I bet you think this is nothing but a cute little 12-inch notebook, but there’s far more to it than meets the eye. Now I can check my emails and catch up on Fallout. And there’s even more. Check this out. I can pop off the keyboard and trackpad, fold the screen, kick out the kickstand, and now it’s a massive 17-inch IMAX-enhanced HDR laptop with a wireless keyboard and touchpad. I mean, look at this thing. It’s hard to believe it started out the size of an M1 MacBook and weighs just half as much as HP’s other premium 17-inch offerings. And the leathery little keyboard is even shockingly usable for a folio-styled device. What’s not to love? Well, the price tag for one thing, but we’re going to talk about that later. First, there is so much cool stuff crammed into this thing that I just can’t wait to show you guys. Just like I can’t wait to show you our sponsor, Ridge. . Just when you thought their wallets couldn’t get any cooler, now they’ve added MagSafe compatibility so you can attach your wallet to your phone. Absolute mad lads. Check them out in the description and transform your everyday carry. Looking at it, it’s hard to believe that the HP Spectre Fold packs a 12-thread Core i7, 16 gigs of LPDDR5 memory, a terabyte of PCI Express Gen 4 storage from Kioxia, almost 100 watt-hours of batteries, and an HDR OLED touchscreen that starts out at a better-than-full HD 1920×1255 in clamshell mode and expands to 2560×1920 in tablet and desktop mode at… an old-school 4:3 aspect ratio that, turns out, is actually pretty great for productivity. Not only that, but it even outperformed HP’s claims, reaching a whopping 550 nits in HDR in our lab. We’ve got Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, not one, but two, Thunderbolt 4 ports, audio by Bang & Olufsen, a five megapixel webcam, and a battery that takes only 45 minutes to get to a half charge. This thing should be a productivity monster, especially if you consider that when it’s fully charged, HP claims the beefy batteries should last you 15 and a half hours. 14 and a quarter hours. 13 and a half hours. 12 and a half hours. Well, at least 11 and three quarter hours. I guess you can’t be wrong about your battery claims if you just put every possible number on your marketing collateral. Runtime shenanigans aside, this thing looks pretty awesome on paper and spoiler alert, I ended up kind of loving it. But my initial impressions were, I don’t wanna say negative so early in the video, so let’s call them unpositive. Out of the box, there is a learning curve for sure. You’re reliant on HP’s software for window management in all of the different modes, and it kind of stacks up on top of the default windows management, so God help you if you missed the introductory animation that shows you the different configs and how to use them. Once you get the hang of it though, the magnetic system for holding the keyboard in its various positions is pretty fine, but what isn’t is this clumsy hack of a USB tether. It allows you to charge the keyboard in desktop mode, that’s what we’re looking at right now, and that’s definitely a good thing. And the magnetic connection saved me from snapping the connector off multiple times. But HP must have known that having this loose wire just flapping around on what is, and I kid you not, the most expensive laptop in their entire lineup is not a good look. Not even our new cable management gear on lttstore.com can save this one. So I would like to see HP find a way to charge the keyboard, either with induction or with pogo pins in the next generation, instead of using this Bajoran earring-looking thing. And, I hear you guys, it’s Bluetooth, you idiot! Unplug it! And of course, that’s the obvious solution, but the Bluetooth was unbelievably buggy on this thing, failing to stay paired sometimes when coming out of sleep or switching between modes, or even failing to pair at all. To make it worse, I’m getting these constant pop-ups about keyboard firmware updates. I then dutifully click "yes" and then it takes me to an internal HP website that needs a login. But since I’m neither an HP employee nor an HP business partner, I guess no update for me? I mean, hey, I get it. HP, you’ve only been selling laptops for longer than I’ve been alive. These little details take time to get right. To be clear, I’m a reviewer and I could obviously escalate the issue, but my job is to review the product as you would receive it. And given how otherwise good the keyboard typing experience was, the connectivity issues were a real downer. With that said, I understand some of the compromises in this product, like the webcam. In the age of remote work and endless Zoom calls, they’re just… Isn’t an ideal place to put a single camera on a device like this It’s gonna be poorly placed for at least one of the modes. Now, the obvious fix would be to add another camera so that you’ve got One, oh, I don’t know, right in the middle of the hinge or maybe under the display But there’s not really a lot of room inside this thing for additional hardware. So a tiny webcam somewhere more reasonable for a desktop mode would be a welcome addition next time but the sideways mounted one realistically didn’t bother me too much unlike the pen it’s usable but it’s also very losable and this might be an unpopular opinion but i’ve always felt that if you’re going to give me a stylus you need to give me a secure place to keep it in clamshell mode it’s supposed to charge at the bottom edge of the fold and it kind of sticks there with magnets That is until you pull down the keyboard into extended mode and knock the pen into your lap or just, I don’t know, dare to move the machine. There’s also some magnets kind of in the hinge back here, but it doesn’t really stay put there either. So I guess it’s time to dust off the old high school pencil case, roll into the