HP Elite Slice | Hacker News Reader

HP Elite Slice

www8.hp.com

89 pointsyitchelle79 comments

This is 2016 https://www.engadget.com/2016/09/01/hp-elite-slice-modular-p... what's the news?

I understand they want to make it look clean, but they show no cords at all in most of the pictures. There's also no mention of battery life, so it must be powered.

If they're going to lie about the cords, what else are they lying about? Also $699?? WTF?

Defining "lying" as "doesn't have cords in promo images" is really really weird. You don't see too many Dell ads with cords flying down to their towers either.

There's a picture of a guy using it (with zero cords) to take a conference call, which goes a bit beyond a flattering studio photo. It allegedly depicts real world use.

Towers tend to hide cords behind them. This is shown on a desk next to a monitor, as if it is being used with the monitor. It is photographed at an angle that would show cords if they were present. It looks ridiculous at least.

The monitor shown may be an All-in-One, but then what is the computer doing there?

You don't see it in iMac marketing photos, either, where the screen is illuminated.

At first I disagreed with you, but when I took another look at the images I realized that it does seem a bit dishonest to not show any cables, especially when the images are designed to showcase how "sleek" it is. There's no way a real-life setup would look like what this page is trying to sell.

It's worth noting that the last image on the page has a cable and make the computer look much less sleek - and that's just one cable, you'll probably need power, display, mouse/keyboard, etc.

This is interesting because it shows no wires is desirable.

You could build an almost wireless box - just a little power lead - if you built in whdi or wigig into your little desktop unit but for now tat would push the price up too much. I hope it happens one day.

You can always drill holes to your desk and use tight L-shaped connectors ;-)

While true, seeing as everyone else also seems to do it (Dell, Apple, Lenovo have very similar photos although admittedly not always with a human user in the photos) it seems slightly odd to complain about what are fairly obviously promotional images?

It's odd to complain about false advertising? I've seen computer manufactures avoid showing cables by hiding them, but the images on this website seem to imply that it operates cordlessly.

I love the concept, but it's missing what's in my opinion the component that would benefit most from modularity: dedicated graphics.

A significant portion of the target market would probably have no need for any more graphics power than what comes with the processor, so not including it in the base module makes a lot of sense. However, for many use cases, discrete graphics is an absolute necessity, so not even offering it as an option in a modular system targeted at the high-end market strikes me as an odd omission (as far as I could tell, the system doesn't even have Thunderbolt 3, so it can't support eGPUs through normal means either).

HP also has another model called "Z2 Mini" which seems to be more graphics oriented:

http://www.zdnet.com/product/hp-z2-mini-g3-workstation/

The USB Type C interface should give them external graphics which would be a better alternative than discrete graphics.

USB Type C is only the connector specification, and it offers very little guarantees about what protocols are actually supported through the connector. External graphics would require a USB Type C port with support for Thunderbolt 3, which is an entirely separate specification from the USB 3.1 spec that's usually the baseline for such ports, and offers 40 Gbit/s in bandwidth vs USB 3.1 Gen2's 10 Gbit/s (and Gen1, which is more commonly used, is only 5 Gbit/s).

I couldn't find any mentions of Thunderbolt in its specs, so I don't believe external graphics is a possibility here.

"HP Elite Slice is like no desktop you’ve ever seen"

Well, except for the Mac Mini, which it pretty much looks like.

Except for the 35W CPU's - so you can get a real quad-core i5/i7... but yeah, I don't see it moving well at this price.

(at least Apple admits up front that they're dual cores, unlike almost every other use of lie5/lie7's...)

Yeah it's also macosx maybe you want to write for ios, if you're stuck with windows it's not going to help. Apple might be underpowered but you also don't need to use an entire cpu core just to run constant virus protection.

Just anecdotally, my 2013 dual-core i5 (1.3GHz) Macbook Air seems to run smoother and faster than a majority of the "new" PC laptops I deal with. I'm not sure if it's OS X or the hardware, but for a four year old machine I wouldn't trade it for any new PC laptop.

