HP Spectre Foldable PC Review: The Future of the PC, Today

The HP Spectre Foldable PC is an innovative step forward for the PC industry, but its high price tag will keep it out of the hands of most customers. No matter: It’s enough of an advance that I feel it requires a different type of review, so I’m going to do things a bit differently this time.

Let’s chat for a bit.

At a high level, meeting the needs of the present while pushing forward with new ideas, new workflows, and new form factors is a delicate balance. And in the HP Spectre Foldable PC specifically, we see the intersection of these conflicting desires, just as we do in the foldable smartphone market. Most would likely agree that folding display technology “is the future,” but that this future comes with an asterisk, a caveat. That is, it can’t just exist, it has to work reliably and work as well or better than existing solutions. It has to make sense today, not just in some vague future.

Put another way, the folding display debate can be framed by my right tool for the job missive of a decade ago: We dream of that magical device that can do the job of two (or more) separate devices, but this dream has often been dashed by a harsh reality: Those dual purpose devices have usually introduced compromises. They do the jobs of two devices, but poorly.

But it is the exceptions that keep the dream alive. The most obvious example is the iPhone, a device that Apple first marketed as “an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator,” a phrase that seems quaint today but in fact undersold its capabilities. More to the point, the iPhone was a better iPod than the iPod, and a better phone than existing phones, and it offered a better Internet experience than other devices of its day. The iPhone was so successful, so much better, that it still forms the basis for most of the personal computing devices we use today. Its influence is almost infinite.

Looking at today’s folding display devices, especially in the smartphone space, it’s impossible not to wonder if we’re not experiencing another iPhone moment. There’s an argument to be made that we’re not because the smartphone market didn’t immediately adopt this new form factor across the board when the first of these devices appeared. But the retort is just as strong: Folding displays are so advanced and futuristic that their expense in the short-term simply means we’re in for a longer transition. The folding display, perhaps, is inevitable as the glass slab smartphone design that Apple formalized.

To me, there is no debate. Folding displays are the future, and they can and will contradict my “right tool for the job” rule in the same way the iPhone did. The only debate is when this will happen. And that timing will indeed be based on cost, as folding displays are prohibitively expensive today. But that price will come down. When, I cannot say.

Here, many are probably throwing up counterarguments about reliability. After all, first-generation folding displays are best remembered for reviewers pulling off what they thought were screen protectors, or for little pieces of dust getting into a crease or hinge, ruining the displays. This innovation was perhaps released too soon.

Perhaps. But those first-generation devices are suddenly long behind us: Samsung, the primary innovator in the folding display space, this past summer released its fifth generation folding smartphones, and you really don’t hear about reliability issues anymore, now do you? The market is mature enough that Google, the most conservative device maker I can think of, has released its first folding device, the Pixel Fold, and it is excellent. Even OnePlus, hardly a mainstream, premium device maker, has jumped into the, ahem, fold with its OnePlus Open. The mainstreaming of this form factor is happening all around us, and what makes this possible is the underlying technology getting better and better.

But I experienced a more telling moment in this transition recently, one that I will now make you privy to via a story that speaks to how much this technology has improved in a short time.

In early October, I attended an HP event in New York City with several other tech reviewers. Part of this event included an in-person reviewer’s workshop for the HP Spectre Foldable PC. This was actually my second briefing for this device, as I had previously attended a virtual workshop back in early September. But the in-person event was longer, and hands-on, and there was a stunning moment that, to me, laid bare the reality of folding displays and how the future, suddenly, is open right in front of us.

Kevin Massaro, HP’s vice president of consumer products, was stepping through a lengthy discussion of the durability of the Foldable PC’s hinge. He explained how this completely new design, which helps the PC maintain a balanced weight distribution and work and feel like a normal laptop in that usage mode, was tested against the exact same battery of tests that the PC maker gives its mainstream and simpler laptop designs. That this hinge would last just as long as any of its other laptop hinges despite its relative complexity. HP handed us an open Foldable PC to pass around from reviewer to reviewer so we could marvel at a hinge design that would be hidden from the device’s owners, and see for ourselves the incredible workmanship and accomplishment.

