It was hard not to shed a tear when MediaWorkstation disappeared, taking its wild six-screen a-X2P workstation laptop with it.
The company’s workstation laptop promised to be an incredible, and ridiculous, powerhouse, with two AMD EPYC Genoa Zen 4 CPUs, two full-size GPUs, up to 3TB DDR5 RAM, one M.2 NVMe boost SSD, and five storage drives.
But if you still have a yearning to own a laptop with half a dozen screens attached to it, then we have good news.
Choice of screen resolutions
Acme Portable’s Megapac L3, the successor to the company’s FlexPAC III, is available to buy and while it only – only! – comes with three 24-inch displays, it can be combined with the company’s ML3 triple display accessory, for a grand total of six screens.
If you’re noticing similarities between this system and the discontinued a-X2P beast, it’s because MediaWorkstation was once a reseller for Acme Portable and had been looking to push the limits of what could be achieved with the platform.
The Megapac L3’s 3x 23.8-inch displays come in a choice of resolutions – UHD (3840×2160) with up to 800 nits brightness, Full HD (1920×1080) with up to 1000 nits, or WUXGA (1920×1200) with 1000 nits, all featuring an optional touchscreen.
It’s powered by a single/dual Intel Xeon, Intel Core, AMD Ryzen or AMD EPYC CPU, with up to 1TB DDR4 RAM and up to 150TB storage. There are seven expansion slots, and it comes with an 850W auto-switching power supply, although there are 1000W or 1200W PSU’s available.
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The dimensions for the three screen Megapac L3 are 16.39-inches high, 22.96-inches wide and 11.98-inches deep, with a weight of 52.82 lbs. It comes with a 105-key keyboard with an integrated touchpad, padded rolling transit case, and can be customized to military specifications.
There’s no pricing available on the website, but if you want the Megapac L3, with three or six screens, you can contact them with your requirements.
The idea behind convertible, or 2-in-1 PCs, has remained the same over the last decade: Why buy a tablet when your laptop can fold a full 360 degrees, allowing you to use it as a large slate, or a screen propped up without a keyboard in the way? Most PC makers have moved on from the concept entirely, but HP remains one of the holdouts. While Windows never became the tablet-friendly platform Microsoft envisioned, there’s still plenty of value in having a machine that can transform to suit your needs.
That was my takeaway two years ago when I tested HP’s 16-inch Spectre x360, and now the company has returned with a smaller model, the Spectre x360 14. It features Intel’s latest CPUs with AI-accelerating NPUs (neural processing units), faster Intel Arc graphics and a beautiful 2.8K OLED display. And best of all, it’s still usable as a tablet, unlike its larger sibling.
HP
The HP Spectre x360 14 has everything you’d want in a 14-inch convertible notebook. It’s fast, features a gorgeous screen and can rotate to suit your needs.
Even if you never plan to twist its screen around, though, the HP Spectre x360 14 is still an attractive premium laptop. For some, it may also serve as a more traditional alternative to Dell’s new XPS 14, which has an invisible trackpad and a capacitive function row. While that computer looks great, getting used to its less conventional features takes some time. The Spectre x360 14, on the other hand, is both attractive and familiar to anyone who’s ever used a laptop. (Its rotating screen takes just 10 seconds to figure out for the first time, while Dell’s invisible trackpad still tripped me up hours after I started testing it.)
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
Design and hardware
That familiarity could also be seen as a shortcoming of HP’s. The Spectre x360 14 has everything you expect to see in a premium laptop today: A sleek metal case, a gorgeous screen with ultra-thin bezels and a luxuriously large trackpad with haptic feedback. But really, it doesn’t look that much different from the 13-inch Spectre x360 I reviewed in 2019. It would be nice to see HP take a few major design leaps, but on the other hand, I can’t blame the company for sticking with a winning design.
With the Spectre x360 14, HP focused on minor updates. It has a wide 14-inch screen with a 16:10 aspect ratio, compared to the previous model’s 13.5-inch display that was a squarish 3:2. Its trackpad offers configurable haptic feedback and is 19 percent larger than before, so much so that it completely dominates the palm area. HP stuck with its wonderfully responsive keyboard, but its key caps are 12 percent larger, making them easier to hit. And to simplify functionality a bit, HP unified the power button and fingerprint sensor (the laptop also supports Windows Hello facial biometrics).
The port situation hasn’t changed. There are two USB-C connections along the right rear (including one on its unique chopped corner), as well as a drop-down USB Type-A port on the left and a headphone jack on the corner. As usual, it would have been nice to see some sort of card reader built in, especially for a machine aimed at creative professionals.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
The Spectre x360 14 may look very similar to its siblings, but HP says it’s been tweaked significantly under the hood. It now supports 28-watt Intel Core Ultra CPUs, instead of the previous 14-watt options, and offers 10 percent more airflow than before. The company also managed to engineer those improvements without increasing the machine’s 17 millimeter height. At 3.2 pounds, it’s a bit more portable than the 3.5-pound MacBook Pro 14-inch.
