The HP Spectre Folio Is A Leather Clad Laptop That's Luxurious

You have to feel it to believe it.

- Melissa Riofrio

The HP Spectre Folio is a sensual experience. By wrapping an incredibly thin laptop in a full-grain leather shell, HP has made a PC whose look, feel, and smell will evoke classic, covetable objects like a bomber jacket, a handbag, or a leather football or baseball. You’ll find yourself responding to the Spectre Folio in the same way—and then fighting it, as if it were wrong to react like that to a PC, even if it’s also one of the first super-efficient Amber Lake (go. pcworld.com/whlk) laptops we’ve seen.

I had the same struggle during my sneak peek at the Spectre Folio ahead of its announcement the morning of October 1 in New York City. I couldn’t take my hands off it, and it felt great on my lap, too. Yet it felt like HP broke some rule. Keep reading, though, and you’ll see that the Spectre Folio is a really interesting PC, as well as a potentially covetable object. (Read about the crack team of HP and Intel engineers who designed it [go.pcworld.com/drtm].) It’s available for preorder starting October 1 at Best Buy and HP, with a starting price of $1,300. See below for full details on prices, specs, and features.

ABOUT THE FULL-GRAIN LEATHER SHELL

A few laptops over the years have sported a leather panel or two, but the HP Spectre Folio is the first whose entire outer shell is full-grain leather. The leather is bonded around the edges, which are hand-painted to match. Hand-stitching accents the hinge in the middle of the lid.

Josephine Tan, the head of consumer notebooks for HP, said they were looking for a completely different material from metal, plastic, or carbon fiber. “Leather is warm to the touch and feels good,” Tan said, adding, “you don’t feel the heat transfer as much as you do with metal.”