I am so glad that HP has addressed what I considered to be the two biggest weaknesses of the first generation of the Z1, the company's first all-in-one workstation, which forced the user to use a very glossy display and had absolutely no connection for an external disk array (RAID). HP just announced the second generation of the Z1, and both issues have been addressed, together with performance improvements and other user choices. Let’s take a first look in this very short article and video.

The above video was created by HP for use by the press.

I am particularly happy about the improvements, since I was at the press conference when they launched the first generation, in person back in 2012, and the second, via a non-disclosure press webinar that took place a few weeks ago.

Summary of the second generation of the HP Z1 all-in-one Workstation

• Choice of 27-inch diagonal IPS matte screen or reflective touch screen
• Choice of Thunderbolt 2 or internal optical drive
• Faster processor options: Intel Haswell dual-core 3.4 with integrated Intel HD graphics, or 3.2GHz i5–4570 (4 cores) or three different Xeon CPUs
• Several options of graphics cards
• Up to 32GB RAM
• Tool-less design
• Available in late January, starting at US$1999

Details I plan to test and evaluate once I receive a review unit

• Performance when encoding audio only… and video/audio
• Noise level
• How matte is it really?
• Performance with external Thunderbolt2 arrays, especially with HFS+ formatting.
• Capability with third-party Bluetooth input devices (keyboard and trackpad)

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