Enterprise guys will buy it without even thinking about it. You're either a Dell shop or an HP shop.

All the brands have smaller size models. For eg. http://www3.lenovo.com/us/en/desktops-and-all-in-ones/thinkc... too is tiny & better value for money.

Minis have no real official modules I guess. Lenovo made similar stackable thinNUC, but I didn't see it catching wind.

Didn't realize the mac mini was modular?

It's not, but that bit is irrelevant for 99% of use cases.

It's the entire point of this offering. I don't want it, but it is all about the modules.

With better specs, speakers and versatile connectivity.

Versatile connectivity? What does it have that a Mac mini doesn't have? Macs have twice the number of USB?

Anyone else notice the vast majority of the photos show it on a desk without a single cord coming out of the back?

This really confused me. Even if you power it from your monitor you've got to plug it in. No shame in having one or two cords, so why fake the product shots?

They could have at least set up the shots to imply the cords were just hidden behind a table or something.

My thought was that one of the modules had a plug on the bottom so you could run the cables through a hole in a wall/desk... but it looks like none of the modules, not even the VESA mount, have anything like that.

cause you can power it from your monitor via usb-c.

that would still be a chord.

This is HN, do you really expect there to be 0 cables? If that were the case I'm pretty sure that would have been their biggest headline ;)

I can run my laptop with 0 cables just fine.

And this is... obviously not a laptop, I can run my electric car without gas just fine!

I love it that you can customise it to have FreeDOS instead of Windows:

http://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&lang...

Edit: PS, is there a way to get this thing in Australia? Their aussie website is atrocious, can't for the live of me find the customise option for the Slice...

What advantage is there to having a FreeDOS PC?

It's free, so you can wipe it and install whatever OS you want without paying for a Windows license. And for the manufacturer the benefit is that it's clear that it's barebones, so no support requests for the preinstalled OS.

I don't know why the alternative isn't "ship with empty disk" though. Maybe some weird regulation, or to make it clearer to dealers and customers that it isn't broken, just without an OS?

> I don't know why the alternative isn't "ship with empty disk" though

You can't ship a "computer" which doesn't do anything when you turn it on. FreeDOS has just enough basic capability that HP can say "yeah this is a functional computer out of the box" while having so little capability that its installation implies a wink-wink understanding that the customer will install his own OS that he'll take responsibility for.

In what sense "can't"? Legal requirement somewhere?

And the reason it doesn't come with a Linux distro (instead of FreeDOS) is so that they don't imply it works with Linux.

The main advantage seems to be price: HP charges negative $202 to install FreeDOS instead of Windows. I'm not sure why they picked FreeDOS instead of having a "None" option, though.

It's a NUC with a USB port on the bottom.

(see: Intel NUC, Gigabyte BRIX, AsRock BeeBox, etc...)

HP decided to interrupt my customer experience by asking me about my experience 30 seconds after I opened the page. No thanks.

This sort of thing always gets on my nerves. Plenty of sellers do it on Amazon (almost always before the product has even arrived), many apps do it, etc. I always leave a negative review in such cases.

"<company name> sent a nag asking for a review/rating. As the product hasn't arrived yet / just got installed 10 seconds ago, I can only rate what I've seen of it: no product whatsoever. 1 star! If they'd waited a week or two I might actually have a positive opinion about <product name> to write here."

If they ask later on instead (after at least a week of use) I'll instead leave an actual review of the product.

The same happened to me. It really spoiled the experience and I felt compelled to submit a poor rating. But then I rather just closed the tab.

"Protect, detect, and recover from malicious BIOS attacks using HP Sure Start with Dynamic Protection - the industry’s first self-healing BIOS that monitors and corrects BIOS corruption in real-time"

In the footnote, it says that it corrects BIOS corruption every 15 minutes. I'd be interested to see how this works and what technology they are using. What happens if my BIOS is corrupted within the 15 minute window and I reboot?

