The idea behind convertibles or 2-in-1s has remained the same over the past decade: Why buy a tablet when your laptop can fold 360 degrees, allowing you to use it as a large tablet or to prop up the screen? No keyboard way? Most PC makers have given up on the concept entirely, but HP remains one of the holdouts. While Windows never became the tablet-friendly platform that Microsoft envisioned it to be, there’s still a lot of value in having a machine that can be adapted to your needs.
That’s what I learned when I tested HP’s 16-inch Specter x360 two years ago, and now the company has launched a smaller model, the Specter x360 14. It features Intel’s latest CPU and AI-accelerated NPU (Neural Processing Unit), faster Intel Arc graphics card and a beautiful 2.8K OLED display. Best of all, unlike its bigger brother, it still functions as a tablet.
life value
The HP Specter x360 14 has everything you need in a 14-inch convertible laptop. It’s fast, has a gorgeous screen, and can rotate to suit your needs.
- Multifunctional switching screen
- OLED displays are incredibly vibrant
- Solid state CPU upgrade
- Starting from 16GB RAM
- Excellent keyboard
- There are many ports,
- HP’s design hasn’t changed in years
- Tactile trackpad is a bit finicky
- average battery life
HP $1,450
Even if you never plan to twist the screen, the HP Specter x360 14 is still an attractive high-end laptop. For some, it may also be a more traditional alternative to Dell’s new XPS 14, which has an invisible trackpad and capacitive features. While this computer looks great, getting used to its less traditional features takes some time. The Specter x360 14, on the other hand, will be attractive and familiar to anyone who’s ever used a laptop. (Its rotating screen took just 10 seconds to figure out the first time, while Dell’s invisible trackpad was still tripping me up hours after I started testing it.)
Design and hardware
This sense of familiarity could also be seen as a drawback for HP. The Specter x360 14 has everything you’d expect to see in today’s high-end laptops: a sleek metal chassis, a gorgeous screen with ultra-thin bezels, and a luxuriously large trackpad with haptic feedback. But in reality, it doesn’t look that much different from the 13-inch Specter x360 I reviewed in 2019. It’s nice to see HP making some big leaps forward in design, but on the other hand, I can’t blame the company for sticking with a winning design.
For the Specter x360 14, HP is focusing on small updates. It has a 14-inch wide screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, compared to the 3:2 square display of the previous model’s 13.5-inch display. Its trackpad offers configurable tactile feedback and is 19% larger than before, so much so that it completely takes up the palm area. HP sticks to its responsive keyboard, but its keycaps are 12 percent larger to make typing easier. To simplify functionality a bit, HP has unified the power button and fingerprint sensor (the laptop also supports Windows Hello facial biometrics).
The situation at the port has not changed. There are two USB-C ports on the rear right (one of which is located in its unique cutout), a pull-down USB Type-A port on the left, and a headphone jack in the corner. As always, it would be nice to see some kind of built-in card reader, especially for a machine aimed at creative professionals.
The Specter x360 14 may look very similar to its siblings, but HP says it has significant tweaks under the hood. It now supports 28-watt Intel Core Ultra CPUs instead of the previous 14-watt option, and offers 10% more airflow than before. The company also managed to make these improvements without increasing the height of the machine by 17mm. It weighs 3.2 pounds, making it more portable than the 3.5-pound MacBook Pro 14-inch.
Specter’s 9MP webcam is also a significant upgrade from the previous 5MP option. The new sensor provides hardware-supported low-light adjustment through quad-pixel binning (the process of taking data from four pixels and combining them into a single pixel). This allows cameras with smaller pixels to let in more light, resulting in brighter overall images. During Google Meet and Zoom calls, the webcam provided clear pictures with bright, bold colors. When I enabled Windows Studio Effects background blur, it looked almost like a mirrorless camera, although the pictures sometimes looked overexposed in direct sunlight.
Video chats also sounded great through the laptop’s four-speaker array, which consists of two upward-firing tweeters above the keyboard and two woofers in front. There’s not a lot of low-end (especially compared to Apple’s MacBook Pro speakers), but speech and music sound surprisingly clear. The speakers can also get pretty loud without distortion, which is impressive for such a thin system.
Although this laptop is equipped with an NPU-equipped processor that can provide support for functions such as Paint, ClipChamp, and Windows Studio Effects, the Specter x360 14 is not technically an “AI PC” as defined by Intel and Microsoft. reason? It doesn’t have a dedicated button for Windows Copilot. Personally, though, I haven’t found the key to be very useful on the XPS 14 and 16. Triggering Copilot from the taskbar or Windows sidebar isn’t very difficult, and it’s certainly not onerous enough to require giving up a spot. keyboard.
is using
The performance of the HP Specter x360 14 I reviewed was similar to other machines we’ve tested using the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H chip. It’s fast and relatively efficient, especially compared to systems from two years ago. My review unit, with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, was 30% faster than the 2022 Specter x360 16 on the PCMark 10 benchmark (6,493 points, up from 4,785 points). This year’s Specter also scored 78 percent better on the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark, proving the progress Intel has made since the launch of its 11th-generation CPUs.
