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HP AI Hardware Technology

HP Resurrects '90s OmniBook Branding, Kills Spectre and Dragonfly (arstechnica.com) 53

Posted by BeauHD from the AI-all-the-things dept.
HP announced today that it will resurrect the "Omni" branding it first coined for its business-oriented laptops introduced in 1993. The vintage branding will now be used for the company's new consumer-facing laptops, with HP retiring the Spectre and Dragonfly brands in the process. Furthermore, computers under consumer PC series names like Pavilion will also no longer be released. "Instead, every consumer computer from HP will be called either an OmniBook for laptops, an OmniDesk for desktops, or an OmniStudio for AIOs," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The computers will also have a modifier, ranging from 3 up to 5, 7, X, or Ultra to denote computers that are entry-level all the way up to advanced. For instance, an HP OmniBook Ultra would represent HP's highest-grade consumer laptop. "For example, an HP OmniBook 3 will appeal to customers who prioritize entertainment and personal use, while the OmniBook X will be designed for those with higher creative and technical demands," Stacy Wolff, SVP of design and sustainability at HP, said via a press announcement today. [...] So far, HP has announced one new Omni computer, the OmniBook X. It has a 12-core Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100, 16GB or 32GB of MPDDR5x-8448 memory, up to 2TB of storage, and a 14-inch, 2240x1400 IPS display. HP is pointing to the Latin translation of omni, meaning "all" (or everything), as the rationale behind the naming update. The new name should give shoppers confidence that the computers will provide all the things that they need.

HP is also getting rid of some of its commercial series names, like Pro. From now on, new, lower-end commercial laptops will be ProBooks. There will also be ProDesktop desktops and ProStudio AIOs. These computers will have either a 2 modifier for entry-level designs or a 4 modifier for ones with a little more power. For example, an HP ProDesk 2 is less powerful than an HP ProDesk 4. Anything more powerful will be considered either an EliteBook (laptops), EliteDesk (desktops), or EliteStudio (AIOs). For the Elite computers, the modifiers go from 6 to 8, X, and then Ultra. A Dragonfly laptop today would fall into the Ultra category. HP did less overhauling of its commercial lineup because it "recognized a need to preserve the brand equity and familiarity with our current sub-brands," Wolff said, adding that HP "acknowledged the creation of additional product names like Dragonfly made those products stand out, rather than be seen as part of a holistic portfolio." [...]

As you might now expect of any tech rebranding, marketing push, or product release these days, HP is also announcing a new emblem that will appear on its computers, as well as other products or services, that substantially incorporate AI. The two laptops announced today carry the logo. According to Wolff, on computers, the logo means that the systems have an integrated NPU "at 40+ trillions of operations per second." They also come with a chatbot based on ChatGPT 4, an HP spokesperson told me.
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HP Resurrects '90s OmniBook Branding, Kills Spectre and Dragonfly More

HP Resurrects '90s OmniBook Branding, Kills Spectre and Dragonfly

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  • Those were so cute and cool. Loved the 800CT size and lack of useless touchpad real estate.

    • Man I had never seen that before I just looked it up, that is pretty neat, especially at the time.

      I feel like the 90's for laptops was a real wild west, companies were trying some real interesting stuff.

    • We had several of those at GTE Wireless for the MTSO engineers. They were useful in some situations.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by r1348 ( 2567295 )

      The Omnibook 800 was my first laptop ever, loved the pop-out mouse, but you had to lug around a full bag of accessories for it to be useful...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ewhac ( 5844 )
      Ohhh, I could wax rhapsodic about this machine, which went with me everywhere for nearly ten years. The only thing that killed it was a spilled glass of cranberry juice.

      You know that pop-out mouse was totally passive, right?

      If they were to resurrect this, this is what I'd like to see:

      • Keep the display hinge (actually a clutch). When you tilted the display and let go, it stayed there. No bounce-back, no wobbling. In this age of IPS and OLED displays, this isn't as important as it was back in the day
      • I forgot about it having SCSI. That rocked. I also used it for various disk-resurrection and imaging tasks. I cannot see that great and I loved the 800x600 resolution because it was chunky enough for me to make out. That lid staying put was just like you described it. High five, thanks for the interesting post!

  • Only Apple can afford to call their product line just "MacBook Pro" for 18 years.

    • There is something to be said about paring down your options for customers. I know you can configure but at it's core if you want an Apple laptop you have 2 options and 2 screen sizes on each and that's it. The desktops are also really just 4 options each in very different form factors so it's pretty clear where the lines are. Of course not every company can be Apple but still I think Dell, HP and Lenovo could stand to simplify a bit more.

      • There's the VAIO range, 28 years old, composed of 4 options in 2 screen sizes.
        Here is a list of their innovations according to Wikipedia: first laptop with integrated webcam in 1998, first with chiclet keyboards in 2004, first with back-lit LED screen in 2005, first with switchable graphics (an APU and a discrete board) in 2006, first with a Blu-ray burner in 2007. It is also known for bloatware but that's not a problem for those who purchase the version that ships with Debian.

