HP Envy 15.6" 2021 Nightfall black aluminum Ryzen 5500U Review

[soldier_ph]

Opening:

 

At the beginning of August 2021 which was also the start of my summer school Holidays I started to look into a 2 in 1 Notebook to replace the iPad 8 which I was using up until that point since I started school last year in October. Basically I’ve been experiencing really weird bugs that are exclusive to that Device even after hard resetting it like randomly starting a Discord call with one of my friends on Discord after I just booted it up even though I didn’t even open the Voice and Video Chat Application. So because I was already pretty fed up with Apple and wanted to start leaving the Ecosystem I sold off the iPad with the Apple Pencil and type Cover for 607 CHF. Will keep the iPhone 12 mini for now, the Apple Watch SE basically killed itself so am not wearing it anymore. With Watch OS 7 the Battery started to drain itself from 100% to dead in like 4 to 5 hours so it always was a dead useless wait on my wrist at lunch break. I once hit it a bit too hard on the top left Corner and now there’s a white Mark there on the Display and both the Button and Crown are like half broken so you really have to press way too hard to activate them. Anyways I am never gonna give Apple my hard earned money again but at least now I know what it’s like to be in the Ecosystem. It was honestly fun for a while but then I started to realise more everyday what a greedy Company they are and how anti Consumer their Products are designed. They can just kill support for something over night and through planned obsolescence make it completely unusable.

 

Specs:

 

HP Envy x360 15.6" 2021 model in Nightfall black aluminum with Ryzen 5500U (8MB of L3, 6 Core 12 Thread) and integrated Radeon Graphics with 7 Cores, 2x8GB of 3200Mhz Crucial RAM, Seagate FireCuda 520 1TB M.2 SSD, 1920 x 1080 Full IPS Display with multi touch, 400 nits, Corning® Gorilla® Glass NBT™, 100% sRGB, 720p HD Webcam in the top, 51Wh Battery with USB-C PD 65W, Windows 10 Home.

 

What I really like:

 

The Keyboard has good stabilized Keys and is tactile. The Trackpad is so good that I’m never taking my Logitech MX Master 3 to school with it and I can multitask fenomenaly with it. I like the assortment of media Controls on the Function keys, the fact that I can mute it and actually close the Webcam with a physical shutter is awesome. Under heavy load the fans will be noticeable but won’t whine, the chassis will get warm but will never exceed a comfortable surface Temperature. USB C, just the fact that I can charge this thing with a tiny 65W Charging Brick is awesome. Port selection is great for its thickness: two USB-A which are 3.2, HDMI 2.0, USB-C with PD of 65W also 3.2, Headphone jack, Barrel Plug which I don’t use #USBCMasterrace, and SD Card Reader. The HP Tilt Pen has its place at the right corner of the machine where I can grab it easily to do quick sketches and mark important words and sentences in OneNote. The Magnet is satisfyingly strong so that it never falls off on its own. Love the extremely fast built in Windows Hello enabled fingerprint reader. I have to give them points for having decent sized perforated venting holes on the back and rear exhaust.

 

What I really hate:

 

The fact that the Power Button is just like a normal media Button above Backspace. Yes I have accidentally hit it before but luckily you have to long press to shut the system down lol. I always hate to see split arrow keys, they could’ve just shrunken down the right shift key and made space for dedicated up and down arrow keys. Most people don’t use left Shift in my experience. As someone who is used to tall Enter Keys I’m not a fan of the standard seized horizontal one on this Keyboard but I got used to it. I had to buy the HP Tilt Pen separately after painstakingly researching which Pens were now officially supported on this Machine, turns out it's only this one. The Ryzen and AMD Radeon logo Stickers aren’t completely aligned horizontally so it’s a bit off and actually sometimes irritating but it’s a really small nit pick which while using the device is not annoying me.

 

Why do I need two Notebooks ?

 

My XMG Gaming Notebook was bought with the thought in the back of my mind that I’ll also use it for school but as it turns out in my profession you need a Touch and Pen enabled device in school to be able to fill out Worksheets in OneNote and sketch up things so the iPad was first bought and now I switched to the HP Envy which was a really great choice and am happily using it now for all the school work that I have to do. So my recently built Desktop is for all the Computing Tasks and Gaming at Home, the HP Envy for school and the XMG Gaming Notebook for Gaming on the go aka just so that I have a powerful gaming device whilst on Holiday somewhere. The Steam Deck will most definitely shake things up in how I’m used to using a PC, really excited for that.

 

Pics:

 

Vanilla internals:

Upgraded internals:

Webcam Shutter open:

Webcam Shutter closed:

 

My Dream Ultrabook would be a Framework with a Ryzen APU and a Touchscreen, so until then this pretty much is the best option for me. 

 

@AluminiumTech has the 5700U Version of this Notebook and has been working on some special sauce Monitoring Software for it so I'll be adding a paragraph about that once he has released the first full Version of his Software.

 

 

Thanks for reading & Cheers