Let’s start with design. The palette comes with a navy blue chassis and black keyboard trim, which feels like it was pulled from the 1990s, and I also find it attracts fingerprints and smudges. You don’t have to worry about getting these prints on the screen at least, because the 14-inch display (date 1,920 x 1,200 pixel resolution) is not a touch screen.
The keyboard provides decent action, but looks smaller than it is now, probably due to its tiny arrow keys and even thinner page-up/page-down buttons, which is most likely the smallest key I’ve ever seen on my laptop keyboard. The touchpad is small in size, partly because it has two discrete physical buttons under it. Button! I was a semi-retro design until I felt how mushy and fragile those buttons felt, which made me feel sad.
The main specs are mid-range, with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU, 32 GB of RAM and 1 correct solid-state drive. However, the port selection is perfect for corporate machines, with two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4 support (one requires charging), two USB-A ports, a full-size HDMI port, Ethernet and a MicroSD card slot, spanning the left and right sides of the device.
Photo: Chris Null
Unfortunately, none of this adds up a lot in terms of performance, as some of the worst benchmark scores for the port are what I see from an Intel-based machine in the core Ultra ERA. In business applications, graphics-centric tasks and AI work, Portégé is barely able to lift its head, taking 10% to 15% of the average score from the pillow. This isn’t enough to slow down to make visible differences in simple tasks like web browsing and Light Productive App work, but anyone can use more complex tasks to drive their machines, such as photo editing and AI Image creation.