        • You know until you said that I had just assumed Vaio wasn't a thing anymore, at least in America but sure enough, they look pretty nice too. I just have not seen one in a long while. I used a couple back in the day and they were always fairly decent.

        • VAIO was Sony's PC brand. Very nice. (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Sony VAIO - I still have one that I no longer use. Excellent notebook but expensive. Wikipedia: "VAIO was formerly a brand of Sony, introduced in 1996. In February 2014, Sony created VAIO Corporation, a special purpose company with investment firm Japan Industrial Partners,[3] as part of its restructuring effort to focus on mobile devices. Sony maintains a minority stake in the new, independent company, which currently sells computers in the United States, Japan, India, and Brazil, and maintains exclusive m

        • I've owned a fairly early (Pentium class) VAIO and one of my employers issued me an HP Elitebook and someone else a VAIO equivalent (In the Core 2 days) and the VAIO was actually even worse than the HP. In both cases the hardware was weird and unreliable, the cases were pretty but flimsy, and the software was atrocious. Both utilities and drivers were just total trash. Given that Sony is still known for shiny over substance I don't see any reason why I would even try another one. Are they somehow not garbag

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          Ah VAIO. My company bought them for one of our laptop refreshes back in the early 2000's. The screen hinges failed on every one of them after about 18 months. Other than that little detail they were great laptops.

        • first with chiclet keyboards in 2004, first with back-lit LED screen in 2005, first with switchable graphics (an APU and a discrete board) in 2006, first with a Blu-ray burner in 2007. It is also known for bloatware but that's not a problem for those who purchase the version that ships with Debian.

          Bullshit. The first laptop to feature a chiclet keyboard was the Mitsubishi Pedion in 1997 (which was conveniently rebranded as the OmniBook Sojourn by Hewlett-Packard). Sony's computers always bit the big one from a repair perspective.

  • branding whiplash (Score:4, Insightful)

    by sound+vision ( 884283 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @06:15PM (#64486503) Journal

    Haven't they had multiple seismic shakeups in their lineup nomenclature over the past decade? It seems like the "Firefly" has only been around for a few years, and they started slapping "Z" on everything after people got the idea those were the highest powered models, just a few years ago.

    I guess they realized their brands had become so diluted and meaningless that they might as well scrap them entirely and start over? Nothing left to lose?

    It seems they didn't manage to purge all the sales/business types when they spun them off into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

    • HP = hot garbage

    • Sounds like HP is having poor sales and hoping to increase it. If the quality still average, I doubt it will change anything.

    • Bet the Russians loved those Z models!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      When I think of OmniBook I think of bloatware, brittle and cracking plastics, and shitty business spec Celeron CPUs.

    • I guess they realized their brands had become so diluted and meaningless that they might as well scrap them entirely and start over? Nothing left to lose?

      Sure, but the one they should kill off is "HP". I won't even take a chance on anything with that logo on it unless it's extremely inexpensive to the point that I can afford to take a loss.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Haven't they had multiple seismic shakeups in their lineup nomenclature over the past decade? It seems like the "Firefly" has only been around for a few years, and they started slapping "Z" on everything after people got the idea those were the highest powered models, just a few years ago.

      I guess they realized their brands had become so diluted and meaningless that they might as well scrap them entirely and start over? Nothing left to lose?

      It seems they didn't manage to purge all the sales/business types when they spun them off into Hewlett-Packard Enterprise.

      Anyone who works with a HP laptop knows how utterly terrible they are. However HP are run by marketers and salestwats who think a rebranding will magically stop their products being crap.

  • HPE Owns the Corpse of Silicon Graphics (Score:3)

    by Seven Spirals ( 4924941 ) on Monday May 20, 2024 @06:24PM (#64486513)
    So, where is my MIPS based IRIX-friendly laptop? I'm joking, but I'm still salty about it. They will make a zillion PC models of many sizes and shapes. They might even make an ARM laptop the way things are going. However, I'm going to pout forever about SGI's IP ending up with these clowns. They barely even know they own it.
    • Amen (crosses-self). God bless SGI and curse the Belluzo's and other traitors who ruined it. I think I remember someone making a laptop using an Indy mobo, once. That was so cool. I always hoped maybe they'd let someone like Tadpole (who made a lot of SPARC laptops) make one. Heck even IBM had a few POWER laptops (ancient now, but wicked cool). An SGI laptop would probably have been the laptop equivalent of a Lamborghini Miura.

