HP’s 15-inch Spectre x360 gets upgraded with smaller bezels and a good trackpad

Last year, HP overhauled the 13-inch Spectre x360 convertible laptop with some much-needed improvements: a slimmed-down design, reduced bezels, and a functional trackpad. At CES 2020, the company is bringing those same improvements to the larger 15-inch model, too.

Much like last year’s Spectre x360 13, the differences between the old x360 15 and the new one are drastic: HP has massively reduced the bezels on the 2020 model, resulting in a device that’s 13 percent smaller than the previous generation. Plus, despite the vastly smaller size, HP is still offering the excellent-looking OLED screen options it introduced last year.

Also improved (thankfully) is the trackpad, which, like HP’s other recent laptops, uses Windows Precision Drivers and is therefore no longer terrible to use. The fact that this is still a notable change in the year 2020 speaks volumes.

The specs are also getting a boost: the new Spectre x360 15 can be configured with up to Intel’s 10th Gen six-core Core i7 processor (although that comes from Intel’s 14nm Comet Lake lineup, not the company’s newer 10nm Ice Lake line) along with the latest discrete Nvidia GPUs.

The rest of the design is virtually unchanged: there are still two Thunderbolt 3 ports, a USB-A port, and an HDMI port. There’s also a physical webcam kill-switch as well as a separate number pad on the keyboard. Between the new trackpad and the slimmed-down design, the upgraded Spectre x360 15 is effectively just a 15-inch version of the 13-inch model in nearly every respect — which is a good thing. There’s no price or release date yet, but HP will presumably announce those in the coming weeks.