I decided to give HP another try back in 2016. I bought a Chromebook that promised Android support. As of 2022, it's still listed as "Planned".[1] It only lasted a couple years before the display completely quit working, so the Android thing was not the biggest problem.
I would not have bought it without the assurance that I'd be able to run Android apps. Never a word from HP about the issue (and obviously no attempt to make the situation right after they lied). I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if you should give them your money.
I've had 2 reasonably modern HP laptops and they've both been very solid. Currently typing this on a latest-gen HP Envy 14 (Core i5-11300H, Intel Xe, 16GB RAM, 400nit 1200p touchscreen) running Fedora 35 and am pretty impressed with it considering I got it for £550 refurb. Fedora works nearly perfectly out of the box. Performance is great, battery life is great (8+ hours in VSCode + Chromium browser with tlp), the display is bright, the touchscreen works well with GNOME and the built-in hardware camera shutter is a nice touch and, unlike my previous XPS 15, the sleep actually works fine by default and its temperatures are very good even in the "low noise" profile. No issues with WiFi/connectivity either since it's an Intel chip and those have good Linux support.
The speakers are mediocre though compared to the work Mac I used to have and are mostly in line with other Windows laptops sadly. I thought they'd sound great since there are these vents behind the keyboard that look like speaker grills but they're actually for cooling.
One of the downsides is that it has coil whine when charging off the USB-C port which doesn't bother me much as I almost exclusively use it on battery or with headphones. The fan curve is also really weird where it's silent 80% of the time but it sometimes turns on and off for 15 seconds at a time which is a bit jarring. I think there's some way to tune this though but I wish the fan were a bit quieter or that there were a way to just have it cool passively. I've also not managed to get the fingerprint reader working, mostly for a lack of trying, as it seems like there's a fork of libfprint that specifically adds support for it (Elan 04f3).
I also have an HP Chromebook 14 with an Intel Celeron N4000 and 4GB of RAM which I got as a cheap laptop to bring on trips for remotely accessing my desktop and it's only real pain point is the performance - Android and Linux apps work, sound is on par with the other laptop, display is decent, no fan and no coil whine so it's very nice to use in a quiet environment and fantastic battery. I was actually surprised when I found out it can drive 2 1440p displays off a single USB-C port which is something my flatmate's M1 Macbook Air can't do.
So yeah, I can say that the consumer line HP laptops are pretty good this gen, just be careful with the displays since a lot of their laptops still use sucky 250 nit screens and also be careful with Nvidia GPUs. In my experience those never work well and you're better off getting a desktop/console/streaming service for gaming or renting a cloud GPU for compute.
Not sure about Lenovo, but I have been thoroughly unimpressed with my HP Pavilion. Granted, I'm a Mac user so my standard may be higher, but my Pavilion just feels horribly cheap, the display flickers all the time, and the HP bloatware is a mess.
Did you buy an HP product that's on the same price range as your Mac? Feels a pretty unfair comparison otherwise.
That said, if not anything else, Lenovo provides the best laptop keyboards in my opinion. Perfectly sized, perfectly spaced, and give the best feedback out of all else. The thermals and overall build are also easily the best on my Ideapad than any other mainstream laptop I have used, though I'd concede I haven't really used as many laptops.
