What is the Pavilion Wave? It’s a question as old as time, dating at least as far back as the early hours of this morning when HP showed off its strange new cloth-covered bit of hardware. It most closely resembles a speaker, complete with a Bang & Olufsen logo on the front – in fact, that’s the only bit of branding you’ll see if you look at it face-on.
The answer, it turns out, is not really an exciting one. The thing is actually a funny looking 10-inch desktop designed to help it blend in with the furniture. And indeed, if Ikea ever went and made a PC, it probably would look a fair deal like what we’re seeing here.
Turn it around and it becomes a bit clearer. Sandwiched between the cloth is a plastic strip sporting the standard ports: three USB 3.0, USB 3.1 Type C, DisplayPort, HDMI and the like. I imagine if you were to crack the thing open, it would look like a PC in side there, as well. There’s a sixth-gen Intel processor and as much as 2TB of storage (or a still decent 1TB, if you opt for solid state).
As the designed pretty clearly hints, sound is king here. High-end audio company B&O did, indeed, tune the product to its specifications. The top of the computer is design to emit sound in 360-degrees, all while venting heat from the computer’s thermal chamber. It also has two on-board mics listening to Cortana, so you can call out for requests a la the Amazon Echo.
The Pavilion arrives September 23rd, priced at $550.