sell the broken Framework for around $400, and I would have to spend another $400 on a new mainboard anyway, so were there any other laptops on the market that fit my bill better for $800? Turns out, the answer was yes. I basically just wanted a Framework 13 but I wanted more battery life and screen size. The ~50wH battery of the 13 and the small screen kinda irked me as I work remotely from my laptop. So I got to researching.

After a lot of time and effort I found the 865 G10. It seemed to fit all the criteria that I wanted:

• Ryzen 7000 series chip for great battery life & performance. Especially the iGPU (Intel has really only caught up this year in iGPU performance).
• Big 16 inch panel.
• Build to be repaired. This is a corporate fleet device, so everything has to be able to be fixed (even if parts can be pricey).
• Clean, minimal, aesthetic. I don't want my laptop to be a design piece, I want it to work.
• Linux support.

Battery Life

Battery life when doing mid-level tasks like android development are close to the M2 MacBook Pro 16. Like a solid 7-8 hour of actual work tasks. For me that means: having an Android emulator open, coding in Nvim, spotify playing in the background, with lots of Firefox tabs.

When it comes to lighter tasks, like viewing pdfs or casual web browsing, it can do even better and break 10 hours of usage. Though things like video playback are more like 6 when streaming from youtube or jellyfin. Hardware acceleration just isn't there on Linux like it is on MacOS.

So for casual use, it won't touch a M-series MacBook. But for my work, it comes close. Of course this heavily depends on the task, but I think most people would be okay with it.

Build Quality

It's solid. The chassis is fully aluminum and feels well built. It is not on par with a MacBook or Framework, but it's good enough. It clearly will dent and scratch with time as the aluminum feels thin.

Speakers

Not good. They are fine but nothing spectacular. You can play music on them, but at higher volumes they distort. And at every volume level they lack body & bass. Once again the MacBook & Framework are drastically better. With that said, they still sound much better than other business laptop. I had a brief stint with a Lenovo T14s g4 and... wow those speakers were horrible.

Input

I'm impressed! Both the keyboard & trackpad are very good and I have no issues with them. The keyboard has nice travel and is pleasant to type on (much more comfortable then a MacBook keyboard). The trackpad is nice and large, with wonderful gesture support on Linux (looking at you Lenovo). A couple times, I had a strange issue where the trackpad would freak out and the cursor would jump around unpredictably. But I figured out that if you wipe the edges of the pad carefully with a cloth after this happens it fixes itself. My best guess is something gets stuck in the crack of the "diving board" at the bottom of the trackpad and it gets fussy. I've had no issues with palm rejection.

Linux support

To start, this laptop is actually officially supported, well at least to a degree.

Everything just... works. Well for the most part. There is one major caveat. There is this issue where if it gets plugged and unplugged when asleep on linux the CPU gets pinned at 443 MHz which is... unpleasant. It gets fixed immediately if you plug it into the wall after that, but it is rather annoying. Here is the bugzilla thread. It supposedly is fixed in kernel 6.16 but I'm still having the issue. Not totally sure what's going on there.

Update: After applying the latest patch from Mario (from the thread), the issue has gone away. No more sleep issues. I think they will have to talk to HP to fix this for real though as it requires a quirk and those don't easily get into the kernel. Also it seems like it is an EC bug which they're monkey patching to get around. In time I have no doubt it'll be properly fixed. This is why it's good to buy older (or directly supported) hardware.

Beyond that bug though, I've had an assortment stability issues. It's nothing completely experience breaking, but it isn't perfect and would be very annoying for someone without troubleshooting abilities. For example, sometimes WiFi just won't connect to some networks? Why? Who knows. Mediatek WiFi cards just kinda have a history of instability and the MT7922 that comes with this board has those issues too. I would recommend swapping it out for an AX200/AX210 if you have the cash and time. It'll save you a good deal of headache.