Geekbench 6 CPU |
PCMark 10 |
Cinebench R23 |
3DMark Wildlife Extreme |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
HP Specter x360 14 (Intel Core Ultra 7, 2023) |
2,273/11,735 |
6,493 |
1,651/8,481 |
5,952 people |
ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED (Intel Core Ultra 7, 2023) |
2,240/10,298 |
6,170 |
1,599/7,569 |
4,827 |
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (Apple M3, 2023) |
3142/11,902 |
not applicable |
1,932/10,159 |
8,139 |
HP Specter x360 16 (Intel i7-11390H, 2022) |
not applicable |
4,785 |
1,515/3,722 |
not applicable |
The most eye-catching upgrade of Specter x360 is not AI intelligence; It’s Intel’s Arc graphics card, which is much faster than Intel’s older integrated graphics cards. In 3DMark’s TimeSpy Extreme benchmark, it was nearly on par with the NVIDIA RTX 3050 in the x360 16 (1,435 points versus 1,730 points). That’s impressive for a thinner, lighter machine.Sure, it’s not a gaming device, but I can still play Halo: Infinite 1080p, around 30 frames per second. I’m sure it can handle smaller indie games just fine.
Thanks to the abundance of RAM and Intel’s Core Ultra chip, my review model could handle everything I threw at it without any noticeable slowdown. In a typical work day, I juggle dozens of browser tabs, photo editing apps, YouTube streaming, video chat, Slack, and Evernote. The Specter x360’s OLED display also makes everything look great, even when I’m just staring at text on a news website. It supports a variable refresh rate of up to 120Hz, so scrolling through documents and websites is smooth.
When I first tested the Specter x360 five years ago, I immediately fell in love with its keyboard. Typing feels very satisfying thanks to the generous amount of key travel and feedback. It’s a rare design that feels like it’s begging me to use it, like a well-tuned piano just urging you to play. Thankfully, HP hasn’t ruined any of the keyboard magic: the new, larger keycaps are more comfortable to use, and the actual typing experience is as good as ever.
However, I have a few complaints about the Specter x360’s new trackpad. Its glides are smooth and precise, and its tactile feedback is almost indistinguishable from a physically depressed trackpad. But HP’s palm rejection software feels sloppy—sometimes, while typing, my hand would tap the trackpad and push the cursor to select another window. This happens often enough that it becomes a killer of creative flow. I hope HP can eventually resolve this issue through a software update.
As a convertible laptop, the Specter x360 14 is far more practical than the 16-inch model. Just tap the screen to flip it over to the keyboard – it transforms into a tablet when it’s fully flipped over, or you can stop the process midway and flip the Specter into “tent” mode. The 14-inch x360 is better as a tablet simply because it’s lighter and easier to hold with one hand (although you may need to hold it on your lap for extended use).
Rotating the screen is also less of a hassle since the width of the monitor is much smaller. I watch YouTube videos in tent form in bed, and on the couch I occasionally fold the keyboard behind the Specter so I can use it like a large touchscreen with a stand. I appreciate the versatility of the 2-in-1 convertible more than the flexible OLED screens we’ve seen on new machines. It’s cheaper to implement and for my purposes the convertible is more practical.
The Specter x360’s main flaw is battery life: It lasted 5 hours and 10 minutes in the PCMark 10 Modern Office test, compared with 12 hours and 43 minutes on the ZenBook 14 OLED. After all, keeping the frame so thin comes at a cost. In real-world testing, it typically required around six hours of charging during my workday.
Pricing and competition
The Specter x360 14 is a good choice for a high-end convertible, starting at $1,450 with Intel Core Ultra 5 125H, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. As of this writing, this configuration is discounted by $300, which is an even better value. (HP doesn’t offer a meager 8GB RAM option, which would just cause a headache for most users.) For $1,900, you can upgrade to a Core Ultra 7 155H chip, 32GB of RAM, and a 2TB SSD.
If you’re looking for other high-end convertible laptops, your choices will be somewhat limited. Dell’s XPS 13 2-in-1 still runs older 12th-generation Intel chips, and you’ll have to look to the mid-range Inspiron and Latitude series for more modern options. We’re still waiting to see Lenovo’s Yoga series upgraded to newer Intel chips. And we haven’t tested Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 360, but it doesn’t have HP’s design flair.
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 is also technically a convertible (its screen pulls forward instead of flipping side to side), but it starts at $1,900. For this price, you’d be better off opting for the x360 14’s more powerful hardware rather than the Surface’s unique screen.
wrap up
It’s unclear how long convertible PCs will last, but I wouldn’t be surprised if HP ends up being one of the last companies still trying. The Specter x360 14 is one of the best laptops you can buy today – and the fact that it can flip in multiple directions is just the icing on the cake.
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