HP Spectre x360 14

[HEXUS]

A stylish laptop bought to life by a 3:2 OLED display.

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[cheesemp]

These ultra portables are very nice but for this level of money I'd only consider Ryzen... Saying that they've really come on since I last considered one in 2015. There are a lot less cut corners than there used to be.

[Dribble]

These ultra portables are very nice but for this level of money I'd only consider Ryzen... Saying that they've really come on since I last considered one in 2015. There are a lot less cut corners than there used to be.

I was just buying something like this so researched it. It depends on you use case. The ryzen's are significantly faster if you need lots of cores at once (e.g. compiling for programming, or complex video editing) but if you want to use it to do standard office style tasks the intel cpu's faster single core performance is more important. The graphics on the intel cpu are quite a bit faster too. Hence for a lot of people (my wife included) the intel cpu is fine.
Incidentally I bought my wife a dell inspiron 14 7000 which cost me < £900 for something spec'd very similar to that hp minus the touch screen and full flip capabilities.

[[DW]Cougho]

I was just buying something like this so researched it. It depends on you use case. The ryzen's are significantly faster if you need lots of cores at once (e.g. compiling for programming, or complex video editing) but if you want to use it to do standard office style tasks the intel cpu's faster single core performance is more important. The graphics on the intel cpu are quite a bit faster too. Hence for a lot of people (my wife included) the intel cpu is fine.
Incidentally I bought my wife a dell inspiron 14 7000 which cost me < £900 for something spec'd very similar to that hp minus the touch screen and full flip capabilities.

Oooh, I'm looking at that Dell laptop myself. What are your (or your wifes) thoughts on it?

[Dribble]

Cougho;6011]Oooh, I'm looking at that Dell laptop myself. What are your (or your wifes) thoughts on it?

Pro's - screen is very nice, sound is good, it runs fine, fairly quiet, pretty light, metal body, compact, it's got nvidia graphics (more a drivers then then performance - more stuff "just works" with Nvidia), good trackpad, looks like you can get to the fan fairly easily to clean it (although I haven't tried yet), looks like you can easily replace the battery.
Con's - keyboard is only ok (it's fine but doesn't feel amazing or anything), you can't upgrade memory (but it came with 16GB so that's not such a problem). It's never going to be blazingly fast (it's running that cpu at 15-20W not the max 28W).

For my wife who wants it for her job which involves a lot of ms office/publisher, watching tennis on prime, having far to many tabs/windows open at once, and it's gotta stay quiet in the endless zoom calls it's the best I could find for the money.

[cheesemp]

I was just buying something like this so researched it. It depends on you use case. The ryzen's are significantly faster if you need lots of cores at once (e.g. compiling for programming, or complex video editing) but if you want to use it to do standard office style tasks the intel cpu's faster single core performance is more important. The graphics on the intel cpu are quite a bit faster too. Hence for a lot of people (my wife included) the intel cpu is fine.
Incidentally I bought my wife a dell inspiron 14 7000 which cost me < £900 for something spec'd very similar to that hp minus the touch screen and full flip capabilities.

That's probably true but my interests are more in those areas plus light gaming which is Ryzen every time. I also like to buy to last which also means more cores.

[philehidiot]

I think it's fair to say if you're doing any real gaming, light or otherwise, this kind of ultraportable shouldn't be on your list.

That being said, I last bought a premium, ultraportable laptop 10 years ago. I still have it and it still does the job. Just. It doesn't get stressed out and I know that Chrome with 20 tabs isn't an option on it.

Given that possible longevity (OLED issues aside), I'd be quite nervous about a quad core system.

This being said, there's now an excellent case for looking at premium tablets with keyboards if you don't need x86 or massive chooch. If someone has a £1600 budget for a laptop and they require a high quality screen, ultraportability and decent typing over outright performance, the tablet competition is real and you could save £800+ even if you splashed out.

EDIT: I wonder if, however, Linux on this thing would work well for mitigating the performance issues? I run Debian on a single core with 2GB of RAM and it's usable.

[cheesemp]

I'm running windows 10 on a dual core celeron that is about 5 years old currently. It runs 100% fine and usable (and that's only with a super old ssd). However I do take your point - a very similar spec chip in my wife's fanless 2in1 is a lot slower purely due to lack of cooling. Sticking it on a laptop cooler can boost performance by 20%+ just by improving the passive cooling. With regards gaming I'm only talking old titles and indie games. That's usually where I find intels gpu lacking especially on the driver front.

[DanceswithUnix]

These ultra portables are very nice but for this level of money I'd only consider Ryzen...

My son just bought an HP Envy 360 13.3 inch, the top of the range is £900 (£100 off) atm because the new range is out next month. It has a 4700U. 500GB SSD and 16GB of ram which should be pretty awesome for student use.

I think we will see a lot of 5000 series Ryzen laptops turning up in the next few weeks, possibly with more sales to get rid of the 4000 series ones. I notice there are still 3000 series laptops kicking around, I guess those are hard to shift at this point.

Edit: and yes that system is overkill for some note taking, spreadsheets and a bit of Minecraft, but the next model down wasn't on offer so wasn't much cheaper for 6 cores, 8GB of ram and only a 256GB SSD. The ram and SSD look fairly easy to upgrade, but nice not to have to.