And then someone asked the question I had been wondering too. Sure, this hinge is great, but whatever. It’s a hinge. What about the display? What has HP done to ensure that this huge folding display was reliable and would endure the rigors of daily use? Was HP—he implied but didn’t say—just focusing on the one thing it could control so that we would ignore the elephant in the room?

Massaro looked over at another HP executive in the room, confused. And then he looked back at a conference table full of reviewers, each waiting to hear how he was going to talk his way out of this one.

“The display is going to outlast the hinge,” he answered. As if that were obvious.

The display is going to outlast the hinge. Think about that for a moment. Here’s HP making a huge bet on a new device form factor that is currently more expensive than most of the cars I’ve owned, one that includes a mammoth 17-inch folding display, and what it’s most concerned with, from a hardware perspective, is the hinge. Not the display. But the hinge.

This was all I could think about later as I threaded my way through nearby Penn Station so I could begin my two-plus-hour trip home. Was this really happening? Is the foldable PC era finally upon us?

Not exactly: The expense of this technology and the Spectre Foldable PCs’ resulting $5000 price tag obviously limits its appeal and accessibility. But HP knows that. This is a first-generation device, one that also took more time than usual to come to market. The company argues that the PC’s ability to replace two or even three other devices—by which it means a laptop, a tablet, and a desktop PC—somewhat obviates the cost issue (though one might equally argue that few people need all three PC types, and even fewer would upgrade all three at the same time). It’s best in breed, we were told, and there are customers willing to pay for this flexibility. The costs are only going to come down.

I see both sides of this debate, but in the end, I applaud HP for even trying: It serves a broad array of customer types, and it has long-established and successful premium brands that include some of my favorite PCs ever made. Here, HP is making a public bet that the future of the PC market is hybrid, that its customers want and need to work from anywhere at any time. And it’s not just predicting that future, it’s adapting its current products to meet this need—with enhanced remote meeting capabilities, especially—while pushing forward with what it believes is the form factor of the future.

Of course, this first-generation foldable PC bumps into some harsh realities, too. There is a complexity inherent to this device that is hard to overcome. There are all these separate pieces, not just the display itself but its integrated kickstand and webcam, and how they work well in one orientation but not the other. There is a keyboard module with a touchpad that attaches magnetically to the display, and also sometimes to just part of the display, but also has a goofy little proprietary charging cable that will be easy to lose. There’s a pen that magnetically charges that I already lost. There is the weirdness of it being a bit too small in laptop mode and almost too big with the display fully opened. A large and heavy charging brick. And all the software customizations that handle the keyboard connectivity and how that impacts the available display real estate and the additional Snap capabilities in Windows. On and on it goes.

But we can make sense of this jumble of contradictory thoughts. If you step back and think about it, the value equation here is the same as with any other PC. And so the questions before us can be simply stated and, I think, answered somewhat easily. Do the benefits of this device outweigh its negatives? Does it offer enough value, enough utility, to justify its expense and complexity? Does the HP Spectre Foldable PC address the needs of today while providing us with a peek at the future? Is it, in other words, the PC’s iPhone moment?

With the obvious caveat that its price puts it out of reach of most people, my answer to all of these questions is yes. And the reason the Spectre Foldable PC succeeds where others, like the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, have fallen short, is that it nails the basics as much as possible given the complexity of doing so. That is, while the Yoga Book 9i offers some compelling dual-screen use cases, its Achilles Heel is the laptop form factor, the most common use case of all. That device is interesting and futuristic, but it does not meet the needs of today.

The Spectre Foldable PC does meet the needs of today by being usable as a laptop. In this usage mode, it’s basically a 12.5-inch laptop with a Full HD+ display, a full-sized hardware keyboard/touchpad module (one of many features the Yoga Book lacks), and a high-quality webcam right where you need it. Yes, it feels a bit small for me and my giant gorilla hands, but I’m an outlier in that way, and even I had no major issues with the typing experience. As a laptop, the Spectre Foldable PC works.

