HP Spectre x360: The surprisingly good offspring of a MacBook Air and Lenovo Yoga

The HP Spectre x360 is a straightforward proposition. It’s a PC Ultrabook that, like so many others, is clearly inspired by the MacBook Air: metal body, thin and light, favoring portability and longevity over performance or expandability. To that basic package, it borrows a trick from Lenovo’s Yoga line. The hinge folds all the way back, turning a slimline laptop into a slightly chunky tablet.

The latest iterations of the MacBook Air and Yoga both have some shortcomings. The MacBook Air continues to be lumbered with screens that are, these days, just not up to scratch. Their resolution is relatively low, and their TN technology results in poor viewing angles and color accuracy. This was unexceptional when the MacBook Air was first introduced, but today devices with IPS screens are abundant, both from Apple and others. They easily outclass the MacBook Air displays.

The Yoga 3 Pro has a pretty screen and an extraordinarily elaborate hinge, but its performance—using a new Broadwell Core M processor—left something to be desired. This might have been OK if the battery life had been magnificent, but it wasn’t. The laptop managed just over five hours in our browsing-based test and three and a half hours in our 3D test.

The x360 rights both of these wrongs. There are two display options: both LED-backlit IPS screens and both quite high-resolution. We tested a 1920×1080 model, but there’s also a 2560×1440 option. The processor is a regular U-series Broadwell part. This gives it a 17W power envelope, as opposed to the 5W of the Core M line, and as a result its performance is all-around pretty good for this class of slim and light PC.

Desirable details

These things are wrapped up in a package that surprises with its attractiveness. Sure, it’s yet another aluminum-body laptop, and we’ve certainly seen an abundance of those over the last few years. But the x360 feels extremely solidly built—not something that’s universally true—and we enjoyed the little detailing and design touches that adorn the machine.

I really like the writing across the lid.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

For example, instead of using the HP logo, the company name is spelled out in full in caps across the lid and again below the screen. Maybe this is hypocritical or maybe HP has done something right, but while many of the logos and embellishments that manufacturers make are ugly and unwanted—see, for example, the “professionally tuned” slogan that Acer once slapped on its laptops—we really like what HP has done. It has a kind of elegance to it. The name on the lid brings to mind industrial machinery, scientific instruments, or even classic cars. It’s like the chrome lettering across the hood of a ’64 Thunderbird.

The different material finishes that HP has used are also nice. While the major surfaces of the machine are a brushed, matte finish, the edges are polished and shiny. The hard precision of the cut-outs for the ports gives a sense of solidity, as if the machine were a solid billet of aluminum.

Ports, from left to right: power, USB 3, SD.

Andrew Cunningham

Ports, from left to right: power, USB 3, SD. Andrew Cunningham

Ports, from left to right: mini DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3, USB 3, headphone/mic.

Andrew Cunningham

Ports, from left to right: mini DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3, USB 3, headphone/mic. Andrew Cunningham

Ports, from left to right: power, USB 3, SD. Andrew Cunningham

Ports, from left to right: mini DisplayPort, HDMI, USB 3, USB 3, headphone/mic. Andrew Cunningham

The inside of the machine is less striking, with its familiar pairing of black bezel around the screen, backlit chiclet keyboard, and buttonless touchpad. As you’d expect from an IPS device, the screen is bright, the colors are good, and the viewing angles are wide. Compared to the Dell XPS 13, the bezels are relatively enormous, but compared to any other machine on the market, they’re perfectly normal.

When unlit, the keyboard’s black-on-silver keys provide a good amount of contrast. But look at how bright that F5 key is!

Andrew Cunningham

When unlit, the keyboard’s black-on-silver keys provide a good amount of contrast. But look at how bright that F5 key is! Andrew Cunningham

The white-on-silver look you get when you enable the backlight is a bit washed out, making some keys difficult to read.

Andrew Cunningham

The white-on-silver look you get when you enable the backlight is a bit washed out, making some keys difficult to read. Andrew Cunningham

When unlit, the keyboard’s black-on-silver keys provide a good amount of contrast. But look at how bright that F5 key is! Andrew Cunningham

The white-on-silver look you get when you enable the backlight is a bit washed out, making some keys difficult to read. Andrew Cunningham

The chiclet keyboard is adequate, but not much more than that. The layout is reasonable enough, and my typing accuracy was fine, so it gets the job done. But it has a flaccid, uninspiring key action, and as Andrew noted in his first look, the backlight renders the key caps all but unreadable in some lighting situations. I would turn the backlight off, personally, except that when it’s off, the F5 key, which is used to toggle the backlight, is brightly illuminated. I understand what HP is trying to do here—clearly indicate which key is used to control the backlight—but the effect is unwelcome.