The Spectre’s 9-megapixel webcam is also a major upgrade from the previous 5MP option. The new sensor offers hardware-enabled low light adjustment thanks to quad-binning, the process of taking data from four pixels and combining them into one. That allows cameras with smaller pixels to let in more light, resulting in a brighter overall picture. During Google Meet and Zoom calls, the webcam delivered a sharp picture with bright and bold colors. It looked almost like a mirrorless camera once I enabled Windows Studio Effects background blur, though the picture occasionally looked overexposed in direct sunlight.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
Video chats also sounded great through the laptop’s quad-speaker array, which consists of two upward firing tweeters along the keyboard and two woofers along the front. There’s not much low-end (especially compared to Apple’s MacBook Pro speakers), but voices and music sound surprisingly clear. The speakers can also get pretty loud without distortion, which is impressive for such a thin system.
While the laptop has an NPU-equipped processor, which powers features in Paint, ClipChamp and Windows Studio Effects, the Spectre x360 14 isn’t technically an “AI PC” under Intel and Microsoft’s definition. The reason? It doesn’t have a dedicated button for Windows Copilot. Personally, though, I haven’t found that key to be very useful on the XPS 14 and 16. Triggering Copilot from the taskbar or Windows sidebar isn’t very difficult, and it’s certainly not onerous enough to warrant giving up a spot on the keyboard.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
In use
The HP Spectre x360 14 I reviewed performed similarly to other machines we’ve tested with Intel’s Core Ultra 7 155H chip. It’s fast and relatively efficient, especially compared to systems from two years ago. My review unit, which came with 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD, was 30 percent faster in the PCMark 10 benchmark compared to the Spectre x360 16 from 2022 (6,493 points, up from 4,785 points). This year’s Spectre also scored 78 percent higher in the Cinebench R23 multi-core benchmark, a testament to the improvements Intel has made since its 11th-gen CPUs.
Geekbench 6 CPU
PCMark 10
Cinebench R23
3DMark Wildlife Extreme
HP Spectre x360 14 (Intel Core Ultra 7, 2023)
2,273/11,735
6,493
1,651/8,481
5,952
ASUS ZenBook 14 OLED (Intel Core Ultra 7, 2023)
2,240/10,298
6,170
1,599/7,569
4,827
Apple MacBook Pro 14-inch (Apple M3, 2023)
3142/11,902
N/A
1,932/10,159
8,139
HP Spectre x360 16 (Intel i7-11390H, 2022)
N/A
4,785
1,515/3,722
N/A
The most noticeable upgrade for the Spectre x360 isn’t AI smarts; it’s Intel’s Arc graphics, which are dramatically faster than Intel’s older integrated graphics. In 3DMark’s TimeSpy Extreme benchmark, it almost kept up with NVIDIA’s RTX 3050 in the x360 16 (1,435 points compared to 1,730). That’s impressive for a machine that’s far slimmer and lighter. Sure, it’s no gaming rig, but I was still able to play Halo Infinite in 1080p at around 30 fps. I’m sure it would handle smaller indie titles just fine.
Thanks to the wealth of RAM and Intel’s Core Ultra chip, my review model tackled everything I threw at it without any noticeable slowdown. During a typical workday, I juggle dozens of browser tabs, photo editing apps, YouTube streams, video chats, Slack and Evernote. The Spectre x360’s OLED display also made everything look fantastic, even if I was just staring at words on a news site. It supports a variable refresh rate up to 120Hz, so scrolling through documents and sites was very smooth.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
When I first tested a Spectre x360 five years ago, I immediately fell in love with its keyboard. Typing felt incredibly satisfying, thanks to a healthy amount of key travel and feedback. It was one of those rare designs that almost felt like it was begging me to use it, like a finely tuned piano that’s simply urging you to play. Thankfully, HP didn’t mess with any of that keyboard magic: The large new key caps are even more comfortable to use, and the actual typing experience is as great as ever.
I have a few complaints about the Spectre x360’s new trackpad though. It’s smooth and accurate for swiping, and its haptic feedback is indiscernible from a trackpad that physically depresses. But HP’s palm rejection software feels sloppy — occasionally, while typing up a storm, my hand would hit the trackpad and push the cursor to select another window. It happened often enough that it became a creativity flow killer. I’m hoping this is something HP can sort out with a software update eventually.
