Who fancies a six-core, 32GB RAM, 4TB NVME ... convertible tablet?

A couple of days back we covered Dell’s new portable workstations and now HP Ink has launched some too. One that caught The Register’s eye is the ZBook x360 G5, a convertible PC that flips to become a tablet. And does so while offering a six-core Xeon E-2186M at 2.9 GHz (bursting to 4.6 GHz(, integrated Intel UHD Graphics 630 …

[CheesyTheClown]

Will have bugs and no love from HP

For a product of this complexity to be good, it needs to reach high enough volumes thatthe user feedback on the product is good enough to solve problems. A company the size of HP will ship this, but the volume of big reports will be low due to a few reasons.

1) the user count is low

2) the typical user of this product won’t have a reliable means of reporting the bugs other than forums. This is because they work for companies who can afford these systems and would have to report through IT. IT will not fully understand or appreciate the problems or how they actually effect the user and therefore will not be able to convey the problems appropriately.

3) HP does not make the path from user to developer/QA transparent as once the product is shipped, those teams are reassigned.

As such, HPs large product portfolio is precisely why this is a bad purchase. Companies like Microsoft and Apple build a small number of systems and maintain them long term. Even with the huge specifications on these PCs, a lower end system and offloading some to the cloud is far more fiscally responsible.

Of course, people will buy them and if we read about them later, I doubt the user response will be overly positive.

I’m using a Surface Book 2 15” with a Norwegian keyboard even though I have it configured to English. This is because a LOT of negative feedback reached MS on the earlier shipments and by buying a model I was sure came off the assembly line a few months later, I was confident that many of the early issues were addressed.

This laptop from HP will not have that benefit because to produce them profitably, they will need to make probably almost all the laptops of this model they will ship or at least components like motherboards in a single batch. So, even later shipments will probably not see any real fundamental fixes.

But if you REALLY need the specs, have a blast :) You’re probably better off with a workstation PC and Remote Desktop from a good laptop though.

[Captain Hogwash]

HP Ink?

I guess the speech recognition software still has a few creases to iron out.

[Steve Foster]

Re: HP Ink?

It's deliberate. (word play on the fact that HP Inc holds what's left of the Hewlett-Packard printer business)

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Interesting times

There are some interesting machines coming out these days, which would allow me to have a mobile workstation that can do some serious heavy lifting image-processing-wise (gigapixel images and 100s of GB of video and the like), without me needing to do some serious heavy lifting. I could do this stuff remotely, but that would generally require a seriously quick internet connection. I routinely gather 250-300 GB of uncompressed 6Mpixel resolution video data, which I then reduce to a single 100+ Mpixel lunar image. It is doable on my current laptop, but it does take all night. Sending the data to another machine is not really an option, so having a much faster machine chew up the data would be great.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Interesting times

> I routinely gather 250-300 GB of uncompressed 6Mpixel resolution video data, which I then reduce to a single 100+ Mpixel lunar image.

So you're the one who keeps those NASA fake moon landing conspiracies running...

[45RPM]

That would make a very nice…

…Hackintosh

I'm not a fan of Hackintoshes in general (I do believe that Apple's developers deserve to be paid for the hard work that they put into macOS) but if Apple isn't prepared to license macOS, or to produce hardware that gets updated as diligently as it does its iOS offerings, I don't really see what choice serious users have.

So now we can turn to HP / Dell for our MacBooks and Mac Pros, Intel for Mac Mini (with the NUC), and only turn to Apple for the all-in-one iMac (where the iMac Pro fills out the high end nicely, and where the cheaper machines will be good enough for those with deep pockets to pay for it, and who don't really care that their shiny new gewgaw isn't upgradable).

Me? I'm sticking with a 2010 vintage, heavily upgraded, Mac Pro. At least until something better comes along.

[45RPM]

Re: That would make a very nice…

@Prof.

I’ve done my bit of development ninjing - including a spot of teaching the young ‘uns who come out of Uni unable to write a single line of assembly language. Not forced upon them you understand, they choose whether or not to listen to me waffling on about writing in a real low level language, or how to write object oriented code in C. I blame the universities, personally, for dumbing down their courses - the thirst for knowledge is there.

But what really gets my goat is piracy. The developers do deserve to be paid. The reverse of the coin, though, is that the users (especially the professionals, whether software engineer, mathematician, physicist, film maker etc) deserve hardware from the last few months - not hardware that is several generations out of date.

[Andrew Barr]

GDPR

Does this mean I can get rid of all these servers in my rack and fill the rack with laptops!

Will it run Crysis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh how the mighty are fallen

if you don’t buy from Cupertino.

