Review: HP Spectre Foldable

Tired: Phones with a single folding screen. Wired: Laptops with a single folding screen.

Hinges are for losers, people! While dual-screen laptops are now a thing, the new hotness does away with the visible hinge and uses a flexible OLED to give you a single, unbroken display. A few of these are on the market now, namely the Asus Zenbook 17 Fold and the Lenovo X1 Fold, neither of which were well received on launch.

The highest praise for these machines has focused on the mind-boggling awesomeness of being able to fold your computer in half, a parlor trick that immediately begets a callback of “Wait, do it again!” when you show it to someone for the first time. Conceptually the idea still feels 10 to 20 years ahead of its time—even if the prices for these devices are mired 20 to 30 years in the past.

Once the oohs and ahhs over the Asus and Lenovo folding laptops settle down, the complaints become almost vitriolic. Battery life is bad. Usability is awkward at best. No ports. And there’s the substantial matter of the price. Well, if you thought the $3,500 folding Asus laptop was expensive, wait till you get a load of the HP Spectre Foldable at a cool $5,000. But we’ll get to that in a bit.

Photograph: HP

Functionally, HP’s Spectre Foldable works the same way as its forebears: Think of a massive tablet—17 inches diagonally with 1,920 x 2,560 pixels of ultrabright resolution (same resolution as the Asus)—that can fold in half when in portrait orientation. The resulting configuration gives you one 12.3-inch screen on the top and another one on the bottom, allowing it to be used as a keyboardless laptop akin to the Lenovo Yoga Book 9i, albeit with a single, seamless screen instead of two discrete displays.

HP includes a physical keyboard too (along with a stylus), which is critical for some tasks, if not most. This can be mounted magnetically, directly on top of the bottom half of the screen when it’s in clamshell mode, or dragged down the lower screen halfway to give you a bit more real estate above the keyboard in a 14-inch “1.5 expanded screen” mode. Lastly, it can be detached completely. In this mode, you’re likely to want to flatten out the device, use the kickstand on the back to prop it up in landscape mode, and engage with the computer as you would a desktop.

If you’re looking for flexibility, the Spectre Foldable has you covered, and I don’t think I’ve ever interacted with a machine that offered so many ways to use it—to the point where I would often find myself second-guessing whether I wanted to type on a clamshell or rearrange things on my desk to spread out on the bigger 17-inch screen. If that was the sole dilemma with this device, we could wrap things up now. But unfortunately, as has been the case with every foldable to date, there’s plenty more to unpack … er, unfold.

Starting with specs is as good a place as any. HP has outfitted this device with a 12th-generation 1.1-GHz Intel Core i7-1250U CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 1-TB SSD. The choice of a 12th-gen CPU instead of a current 13th-gen one might surprise you, but HP says it wanted to use a 9-watt CPU to meet its “thinness and battery life goals,” and that there was no 9-watt CPU available in the 13th-gen Core line.

Photograph: HP

I will say that HP has done a great job on both those thinness and battery life goals. The Spectre is just 11 millimeters thick in tablet mode (23 when folded in half), and without the keyboard it weighs in at a scant 2.9 pounds. With the keyboard, it’s still just 3.5 pounds—unheard of for a 17-inch laptop and less than what most 15-inch laptops weigh. The battery life, which I tested by playing YouTube videos on the fully extended 17-inch screen, nearly hit 11 hours. That's an incredibly impressive mark for a machine of this size and weight.

Design-wise, the system looks good enough, its magnesium alloy chassis feeling sturdy no matter how you have it configured. When closed, the unit has the monochrome appearance of any old corporate laptop, the only outlier being the kickstand that recesses into the base of the device.

Performance? Well, there’s not much to talk about. The slow CPU and lack of any kind of graphics processing earned the Spectre Foldable some of the worst benchmark scores I’ve seen in years. Things aren’t awful if you’re doing light productivity work—with PCMark scores equivalent to what you would have seen on mainstream laptops around 2019 or 2020. Anything remotely graphical is a no-go—though to its credit, the system never crashed on me, even during some pretty heavy stress testing. Still, on a price-to-performance basis, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything worse.

Photograph: HP

One of the biggest challenges with this or any foldable is a dearth of ports. The Spectre includes just two USB-C ports with Thunderbolt support, and one of those is used for charging. The unit includes a small breakout box that offers a pass-through USB-C port and adds two USB-A ports and an HDMI output. Sadly, this thing is total junk. I connected a USB hard drive to one of the USB-A ports and was appalled at how slow the transfer rate was, invariably requiring half an hour or more to install an application from the external drive. The box may be fine if you just want to connect an external mouse or a printer, but for storage devices, you’ll want something more robust. You can also use the small included dongle to charge the keyboard via USB-C, but since the keyboard charges magnetically when in clamshell mode, you probably won’t need it.

The placement of the two USB-C ports is weird. In clamshell mode, one appears on the lower right of the upright portion of the screen, which isn’t bad, but the other is on the top of the screen, which limits its accessibility and aesthetics. The problem’s the same in 17-inch desktop mode. In this configuration, the two ports appear on the bottom left of the screen and the center of the top of the display. This also places the webcam on the left side of the screen rather than the top, while the slim speakers are positioned on the edges—creating a loud but echoey audio experience.

Much has been written about what happens when you ditch a physical keyboard—or make it optional—and to say there’s a learning curve here is an understatement. The option to use a virtual keyboard is erratic, made more difficult by a touchscreen that wouldn’t always register my taps unless they were exactly on point. I also found the clamshell mode—which is probably the most universally usable configuration—to be particularly unworkable, because there’s zero space between the top of the physical keyboard and the screen. Every time I tried to tap a number on the top row, my knuckle would graze the screen and move the cursor, a frustrating issue that meant having to redo things repeatedly.

The “1.5” mode is more usable—but the weird half-screen didn’t do much for me. It’s also worth noting that there’s no real way to use the device in portrait mode without leaning it up against something; the kickstand only works in landscape. Lastly, while there are external audio control buttons, there’s no standard headphone jack. I don’t know about you, but for $5,000, I want a headphone jack.

At this price, shovelware should not be anywhere near the picture. The big offender on this machine is the inclusion of McAfee LiveSafe, which told me I had “109 MB of junk files cluttering your PC” immediately after a fresh Windows installation. Well, whose fault is that? Ugh, delete.

So yeah, about that $5,000. The price feels like it’s based on nothing at all, like a number an executive picked out of the air during a corporate retreat. “Well, if someone will pay $3,500 for a folding Asus, they’ll surely pay more for an HP, right?” And I guess they will. Tech bro billionaires, trust fund influencers, and oil barons alike all now have a sky’s-the-limit computer that can’t help but turn heads, an ambitious and amazing engineering feat with nowhere to go.