As a convertible notebook, the Spectre x360 14 is far more useful than the 16-inch model. A gentle push on the screen is all it takes to flip it around the keyboard — it becomes a tablet when it’s fully turned around, or you can stop that process halfway and flip the Spectre around for its “tent” mode. The 14-inch x360 is better at being a slate, simply because it’s lighter and easier to hold with one hand (though you’ll probably want to prop it on your lap for longer sessions).
Rotating the screen was also less cumbersome, since the display was far less wide. I used the tent formation to watch YouTube videos in bed, while on the couch I occasionally folded the keyboard behind the Spectre, so I could use it like a large touchscreen with a stand. I appreciate the versatility of 2-in-1 convertibles more than the flexible OLED screens we’re seeing on new machines. It’s cheaper to implement, and for my purposes, convertibles are simply more pragmatic.
The Spectre x360’s major flaw is battery life: It lasted five hours and ten minutes in the PCMark 10 Modern Office test, whereas the ZenBook 14 OLED pushed through for 12 hours and 43 minutes. There’s a cost for keeping its frame so thin, after all. During real-world testing, it would typically need to charge around six hours into my workday.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
Pricing and the competition
The Spectre x360 14 is a decent deal for a high-end convertible, starting at $1,450 with an intel Core Ultra 5 125H, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. At the time of writing, that configuration has been discounted by $300, which is an even better value. (Credit to HP for not offering a meager 8GB RAM option, which would only lead to headaches for most users.) For $1,900, you can bump up to a Core Ultra 7 155H chip, 32GB of RAM and a 2TB SSD.
Your options are somewhat limited if you’re looking for other upper-tier convertible laptops. Dell’s XPS 13 2-in-1 is still running older 12th-gen Intel chips, and you’ll have to look to the middle-range Inspiron and Latitude lines for more modern options. We’re also still waiting to see Lenovo’s Yoga lineup get upgraded to newer Intel chips. And we haven’t tested Samsung’s Galaxy Book4 360, but it doesn’t have the style of HP’s design.
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop Studio 2 is also technically a convertible (its screen pulls forward, instead of flipping around), but it starts at $1,900. For that price, you’re better off going for the x360 14’s beefier hardware, instead of the Surface’s unique screen.
Photo by Devindra Hardawar/Engadget
Wrap-up
It’s unclear how much life is left in the convertible PC format, but I wouldn’t be surprised if HP ends up being one of the last companies still giving it a shot. The Spectre x360 14 is one of the best laptops you can buy today — the fact that it can also be flipped around in multiple orientations is just icing on the cake.
Gwinnett County police are still looking for the two people accused of attacking Michael Thomas at the Grove Point Apartments in Norcross.
On Tuesday, the Gwinnett County Police Department said that on September 9, two guys who were not known to them approached the victim in the parking lot of the Grove Point Apartment Homes in Norcross. During the fight, he was attacked and shot two times.
FOX 5 Atlanta found out that the victim was Michael Thomas, who lives in an apartment complex. Thomas said the trouble started when he was sitting on his porch and saw three young guys he didn’t know hanging around the buildings.
Thomas said he asked them to move away from the front of the breezeway. One of them reportedly said, “Okay, but you don’t know who you’re talking to.” Thomas said that when he took out his trash a little later, the young guys met him in the parking lot.
“He tried to shoot me twice in the head, but both times the shots hit the rock and bounced away. The third person with them started running away. He must not have known that was going to happen, because he turned around and shot me twice in the right leg,” he said.
Gwinnett County police confirmed what witnesses told FOX 5: that one of the suspects hit Thomas in the head with a gun before he was shot.
Thomas was taken to the hospital right away, where he had surgery. This past Sunday, he was able to go home again. He has to use a walker now, and a bullet is still stuck in his leg. Thomas told FOX 5: “You won’t expect something like that to happen just because you asked someone to move out of the way.”
Thomas said that he wants the suspects to be found and brought to justice so that no one else in the complex has to go through what he did.
“All I can do is thank God that I’m living. “I can still get up, breathe, and move around, but for me and my wife, the most important thing is to be here for our kids,” he said.
Tuesday, Gwinnett County police shared video from a doorbell camera that showed the two possible attackers going around the complex. They did this to try to figure out who they were. Police said that both were Black men and that one was big and had dreadlocks, while the other was skinny and had a short hair. On the night of the crime, the bigger man was wearing blue shorts and a black shirt. The other man was wearing a black jacket, blue pants, and green underwear. Witnesses told FOX 5 that they are young people who “constantly asked for money around the complex.”
Detectives in Gwinnett County ask anyone who knows anything about the suspects or what happened to call them at (770) 513-5300. Call Crime Stoppers at (404) 577-TIPS (8477) if you want to stay private. There is a cash prize for information that leads to an arrest or charge.