HP announces the ZBook x2, the world's first detachable workstation

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the second generation of its detachable PC, the Surface Book 2. At Adobe's MAX conference today though, HP has announced its own take on the form factor with the ZBook x2.

The company says that the ZBook 2 is the first detachable PC workstation, and it's meant to give designers the power that they need to easily get their work done.

It comes with dual-core seventh- or quad-core eighth-generation processors, and it has an option for Nvidia Quadro M620 (2GB GDDR5) graphics. And one of the benefits of the dGPU here is that it's stored in the tablet portion of it, rather than in the base as with the Surface Book. If you remove the keyboard, you don't lose that additional GPU power.

There are also buttons on the sides, which can be customized for various shortcuts. They'll also be preprogrammed with 18 different shortcuts for some Adobe Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop and Lightroom.

"As the world’s most powerful and first detachable PC workstation, there is no device better suited to turn the vision of artists and designers into reality," said Xavier Garcia, vice president and general manager of HP Z Workstations, HP Inc. "With the HP ZBook x2, we are delivering the perfect tool to accelerate the creative process – with unprecedented power, performance and natural ease-of-use. This device will make it easier than ever for creators to do what they do best – bring inspiring new ideas to life and enrich the world around us."

The tablet is a 14-inch 4K UHD display, and customers can draw on that with the Wacom pen that supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity, and doesn't require a battery. If the display isn't enough for you though, HP says that you can power up to two external 4K displays or five total external screens.

If dedicated Quadro graphics, a 4K display, and a quad-core processor aren't enough, it also comes with up to 32GB of RAM, twice as much as competing devices. You can also get it up to a 512GB NVMe M.2 SED SSD.

Starting at $1,749, it comes with either Windows 10 Home Single Language, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, or FreeDOS 2.0, and comes out in December.