meeting with your super nice expensive laptop and also your Pikachu zip up. I swear though, the point of this review is not to trash on this product because… I really did fall in love with it by the end, warts and all. There is nothing like rolling into that aforementioned meeting and casually slipping a 17-inch productivity monster out of your tablet sleeve. Sure, it’s not 4K, but the 2560×1920 resolution is totally acceptable for a 17-inch display, and obviously, there’s a crease in the middle, but as someone who’s been daily driving folding devices for the last several years… I promise you guys, you’ll get used to it quicker than you think, and this one is particularly non-bothersome. The Spectre Fold is just in its element in this environment. It’s amazing for note-taking, it’s great for multitasking when the conversation drifts off topic, and it’s even great for giving an impromptu presentation in a pinch because the screen is quite a bit bigger even than it sounds. Think about it: the more square a screen is, the more total area that it has per diagonal inch, and… it’s also a head-turner and a legitimate conversation starter when every other NPC in the meeting is using a freaking MacBook. It’s just that there is a lot that I would like to see improved before I spent this kind of money on it. The weight, for instance. It’s certainly light for a 17-inch laptop, but for a 12 or a 13-inch, which is realistically how I used it most of the time, it’s pretty heavy and at just under an inch thick when folded up, I think it’s a pretty good laptop. It seems to be more of the laptops of my childhood than modern ones, and I mean that in more ways than one. Remember those old glossy screens that had the kind of ripple effect under direct light? Yeah, HP brought that back. I didn’t find it too distracting day to day, but I also can’t promise that you’d get used to this one like with the fold down the middle, and that’s especially true if you work in an open concept office with a bunch of foot traffic behind you. On the plus side though, that might distract you from the cooling fan. The thermal design of this machine leaves a lot to be desired. At idle, it’s dead quiet, even silent. But should you have the audacity to do anything, like say conduct a Zoom meeting, it sounds like, well here, I’ll let you guys listen. Now I could excuse that noise if the performance absolutely rocked, and it should be pretty good. The internals of the Spectre Fold are virtually identical to the Asus ZenBook Fold. Same CPU, GPU, RAM spec, max resolution, and even similar NVMe drives. But the performance doesn’t rock. In virtually every test, the Asus ZenBook Fold outperformed the HP Spectre Fold, with the only big exception being, of course, battery life, where the HP outlasted the Asus by an hour in our full screen endurance test, and more than two hours at half screen. And, this seems to come down to thermal management. While HP had an edge in maximum clock speeds, Asus averaged about 300 megahertz faster over time, and 100 megahertz faster at the bottom end. HP sent over a disassembled unit for us to investigate, this was before we got our CT scanner by the way, and the problem was immediately apparent. That’s a cooler? Who do they think they are? Apple? With these guts. No one expected it to be a gaming powerhouse. And the trade-off for extra battery life is a valid one and one you personally might prefer, but a shocking number of people do like to play casual games or run other somewhat intensive applications. And it’s always painful for me to see hardware performing less than its best. On that note, we fired up a couple of games then just to see how it fared. It got a little confused about what resolution it should be using, it tried to use desktop resolution in clamshell mode for example, but repositioning the keyboard resolved that, and then it did manage a respectable average 60 FPS in both Rocket League and Dota at 1080p. So, not for gamers, confirmed, but also not for folks who need something completely bug free, or for folks who need something very affordable. It’s 5,000 US dollars for the one configuration that, from our understanding, is because Intel only has one chip that is able to meet the thermal requirements of this chassis. However, with all of that said, if you are that special someone who saw this thing and went, oh my god, that was made for me, and I absolutely can’t wait. For the inevitably much better second gen, I can’t say you’re the only one. Now that the review’s done, and I just auctioned my Daily Driver Framework laptop for charity, investment disclosure, I think I might just adopt this orphan designer breed puppy and hope that it doesn’t get prematurely worn out from being folded in half over and over and over again, while I eagerly await a second gen that hopefully fixes all those little issues and brings me to sheer nirvana, gigantic screen meeting bliss. Just like I’m blissfully telling you about our sponsor. Vessi, here in Vancouver, the weather can be all over the place. Bright and sunny one day to a sudden downpour the next. But thankfully, we have a secret weapon, Vessi. They claim their shoes are 100% waterproof thanks to their Dymatex technology, which means even the most torrential storms don’t stand a chance. The Storm Burst shoes are now available in a low-profile form, providing the warmth of a boot and the comfort of a sneaker. Its rugged rubber outsole with extra grip means you can take on the trails, chase those waterfalls, or simply get to work without a second thought. Head over to vessi.com/linustechtips and get 15% off your first purchase. If you guys liked this video, maybe check out the 10 reasons that I daily drive a foldable or at least did when I made that video. Now I’m just back on my broken Note 9.

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