HP's Spectre x360 13 Promises Up To 16 Hours of Battery Life in a Faster, Cooler Design (pcworld.com)

From a report: The HP Spectre x360 13 is already one of the most popular 360-degree convertible laptops, and it's about to get faster and cooler, thanks in part to Intel's latest 8th-generation Core CPUs. Announced Wednesday, the refreshed Spectre x360 13 also offers greatly improved thermals and other nice tweaks. The Spectre x360 13 will ship on October 29 with a starting price of $1,150, including a color-matched pen. Best Buy will begin taking pre-orders October 4. Multiple configurations will be available, but we're listing below the specs we were given for the higher-end model ae013dx: CPU: Intel 8th-generation Core i7-8550U, a quad-core CPU with a 1.8GHz base clock and turbo boost up to 4GHz. Core i5 CPUs will also be available. RAM: 16GB LPDDR3 SDRAM. Storage: 512GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD.

Comments

Which OS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice (awesome) hardware.
I would rather prefer to buy it with a Libre operative system tought

Re:Which OS?

[tbuddy]

Windows 10 with Windows Ink support. I wouldn't expect the pen to do much on Linux/BSD/etc due to odd drivers.

Re:Which OS?

[imrahilj]

Does HP offer a windows-less version of most or any laptops? It's been a while since I shopped for a laptop, I seem to remember Dell offering no OS as an option.

Re:Which OS?

[Bing Tsher E]

You can probably run NetBSD on it. It will be like with some of the Apple Powerbooks, though, meaning you'll only be able to run NetBSD on it over a serial console because there's no graphics support. The serial port you can create by plugging in a USB adapter. Of course, the USB adapter won't be supported during installation, so you'll need to install the OS on the drive on some other machine, then move it to the HP machine (after changing the init script to go to the serial console, of course, of course....)

Re:Which OS?

[imrahilj]

This reminds me of some of my experiences installing Linux on EFI systems.

Isn't saying...

[Anubis IV]

Isn't saying "The HP Spectre x360 13 is already one of the most popular 360-degree convertible laptops" kinda like saying "The Tesla Model X is already one of the most popular vehicles with gull-wing doors"? I mean, 360-degree convertible laptops aren't exactly sweeping the market, just like I'd guess that the Model X's biggest competition in the gull-wing niche of the market is probably the 35 year-old Delorean DMC-12.

If your device is actually popular, then say so. Don't attach caveats. But if you're saying you have one of the most popular devices among those with an unpopular feature, what you're really telling us is that you're willing to lie with statistics in an effort to make an unpopular device sound popular.

Re:Isn't saying...

[thegarbz]

I mean, 360-degree convertible laptops aren't exactly sweeping the market

That's not quite fair. Gullwing doors are very specialised and serve no real purpose. 360-degree convertible laptops on the other hand are just that, tablet convertibles. There are a surprisingly large number of them. Often you'll confuse them for a normal laptop.

How many car companies are currently offering gullwing doors? Is it one or can you find another example?
By comparison pretty much every laptop company offers 360-degree convertibles somewhere in their lineup.

It would be better to compare it to actual convertible cars.

Re:Isn't saying...

[Anubis IV]

How many car companies are currently offering gullwing doors? Is it one or can you find another example?

Mercedes and Pagani both had models with gull-wing doors in the last few years. Not sure if they're still current, however, much the same as I'm not sure which, if any, of the other PC manufacturers are currently offering laptops that can flip around like this.

Re:Isn't saying...

[haruchai]

Given that the Model X is the only production car ever made with double-hinged doors that can open both horizontally & vertically at the same time, it has NO competition and the doors are more properly referred to as "falconwing"

Re:Isn't saying...

[Anubis IV]

Given that the Model X is the only production car ever made with double-hinged doors that can open both horizontally & vertically at the same time, [...] the doors are more properly referred to as "falconwing"

Ah, fair enough. I forgot that detail and now stand corrected. Thanks for the response!

What is the point of this article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any new tech here? What exactly is supposed to be interesting in this article?

It is still a plain puny 60kw/H battery

[fubarrr]

I don't see how can they squeeze more hours out of the machine while not having a lower idle TDP cpu or a bigger battery.

