Keeping the 2-in-1 laptop dream alive

The idea behind the cabriolet, or 2 in 1 PChas remained the same for the past decade: When should you buy a tablet? your laptop allows you to fold it a full 360 degrees, using it as a large slate or supported display without a keyboard? Most PC manufacturers have completely moved on from this concept, but HP remains one of the ones that hasn’t stopped. While Windows was never the tablet-friendly platform Microsoft envisioned, there’s still a lot of value in having a machine that can change to suit your needs.

This was the food I bought two years ago Tested HP’s 16-inch Specter x360and now the company is back with a smaller model Specter x360 14. It features Intel’s latest CPUs with AI-accelerating NPUs (neural processing units), faster Intel Arc graphics and a beautiful 2.8K OLED display. Best of all, it can still be used as a tablet unlike its big brother.

HP

The HP Specter x360 14 has everything you want in a 14-inch convertible laptop. It’s fast, has a great screen, and can rotate to fit your needs.

Pros

• Versatile replaceable screen
• The OLED display is incredibly vibrant
• Solid CPU upgrade
• It starts with 16 GB of RAM
• Great keyboard
• Many ports,

Cons

• HP’s design hasn’t changed in years
• The haptic touchpad is a little finicky
• Average battery life

$1450 with HP

Even if you never plan to flip the screen, the HP Specter x360 14 is still an attractive premium laptop. For some, it may be a more traditional alternative to Dell’s new XPS 14, which has an invisible trackpad and a capacious feature array. While this computer looks great, its less conventional features take some getting used to. And the Specter x360 14 is both attractive and familiar to anyone who has used a laptop. (Its rotating screen takes only 10 seconds to figure out the first time, while the Dell’s invisible trackpad cracked me up even hours after I started trying it.)

Design and hardware

This familiarity can also be seen as a disadvantage of HP. The Specter x360 14 has everything you’d expect to see in a premium laptop today: a sleek metal body, a gorgeous display with ultra-thin bezels, and a luxuriously large trackpad with tactile feedback. But in fact, it is not so different from before I reviewed the 13-inch Specter x360 2019. It would be nice to see HP make a few major design leaps, but on the other hand, I can’t fault the company for sticking to a winning design.

With the Specter x360 14, HP focused on minor updates. Compared to the previous model’s 13.5-inch screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio, it has a 14-inch widescreen display with a 16:10 aspect ratio. Its trackpad offers configurable haptic feedback and is 19 percent larger than before, so it completely dominates the palm area. HP stuck with the amazingly responsive keyboard, but its keycaps are 12 percent larger, making them easier to hit. And to simplify functionality a bit, HP integrated the power button and fingerprint sensor (the laptop also supports Windows Hello facial biometrics).

The port situation has not changed. There are two USB-C connections on the right rear (including one in a unique chipped corner), as well as a pop-up USB Type-A port on the left and a headphone jack in the corner. As always, it would be nice to see some kind of card reader built in, especially for a machine aimed at creative professionals.

The Specter x360 14 looks a lot like its siblings, but HP says it’s been tweaked significantly under the hood. It now supports 28-watt Intel Core Ultra CPUs instead of the previous 14-watt options, and offers 10 percent more airflow than before. The company also managed to engineer these improvements without increasing the car’s height by 17 millimeters. At 3.2 pounds, the 3.5-pound MacBook Pro is slightly more portable than the 14-inch.

The Spectre’s 9-megapixel webcam is also a big upgrade from the previous 5-megapixel option. The new sensor offers hardware-powered low-light adjustment thanks to quad binning, a process of taking data from four pixels and combining them into a single point. This allows cameras with smaller pixels to let in more light, resulting in a brighter overall image. During Google Meet and Zoom calls, the webcam delivered a sharp image with bright and bold colors. After enabling Windows Studio Effects background blur, it almost looked like a mirrorless camera, although the image was sometimes overexposed in direct sunlight.

Video chats also sounded great through the laptop’s quad-speaker array, which includes two top-firing tweeters along the keyboard and two front-facing woofers. There isn’t much low-end (especially compared to Apple’s MacBook Pro speakers), but sounds and music are surprisingly clear. The speakers can also get pretty loud without distortion, which is impressive for such a thin system.

The laptop has an NPU-equipped processor that powers it Features in Paint, ClipChamp and Windows Studio Effects, Specter x360 14 is technically not “AI PC” Under the definition of Intel and Microsoft. Reason? It does not have a dedicated button for Windows Copilot. Personally, I haven’t found this key to be very useful on the XPS 14 and 16. Launching Copilot from the taskbar or Windows sidebar isn’t too difficult, and certainly not difficult enough to give up some screen space. keyboard.