To be clear, there is some complexity here.

The keyboard/touchpad panel connects to the PC via Bluetooth normally but it attaches to the bottom half of the display with magnets. That connection is strong, but I sometimes would open the display and find the keyboard had detached and was stuck to the top of the display. Oops.

While connected, the keyboard/touchpad module charges wirelessly, so it’s being charged when the device is closed, which is ideal. But there’s also that goofy little proprietary cable that charges and connects via USB, and a very hard-to-find and use on/off switch on the keyboard/touchpad’s paper-thin side. (The good news? You probably won’t need this cable: HP says that the keyboard mode is good for 361 (!) hours of battery life when fully charged, and a 10-minute charge adds 10 hours of life.)

This configuration also introduces some software complexity. When you attach the keyboard such that the device is essentially a laptop, the bottom half of the display turns off—something the Yoga Book does not do—and the top half of the display—what the user would consider to be “the” display in this mode—becomes a 12.5-inch panel with a 1920 x 1255 resolution. Detach the display and … well, it depends.

You can actually slide the keyboard/touchpad module down towards you so that the keyboard bit now covers about two-thirds of the bottom half of the display, with the touchpad bit hanging off the front, bending thanks to a built-in crease.

When you do, the display expands to fill the space not covered by the keyboard/touchpad. And it’s now a tweener 14-inch-ish display—a “1.5 display,” as HP calls it—with a tall 1920 x 1820 resolution. Adding to the complexity, the bottom part of that display is flat with the keyboard, so somewhat perpendicular to your eyes.

And HP’s extension to the Windows Snap feature can snap windows into that space so you now have both vertical and horizontal app windows on-screen. The utility of this is unclear to me, but it’s an option.

Conversely, if you pull the keyboard all the way off the display, you can keep using it—remember, it’s connected via Bluetooth—and the display expands as expected to fill the entire size of the panel. So now it’s a 17-inch display with a resolution of 1920 x 2560, albeit it one that is bent into an L shape. I suppose some people might use it this way, with equal-sized vertical and horizontal halves. But most will likely contort it in this way to open it up in landscape mode and prop the thing up with its built-in kickstand.

In doing so, you move away from the traditional laptop form factor and into a desktop PC form factor. This is small by desktop standards—most desktop PCs utilize 24- or 27-inch displays, I bet—but capacious in the portable PC space: Despite the relatively small difference in size, the HP Spectre Foldable PC’s 17-inch display feels dramatically bigger than those found in the 16-inch laptops I’ve tested this past year. It’s quite nice.

But this desktop usage mode also introduces some complexities of its own.

The kickstand is OK, I guess, and I like the rubberized texture on its exterior. But it has trouble with interim viewing angles and seems to work reliably only when fully open.

And that viewing angle, to me at least, is not ideal, with the screen tilted back too far. Worse, the kickstand only works in landscape mode, so there’s no way to prop up the screen vertically, something I’d love to do given how much I write.

As bad, the PC’s excellent webcam is now unusable because it’s on the left side of the display and not on the top. I suppose HP could put a second webcam in the bezel, but the folding screen and hinge mean it couldn’t be in the middle when the device is used this way. So maybe there’s no good answer beyond packing an external webcam, yet another complexity.

Still. The versatility here is both fascinating and useful. The complexities are not insurmountable, and as I have to sometimes remind myself, most people aren’t moving from PC to PC as often as I do, meaning that any customer who buys the Spectre Foldable PC will get used to its eccentricities. Switching between usage modes will become second nature.

I’m not sure what to say about its usage as a tablet: I don’t draw or write on screens, and the large size of this PC’s display panel seems almost daunting. But it is a far more natural tablet than any convertible PC because there’s no bulk or thickness, and its weight seems commensurate with its size. There’s also a high-quality MPP-compatible smartpen with two different tips if you need that kind of thing. But I feel very strongly that we should optimize for the day-to-day not for the occasional, and it’s fair to assume that most Spectre Foldable PC users will stick to this device’s laptop and desktop modes. It works well in both, and transitioning between the two is easy enough.

