HP Spectre

WE ADORE POWERFUL GEAR here at MaximumPC. But we’re also suckers for sweet aesthetics. We want it all: power and looks. And for those of us not willing to go down the Apple route, the options have always been somewhat limited. Which is where HP’s latest offering slides smoothly into view, showing off its tasty styling, while not being too shy about the gorgeous tech hidden within.

Measuring a faintly ridiculous 10.4mm and weighing just under 2.5lb, this is the ideal machine to throw in your bag and take out on the road with you. Of course, when we say “throw,” we really mean slide lovingly into that leather briefcase you’ve bought to carry this gorgeous sliver of computing around with you. And with up to nine hours of battery life, it should last you your full working day, too.

There’s no room for a discrete GPU in here, but the Intel HD Graphics 520 does a good job of keeping the 1080p IPS screen bathed in pixels. It’s not a gaming monster, but it’ll handle casual titles happily. It’s great for watching movies on at the end of a hard day, too.

SAMSUNG 512GB 1 NVME SSD One of the beauties of M.2 SSDs is that they’re tiny. Not in capacity, but physically. 512GB is more than enough for normal use, and it’s fast too—in a quick bout of testing, we saw 1,664MB/s reads and 580MB/s writes.