HP is Reinventing the PC

Forget Microsoft Surface and by all means ignore Apple's Mac. Because it is once-staid HP that is reinventing the PC today. And the hits just keep on coming.

Today's HP is the result of the corporate split of Hewlett-Packard last year, with the other uninteresting half of the company spinning off into something called Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, or HPE. It would be convenient if this story paralleled that event, if there was some way to explain that HP, the PC maker, "got its mojo back", or experienced some kind of resurgence because of the failings of its predecessor.

But history is rarely that accommodating, and that's not what happened. No, HP did't experience a resurgence, it was never all that good to begin with. Instead, HP simply started over from scratch and transformed itself. It made a few mistakes, sure. But it also kept hitting them out of the park, again and again and again.

It started, perhaps, with that most modest of PCs, the HP Stream 11, which debuted in 2014. At the time, I described this $200 laptop as "the best tech deal of the year", and HP as "the PC comeback story of 2014." (See, even I was trying to fit the narrative.) The HP Stream proved that Chromebook wouldn't own the low end of the market, and the device was copied endlessly by its competitors, the surest sign of success in this market there is.

From this humble beginning, HP then went churned up a torrid release cycle that saw it remake its product families from top to bottom, with stunning new premium, gaming, business, and consumer offerings. The hits are almost too numerous to name, from the stunning Spectre x360 to the EliteBook Folio 1020 (which arrived before Apple's new MacBook), to the Spectre Notebook, which was the world's thinnest---and arguably most beautiful---notebook at the time of its launch.

HP's approach to the PC is fascinating to me, and it stands in sharp contrast to competitors like Apple, Microsoft, Lenovo, Dell and others. For starters, HP is one of the few "pure play" PC makers left standing, by which I mean that PCs are in fact HP's primary business. Mobile is never going to save HP, so the firm won't almost completely ignore its PC business for years---cough, Apple---so it can focus on the higher margins and steadier churn provided by smart phones. It needs to figure out a way to make money selling PCs. And if you're a fan of the PC, as I am, you just gotta love them for that.

So what HP has done is figured out where it can make a difference, where it can make money, and to do so across its product segments. And that explains its push into premium PCs with the Spectre and Elite lines, in particular, and into gaming PCs with Omen. But HP will always churn out the volume products, too--Stream, Pavilion and so on---and even those products are generally of high quality and include thoughtful touches. This company has really turned up the volume on good design and meeting actual customer needs, across the board....