Also there are just performance inconsistencies. Even with a patch applied to fix the 443 MHz issue, it seems that pstate refuses to ramp up the frequency when it should sometimes. This means the computer will just be laggy for a couple minuets until it ramps up frequencies to the point they should be. The CPU should not be running below 1 GHz at any point unless I'm at idle.

So in all, it's a pretty good experience. I was able to work for 3 months this summer doing development work without too many headaches. But the average uptime of this guy is probably 3-4 days as sometimes I just have to restart it to fix... weird issues. These will probably get better over time as it ages, but still annoying. Linux support generally gets better at the 2-3 year mark of popular devices as that's when they start to get sold off by companies and get cheap.

One positive, you get firmware updates through fwupd. You never have to boot into Windows if you don't want to! That is because the whole 8x5 series is officially supported to a degree. It is more for the zbook series, but these share boards so they get the updates too.

Performance

I have the 7840u model because I wanted a balance between power & efficiency. I think it strikes this quite well. Eight full fat zen 4 cores combined with a twelve core vega GPU is pretty wonderful. It compiles code, games, and generally works very well. I have no complaints.

I'm not an avid gamer, but the 12 core vega GPU does really well. It's basically a steam deck but 50% faster. This means you can (more or less) play every modern game. I played Jedi Fallen Order, Silksong, Hi-Fi rush, and more with no issues. Is it a 5090? No, not at all. But it works just fine and that's all I care about. If you do wish to game though, make sure to allocate more VRAM in the bios as this can really help performance.

I have had some difficulty with running a 4k monitor from this guy. I'm not sure if it's a GNOME performance issue or if it's the laptop though. The system will lag a lot even if top and radeontop are showing well under 50% utilization. I'll have to look into this more.

Repairability

It's really good! Is it a Framework? No, of course not. But it is great. It has slotted memory, storage, and WiFi cards. The battery is screwed, not glued. The trackpad can be replaced without replacing the top cover, etc. It is clearly made to be workable for an IT department. This is wonderful!

Not everything is good though. While HP parts availability is generally good, prices are not. A new battery for this guy will cost you $250... That is so expensive that a lot of people would rather just buy a new laptop than replacing it. Some OEM sellers will sell it for $140, and aftermarkets generally go for $70. Is it better than $500 from Apple? Sure. But this is purposeful planned obsolescence and I do not approve. HP could sell it OEM for $100 and solve this problem so easily.

With that said, I do sleep better at night that if I crack my trackpad I can pick one up on eBay for less than $50 and be rolling within an hour. I really don't want to throw away perfectly good tech because the company was greedy.

Screen

I have the 1920x1200 400 nit panel and it is totally fine. I know that a 2560x1600 panel would be better for viewing text, but there is a battery life tradeoff there with current tech that I'm not sure if I'm willing to pay. Longer runtimes are very important to me.

In terms of brightness, the matte coating helps a lot. If I run this thing on light mode it's fully capable of being viewed outdoors. I am currently typing this with direct sunlight which is pretty impressive! It's still not that bright, but it's totally viewable in basically all conditions.

In regards to the panel, the color accuracy is kinda weird. It has a bit of a purple hue. But beyond that it is totally passable and I have no issues. I appreciate the matte finish improving the high contrast visibility.

Conclusion

I think I finally found the (almost) perfect laptop for me. It's portable, plenty powerful, has great off the wall runtime, and is designed to be maintainable for a long time. Is it perfect? No. The build will show wear over time, the speakers are subpar, and it has some software quirks that haven't been worked out. But there's nothing else on the market that combines the qualities that are important to me, and I love what HP has done to make this machine fly.

For the future: I do hope that by the time I move on from this laptop, Framework will have released something like strix halo for the Framework 16. I would love the portability of the 16 without the dGPU module and the power of a real dedicated GPU. For now though, Frameworks are just too expensive for me. For a nearly equivalent laptop I got the 865 g10 for $650, and a new framework would cost me $2k. Used business products are a damn good deal, and it's hard to choose anything else if money is of any value to you.

Cheers,
Luke