The touchpad is really very wide.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The touchpad is large or, at least, very wide. Its surface is smooth and glassy and is pleasant to touch. It isn’t a Precision Touchpad, instead using Synaptics’ drivers to support essentially the same set of gestures as Precision Touchpad—not the greatest choice. The full range of Synaptics gestures is very broad, and I believe it matches the set of Windows 8 gestures. I’m not sure, however, if it matches the imminent set of gestures that Windows 10 will offer. If it were a Precision Touchpad, it’d support the Windows 10 gestures automatically. With Precision Touchpad, gesture handling is done by Windows rather than the third-party touchpad driver, so any new gestures added by Microsoft get supported automatically.

HP says that they stuck with the Synaptics drivers due to greater control over, in particular, palm rejection. While it’s true that I never had a palm rejection problem with the x360, I also never had problems with the Dell XPS 13, and the XPS 13 uses Precision Touchpad. As such, I’m not sure how much I care for HP’s rationale.

That complaint notwithstanding, tracking accuracy, clicking, and scrolling were all good. I’m an adherent of the two-finger-tap-to-right-click style, and the Spectre reliably and consistently distinguished between left and right clicks. Andrew, however, had a different experience; I’ve not watched him use a touchpad, so I don’t know what we’re doing differently.

In tent mode, the most useful of the four convertible modes.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The x360, like the Yoga line, retains the party trick of having a lid that folds all the way around to turn the machine into a kind of tablet. I’m not actually convinced that this is tremendously useful in itself—even a fairly thin and light laptop is bulky as a tablet—but it’s still a useful feature. That’s because the hinge enables what Lenovo and HP call “tent mode” and “stand mode.”

Both of these modes are pretty great when, for example, watching movies in cattle class on the plane. So much so that I think these hinges are a valuable feature even if you have no intention of ever using the laptop as a tablet. The hinge mechanism itself is stiff and will easily hold the screen in just about any position.

The wide-screen bezels mean that, unlike the XPS 13, the x360’s integrated webcam can be positioned sensibly. It’s basically adequate.

I’m now relatively beardless. It’s summer here in Houston, making beards unbearable.

Good on the inside

We’ve had a few Broadwell systems pass our desks now, and the x360’s performance doesn’t hold too many surprises. While the Core M, with its 4.5W power envelope, has underwhelmed us, the Ultrabook-oriented U series performs well. The mainstream parts found in this machine and most others have a 15W power rating and so show none of the performance weaknesses of the Core M. But that’s not to say they’re without problems.

The issue is heat. When cool, they show modest improvements over their Haswell predecessors in both CPU and GPU benchmarks. However, all these machines are running up against severe thermal constraints, and their performance can drop off significantly when they’re hot. This isn’t a new problem as such, but it becomes increasingly acute as PCs get thinner; it’s harder to keep their processors cool.

The Dell XPS 13, which had the same Core i5-5200U as the Spectre, kicked its fans up to high speed during testing, emitting an almighty roar when it did. The Spectre x360 is much quieter—but pays a price for this. In a number of benchmarks, the XPS 13 posted higher scores than the x360. For example, in the 3DMark Fire Strike, Cloud Gate, and Sky Diver tests—all of which are heavily dependent on GPU and CPU performance—the XPS 13 was meaningfully faster than the x360.

Not every test showed this behavior, showing how the thermal output of the system is quite workload dependent. For example, the Geekbench tests, especially single core, were nigh identical between the two machines, as we’d expect.

Managing thermals is perhaps the biggest challenge for these thin and light systems. The XPS 13 includes something called the Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework (DPTF). This isn’t tremendously well documented (by Intel or anyone else), but it allows the system’s thermal and power management to incorporate more information, such as the temperature of the case exterior, when setting the processor’s performance level.

This in turn can improve system performance; using the processor’s own thermal sensors, the power management has to be somewhat conservative, because it has to be sure that the case is never hot enough to cause burns. With DPTF, the processor temperature can be allowed to increase until the skin gets too hot, increasing the thermal headroom. In 2012, Intel hoped that by 2014 all Ultrabooks would include DPTF. That hasn’t come to pass.

The x360’s battery life was more straightforward and substantial. In our browsing test, the Spectre managed just over 12.5 hours, and in the WebGL test, it achieved a hair under six hours. These scores weren’t far off the results of the 2015 MacBook Air, which is an impressive showing given the x360’s 1920×1080 screen is going to be more power hungry than the MacBook Air’s 1440×900 device.

The SSD’s performance is solid but, as PCIe-connected devices become more common, unexceptional. This is one area where Apple has pushed technology forward and PC manufacturers have not followed. Most SSDs in most PC laptops continue to use SATA connections. This caps them at about 500-odd MB per second for reading and writing. The newest PCIe x4 devices, by contrast, can achieve around 1400MB read and write performance. While some manufacturers offer PCIe SSDs as an option, it’s usually reserved for the largest and most expensive systems. The Lenovo X1 Carbon we tested, for example, included a 512GB PCIe disk, and its performance was stupendous. But this option was $700 more expensive than the 128GB SATA SSD that’s used by default.