HP Spectre x360 14 (2024)

The Spectre x360 is HP's flagship consumer convertible laptop and a multiple Editors' Choice award winner. (HP is also PCMag's 2023 Readers' Choice award winner for 2-in-1 laptops.) For 2024, it gets Intel's new don't-say-14th-Gen Core Ultra processor architecture and switches back from a 13.5-inch, 3:2 aspect ratio display to a 14-inch, 16:10 ratio panel, but it hasn't really changed much—it remains a sleek and light 2-in-1 that stands out for build quality, versatility, and productivity. The latest Spectre isn't cheap, starting at A$2,549 and costing nearly $4,000 for the higher end models. Regardless, the latest HP Spectre x360 14 easily earns another Editors' Choice nod as a premium convertible status symbol.

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Design and Configurations: Cutting Corners in an Attractive Way

As before, HP sells the Spectre x360 2-in-1 in 14- and 16-inch screen sizes, the latter a potent desktop replacement that's too hefty to be more than occasionally useful in tablet mode. The 14-inch model satisfies sketchers and note-takers with a rechargeable stylus that sticks magnetically to the laptop's side. (You'll find no garage or niche to store the pen internally.)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

While base models get by with an Intel Core Ultra 5 125H chip, our loaded review unit flaunts a Core Ultra 7 155H (six Performance cores, eight standard, and two low-power Efficient cores; 22 threads), with a clock speed varying from 1.4GHz to 4.8GHz and Intel Arc integrated graphics. It's teamed with 32GB of memory, a 2TB NVMe solid-state drive, Windows 11 Pro, and a 2,880-by-1,800-pixel OLED touch screen with dynamic 60Hz or 120Hz refresh rate. An HP.com Core Ultra 7 config with extravagant 16GB of memory and 1TB SSD is A$3,999.

Available in Slate Blue or Sahara Silver as well as our system's Nightfall Black, the Spectre measures 0.67 by 12.4 by 8.7 inches. HP brags that its aluminum lid and keyboard deck are 90% recycled, and its plastic keycaps and the scissor mechanisms beneath are 50% recycled. Thin bezels (HP quotes an 89% screen-to-body ratio) surround the display. You'll feel virtually no flex if you grasp the screen corners or press the keyboard deck. The F2 key serves as a webcam privacy shutter.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

The HP is slightly too heavy for ultraportable status at 3.19 pounds, but actually a tad trimmer than the company's non-convertible HP Pavilion Plus 14 (0.74 by 12.4 by 8.9 inches). Its archrival, the Lenovo Yoga 9i Gen 8, is barely larger (0.6 by 12.5 by 9.1 inches) and a tad lighter (3.09 pounds).

More monochromatic than its brass-accented predecessors, the 2024 Spectre x360 keeps the signature sleek styling with diagonal-cut rear corners that hold ports (an audio jack at left and a Thunderbolt 4/USB4 port at right). A second USB4 port is nearby on the right side, with a drop-jaw USB Type-A port on the left.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

You'll find no onboard HDMI port for an external monitor, but the Spectre comes with two USB-C mini docks or dongles, one with just an HDMI port and another with HDMI, two USB-A, and one USB-C. The AC adapter has a USB-C connector. Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth handle wireless connectivity.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

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Using the HP Spectre x360 14: Always Look Your Best

Videoconferencers will find the Spectre's webcam is exceptional, with 9-megapixel resolution (videos up to 4K or 2160p) and images that are remarkably bright and colorful with no noise or static. The myHP software lets you blur or replace the background. This tool can also make backlight and low-light adjustments as well as handle tone and appearance enhancement—in addition to the ability to tag-team a second USB webcam if you move around a lot. It can also capture PDFs and perform keystone correction to help you read tilted whiteboards. HP Enhanced Lighting puts a white border around the screen to mimic a ring light.

The webcam supports Windows Hello face recognition, joining the fingerprint reader built into the power button to give you two ways to skip typing passwords. An HP Command Center utility not only provides familiar smart features such as locking the system if you walk away and waking it on return, but lets you pause and resume video play with a wave of your hand and can warn you if you're logging too much screen time or put your eyes too close to the display.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Speaking of the display, it's like some other recent HP laptops in being IMAX Enhanced, which is less impressive than it sounds: You'll see a few more pixels at the top and bottom of Marvel movies on Disney+, for example. Regardless, this is a crisp, bright, and beautiful screen, with sky-high contrast and rich, vivid colors. Fine details are razor-sharp, and viewing angles are wide. Photos and videos look amazing, and text pops on white backgrounds. myHP lets you toggle among HDR and manual sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3, and native screen modes.

The 5.5-inch pen's sliding top reveals its USB-C charging port. The stylus has 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and two buttons, which the myHP utility lets you reprogram from the eraser function and right-click to other functions, such as taking screenshots, basic media controls, or opening new browser tabs. The pen keeps up with my fastest swoops and scribbles with effective palm rejection.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

Sound from the two top-firing tweeters and two front-firing woofers isn't deafening but loud enough to fill a modest room. Tuned by the conferencing-oriented Poly Studio (a.k.a. Plantronics) instead of HP's audiophile contractor Bang & Olufsen, sound is nevertheless clean and crisp; you'll hear minimal bass but you can make out overlapping tracks. The myHP software provides music, movie, and voice presets and an equalizer, and the Start menu adds DTS:X and DTS Headphone:X enhancements.

