The HP Spectre Folio Review: Luxurious Leather Laptop
by Brett Howse on June 7, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- HP
- Spectre
- Amber Lake
- Spectre Folio
Battery Life
HP outfits the Spectre Folio with a battery that is about 55 Wh in capacity, and coupled with the new 1W display and Y series processor, expectations are high for good battery life. We test a couple of different scenarios, with a light web test, our newer more demanding web test, and movie playback. We’ll be mixing in some new workloads with the latest PCMark 10 update too which has added battery life tests to its suite once we’ve got some more data to work with.
All of our battery testing is done with the display set at 200 nits of brightness, and there was no detectable CABC on this laptop to influence the results.
2013 Light
Our lightest test opens just four web pages per minute, and is not very stressful for modern laptops. The HP Spectre Folio has topped our chart with one of the best results we’ve seen on this test. At over 14 hours of runtime, it’s an impressive result.
2016 Web
This newer test is much more demanding and generally causes results to drop significantly, but the HP Spectre Folio managed almost exactly the same time as the light test – in fact it was a couple of minutes longer. With this kind of battery life, this is truly an all-day laptop.
Normalized Results
By removing the battery size from the results we can get a feel for how efficient each device is. The results are excellent. HP achieves amazing battery life and they don’t have to brute force the situation with a massive battery. On the 2016 Web result this is the most efficient PC we have ever tested. The combination of Y series Core and a low-power display are clearly combined with some attention to detail by HP and Intel when designing this device.
Movie Playback
When playing back media, the CPU can go to sleep as the work is offloaded to the media block in the GPU, and the result on most laptops is the highest battery life of any workload. That is definitely the case here. The HP Spectre Folio lasted almost 22 hours on a single charge which is insane.
Switching that into our Tesseract score, which is the battery life divided by the runtime of a long movie (The Avengers) and you could play over nine movies in a row before running out of juice.
Digging into platform power
The display is always the biggest power draw of any notebook, and that continues to be the case here even with the new “1W” panel. As mentioned on the display page, testing showed that at maximum brightness the display only drew 1.71 Watts of power, which is quite good.
But what’s even more impressive is the overall platform power. At idle, the HP Spectre Folio draws just 750 mW. That is almost half of what a Surface Book 2 draws at idle. HP has clearly done their homework to ensure every component is as power efficient as possible, and it shows in the end result.
Under load, the Y series Amber Lake processor also helps out significantly, as we saw in our 2016 Web Test. Generally we see a significant drop in runtime here compared to the older light test, but the Spectre Folio scored more or less the same. The lower TDP also means a lower peak power draw for PL1 compared to a U series processor, and that is another factor that helps the Folio achieve such great battery life.
Charge Time
HP ships the Spectre Folio with a 65-Watt AC adapter which has a USB Type-C connector, and the cord features a fabric cover and is quite long, which is welcomed since you never know where an outlet is going to be in some rooms.
Overall charge time is about on-par with most non-Lenovo laptops, and the HP charged to 50% in 56 minutes.
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peevee - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
5W for 2 cores at 1.3GHz.Apple A12 is ~5W for 2 similarly fast (in terms of IPC) cores at ~2.5GHz + 4 slow efficient cores.
10nm fiasco costed Intel a lot.
Retycint - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
Intel was never really as efficient for mobile (<5W) though, which is why their atom line failed spectacularly. ARM-based processors definitely has the advantage in the low-power fieldKorguz - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
im sure HStewart will find a way to refute this.. and bash arm based cpus some how...AshlayW - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
I like the idea of a leather covered laptop, leather feels nice to the touch for me. And it makes a nice change I think. I have an HP ENVY X360 with the Ryzen 2500U in it, and it is a really great little machine and was £649 when I bought it. I can manually set the power limit to 30W and disable the skin temperature throttling for maximum sustained performance. It is around 3.1 GHz all core in multi-thread and 3.4-3.5 GHz in single threaded. In games the GPU can boost to 800-900 MHz and easily beats any Ultrathin Intel iGPU. Also I think at stock the 2500U is heavily throttling so it explains why it gets beaten a lot by this device in the review. (yes I am aware that the whole point is that they are efficient, and yes Intel's processor is more efficient, largely helped by the fact that Intel 14nm+++ has vastly superior power and voltage characteristics to GlobalFoundries 14nmLP/P).As for 5W, in this power envelope, 10/7nm will really, really help a lot here. I think if AMD can get 7nm low power mobile chips out soon-ish, they can have a really big competitive advantage against these 14nm Intel ones. But that said, Ryzen with onboard graphics is usually an entire cycle behind the desktop CPUs without. 12nm 3000-series APU are uninteresting for me, as it is basically 10% or close to that, more performance than my 2500U at the same power use. But I heard the idle power use is vastly improved. Sorry I typed a huge comment.
ikjadoon - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
Excellent review.This laptop was one of the inspirations for Project Athena, apparently.
>Though the HP Spectre Folio wasn’t explicitly described as a Project Athena device, it’s representative of the collaboration between Intel and its PC partners.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3331244/intel-proj...
Props to the 1W display. I'd love a deep dive by Anandtech on how 1W (LPDT) panels work. IIRC, they use LTPS backplanes (a-si -> IGZO -> LTPS from worst to best), panel self-refresh, variable refresh rate, more efficient backlights, and some panel microcontroller efficiencies.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-low-...
So a lot of good technologies on their own brought together into a shipping product.
Gc - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
In 2013, the Sony Fit 13A, 14A, 15A "Flip PCs" had screens that can flip down over the keyboard.https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/sony-vaio-fli...
Spun off, Vaio continued with the Vaio Z Flip in 2016.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10006/vaio-to-start...
That model still seems to be sold in Japan.
https://vaio.com/products/z131/
Gc - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
One benefit of the flip-down screen is that it is simpler and quicker to switch between keyboard mode and pen mode for taking notes. Other convertibles require picking up the whole computer, which can disturb your neighbors in a meeting or lecture. A benefit of the leather surfaces might be to quiet any clattering as the pieces fold together.wr3zzz - Friday, June 7, 2019 - link
I pre-order the Folio and have been using it as my daily work machine since. I agree with every point in this review.One thing to note is that Dell just added fans to its XPS 13 2-in-1 so it looks like the Folio could be the only premium fanless notebook with screen larger than 13" left in the market.
ramisingh - Saturday, June 15, 2019 - link
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