The design is completely original and refreshing, so no one’s going to tell you the design is derivative of all the aluminum clad laptops you see these days. There’s even a slick new version of the HP logo on the lid.
That said, while the design is eye-catching, it’s undeniably blingy and if you’re not sold on the coppery-gold finish, HP doesn’t have a sober alternative for you. Ergo, it’s not for everyone. Plus it’s a fingerprint magnet, and catches every speck of dust and fingerprint dirt in a two kilometer radius. I’m kidding, but you get the picture. With its slim dimensions, the obvious comparison is with the Core-M3 powered Apple MacBook, but the Spectre 13 really takes the portability of these dimensions and marries it with stuff found on the MacBook Air - a full sized keyboard, Intel’s more powerful Core i5 and i7 processors and a 13.3-inch full HD display.

The variant I tested (Rs. 1,39,990) was no pushover, which I chalk up to the sixth-generation Intel Core i7 chip and the 8GB of RAM it ships with. Everyday tasks are a breeze and the combo makes short work of the large number of browser tabs I usually work with. 512GB SSD storage is nice, but expected at this price point. Understand this, the Spectre is by no means a gaming machine, but it’s more than capable of pretty much anything else you’d want to throw at it. It doesn’t break a sweat, either. The 13.3-inch display on the Spectre is a full HD number, and while it wont break any pixel density records, it’s plenty sharp for the screen size and is bright to boot. The design of the hinge doesn’t allow the screen to tilt back a lot, which was bit of an issue, and while the screen has Gorilla Glass 4 for protection, the display isn’t a touchscreen, which is a bit odd for a top-end Windows 10 laptop.
Redemption is by way of an excellent backlit keyboard with keys that have real travel, which is good for a laptop this slim. The smooth glass touchpad has plenty of room and a great feel when clicking.

The slim profile means HP forgoes the full-sized USB ports in favor of USB-C for wired connectivity, but you get three ports where the MacBook has just the one. You can recharge with the bundled adapter through any of the ports, and two of the three ports support the Thunderbolt standard to push external 4K monitors.
Let’s face facts, USB-C is still new on PCs so if you want to use Ethernet, VGA, HDMI or a regular USB port, you’re going to carry along the additional USB-C dongles for each (HP includes these four adapters in the box).
What’s Bad? In pursuit of the "thinnest laptop” title, HP has managed to steer clear of some compromises, not all. Despite packing in Bang & Olufsen branded speakers, audio is tinny and treble heavy.
As I mentioned, no touchscreen is a bummer but I’m more disappointed with the average battery life on the Spectre 13. HP claims 9 hours and 45 minutes, I got between 5 and 6 on a daily-use basis. If you’re at a desk all day, this wont matter, but if you’re out and about, the shiny new laptop may die on you towards the end of your work day.

Of course, the sticker shock means that only those with deep pockets are going to consider this laptop, and while I’m not going to be able to justify dropping a lakh and forty grand on this (there’s a Core i5 variant for Rs. 99,990), you get plenty for your money. HP’s design and engineering has ticked off a lot of checkboxes with the Spectre 13 – sleek design, great keyboard, good display and no-compromise performance. The Spectre 13 is a Palo Alto lightweight that can go head-to-head with Apple and win some rounds against the Cupertino heavyweights.

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More importantly, it’s a solid daily computer and one of the best we’ll see in the Windows camp this year, if your budget can stretch that far.
(Tushar Kanwar is a technology columnist and commentator and has been contributing for the past 15 years to India’s leading newspapers and magazines. He can be reached on Twitter: @2shar.)
When you innocently say the words "integrated graphics” to those who play PC games, don’t expect a positive response. Or for them to not laugh in your face. Graphics processor units (GPUs) that are combined with central processing units (CPUs), often called iGPUs, have a bad reputation, especially when compared with standalone GPU beasts, like Nvidia’s latest, $700 Geforce GTX 1080. iGPUs are usually found in portable computers and generally aren’t powerful enough to handle the latest games. But Intel is making moves to redefine the expectations surrounding iGPUs and its most up to date offering aims to back up its claims.