    • They killed off Alpha too

    • IRIX was never good (it was always terribly insecure) except for the UI, which was decent but not amazing and has in any case long since been eclipsed by other options. MIPS was pretty good in its day, but not superior to the competition except perhaps in price:performance, and that only barely. SGI had impressive graphics hardware for its day, but even towards the end of them being a company it was already lagging behind gaming GPUs. There's really nothing to be sad about losing from SGI. Their swan song w

      • I never said it was superior to anything or tried to dick measure with modern systems. This is about nostalgia, not technical superiority to some fancy new Nvidia GPU card. You're not wrong, but you do sound like you got all that from Wikipedia, not from personal experience. I doubt you've ever used IRIX or owned an SGI system. SGI inspired a lot of nostalgia and people who actually know the systems beyond reading about them understand why they were insecure (they were meant for workgroups of artists and mu

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Well HPE doesn't make laptops, so there's that. HP makes laptops. They split off the consumer stuff from the server/storage/switching stuff a while back now.

    • Re:HPE Owns the Corpse of Silicon Graphics (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cyrano de Maniac ( 60961 ) on Tuesday May 21, 2024 @10:39AM (#64487895)

      HPE and HP are completely 100% separate companies at this point, other than a conjoined history up to when they separated, and the dumb decision to keep the names so similar after they separated. Neither is a subsidiary of the other, nor are they owned by a common parent company.

      If you'd like an analogy it's like B.F. Goodrich and Goodrich. One makes tires, the other makes aerospace stuff. They were once one company, now they're two completely different companies making different things.

      • Understood and it never hurts to clarify that point, maybe I should have waited to make my nostalgic joke on an HPE story instead.

  • I know how these guys sell printers, and it makes me really leery of buying a computer from them.

    • I've had good luck with several of their PCs over the years, including a low-end "gaming" laptop marketed under their "Victus" brand.

      But if their Printer division ever takes over, we're going to see all-in-one computer+printer combos, and the BIOS refuse to boot until your install a fresh ink cartridge.
       

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by unrtst ( 777550 )

        But if their Printer division ever takes over, we're going to see all-in-one computer+printer combos, and the BIOS refuse to boot until your install a fresh ink cartridge.

        Don't give them any ideas!!! I'm suddenly surprised they don't have an AIO that includes a printer, scanner, and fax. Doesn't even seem like too awful of an idea, and they could even have the monitor separate. If one needs a printer, then it's going to take up a chunk of space. Squeezing a PC into that would be trivial these days, what with all the micro PCs out there.

    • ... leery of buying a computer ...

      HP wins on price and build: Plus their bloatware can be uninstalled.

      The auto-update BIOS is terrifying for sure. Their batteries tend to swell, although that might be a design/placement flaw. Their device-drivers (and updates) are improving but still problematic: It's a good idea to use a driver-extracting utility to back-up the drivers after the first-use update(s). cCleaner can be used to install the latest device-drivers. (Then back-up again.)

      • Their batteries tend to swell, although that might be a design/placement flaw

        Yeah, they're placed directly under the track pad, which causes the pad to flip out. But the swelling is so slight, you don't notice it (or even realize that's why the pad is behaving erratically) otherwise.
  • Because everyone now knows about HP, and not in a good way. Do they still make those subscription printers? Oh wait, I don't care.
    • Forgot to pile on by asking how long it might be before they whip the Compaq name as something new and innovative?

      /s

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Mogster ( 459037 )

        Forgot to pile on by asking how long it might be before they whip the Compaq name as something new and innovative?

        Why stop at Compaq? Bring back DEC

  • Bring back Carly Fiorina

  • I want that Omnibook 300 with an ARM chip and modern display in the lid, but please don't change the case or keyboard!

  • Eventually the Hewlett-Packard experiment in mediocre computers and overpriced printers is going to come to an end, and HP will exit the business.

    At that point I hope that Keysight (the instrumentation company that used to be called Hewlett-Packard before the PC craze took over) will be able to reclaim the name.

    Hewlett-Packard once meant top-of-the-line laboratory and engineering equipment. Maybe one day it will be that again.

  • HP's attempt to copy the competition managed to successfully only copy all the bad things. A stylus as god awful as Dell's, a reliability as god awful as the Surface Pro, and ... well HP has always had shitty customer support, they didn't copy that from anyone.

  • I've had a couple of HP laptops and first was decent, the second not so much and the ones I've seen since then were not anything I would buy. Maybe instead of worrying about the NAME, they should focus on MAKING A BETTER PRODUCT ?? I forgot , US management is all about selling cheap shit to US consumers at a HIGH MARKUP and then wondering where all your customers went. Shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic

  • Other than people with degrees in marketing, does anyone really care about a new branding strategy?

    Well okay, language majors might care. They're probably ticked at HP calling the entry-level models "Pro". "Pro 2", at that, compounding the superlative inflation. And people who like nice logical progression probably develop an eye tic when they see a series that goes 3, 5, 7, X, Ultra. It's like one of those idiotic Facebook quizzes. What's next in this sequence? With deliberately ambiguous answers desig

  • Let's see - might they name their printers OmniSwindle? Or OmniPlunder? Or, perhaps more literally, OmniRent?

    I plan never to support HP again. Whether it's a printer or a computer of some kind - or whatever other product they come up with to fleece their customers - HP can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned.

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