Because of my own particular usage norms, I typically used the Spectre Foldable PC as a small-ish laptop, which worked well enough, and as a desktop PC. But in the latter mode, I found the bundled keyboard/touchpad a bit awkward, so I turned to the desktop dock that I have here and used it with the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard and Mouse that I prefer. It worked well in this configuration, though the screen itself was a bit low on the desk (plus that webcam issue). Unfortunately, neither of the laptop stands I have here worked because, well, they’re designed for laptops and when used with the Foldable PC, the display leaned back too far. So some other platform is needed. Another complexity.

But again, this is about the value proposition, the comparing of pros to cons. And leaving aside cost for a moment—I know—I do believe that the pros outweigh the cons. This PC’s ability to not just meet needs but actually replace two or three devices is real. Yes, it’s somewhat obviated by the fact that you can dock any portable PC, but that use case relies on having a separate external display. The Spectre Foldable PC can turn into a reasonable desktop PC anywhere, and you don’t need that external display. It’s an interesting and useful capability.

OK, at some point, we have to discuss the specifications. This is, after all, technically still a review. But we can do so more quickly than usual because, as it turns out, HP has countered the complexity of this device and its cost by offering only one configuration. You can get any Spectre Folding PC you want, as long as it’s this one. And that’s probably for the best: As prices come down and this technology makes its way to more and more PCs across HP’s family of products, there will be more configuration choices as well.

So let’s get through this.

The HP Spectre Folding PC is powered by a 12th Gen Intel Core 17-1250U processor, Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics, 16 GB of LPDRR5 RAM, and 1 TB of PCIe Gen4 NVMe TLC M.2 SSD storage. And yes, I already sense your question: A 12th Gen Intel Core CPU? Come on. It’s 2023. But that choice was deliberate: Intel doesn’t make a 9-watt 13th Gen Core part, and HP needed its balance of performance, efficiency, and battery life. And so here we are: In normal use, I found this system to be just as capable as any other productivity-focused laptop I used this past year, and it was never bogged down with fan noise or heat in any usage configuration.

Battery life is interesting. I wasn’t able to effectively test whether battery life varies according to which usage modes one prefers, but HP tells me that it does not vary much. I saw an average of almost 10 hours of battery life, which is pretty incredible. Here, HP says that its large 93-watt-hour battery, split between both sides for weight balance, combined with the efficient processor helps to overcome the display’s power consumption. The bundled 100-watt charge is bigger than the average charger but not obnoxious, and it supports fast charge with a 50-percent fill-up after 45 minutes.

And that display! Leaving aside its folding capabilities for a moment, we’ve got a gorgeous 17-inch 2.5K (1920 x 2560) OLED multitouch panel with ultra-wide viewing angles, HP’s BrightView and low blue light enhancements, and 99.5 percent DCI-P3 color space support. It’s colorful and contrasty like all OLED panels, and it throws off 400 (SDR) to 500 (HDR) nits of brightness. It is, in a word, stunning, and I found it as wonderful to use for work as I did for entertainment.

Maybe even more so for entertainment, actually: The OLED panel is certified for IMAX and the Bang & Olufsen quad-speaker system is terrific, with fully licensed DTS:X surround sound. Put simply, the video viewing experience was next level, putting most of the laptops I used previously to shame. I didn’t just watch clips to test it, I ended up watching full movies because it was so impressive. Yes, a 4K panel would be even better visually, but Full HD+ is the right compromise between quality and battery life.

Like all folding displays, there is a slight impression of the crease where it folds, even when it’s open fully, an area that seems to reflect light in odd ways. This is more easily noticed when you’re off to the side, however, and it disappears fully when viewed head-on. And that’s true whether you’re working in apps in Windows or enjoying its multimedia wonders. Pretty impressive.

Connectivity is modern, with Wi-Fi 6E and Bluetooth 5.3 but not cellular connectivity. And for expansion, there are two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt 4/USB4 capabilities (40 Gbps data transfer, power delivery, and DisplayPort 1.4, plus HP sleep and charge support).

