HP Pavilion Aero 13 Review: Ultra-light, ultra-powerful?
RRP $ 1,000.00
"The HP Pavilion Aero 13 is as powerful as it is light."
advantages
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Mostly solid build quality
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Excellent performance
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Very good battery life
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Extremely light
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Minimalistic good looks
disadvantage
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Keyboard is a bit rough
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Lid is too flexible
Light laptops usually come with compromises. Chunky performance and flimsy build quality are common.
The new Pavilion Aero 13 from HP tries to resolve these misunderstandings. Although the HP Pavilion Aero 13 weighs just 2.18 pounds (and is technically categorized as a budget laptop), it's a fast, well-built, and surprisingly high-quality small laptop.
I tested a mid-range configuration of the Pavilion Aero 13 for $ 1,000 that comes with an eight-core AMD Ryzen 7 5800U CPU and a modern 16:10 Full HD + (1,920 x 1,200) IPS display. Most buyers will be interested in the $ 750 base configuration with a Ryzen 5 5600U and half the RAM and storage.
But no matter what you choose, this isn't your dad's budget pavilion.
design
The Pavilion Aero 13 is the first in its product line in which the entire chassis is made of a magnesium-aluminum alloy. That makes it extremely light at just 2.18 pounds – in fact, it's the lightest consumer laptop HP has ever made. The HP Envy 13 is slightly wider and slightly flatter and is the same thickness at 0.67 inches but weighs 2.88 pounds.
The previous generation Pavilion 13 was larger in all dimensions, 0.70 inches thick, and weighed 2.71 pounds – without an all-metal design. The Pavilion Aero 13 clearly stands out among the thin and light 13-inch laptops from HP.
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
It also beats the best 13-inch laptop on the market, the clearly high-quality Dell XPS 13, at least in terms of weight. This laptop is 0.58 inches thick, weighs 2.8 pounds, and is a bit thinner even with its own 16:10 display. The reason: HP has raised the hinge a bit, which tilts the keyboard for better typing and improved airflow, and so the chin of the Pavilion Aero 13 is larger than it appears when the lid is open. A closer competitor is the Asus ZenBook 13 OLED ($ 1,000 with 16GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD, and an OLED display), which is slightly larger in width and depth and heavier at 2.5 pounds, but only 0.55 inches is thick.
This light metal alloy has its price. While the lower chassis of the Pavilion Aero 13 only yields slightly under good pressure, the lid is quite flexible. Because the metal is not only more flexible, it is also quite thin. Build quality is one area where the Pavilion Aero 13 proves its budget pedigree – although it's by no means bad. Nevertheless, a higher-quality notebook like the XPS 13 or the HP Specter x360 13 gives the impression of rock-solid rigidity that the Pavilion cannot achieve.
The ZenBook 13 OLED has a lot going for it too, but it's hard to say which one is more solidly built without comparing them side by side. I have to note that the hinge on the Pavilion Aero 13 is excellent – you can open the lid with one hand and there is only a tiny wiggle when you type.
Aesthetically, the Pavilion Aero 13 has a modern look that is reminiscent of the Envy line. It's a minimalist design with clean lines and angles that comes in four colors – the natural silver of my review unit, pale rose gold, warm gold, and ceramic white. Whichever color scheme you choose, you get a simple and attractive look without being overbearing. It's also modern thanks to the small bezels of the display that give it a screen-to-body ratio of 90%. The XPS 13 and Specter x360 13 are more standout machines, but there's plenty of room for a laptop that looks this good without attracting attention.
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
Connectivity is mixed up, with a full-sized HDMI 2.0 port, a USB-A port and a USB-C port on the left, and a second USB-A port on the right. This is great legacy support, but there is no Thunderbolt support due to the AMD chipset. There is also no SD card reader, which is disappointing. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.2 offer wireless connectivity.
perfomance
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
Equipped with an 8-core / 16-thread AMD Ryzen 7 5800U CPU, together with 16 GB RAM and a 512 GB PCIe Solid State Drive (SSD), the Pavilion Aero 13 promises to be quite powerful. AMD's chip is faster than Intel's 4-core / 8-thread Core i7-1185G7 of the 11th generation for CPU-intensive tasks.
These additional cores are most important to anyone using applications such as creative software that are CPU demanding. Video editing stands out here, and according to our benchmarks, the Pavilion Aero 13 offers a surprising amount of performance in such a light package.
The Pavilion Aero 13 is the fastest notebook in our comparison group and is on par with other notebooks equipped with the Ryzen 7 5800U, such as the Asus ZenBook 13 OLED. These two swapped places from benchmark to benchmark, with HP leading the way in Handbrake with an excellent score of less than two minutes to encode our 420 MB test video in H.265 and in Cinebench R23. These benchmarks show how well a laptop performs not only on creative tasks such as video rendering and display, but also on most tasks that place stress on the CPU for an extended period of time. They not only show the processor performance, but also how well the thermal design of a laptop keeps the CPU running at full speed.
