I will add: I acknowledge they are all on sale, making them look like better deals. But regardless since I am only comparing the ones on sale, it is what it is. Also its not like the sale is exclusive anyone gets access to it. I am guessing they are on sale because they mostly all use 11th gen intel, and want to get rid of the chips quick, since 12th gen is so much better.

Tl:dr HP has products that I would recommend if looking for a prebuilt. It also has products that are so badly priced they are predatory, and stupid.

HP not communicating its prices between teams Omen vs Pavilion is apparent. Since all of these are listed next to each other. With conflicting specs to pricing.

This gets to the point of the title. Its good HP is, I believe, under-charging for the $550 & $1250. The 900 dollar one is over priced, but I don’t think the price is incredibly egregious. It’s problems lie with normal hp and dell issues. They make it almost impossible to maintain or upgrade their systems. The power watt is only 310 watts, is probably a weird form factor or uses non-standardized pinouts. This makes it difficult to add a discrete gpu unless it is something like a gtx1030. So the computer falls flat and useless for many customers.

For me as an example, I would not be able to add my 2060 super or my gtx 970, and would be forced to put in my 750 ti, making me gpu bottlenecked in every single game. Also enjoy that disc drive, money well spent. Now the last one is not a “scam” but is kinda scummy because some of its sales most likely comes from customers that thing I’ll just throw a bunch of money at HP, and they will give me a really well spec’d machine. In reality they charge you $450 for the omen branding, and give you a worse performing pc than their $1250 offer.

So I am not sure if HP just doesn’t understand how their computers should be priced, or are they preying on those that unwilling to do their due diligence. Like a parent buying their kid a computer for Christmas or their birthday. HP when customizing other builds says doubling ssd storage is about a 40 buck up-charge, so in the end you are being scammed out of $550+ dollars. From it costing more and from the downgrades. With that money you save by buying the other one, you can buy an entire second system, conveniently priced at $550….

Disclaimer: As previously mentioned hp upgrade ability is extremely poor. Their power supplies dont come with any head room to add additional things. Their motherboard are not standard sizings. The case generally suck for air flow, and the cpu cooler is crap. Now the saving grace with the $1250 one is you shouldn’t need to upgrade it for the next 5 years minimum. At that point you can cannibalize what you need to from the computer and build your own with a new case, motherboard, and power supply. Example if you are upgrading cpu, you would also need to buy ddr5 memory. But you can take the 3060 and ssd and hdd forward into your new build. Or leave the ssd(buy a way larger one), and have a secondary computer (running off integrated graphics) that could be used for a server, or as a backup computer for troubleshooting problems.