The location of those ports is interesting: In laptop mode, one is on the lower right of the (upper/visible) display and the other is on the top left.

But flip it into desktop mode and one is on the lower left of the display and the other is on the top middle left. So there is always one USB-C port in a useful/usable position in either mode. Smart.

Not enough? HP also bundles a handy little HP Elite USB-C Hub in the box that provides a passthrough USB-C port for power, two USB-A 3.0 ports, and an HDMI 2.0 port for 4K eternal video. I guess it’s yet another thing to lose, but it’s nice to have.

For hybrid work scenarios—remote meetings, for example—the HP provides a high-quality 5 MP webcam and dual-array microphones.

As noted, the webcam is mostly just useful in laptop mode because of its positioning, but it has Windows Hello facial recognition capabilities and is augmented with HP’s useful (but hard to find) Video Control features (background blur, appearance filters, and the like), and there’s a privacy camera switch next to the PC’s power button (on the top right in laptop mode).

The bundled keyboard and touchpad are good, similar to HP’s integrated parts on its premium PCs, and the keyboard specifically is full-sized and about the same size as the keyboard on the Dragonfly Pro. It feels a bit constrained for reasons I have trouble explaining, and there’s no backlighting. But the keys have nearly ideal key throws, and they are nearly silent in use. The touchpad is a great size regardless of the limitations inherent to the form factor, wide but not too large, and it didn’t introduce any noticeable errors.

Security is solid, with walk-away auto-lock, wake on approach, automatic screen dimming, and privacy alert capabilities. And there are screen time and distance reminders for digital wellbeing (that I found a bit annoying).

The Foldable PC has a good sustainability story, too, with 90 percent recycled magnesium in the enclosure and keyboard frame, 50 percent recycled plastic in the bezels, keycaps, and speaker enclosures, 33 percent recycled PU leather/polyester fiber in the keyboard module, and 100 percent sustainably sourced and recycled wood fiber and cushions in the packaging. There’s no word on repairability, but I assume the nature of this device limits the options.

The PC weighs about 3.6 pounds including the keyboard and while its dimensions are more book-like than laptop-like in transit, it’s no less portable. It’s also quite thin: 10.91 x 7.53 x 0.84 inches when folded and 10.91 x 14.81 x 0.33 inches when open like a tablet (and sans keyboard, of course).

On the software front, the big news is HP’s expansion of the Snap functionality in Windows. Similar to what Lenovo did with its Yoga Book 9i, the Spectre Foldable PC augments Snap with its own layout options, though they only appear when you drag a window and not when you mouse-over a window’s Maximize/Restore window button. They also only appear when needed: In desktop mode, for example, the standard Snap options suffice.

As always, HP bundles a few too many of its own utilities on the system—about 11, by my count, including the Omen Gaming Hub—and I’d like to see it consolidate that down into just a handful of apps, especially on premium PCs like the Foldable PC. There are also three Intel utilities, including the interesting Unison app that adds better iPhone integration capabilities than the Phone Link app built-in with Windows 11 Pro. And some crapware, sadly, like a Dropbox promotion, that has no place on a PC this expensive.

Pricing and configurations

As noted, there is one configuration, which comes in one color, Slate Blue, and it costs $4,999.

Recommendations and conclusions

The HP Spectre Folding PC is a significant advance for PC form factors, one that represents a compelling vision for the future of the PC. The heady cost artificially limits its audience, of course, but the real innovation here is that it works well enough as a laptop and a desktop-type PC without being bogged down by major compromises. Yes, there is complexity to this form factor, but early adopters who are drawn to such things will happily deal with that to take advantage of this PC’s impressive and expansive folding display. And as the prices come down, the configuration choices will expand, and the entire industry can move forward.

This is the first step. And it’s a big one.

At-a-glance

Pros

• Versatile form factor with truly usable laptop and desktop modes
• Stunning and expansive 17-inch folding display
• A great mix of performance and battery life
• Modern connectivity and expansion
• Next-level AV experience with IMAX and DTS-X capabilities

Cons

• Price
• Complexity