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
Final Words
HP has delivered a unique laptop in the Spectre Folio, offering not only the first bonded leather exterior, but also a different take on the convertible as well. Yet they haven’t sacrificed quality to achieve these goals. The HP Spectre Folio really is in a category of its own.
That category would almost certainly be a companion device where someone requires great mobility, battery life, and flexibility. The excellent styling and the fantastic feel of the leather exterior only elevate the Spectre Folio from there.
There’s a few downsides, as there tends to be with any notebook. When Core M launched in 2015, it could offer similar performance to U series devices in short workloads, and while the latest Core i7-8500Y ratchets up that performance compared to the original Core M, the performance gap between Y and U is much greater now that Intel offers quad-core in their U range. Still, the Spectre Folio can easily handle any light task thrown at it without any issues at all. App launches are still fast, and the system doesn’t feel sluggish under most office type tasks, and it’s really only in high-demand situations where the lowered TDP is going to be noticed the most.
HP, despite the leather exterior, still had no issues dealing with the processor even in a fanless design, and the work that the company has done with Intel to not only shrink the motherboard to provide more room for battery, but also to address power consumption is dramatic. HP’s battery life in the Spectre Folio was outstanding, easily topping our charts in some of our tests. The low-power display and attention to detail in the motherboard design has paid dividends here.
It would have been nice to see HP go with a taller aspect ratio display, because convertibles that are 16:9 are best used in landscape mode. They tend to feel awkward when rotated to portrait, and the large chin at the bottom of the display begs to be filled with more screen real estate. 3:2 works so well in convertibles that it’s a shame it wasn’t used here. Even if sourcing a 3:2 1W display would be difficult, a company the size of HP can certainly handle that.
The convertible design where the screen folds forward is another one of the unique features of the Spectre Folio, and it certainly has advantages. HP uses strong magnets to hold it in position as well, which makes it incredibly sturdy. Switching from one mode to another is not quite as easy as a 360° hinge, but it still works well and provides the added benefit of the keyboard being protected when in tablet mode. It still provides all the extra functionality you’d expect, but like the leather exterior, it’s just a bit different.
HP outfits the Spectre Folio with plenty of expansion, with two USB-C Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as a third USB-C connector, and you can charge the laptop on any of them. We’re not quite in a world where Type-A can be completely abandoned though, so it’s nice to see HP also ship an adapter with the laptop.
HP has delivered an incredibly well-built, stylish, and usable notebook in the Spectre Folio, and they’ve done it with a design that is unmatched in the industry. The addition of offering LTE adds another dimension, and coupled with the incredibly good battery life, really provides a fantastic computer for working on the go. The convertible nature provides a great writing surface as well, and HP offers a stylus for just that reason. HP offers a great amount of customization, with plenty of choices for specifications as well as a couple of color options. Pricing is high, as expected, but the base model is completely usable, offering 8 GB of RAM and 256 GB of storage, unlike some Ultrabooks that perhaps start with a lower price, but it only offers 4 GB / 128 GB and really isn’t very usable. The Spectre Folio isn’t inexpensive, and it isn’t the fastest notebook around, but the all-leather exterior makes a statement that no other machine on the market can match.
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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.
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