The performance of the HP Pavilion Aero 13 was impressive across the board.
At the same time, the ZenBook 13 OLED came out on top in Geekbench 5 and the PCMark 10 Complete Score, tests that show how well a laptop performs at a mix of productivity tasks such as web browsing, video conferencing and office applications, as well as multitasking. The difference wasn't that big, and so it would be fair to call the two laptops equivalent. And as you can see in the table below, both laptops outperformed the Intel competition with quick results that are well above the price of about $ 1,000 for each laptop. Apart from single-core scores in Cinebench R23, the Intel chips couldn't keep up. The division of the PCMark 10 benchmarks into the points Essentials, Productivity and Content Creation resulted in the same inequality.
Simply put, the Pavilion Aero 13 was impressive across the board. If you run the CPU-intensive apps above, you will find few thin and light laptops that can keep up. The Pavilion Aero 13 was pretty quick during my tests and handled everything I threw at it without hesitation. I highly recommend this incredibly light laptop for its performance alone.
| Geekbench (single / multiple) | Handbrake (Seconds) |
Cinebench R23 (single / multiple) | PCMark 10 | 3DMark time spy | |
| HP Pavilion Aero 13 (Ryzen7 5800U) |
1373/6430 | 112 | 1381/8304 | 5756 | 1212 |
| Asus ZenBook 13 OLED (Ryzen7 5800U) |
1423/6758 | 124 | 1171/7824 | 6034 | 1342 |
| Dell XPS 13 (Core i7-1185G7) | 1549/5431 | 204 | 1399/4585 | n / A | 1380 |
| HP Specter x360 14 (Core i7-1165G7) | 1214/4117 | 236 | 1389/3941 | 4728 | 1457 |
| Razer Book 13 (Core i7-1165G7) | 1548/5374 | 210 | 1508/4519 | 4878 | 1776 |
| MacBook Pro 13 (M1) | 1707/7337 | n / A | 1487/7547 | n / A | n / A |
When it comes to gaming performance, however, the Ryzen chips do not dominate. The Pavilion Aero 13 achieved the lowest 3DMark Time Spy test in our comparison group and could not convince in our test game Fortnite.
It reached 29 frames per second (fps) at 1080p and high graphics and 15 fps with epic graphics turned on. That's about the same as what you get from the built-in Intel Iris Xe graphics, and not enough for older titles or newer titles with reduced resolution and graphics detail.
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Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
For the Pavilion brand, HP has moved the larger 16:10 aspect ratio downwards and has equipped the Pavilion Aero 13 with a 13.3-inch 16:10 IPS panel in one of two resolutions. You can choose from Full HD + (1,920 x 1,200), which my test device has, or QHD + (2,560 x 1,600) displays.
I was impressed with the display, which was so much better than you usually find on a Pavilion or other supposedly budget laptop. Again, it's a $ 1,000 machine, so it's reasonable to expect a good display – and HP delivered. My subjective experience matched my objective results, which I'll outline in a moment, with colors showing up without oversaturation and appearing accurate enough for all but the most discerning creative professionals. While the contrast was lower in absolute terms than I would like, black text on a white background still stood out – important for anyone who works with words or numbers on the screen.
The ultra-bright display of the HP Pavilion Aero 13 holds up particularly well in direct sunlight.
According to my colorimeter, the Pavilion Aero 13's display was primarily a high quality premium display. It was very bright at 437 nits, well above our 300 nit threshold and close to the 458 nits of the Dell XPS 13 Full HD + display. In comparison, the Asus ZenBook 13's OLED panel delivers 397 nits of brightness. Each of these displays may even be useful in direct sunlight, but the Pavilion Aero 13 holds up particularly well. The only disappointment with the Pavilion Aero 13 was the contrast ratio, which was only 830: 1 – below our 1,000: 1 threshold for the best displays. The XPS 13 was much better at 1350: 1, while the ZenBook 13 OLED enjoyed the extreme contrast of this display technology at 396,690: 1.
The color saturation of the Pavilion Aero 13 was average of 77% AdobeRGB and 99% sRGB, a little better than the premium average. The XPS 13 achieved 75 and 98% respectively, while the ZenBook 13 OLED again benefited from the display technology with an excellent 100% of both color spaces. The HP's colors were reasonably accurate with a DeltaE of 1.8 (less than 1.0 is considered excellent), the XPS 13 with 1.36 and the ZenBook 13 OLED with a phenomenal 0.49.
The tone was not quite the same standard. The volume was too low, even though there was no distortion when fully turned up. The mids and highs were clear, but there was no bass which made the sound a bit lifeless. It's fine for system sounds and the occasional YouTube video, but you'll need headphones or bluetooth speakers to enjoy Netflix or listen to music.