When I used to regularly visit Cupertino then Apple had a little office across the road from the huge HP campus. Now the campus is in Apple's hands and I guess HP aren't even in Cupertino any longer.

[bombastic bob]

Re: Oh how the mighty are fallen

"HP aren't even in Cupertino any longer"

yeah probably to HP's advantage.

The REAL question: for $3k can I at least get Devuan Linux with a mate desktop pre-loaded? I wouldn't want to pay the "Win-10-nic" tax. [and Win-10-nic will, no doubt, cause their sales to be MUCH lower than what is possible with a high end platform that runs a REASONABLE operating system!!!]

Apple is based on BSD (Mach, FBSD userland) and so has THAT advantage already. 'Win-10-nic' as "competition" against that is LAUGHABLE at best.

[Christian Berger]

So how easy is it to service?

I mean if this is sold as a workstation, which means that it has to be both reliable and easy to fix/upgrade during it's 10+ year life span. Otherwise it's just a short-lived fashion statement.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be nice if they came out with something similar using the top end Ryzen CPU.

[adam payne]

When you need it, recharge ultra-fast (50% in just 30 minutes)

Recharges the battery up to 50% within 30 minutes when the system is off or in standby mode.

When you need ultra fast charge you'll probably need it when using the laptop.

[MrKrotos]

10+ year life span

Nice Joke, you do realise that nothing is built to last that long now-a-days?

Even modern cars are only built to last 6 to 7 years now

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: 10+ year life span

"Even modern cars are only built to last 6 to 7 years now"

According to a solicitor I spoke to, a car which only lasted 6 years would be regarded as not fit for purpose or of unsatisfactory quality in the UK. We have 3 cars, all in the 10-15 year old bracket, and all working as if new.

[Christian Berger]

My current main Laptop is 10+ years old

Despite of heavy abuse (including running it in a dusty environment for a while) it still shows little signs of getting old.

The point simply is, if you are a large business you'll notice if 0.01% or 10% of the laptops you bought fail within the first years. Since a failed laptop can be hugely expensive, you will stop buying from the 10% companies.

And 0.01% over 2 years simply more or less translate to a high percentage of computers still working after 10 years.

This is not like the consumer business where there is no correlation between broken devices and returns. People will return perfectly working devices, and people will use severely broken devices thinking it's supposed to be that way.

[Colemanisor]

Window 10 Requirements?

Is this an indication of how much resource is required to effectively run Windows 10 these days?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: " effectively run Windows 10 "

Hmm, how does that work? Are there any whitepapers?

[bombastic bob]

Re: " effectively run Windows 10 "

win-10-nic does not "run effectively". The only possible "system requirements" list consists of magical items and unicorns.

[John Savard]

Too much?

Although I was impressed favorably by Dell's earlier offering, something that converts to a tablet as well as being this powerful seems to be overpowered for its use case. Still, one never knows when a little extra versatility might not come in handy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows on a powerful machine

I haven't used windows properly for years, then the other week I bought a new laptop from HP (I7 8550U with 16GB and 256SSD) and can't believe how much better Windows (10) is on SSD compared to HDisk...it's become useful. It feels responsive now and only 1 crash (task bar lock up) in a week. I still prefer Linux but for general using there isn't such a big difference now. (I have Fedora 28 running from the HDisk, Windows from the SSD)

The last machine I compared Linux and Windows on (Desktop) had Win 7 and Fedora was simply better IMO, speed wise and lack of problems. (Both were on HDisk)

So, perhaps a 4 core 8 thread CPU rattling along towards 4Ghz, 16GB and PCI SSD is where the requirement for Windows 10 is at :)

[doublelayer]

Battery?

As much as I'd like one of these super-powerful laptops, any review of them should some tech-knowledgeable journalists get one hinges on the battery life. Running with such power isn't really necessary for the laptop user unless they also intend to utilize the portability aspect quite a bit. If they just need that power somewhere, they can use a desktop, and if they need that power in a variety of similar locations (say, an office building where the machine gets taken between dev lab and presentation room), they could use a reasonably powerful machine remotely accessing something more powerful. However, something like this would be optimal for someone who needs that power on the go or when network connection is lacking. That usually means that they would be operating for a significant amount of time on battery. If this is like some other capable machines, in that it runs for about an hour, it probably won't serve the needs of its major customer.

[derfer]

10 TB of total storage?

I'm sure there are fringe cases but how many people really needs 10TB of local storage on a laptop/tablet?

[doublelayer]

Re: 10 TB of total storage?

The only thing I can think of is editing a bunch of raw video, which I assume can quickly fill up storage. Other than that, probably not.

[deltamind]

HP?

Pass, I don't care if it has 128GB RAM and or 12 cores. HP is the most unreliable brand, even their mouses suck.