This implies that the bios can be corrupted - the bios shouldn't accept unsigned updates (without an in bios flag being switched first), even from a root-level user on the OS.

gg no re

OK, so a 2x more expensive NUC with emphasis on design and HP-specific modularity. I think Intel planned custom lids as well and MSI Cubi has a storage expander, so HP probably took cues from them. I personally like these super mini PCs, for office work you don't need anything else these days.

one thousand plus days of Apple not updating the Mac Mini while holding firm to their price and HP reinvents it? The value isn't in the components, it is in the integration and software.

This is the space Apple should have been in long ago but they dropped the ball with the desktop market three years ago and only seem to have moved after being goaded, nigh embarrassed about the state of their offerings.

While this HP is not useful to me I do appreciate what they have done.

ASUS gives you barebones much cheaper. Just buy RAM + hard drive and you are good to go.

https://www.asus.com/us/Mini-PCs/VivoMini-Products/

I am really interested in a consumer-clean modular desktop concept. Sometimes I feel like there needs to be something that will save the layman from the tablet virus.

What is the "tablet virus", and why does the layman need to be saved from it?

The tablet virus is the idea that tablet computers can replace desktops.

I, personally, don't disagree [tablets] can cover a good portion of the layman's usecases; yet it is important to teach (to) and have people realise the strengths of the freedom desktops give them.

I hope Apple updates Mac mini in response. It's over 3 years old now. About time it got kaby lake and USB C treatment.

Gruber (https://daringfireball.net/linked/2017/07/13/mac-mini-1000) pointed out Phil Schiller's stunning endorsement, "The Mac Mini remains a product in our lineup."

If Apple updated the Mac Mini (I, too, hope they get their act together), it would not be in response to the HP announcement. The two machines are meant for different customer groups, I think.

Apple tends to be pretty high end as of late. So they could chuck a decent GPU and a quad core CPU in there, raising the price, of course. I'd buy one. My mini is something like 5 years old at this point.

Mac mini is quite maxi these days, comparing to NUCs and its derivations.

Just let me upgrade my own hard drive and RAM :(

Meh. The best use of desktop-style computing these days, in my opinion, is if I can easily covert them to a commodity Linux box later. It's the only way to reliably extend the useful life of old hardware other than selling/donating it to someone who can make use of it.

If it had a network switch add-on, a really good projector add-on, and really good microphones/speakers, this could be a great meeting room pc. But it just looks like a dumb terminal replacement for corporations. (Though I don't know why you would pick one instead of a cheap business laptop?)

Is there any mini desktops with built-in PSU? All these NUC-like things are smaller than Mac Mini but their dirty secret is a big ugly power brick under the table.

Linux support?

It looks beautiful! I would buy one of these for my parents, keep it out of the way. Taped to the back of the monitor?

There is a VESA mount adapter

There are JPEG compression artefacts all over this page. Horrific.

Why is this trending? I saw one in the shop just last week, they aren't exactly new.

Looks kinda like a NUC

Would make for a good Hackintosh, presumably.

Not going to buy anything from HP until they boycott and divest from Israeli apartheid military and government contracts.

PS: I'm half-Jewish, atheist.

HP thinks its people now?

This looks hilariously ugly compared to the now three-year-old Mac mini.

HP just does not seem to be able to get industrial design right.

isn't that highly subjective?

It is. This design may appeal to people who like cheap routers and 80's gold watches.

"Powerful PC" - probably uses Core M, a giveaway being that they don't mention exactly what processor they're using. It's also the reason Intel will soon rebrand Core M to "Core i5", because everyone knew Core M sucked. So their solution is to make people believe it's a more powerful chip. Because feels > reals (marketing 101, I suppose).

> "Powerful PC" - probably uses Core M, a giveaway being that they don't mention exactly what processor they're using.

They make you go through many clicks to get there, but the "Tech Specs" on the HP site say that it's an i3-6100T (for the Core i3, anyway).

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