It is in use

The HP Specter x360 14 I reviewed performed similarly to the other machines we tested with an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip. It’s fast and relatively efficient, especially compared to systems from two years ago. My review unit, which came with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, was 30 percent faster on the PCMark 10 benchmark (6,493 points out of 4,785 points) compared to the Specter x360 16 from 2022. This year’s Specter also scored 78 percent higher on the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark, which is a testament to the improvements Intel has made since its 11th generation CPUs.

The most noticeable upgrade to the Specter x360 isn’t the artificial intelligence; it’s Intel’s Arc graphics, which are dramatically faster than Intel’s older integrated graphics. In 3DMark’s TimeSpy Extreme benchmark, it almost kept pace with NVIDIA’s RTX 3050 on the x360 16 (1,435 points compared to 1,730). That’s impressive for a machine that’s thinner and lighter. Sure, it’s not a gaming rig, but I was still able to play Halo Infinite At about 30fps at 1080p. I’m sure it will handle smaller indie titles just fine.

Thanks to the abundance of RAM and Intel’s Core Ultra chip, my review model handled everything I threw at it without a noticeable slowdown. During a typical workday, I juggle dozens of browser tabs, photo editing software, YouTube streams, video chats, Slack, and Evernote. The Specter x360’s OLED display also made everything look fantastic, even if I was just looking at words on a news site. It supports a variable refresh rate of up to 120Hz, so scrolling between documents and sites was very smooth.

When I first tested the Specter x360 five years ago, I immediately fell in love with its keyboard. Thanks to a healthy amount of basic travel and feedback, it was incredibly satisfying to write. It was one of those rare designs that almost begged me to use it, like a finely tuned piano that just begs you to play. Thankfully, HP hasn’t messed with any of that keyboard magic: The big new keycaps are more comfortable to use, and the actual typing experience is as great as ever.

I have a few complaints about the Specter x360’s new trackpad. It’s smooth and precise to slide, and its tactile feedback is indistinguishable from a physically oppressive trackpad. But HP’s palm rejection software seems sloppy – sometimes typing up a storm, my hand would hit the trackpad and push the cursor to select another window. It happened often enough that it became a creative flow killer. I hope this is something HP can finally fix with a software update.

As a convertible laptop, the Spectrum x360 14 is more useful than the 16-inch model. Just gently press the screen to flip it around the keyboard – it transforms into a tablet when fully flipped, or you can stop the process midway and flip the Specter for its “tent” mode. The 14-inch x360 is better at being a slate, just lighter and easier to hold with one hand (though you’ll want to put it on your lap for longer sessions).

Rotating the screen was also less difficult because the display was less wide. I used the tent setup to watch YouTube videos in bed, and on the couch I occasionally folded the keyboard behind the Specter so I could use it as a large touchscreen with a stand. I appreciate the versatility of 2-in-1 convertibles more than the flexible OLED screens we see in new cars. It’s cheaper to implement, and for my purposes, convertibles are simply more pragmatic.

The Specter x360’s main flaw is battery life: it lasted five hours and ten minutes on the PCMark 10 Modern Office test, while the ZenBook 14 OLED lasted 12 hours and 43 minutes. There is a cost to keeping the frame so thin. During real-world testing, it would typically fill about six hours of my workday.

Price and competition

The Specter x360 14 is a decent deal for a high-end convertible starting at $1,450 with an intel Core Ultra 5 125H, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. At the time of writing, that configuration has been discounted to $300, which is a better value. (Credit HP for not offering a serious 8GB RAM option, which would be a headache for most users.) For $1,900, you can get a Core Ultra 7 155H chip, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.

If you’re looking for other high-end convertible laptops, your options are somewhat limited. Dell’s XPS 13 2-in-1 still runs on older 12th-generation Intel chips, and for more modern options, you’ll have to look to the mid-range Inspiron and Latitude lines. We are still waiting to see Lenovo’s Yoga lineup upgrade to newer Intel chips. We haven’t tested Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 360, but it doesn’t have HP’s design flair.

Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 is also technically a convertible (its screen slides forward instead of rotating), but it starts at $1,900. At this price, you’re better off going for the x360 14’s better hardware instead of the Surface’s unique display.

Collection

It’s unclear how much life is left in the convertible PC format, but I wouldn’t be surprised if HP is still one of the last companies to experiment with it. The Specter x360 14 it’s one of the best laptops you can buy today – the fact that it can be flipped in multiple directions is just icing on the cake.