The backlit keyboard commits the common sin of pairing the Fn key with the cursor arrows instead of providing real Home, End, Page Up, and Page Down keys; it also commits HP's eternal sin of stacking hard-to-hit, half-height up and down arrow keys between full-size left and right ones in a clumsy row instead of the proper inverted T. The keyboard's typing feel is shallow but comfortably snappy and responsive.

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

HP's buttonless touchpad has a short, stiff click but taps and glides smoothly. It's large enough to take advantage of a myHP option that turns its left and right edges into vertical haptic sliders for screen brightness and audio volume, respectively.

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Testing the HP Spectre x360 14: Intel Core Ultra 7 FTW

As a premium 2-in-1, the Lenovo Yoga 9i is the most obvious comparison for our benchmark charts. Dell contributes 14-inch convertibles from opposite ends of the price spectrum, the Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1 and corporate-centric Dell Latitude 9440 2-in-1. The last spot goes to the MSI Stealth 14 Studio, a clamshell in the HP's price bracket with a game-worthy Nvidia GeForce GPU instead of integrated graphics.

Productivity Tests

We run the same general productivity benchmarks across both mobile and desktop systems. Our first test is UL's PCMark 10, which simulates a variety of real-world productivity and office workflows to measure overall system performance and also includes a storage subtest for the primary drive.

Three other benchmarks focus on the CPU, using all available cores and threads, to rate a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads. Maxon's Cinebench R23 uses that company's Cinema 4D engine to render a complex scene, while Geekbench 5.4 Pro from Primate Labs simulates popular apps ranging from PDF rendering and speech recognition to machine learning. Finally, we use the open-source video transcoder HandBrake 1.4 to convert a 12-minute video clip from 4K to 1080p resolution (lower times are better).

Finally, we run PugetBench for Photoshop by workstation maker Puget Systems, which uses the Creative Cloud version 22 of Adobe's famous image editor to rate a PC's performance for content creation and multimedia applications. It's an automated extension that executes a variety of general and GPU-accelerated Photoshop tasks ranging from opening, rotating, resizing, and saving an image to applying masks, gradient fills, and filters.

The MSI's 45-watt (W) processor topped the HP's 28W chip in our CPU tests, but the Spectre's performance impressed regardless, with the new Intel Core Ultra 7 mostly landing between the chipmaker's previous-generation Core i7 and Core i9. It's no CGI-rendering or dataset-crunching workstation, but it's more than muscular enough for productivity and creativity tasks.

Graphics Tests

We test Windows PC graphics with two DirectX 12 gaming simulations from UL's 3DMark, Night Raid (more modest, suitable for laptops with integrated graphics) and Time Spy (more demanding, suitable for gaming rigs with discrete GPUs).

Additionally, we run two tests from the cross-platform GPU benchmark GFXBench 5, which stresses both low-level routines like texturing and high-level, game-like image rendering. The 1440p Aztec Ruins and 1080p Car Chase tests, rendered offscreen to accommodate different display resolutions, exercise graphics and compute shaders using the OpenGL programming interface and hardware tessellation respectively. The more frames per second (fps), the better.

The Stealth's GeForce discrete GPU blew away the other laptops' integrated graphics. In other news, water is wet. Casual gamers and perhaps content creators will be happy to see the new Intel Arc Graphics are a noticeable step up from the last generation, however.

Battery and Display Tests

We test laptop battery life by playing a locally stored 720p video file (the open-source Blender movie Tears of Steel) with display brightness at 50% and audio volume at 100%. We make sure the battery is fully charged before the test, with Wi-Fi and keyboard backlighting turned off.

Additionally, we also use a Datacolor SpyderX Elite monitor calibration sensor and its Windows software to measure a laptop screen's color saturation—what percentage of the sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3 color gamuts or palettes the display can show—and its 50% and peak brightness in nits (candelas per square meter).

The high-powered MSI's sins caught up with it, presenting wretched battery life in our video rundown, while the Spectre x360 led the way with swell unplugged stamina. The HP's display also dazzles with color matched only by the OLED Lenovo, though the Stealth's top-quality IPS panel comes close, and it emits ample brightness (OLED technology is generally worth about 100 IPS nits).

(Credit: Joseph Maldonado)

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Verdict: One of 2024's Top-Tier 2-in-1s

We wish it cost a couple of hundred bucks less, but the 2024 HP Spectre x360 14 easily repeats as an Editors' Choice award recipient. We'd like to see a few minor complaints addressed next time, like a media card slot and somewhere to store the stylus, but these aren't deal-breakers here, especially thanks to the included accessories. All told, this may be the best consumer convertible you can buy so far this year—we'll hold off on making that call until we see more Intel Core Ultra-generation 2-in-1 laptops—but either way it's an excellent choice for grab-and-go productivity and versatility.