FEBRUARY 2020 PCWorld 43the consumer.
Which is right? Again, Dell (and others
who do the same, such as Apple) aren’t doing
it to anger you. They’re taking that space from
the M.2 slot and using it for, say, better
cooling, or shrinking the motherboard.
We, however, like to think long-term.
While 512GB seems like more than anyone
will ever need today, in three years when you
pick up a 4TB SSD for $25 on Black Friday,
you (or some authorized person) can crack
open the Spectre x360 13t and replace the
512GB one that the HP came with. Dell’s SSD
will be there for eternity.
We should also mention that the Intel
Optane hybrid drive option is available only
on the HP. There are times when Intel’s fancy
new storage is a huge advantage,
and times when it doesn’t help—
you can read more on that here in
our Optane H10 review (go.
pcworld.com/oh10).
We suspect the Optane
hybrid SSD greatly contributes to
just how crazy-fast the HP is at
booting. You can see this
captured on slow-motion film in
the video attached to this story.
Note: Our video was shot at a
high frame rate, so it’ll appear
these laptops are cold-booting
slowly. In real time, the HP boots
in about 8 seconds, while the Dell
boots in about 13. The HP is so
fast, it gets to the desktop using Windows
Hello facial recognition before the Dell even
hits the login screen prompt.
Both laptops include microSD slots,
which let you add cheap 1TB memory cards
for additional storage. We tested both and
found the card readers performed about the
same, with read speeds in the 77MB range
and write speeds in the 70MB range.
Winner: HP Spectre x360 13tSIZE AND WEIGHT
Both laptops are pretty darn close in size.
While it’s a little difficult to tell from the
perspective in the picture above, the Spectre
x360 13t is basically about a half-inch wider,
while the XPS 13 2-in-1 is about a half-inchThe Spectre x360 13t is slightly wider, while the XPS 13 2-in-1 is
slightly deeper. That’s no surprise as the Dell has a 16:10 aspect
ratio, while the HP’s screen is 16:9.