The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
This Spectre x360 has the
i5-6200U, 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM, and comes with Windows 10. It's also listed on this French website, but with an availability date of 9/28:
Any wishlists? What upgrades are you looking for? I'm hoping they make the keyboard easier to read, get rid of that annoying F5-key-is-always-backlit "feature", add some USB type-C ports, at least one Thunderbolt 3 port, stock SSD uses PCIe, and pick DDR4.
Yea I am pretty sure they gonna leave everything the same. It will be the specs of that Best Buy/HP spec sheet that was around for the Win10 release. New Skylake Processors, USB-C and New Bang and Olufsen. I do not expect anything else. And if the release is in France end of September it is going to be mid-September in the USA I assume.
Skylake mobile CPUs haven't even been officially announced. The info we heard two weeks ago was a leak. On top of that, it was less than a week ago that Intel officially detailed the architecture. Seems to me that it would probably take more than a few weeks to see new models.
Maybe they've already been made available to OEM's and manufacturers, we don't really know. The leaked slide said 2015 though. Anyway, Broadwell had been delayed for too long, so Skylake being released fast is kinda a breath of fresh air.
ikjadoon, what a pleasure it is to run into you here! I hope all is well in your corner of the world.
A quick update from my end: after stalking the Yoga 2 Pro...and then the Yoga 3 Pro, for quite a few months, I set my sights on the Yoga 3 14". It seemed like the best machine for me, considering the various compromises you always have to make. I spent several months on the owners' forum at Lenovo, but grew discouraged as I followed problem threads, especially the one reporting "ghost touches" (though there appears to be a firmware fix for this issue):
Anyway, as a fallback option I had my eye for some time on the x360 and took the plunge about a month ago. It was the right decision.
To touch on a few of your questions:
(1) F5 light: some time ago HP issued a BIOS update so that light can be toggled on or off -- not a concern any more
(2) Silver keyboard keys: I fell completely in love with the beautiful black (with translucent underside) keys on my Samsung Series 7 NP700Z5C. When the next gen model came out with silver keys I couldn't believe how...discouraged...I was. The silver keys on the x360 were probably the biggest con for me. HOWEVER, several weeks later I have to say it's become a complete non-issue: in good lighting, the keys are easy to read, and with the backlight on in the dark, they are just as easy. I'd still prefer black keys but it's not as bad as I first thought.
(3) SSD/RAM: I'm not the speed-demon you may be, so for me the stock RAM is more than fine. I admittedly picked up a 500GB M.2 SSD to replace the stock 256GB, but it benchmarks at ~500MB/s for both read & write, which is also more than I need. So I'd say that having blinding speed sounds great on paper, but if you can't see the difference with the naked eye then it's mostly good for bragging rights (which I totally get).
Finally for me the type-C and Thunderbolt ports also sound wonderful on paper, but the vast majority of the time, data transfer for me is via wifi. I *rarely* attach a peripheral or stick in a thumb drive (maybe once or twice a week) and plain old USB 3.0 does the trick for me!
I have done 0 research on Skylake, so perhaps my only minor regret is that battery life might be noticeably better than the 5500U Broadwell, but I'm sure I can live with that too.
Oh, I should mention having an active pen is pretty useful -- I picked up the Dell stylus and it works well. Didn't think I'd do much penning but it's turned out to be a nice surprise!
HP likes to play the marketing game and confuse people by advertising the x360 with 6th gen Core CPUs.
To them, 6th gen means the i5-5200U or i7-5500U, because they are counting the Core 2 as a generation of core CPUs. That in turn makes Broadwell technically 6th gen and skylake 7th gen.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