The 8th Gen Intel CPUs might be interesting

[rsilvergun]

Intel's turned the i3's into i5s and i5s into i7s. They've shifted the entire product line in response to Ryzen from AMD. For the first time in a decade we're going to see significantly more performance on the lower end. Now if nVidia could get their 1050 laptop chipset down in price you might start seeing sub-$600 gaming laptops. Plus the lower power draw means they might not burn out in a year.

Re:The 8th Gen Intel CPUs might be interesting

[thegarbz]

Plus the lower power draw means they might not burn out in a year.

A comment brought to you from 1999. Seriously, has a CPU been capable of burning itself out since the Athlon 800?

It may burn out your battery, or burn a hole in your wallet if you leave it on all day and pay for electricity in Hawaii, but TPD doesn't have much correlation to reliability unless you're running your system seriously out of spec, like without a fan.

Oooooh

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

"...with a starting price of $1,150, including a color-matched pen."

Well if it comes with a color-matched pen, sign my skanky ass up! Hell, I'll take two!

Re:Oooooh

[thegarbz]

Hell, I'll take two!

Careful, this is HP we're talking about. A replacement pen will cost an additional $1,149.

Re:Oooooh

[Hognoxious]

The pen will be $10. A bottle of ink will be $1,139.

Re:Niggers aren't people

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You're not helping.

Imagine.

[dicobalt]

What if PC makers threw off the obsession with thin and fragile and made laptops as thick as old laptops with a nice big honking battery? You could set off on a trip and not need to recharge until you reach your destination. You could game for an entire flight. You could forget about hauling around external battery packs. You could stop worrying that the razor thin plastic is going to crack open. Nah, thin and light, gotta be trendy.

Re:Imagine.

[iTrawl]

[...] laptops as thick as old laptops with a nice big honking battery

Would a chunky Dell XPS fall into that category?

You could set off on a trip and not need to recharge until you reach your destination. You could game for an entire flight. You could forget about hauling around external battery packs. You could stop worrying that the razor thin plastic is going to crack open. Nah, thin and light, gotta be trendy.

I don't have a Dell XPS, but I've seen one once, and did a google on battery life just now and it seems to fit the bill, more or less - depends on how long your flight is, really.

I'm mainly where a Dell XPS stands in regards to your wish, as a benchmark.

Re:Imagine.

[CastrTroy]

Because most people don't need anywhere near that amount of battery life. As long as it lasts the day, you can just plug it in as you sleep. Most people don't do more than a few hours on the battery in a day. Most people just cart them back and forth between home and work, and plug them in when actually using them. The main market for people who need extended battery life are students who often can't find a spot to plug in for every class. But they don't have much money to be spending on laptops with 48 hour battery life. A lot of schools do have places to plug in now as they realize that students can't afford a laptop that lasts all day.

Re:Imagine.

[iTrawl]

Actually, scratch that. It looks like you can get a slim laptop with huge battery life (and probably performance too) these days. Dude... I've been living under a rock. Last time I googled for "long battery life laptop" they defined "long" as 4-6 hours.

Spectre ?

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It sounds like the evil criminal organization from some old comic book.

Nobody wants big and thick anymore .....

[King_TJ]

You still had almost nothing but huge slabs as "gaming laptops" until VERY recently because they couldn't pack a high end graphics card in a small, thin notebook and still have decent cooling for it.

But even there? People are buying systems like the new ASUS ROG Zephyrus now, because it fits a GTX1080 series GPU in there with 8GB of VRAM and still manages to look like a reasonably thin machine. (Bottom of the case actually opens up when you open the lid, to provide sufficient ventilation for the GPU -- but with the lid closed, looks like any other modern notebook in thickness.)

The push for "thin and lightweight" isn't just because people are fixated on it being stylish. It's really much more pleasant to carry around a thinner, lighter computer. If you made a big, huge cellphone that looked like the old "bag phones", think how long you could go on a battery charge today? But yet, nobody wants that either.

The gauntlet has been thrown down to PC makers, saying "Find a way to cram all of the latest technology into this thin, light form-factor!" And increasingly, they're doing it. It's all good.

It's not the CPUs

[rsilvergun]

it's the mobos. Specifically the traces between ram & CPU or (more often) video ram & GPU. On a laptop board they PCB is often thinner and the heating/cooling causes the traces to break over time.

Actually 8, finally?

[bill_mcgonigle]

These "up to" claims all seem to be about double the usable levels, but if 16 means 8 hours of useful life then we might actually have a new, useful bit of tech. Being HP I would like to see Overnight Replacement on the warranty.