This May, Intel has demonstrated how far their iGPUs have come by releasing the newest and fastest generation of their Next Unit of Computing, or NUC. Dubbed Skull Canyon, the box is only eight inches wide, four inches deep, and a little under an inch tall, and is home to a full size i7 quad core processor. Not limited by the delicate power requirements of a laptop battery, the processor can go full bore to rival speeds found in traditional desktop PCs when needed."Four and half years ago now, Intel was doing desktop motherboards,” said Bruce Patterson, marketing manager at Intel. "We challenged our engineering team with almost a science project: what was the smallest motherboard you could create that had Intel Core processor on it? That was the genesis for NUC.”

The magic in the NUC is built into the processor: the Intel Iris Pro 580. It is the most equipped integrated graphics chip from Intel yet. It’s the sequel to the Iris Pro Graphics 6200. It boasts way more computing units and has dedicated memory that can be used just for graphics processing—minimizing the need to use slower, shared memory with the CPU.Intel claims that iGPUs of this caliber can replace the need for low end video cards for many mainstream gamers.I understand if I wanted the ability to game without the huge footprint, I could get a console. If I wanted to have a small video player, the Apple TV and other media players were options. But nothing could perform the productivity tasks and has the flexibility of a full PC while maintaining a small desk footprint.Having the option of not lugging my giant tower—which I’ve always been terrified of dropping— around to LAN parties and maintaining performance beyond a very high end laptop was also really attractive to me.

The Skull Canyon NUC doesn’t necessarily change the landscape for big budget, blockbuster releases which bring the best video cards to their knees, but are those really what the vast majority of people play on a daily basis? The top games currently on Steam are Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2. When I wrote this, that counted for over 1.5 million players.From my experience with the computer, the games that see the most amount of play worked perfectly. Frame rates exceeded a hundred per second on CS:GO and TF2.Combined with the two M.2 solid state drive connections and up to 32gigs of DDR4 RAM, this thing boasts the same power you’d find in a full-sized desktop tower. Except for the obvious exception: the lack of a dedicated GPU.

But that is becoming less of a problem as developers are shifting their focus to the lower powered set-ups. I spoke to Blizzard, creators of the new arena shooter Overwatch, which hit 7 million players in its first week."Initially when we started Overwatch, our main goal was to ensure that everyone at recommended spec or higher running at high settings would get 60 frames per second (FPS),” said John Lafleur, one of the technical directors who worked on Overwatch. "That left us a lot of headroom for lower-end systems.”Blizzard has always had a history of supporting every type of PC setup. Overwatch certainly continued this trend."I actually have a NUC at home,” said Lafleur. "I brought it in and we spent a lot of time looking at a wide variety of systems. We wanted to support as much as graphics hardware as we could. We didn’t really think we could go as low as we could, but we ended up supporting a decent amount of the Intel hardware out there.”

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Overwatch was a completely playable 30+ FPS and MOBAs like League of Legends and Dota 2 ran smoothly and reliably on the the Skull Canyon.A negative of the entire setup is the cost. Even after you purchase the tiny computer, you still need to pick up RAM and a solid state hard drive. That’s going to set you back around $1,000 including the NUC, more in Canada where I am. You can purchase a console or a well budgeted, but much larger, PC with a much more powerful dedicated GPU for that price, or less.Today’s mid-range CPUs are more than enough for mainstream games, meaning an effective graphics processor gives you much more bang for buck.
My suggestion for Intel would be to follow a trend in the r/buildapc subreddit: using a low end CPU combined with high-end graphics equipment. If the chip’s architecture allowed for a lower end CPU to be combined with the Iris Pro graphics, like a dual core i3 or i5, I think you’d see very similar performance for a lower entry point.

The Skull Canyon NUC was already in development when more chips with the Iris Pro 580, such as the i5-6685R, were released. Rian Lawson, product review manager at Intel, told me over email they could not include it in the NUC, but there was hope for what would come next."Assuming market demand exists as we anticipate, we would look to continue to offer similar products in the future and will continue to listen to customer feedback,” said Lawson.We’re on the verge of built-in graphics processors becoming a reliable alternative to expensive graphics cards for most gamers. Even now, millions of Overwatch, Counter-Strike, and League of Legends players can get by without a discrete GPU.

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