HP Spectre Foldable

The HP Spectre Fold is an intriguing product given how it’s a laptop, tablet and desktop. Despite its multiple functions, its exorbitant asking price and so-so performance make it difficult to recommend for most people. But if you’re a tech enthusiast with money to spare, the HP Spectre Fold might be worth considering.

The HP Spectre Foldable is the best foldable yet, but the category is still in its infancy. It has great build quality and a nice display, but this laptop, which costs $5,000, has a webcam that can barely be used in portrait mode and a kickstand that only supports holding the device one way.

So yeah, about that $5,000. The price feels like it’s based on nothing at all, like a number an executive picked out of the air during a corporate retreat. “Well, if someone will pay $3,500 for a folding Asus, they’ll surely pay more for an HP, right?” And I guess they will. Tech bro billionaires, trust fund influencers, and oil barons alike all now have a sky’s-the-limit computer that can’t help but turn heads, an ambitious and amazing engineering feat with nowhere to go.

The Spectre Fold is HP's luxurious entrant into the foldable PC market, and it's quite the flexible masterpiece, but the obsolete internals are a bummer.

The HP Spectre Foldable PC is fun to show off, but it's hard to recommend due to underwhelming performance, potentially fragile hardware, and too many quirks in this proof-of-concept 3-in-1.

Overall, though, this still feels like a "we're trying to figure out what these should look and act like" foray into a nascent category. I think it needs another round of design tweaks before the products feel real. And I still can't help but wish these foldable laptops were portable monitors instead, because bigger portable monitors without the carry bulk are a good thing.