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HP Claims Innovation Over Apple With 'World's Thinnest Laptop'

I'm going to sound like the biggest Apple fan boy ever, but genuinely I look at this and it just screams at me that its TRYING to be sophisticated but also failing. I like bits of it but then other bits are repulsive, especially the shiny coloured hinge. Even if this and the 12" retina Macbook both ran OS X, id still chose the retina Macbook - sometimes less is more and whilst this has got some great specs, if i'm buying a laptop this thin i'm not really buying it for specs i'm buying it for writing and doing my day to day work on so I don't need to carry the Macbook Pro with me and this doesn't really cut that.

I'll admit that, now, after a few updates, Win 10 is the best Windows 10 they've, especially now they've integrated Unix terminal and features - but I have to play around on it occasionally and I cant wait to get back to OS X still. I still have a Unix based foundation a lot more flexible than a Win NT one.
 
Quite frankly, I am getting tired of this...the-thinner-the-better attitude. You can only get so thin, to a point that its stupid. I like to feel like I have something in my lap or to carry around. Wow.
 
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IvanX said:
Real world: we need to promote normal shapes, very thin = very bad!
Tech world: we must make it thinner! All the time! It is never too thin!
Click to expand...

You solidify my point.

What I said originally:

Quite frankly, I am getting tired of this...the-thinner-the-better attitude. You can only get so thin, to a point that its stupid. I like to feel like I have something in my lap or to carry around. Wow.
 
dmylrea said:
So, please explain why the Macbook has only ONE USB-C port.
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One because if Apple could design something portless they would and two it's designed to be a mostly wireless machine, for work to be done wirelessly and via the cloud. Apple sells other laptops for people who need more ports and power.

iPad Air said:
Quite frankly, I am getting tired of this...the-thinner-the-better attitude. You can only get so thin, to a point that its stupid. I like to feel like I have something in my lap or to carry around. Wow.
Click to expand...

Plus it's thinner than Apple's MacBook but it weighs more. So what was the point of going that thin then?

malexandria said:
I hate Windows but that is one gorgeous laptop. I would purchase this as an iPad replacement. Considering a 128 GB Ipad Pro is about $1,000. I'll get this and I have a 25% HP discount that I've never used. And look at that Apple - PORTS!
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If you need ports why are you using an iPad? MacBook Pros have ports you know.
 
Seems like a beautiful notebook, but does it really compare to the MacBook 12-inch? Sure it is slightly thinner, but it's larger in every direction making it a overall larger notebook and it weights a bit more. I don't really see the point of thinness if they are not able to keep the overall footprint and weight in the same league.

Besides that you got all the usual stuff like the trackpad being rather sluggish, it runs Windows 10 and not Mac OS X etc..

EDIT:

Not to mention the display... It's a freaking 16:9 display, at this size such a wide aspect ratio makes it rather useless for anything other than media consumption due to the very limited vertical working area of the display. It should have been at least 16:10, or even 4:3 or 3:2.

And according to reviews the colour balance of the display panel does not seem to be all that great.
 
Beautiful! And filled to the brim with craplets, lol. Also, the ONLY reason I'd go to Win10 is for the touch screen, and I see no mention of that here.

Do you think Apple will kill the MBP in an effort to go super-light and thin??
 
beebarb said:
I see one advantage it has over Apple's ultrathin right away.
IT HAS MORE THAN ONE PORT.

It actually looks usable as a productivity machine.

I may be a Mac user, but Apple goofed big time by only having one USB-C port on their device.
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I still don't agree with this - the retina Macbook was supposed to be used as a wireless device - not something you start plugging stuff into. If you can't get everything done wirelessly its not the device for you - get a Macbook Pro.

It staggers people how people want to buy devices that do everything for them. They want iPads to replace their laptops, they want super thin laptops with all the ports a Macbook Pro has (because it'd be oh so super thin and portable with three things hanging out of the port on it!)

Devices made specifically for one thing are always better than devices which try and be a jack of all trades - and sure the average consumer loves "bang of their buck" and will buy the most hideous tech crap because "hey look my phone has HDMI out so I can watch movies on my TV from it" - urghhhh. If its too expensive for you to excel at only specific tasks, don't buy it.
 
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Thanks to my very recent experience with HP EliteBook 950 G3 - I will never recommend HP laptop to anybody.

The notebook was chosen by me for one frequent traveler who needed to have a solid working machine with Windows on it. The specs looked right (recent Intel processor, 8GB of RAM, solid SSD, ok weight and no useless external GPUs, sturdy design).

Notebook was received very warmly by the person I bought it for but the nightmares came soon after.

Windows 7 Pro does not support BitLocker and encrypted drive was the requirement. I have said to the owner that we can try to use HP preinstalled utilities, which do provide drive encryption, but which I have no experience with. This was a very bad idea.

Just installing a windows password through that utility resulted in a 'missing operating system' message after reboot.

