HP upgrades its Spectre X360 and Pavilion X2 laptops with larger screens
Bigger is better, right? — At least, that seems to be what HP believes, as the PC manufacturer announced at CES 2016 larger versions of both its Spectre X360 and Pavilion X2 products, due out in February.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Pavilion X2 only arrived months earlier as a small budget detachable — HP's $299 USB-C Pavilion x2 from summer 2015 — so the February upsizing of both lines at CES 2016 reads as HP testing whether its convertible formulas scale beyond their original sizes.
The later coverage confirms they did: HP went on to ship a 15-inch Spectre x360 with discrete GPUs (the 2018 Spectre x360 15), then a 3:2-aspect 14-inch Spectre x360 in 2020, and a 16-inch 2-in-1 by 2021 — making this CES announcement an early data point in the line's steady climb up the size ladder.
First-order effects
- Buyers of both lines get bigger-screen options when the new models ship in February, with the Spectre X360 moving upmarket in size and the budget Pavilion X2 gaining a larger detachable variant.
- HP's CES slate forces a choice on shoppers who had treated the X360 as a compact 2-in-1: portability or screen real estate, since the enlarged chassis breaks the original footprint.
Second-order effects
- Larger panels and chassis give HP room to layer in higher-priced configurations on the Spectre line — a path the coverage bears out as later refreshes climbed from roughly $1,099 to $1,639-plus starting prices across the 13- to 16-inch range.
- Rival PC makers showing convertibles at CES face pressure to match the expanded size tiers rather than compete only within the standard 13-inch format HP is leaving behind.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the premium convertible market fragments into distinct size segments — 13, 14, 15, and 16 inches — instead of converging on one canonical 2-in-1, with each tier carrying its own price floor.
- Screen size becomes the main annual differentiator for mature laptop lines whose internals track Intel's CPU cadence anyway, shifting marketing competition toward display dimensions and aspect ratios.
The trend: Premium Windows convertibles are expanding upward from a 13-inch baseline into a multi-size portfolio, with HP's Spectre line leading the march toward 14-, 15-, and eventually 16-inch 2-in-1s.