HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery | Hacker News Reader

HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery

engadget.com

41 pointselorant35 comments

Silly question, but...how is this as thin as a AAA battery? Especially given this gallery image:

http://www.engadget.com/2016/04/05/hp-spectre-13-3/#gallery=...

Well, there's your answer. "As thin as an AAA battery" is about twice the thickness of an AAA battery. Simple.

Probably excluding the foot pads it would be comparable...

Not only that but the featured image is purposely placed on a dark surface with shitty lighting to give a much thinner impression.

Look, I want my laptop to be as thin as a AAA battery as bad as the next battery enthusiast but going around claiming a laptop is AAA battery thin when it clearly is barely AA battery thin then it's time to go back to the drawing board.

I don't agree with going back to the drawing board, but HP should be more honest about its claims and Engadget should absolutely vet the claim before using is as the headline for the article!

Probably in the same way that the Macbook Air was only .6cm thick and the world's thinnest laptop despite being .09cm thicker than the Mitsubishi Pedion which was a consistent 1.84cm thick. I believe it's called iMeasure.

The grey plastic(?) parts when put together are about as thin as a AAA battery. The bottom black parts aren't, but if you're in a dark room or something then you won't notice. You might even think your laptop is hovering! Just imagine how you could entertain guests!

Maybe you are just looking at the AAA battery the wrong way up..

I have a Retina Macbook, but I'm really pleased that PC makers have, finally, in the last two or three years started producing better laptops. For the longest time, only IBM and then Lenovo made laptops that were reasonably svelte and not actively hideous. But Lenovo ships malware in its laptops: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/now-three-pre-installed-malware... and should probably not be trusted.

Now Dell's XPS series is widely admired and HP is actively making good laptops. It's a miracle that shouldn't be miraculous!

Paul Graham wrote "Return of the Mac" in 2005: http://paulgraham.com/mac.html:

Powerbooks are beautifully designed and run FreeBSD. What more do you need to know?

I got a Powerbook at the end of last year. When my IBM Thinkpad's hard disk died soon after, it became my only laptop. And when my friend Trevor showed up at my house recently, he was carrying a Powerbook identical to mine.

It took seven or eight years between "Return of the Mac" and decent PC laptops to show up. Way too long.

Ugh, the PC industry has been dying like lemmings ever since the "Return of the Mac" and since it gave up power for the pursuit of fashion.

Just because they make machines look like Macs doesn't mean they will get the high profit margin Apple gets. Today you can buy a Mac or buy a fake Mac so people will just buy a Mac. If somebody in the PC industry was competing on power they might be getting the high profit margin 2 years from now and Apple's profit margin will collapse the way Wall Street has been expecting since "Return of the Mac".

> and since it gave up power for the pursuit of fashion.

PC manufacturers with a corporate target market have never stopped selling 'power'.

Dell will happily sell you a Precision laptop with quad Xeons and 64GB of ECC RAM. It has the aesthetics and portability of a paving slab but by Jove it has power. They'll even knock-off $100 if you choose Ubuntu...

I've seen a few in ${WORK} and they were awesome beasts even beside otherwise impressive mid-tier Latitudes.

A former coworker ran a VMware lab environment of several VMs off his Precision laptop. Being told I could play with the test environment while his laptop was in the building and on was funny.

I have two 2.5" SATA drives in my Precision, and I have room for an M2 slot SATA left. And it has three network card slots, effectively.

Also, I had to buy a bigger laptop bag for my Precision, and carrying it to and from my car counts as an exercise regimen.

They have, you just had to pay for them, ASUS's Ultra/Zenbook series has been around for a while and is quite sleek and performs well. They had nice procs, good RAM, and SSDs all in a tiny lightweight beautiful package. The touchpad is kinda crappy though.

That's about the time I got on the Mac bandwagon too. 2005-2006. I wanted a laptop with a decent Unix environment, and my university had a messed-up Cisco wireless solution that was very challenging to consistently connect to from Linux.

I still have my 2010 Macbook Pro (upgraded RAM and HDD), but recently have bought a non-sexy beast of a Lenovo to get real portable Linux (and non-VM Windows).

Don't forget Asus Zenbooks

Let me be that guy and ask: what's the point? Who wants a thinner laptop (besides Steve Jobs)? I understand the drive for lighter laptops but thinner poses engineering challenges (in cooling) which drives up costs. I just don't understand the point.

I agree. And I'd rather have a laptop a few millimeters thicker and have a bigger battery inside.

Then you buy the thick ones, and I'll buy this one.

Ahah, yes of course :) But this also applies to smartphones, and it seems like the trend nowadays is only to make them thinner.

I think thinness and lightness makes devices more usable. I currently own a 2007 MacBook Pro and a Dell XPS 13 (2014 I think), and the difference in traveling with them is so much more significant than I ever would have guessed before getting the XPS.

Thin and light go hand-in-hand too; speaking in generalities, one probably begets the other.

And, as the tech gets smaller and lighter, it can go in more places. I have to think that Apple's obsession with thinness on the iPhone led to the Watch (which receives criticism for...being too thick).

I have a Lenovo T450s and Yoga 2. The Yoga 2 is probably half the thickness of the T450s but weights about twice as much. I prefer carrying the T450s.

The thinner the laptop the more practical it is use -- to a point. I've had many laptops but I've never used a laptop more than my Asus ultrabook. It's just so easy to carry around, pack, and grab for even small tasks.

Why are they still releasing laptops that top out at 8GB? It feels like the PC manufacturers have some rule where they must have at least one major deficiency preventing me from considering their laptop.

For my usage patterns, 8 GB is too little RAM. I suspect same is true for a lot of developers. 16 GB is the bare minimum, 32 GB or more is desirable.

And so the keyboard is going to suck :/

I really wish long-throw style keyboards on the thinkpad lines were still a thing business class laptops included. I hate feeling like I'm typing on a touch screen no matter what device i use.

ThinkPad Retro is coming next year. Until then I am keeping to the T420.

It's nice to see PC laptops taking advantage of lower power chips to improve their external design. But from online reviews of previous Spectre 360 models, it seems many users complained of overheating and poor wifi reliability. I wonder if HP have done anything to address those in the new thinner version? Aside from that it looks like an attractive machine (golden swirls and jewels notwithstanding).

In my experience HP laptops have the poorest cooling solutions possible. I made the mistake of buying two and I wouldn't use another one as my daily driver if it were free.

I bought a Pavilion x2 a couple of weeks ago, it didn't get too hot but didn't survive the first Windows 10 update and now won't boot.

I will be getting a refund next week.

This laptop supports Thunderbolt over USB-C. Can it drive a 4K monitor?

Yes.

Could we change the title to "thin as a AAA", as in "thin as a Triple-A".

Most significant thing I noticed was that it sports two small fans. Thin, light yes. Quiet no.

Wow, the bedazzled laptop.

Title is a lie.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com