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

Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by jseliger on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @10:32AM (#11430647)

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.

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Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by tonyarkles on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @10:57AM (#11430838)

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).

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Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by atwebb on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @10:54AM (#11430817)

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.

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Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by PaulHoule on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @10:39AM (#11430700)

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".

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Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by dingaling on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @11:19AM (#11431025)

> 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.

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Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by ocdtrekkie on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @05:37PM (#11434717)

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.

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Re:HP's Spectre 13.3 laptop is as thin as an AAA battery by kyriakos on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @01:37PM (#11432522)

Don't forget Asus Zenbooks

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