When HP unveiled the Envy 14 Spectre this past January, they offered up something that had been missing from the HP line in the past couple of years: a truly premium notebook. With the introduction of the 13-inch, aluminum-shelled Envy Spectre XT, what was once a single product is primed to become a line of high-end products.
Where the original Spectre costs $1400, the Spectre XT starts at $1000. And while the original Spectre only has the Sandy Bridge CPU (for now, at least), the Spectre XT will come equipped with the third-generation Ivy Bridge core processors (whether or not it'll include a Core i7 processor remains to be seen).
Weighing three pounds with a thickness of 14.5-millimeters, and coming standard with four gigabytes of RAM and 128 GB of SSD storage, the Spectre XT has eight hours of battery life and certainly has the MacBook air in its crosshairs.
But the Spectre XT isn't the only new offering. HP also has a quartet of laptops which they bill as ultrabooks and "sleekbooks" (ugh), which come in 14 and 15.6-inch sizes and are all 19.8-millimeters thick. The difference between the ultrabook and the ughbooksleekbook is that the former will be powered by second and third-generation Intel Core processors, and the latter by AMD's APUs. All-day battery life, four gigs of RAM and 1366x768 pixel screens are common across all models.
As for pricing and availability, the Spectre XT will be available on June 8 for the aforementioned $1000 dollars, the 14 and 15.6-inch ultrabooks will be available starting today for $750 and $800, respectively. The 14-inch ughbook sleekbook will also be available today starting at $700, but the 15.6-inch sleekbook won't hit shelves until June 20 with a $600 pricetag. [HP]