HP's 0.41 inch-thick Spectre laptop outperforms the MacBook but trails on battery life, and like MacBook makes too many sacrificies for thinness
As laptops go on extreme diets, you need to ask yourself what you're willing to sacrifice in ports, power and battery life
Context & Ripple Effects
HP's April launch of the 10.4mm Spectre with an i7 CPU was pitched as a Windows answer to Apple's thinness play, and the WSJ verdict is now in: it beats the MacBook on performance but loses on battery life. That mirrors the criticism Apple itself absorbed when the MacBook's single-port, performance-compromised design landed a year earlier.
The trade-off framing is not unique to these two: Samsung's Notebook 9 line pushed thin-and-light to a 1.85lb extreme earlier this year, so the premium ultraportable market has become a contest over which sacrifice — ports, power, or battery — each vendor asks buyers to accept.
First-order effects
- Premium laptop buyers comparing the Spectre and MacBook now face an explicit trade-off matrix — HP wins on performance, Apple on battery life — rather than a clear category winner.
- HP's $1,169 starting price puts the Spectre directly against the MacBook, making the port-and-battery compromises the deciding factors for that exact buyer.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's Notebook 9 weight push forces both HP and Apple to defend their own compromise choices, since reviewers are now scoring thinness against what it costs in battery and connectivity.
- HP's own Spectre x360, praised for balancing thin design with long battery life, becomes the internal counterargument to the thinner-at-any-cost Spectre — pressuring HP to keep a balanced option in the lineup.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the ultraportable segment splits into two camps — extreme-thin machines that shed ports and runtime versus balanced designs — with battery life and connectivity becoming the premium differentiators as thinness itself stops being novel.
- Review consensus that every thin laptop 'makes too many sacrifices' points toward buyer fatigue with the thinness race, rewarding vendors who restore ports and battery without giving up the slim chassis.
The trend: The premium laptop market is racing toward ever-thinner chassis while trading away ports, power and battery life, turning those sacrifices into the new competitive battleground.