HP Spectre x360 review: best premium Windows laptop of 2016 with thin, light design and great battery life, but no SD card slot and uneven keyboard backlight
it goes full circle ... and beyond :) http://twitter.com/... Sean Hollister / @starfire2258 : @Techmeme also no HDMI port, no meaningful increase in speed or battery life http://www.cnet.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
HP has spent 2016 chasing thinness at the expense of connectivity: June's 0.41-inch-thick Spectre was already flagged by reviewers for outperforming the MacBook while making too many sacrifices to get there. The Spectre x360 is the payoff of that strategy — The Verge crowns it the best premium Windows laptop of 2016 on design and battery life, while still docking it for the missing SD card slot, no HDMI port, and no meaningful speed gains over its predecessor.
The competitive frame matters: a month earlier Ars Technica reviewed the Lenovo Yoga 910, which undercuts the Spectre x360 on bezel-slim display but skips Thunderbolt 3 and costs more. And the port-stripping pattern doesn't end here — the Surface Laptop 2 two years later ships with the same no-USB-C, no-SD-card compromises.
First-order effects
- Buyers picking between the Spectre x360 and Lenovo's Yoga 910 face a direct trade: HP wins on price, battery life, and Thunderbolt 3, while Lenovo counters with a sharper 4K display and thinner bezels.
- Owners of the new Spectre x360 immediately need adapters for SD cards and HDMI — the same dongle tax reviewers attached to HP's mid-year Spectre and Apple's MacBook.
Second-order effects
- Port selection becomes a differentiator in premium reviews rather than a footnote: when the 2019 Spectre x360 13 arrives with 'nice port selection,' HP is visibly walking back exactly the omissions this 2016 review flagged.
Third-order effects
- If the cycle holds — strip ports for thinness, absorb reviewer criticism, restore them years later — port count hardens into a standard scoring criterion for premium laptops, and vendors that repeat the Surface Laptop 2's omission pattern pay for it in review scores even when design and performance excel.
The trend: Premium Windows laptops are oscillating between thinness-driven port removal and a slow restoration of connectivity, with reviews turning port selection into a durable purchase criterion.