At that moment deep inside of me I already knew that 3-4 hours of time I spent for remote setup were wasted and countless of hours of pain are in front of me. I had a guy sitting with a 'brick' in another country with 3G internet telling me that he needs a working machine real fast, especially since in 3 days he is going to remote location hardly with any internet there.

Have you tried to go though bios and installing windows with the hands of a novice PC user through a poor skype video conference on a phone? That was fun:)

For those of you wondering how the story ended:
- We were not able to recover base Windows 7 installation
- Windows 10 clean install was done instead (I would of go with 8.1, but on HP site only Win 7 and 10 drivers were available so I did not risk it)
- Windows 10 HP drivers turned up to be total crap anyway. Installing sound driver from HP website resulted in no audio device detected...

-> Things are sort of working now, however the owner already had 'missing operating system' message once again out of blue and is now scared of using this notebook, expecting it to 'die' any second for no reason.
-> HP software SUCKS ASS. If you have to use HP notebook somehow, please do yourself a favour and don't ever use HP software on it. Or better delete it altogether. Or better install fresh copy of Windows... on a notebook by different manufacturer.

Bugs are not nice. I face them in iOS, less frequently on OS X... but, there is no doubt in my eyes - most PC manufactures are in much bigger trouble when it comes to software with Windows 10 and the 'great' software that comes preinstalled in most cases...

About this new HP release:
I am sure there are some people who will like the gold polish of this new Spectre notebook, but I am definitely not one of them. It will be scratched and hey... 99,9% chance the ventilation system will not work well and the notebook will sound like a leaf blower either due to week hardware design or buggy software/drivers (most likely both).

No more HP for me or my clients. Thank you very much.
 
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robjulo said:
Windows 10 is a great OS, whether the crowd here (who likely have not used it) can admit it or not.
Click to expand...

Careful on the unsupportable claims. You have no idea who has or hasn't used something.

I use Win10 every day (work), so typically about 50+ hours per week. While it's not as awful as prior incarnations, it's still not a "great OS" by any stretch of the imagination.
 
I'm pretty neutral on the styling; the thing I'm confused by is having three USB Type-C ports but only two supporting Thunderbolt, as it doesn't look especially clear which ones do.

I'd assume that the leftmost port is the one that doesn't, but is that because it's intended for charging? If that's the case then that's backwards IMO, as the charging port makes the most sense for docking the laptop with a display, extra ports etc. without having to connect additional cables.
 
The style is a matter of taste. I kind of like it, but I can easily imagine others thinking the copper is too much... Too gaudy.

The only thing that I really dislike about this laptop is the placement of the ports. Along the back is the worst place.
 
Rogifan said:
Do you really think the MacBook doesn't have 3 USB ports because Apple didn't know how to engineer it? And no Apple laptops are running Skylake right now so can't really compare.



Does the actual laptop look like those press renders? I haven't seen a real-world photo that does. Unless it comes in different colors. It reminds me a bit of the MacPro. Apple's press renders made it look black but in real life it was a darker silver that looked lighter in some settings.
Click to expand...

dmylrea said:
So, please explain why the Macbook has only ONE USB-C port.
Click to expand...
Faster than my reply. By the way, my post was mentioning about looks vs useful specs.
And by the way, we can't compare just because Apple is late to the party. So it's not HP's fault
 
if it wasn't for the thick hinge, this laptop would be weigh lighter then the 12 inch Mac. However, where are u gonna put the USB ports if u never have a "thick" part ?

The port takes up space too. otherwise it will either be a flip down hinge.... (will still be thicker for that), or this will be the first laptop with zero expand-ability :D...
 
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Apple snoozed... such skylake processors that are able to power this machine have been around for months.

Apple have long been dragging their feet with laptops / desktop machines. Still trying to convince people that an iPad is a PC replacement for everyone...

nicovh said:
Bring on the MacBook Pro's Apple! Show em what you got!
Click to expand...

Yup, Apple sure will.. with one USB port.......
 
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I'm not a fan of Apple, but the simple problem with the HP laptop is that it runs Windows. I'd love a better laptop (my 13" MacBook Pro has a lot of annoyances), but I couldn't consider Windows.
 
Let's be honest here. Apple could have given them HP the plans for their new MacBook, let HP release the exact same machine for them - and a large segment of MR users would say it's hideous trash simply because it wasn't made by Apple.

it's a good looking machine. I'm in the camp that would prefer they would all go slightly/thicker and give us more ports battery/life. But that's just me. As someone who's first 'portable' was the original Compaq that was the size of a suitcase, once laptops got to 3-3.5 lbs, I don't see the point in giving up functionality to go smaller.

I mean if a 3 lb laptop is too much for you to carry....
 
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One man's "beautiful" is another man's butt ugly, I suppose. LOL

But seriously, it's mystifying to me that HP can so proudly proclaim that they are taking away the innovation title from Apple when they're just copying technology that Apple has had in their laptops since 2008, such as the glass trackpad.

Sure, they may have reversed engineered a Macbook and added some really fugly bling to it, but this is still a fairly "me too" machine.
 
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