Keyboard and touchpad
Mark Coppock / Digital Trends
The Pavilion Aero 13 has a keyboard that looks like that of the Specter and the latest Envy laptops. It's well spaced with nice sized keycaps and the same row of position keys along the right side. But it doesn't use the same mechanism that I've gotten used to. There are good trips out there, but without the precise ground motion and click feel you get with the high-end devices from HP.
The Specter keyboard is my favorite among Windows 10 laptops, and the Pavilion Aero 13 isn't stackable. It's better than many budget laptops, but this is a $ 1,000 device – the keyboard is a budget holdover that doesn't belong. The Asus ZenBook 13 OLED has a better keyboard for the same price. I should mention that the Pavilion Aero 13's keyboard is also a bit noisy, and not backlit, without paying a $ 20 premium – a disappointment given the $ 1,000 price tag.
The touchpad is better – it's 23% larger than the previous version and takes up most of the available space on the keyboard deck. It's bigger than the touchpad on the Specter x360 13, but not as big as the version of the Specter x360 14. It has a smooth finish and supports Microsoft's Precision touchpad drivers, so it supports Windows 10 multi-touch gestures well. There's no touch display option, and that's a disappointment because I don't really like non-touch displays – but not everyone feels the same, and that might not be a deal-breaker for most buyers.
Windows 10 Hello support is provided by a fingerprint reader on the keyboard deck, and it worked fine. I was able to log in straight away without my password, that's all you want the feature to do.
Battery life
The Pavilion Aero 13 is equipped with a 43-watt-hour battery, which is a bit small for a 13-inch laptop. I've seen mixed results with Ryzen battery life, so I wasn't expecting great longevity even with the Full HD + display.
I got the most encouragement in my benchmark tests. The Pavilion Aero 13 lasted 10.5 hours in our web browsing test, which is a solid result. The Dell XPS 13 Full HD + managed 8.5 hours, while the Asus ZenBook 13 OLED achieved a staggering 15.7 hours even with an OLED display. In our video test, which ran through a local 1080p trailer, the Pavilion Aero 13 again achieved just over 10.5 hours, the XPS 13 with 12 hours and the ZenBook 13 OLED with 15.5 hours. It struck me that, unlike Intel laptops, Ryzen computers do not always show such a large increase from web browsing to video testing.
The Pavilion Aero 13 managed almost 11.5 hours in the PCMark 10 Applications battery test, a strong score that is right at the top of our database. The XPS 13 lasted almost 10 hours; we didn't test the ZenBook 13 OLED with this benchmark. The Pavilion Aero 13 only lasted 94 minutes in the PCMark 10 gaming battery test, which is at the lower end of our database, while the XPS 13 lasted almost four hours. However, this PCMark battery test is highly dependent on how aggressively a laptop runs on battery power, and so it is likely that the HP maintained full speed while the Dell throttled during the test.
Overall, the Pavilion Aero 13 achieves an all-day battery life and a few more. You can take up some work in the evening without joining, or enjoy Netflix for a few hours. In view of the low weight of the laptop, this is a commendable result, also thanks to the lower battery capacity.
Our opinion
With the Pavilion Aero 13, HP has added a few premium features to the Pavilion line and at the same time increased the price. The all-metal chassis and 16:10 display aspect ratio are welcome additions and give the Pavilion Aero 13 a justification for its $ 1,000 price tag. The performance and battery life were also good enough to make the price seem reasonable, even if it's more than we'd expect from a machine that's supposed to be a budget option.
Add in the extremely light nature of the Pavilion Aero 13 and you have a very compelling option in the 13 inch space. If you are looking for a notebook of this class, you will be happy with the Pavilion Aero 13, even considering midrange and premium alternatives.
Any alternatives?
I'm not mentioning the HP Envy 13 because it's a great alternative, but because for the same $ 1,000 you can get a less-performing laptop with an old-school 16: 9 display. It shows how aggressively HP positions the superior Pavilion Aero 13 against the rest of its product lineup.
The Asus ZenBook 13 OLED is a more competitive alternative that also costs $ 1,000. It runs the same CPU but includes a larger 1TB SSD and an OLED display.
Finally, you could go for the Dell XPS 13, which is more expensive but also of higher quality. You get better build quality, a slightly better display, and a sleeker look and feel.
How long it will take?
The Pavilion Aero 13 has a slightly flexible lid, but otherwise it's a well-built and well-equipped laptop that should last for years with typical use. The one-year warranty is standard, but disappointing as usual.
Should you buy it?
Yes. The Pavilion Aero 13 is not only – or even primarily – intended for budget-conscious laptop buyers. It's a great machine for anyone looking at a 13-inch laptop.
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