HP’s New Pavilion Wave is a Desktop Computer Designed to Not Look Like a Desktop Computer

Just as Lenovo unexpectedly reimagined the tablet form factor, HP also surprised consumers this week by releasing the Pavilion Wave, a desktop computer designed to look like anything but

To hear it from HP, the Pavilion Wave is designed for entertainment and productivity for the home by combining desktop power and audio experiences for customers who want a PC that can fit into small places.

Aside from the Mac Pro, desktop computers are always ugly, and they’re always obviously desktop computers. The Wave, while weird, is a marked exception; it more closely resembles an oversized bluetooth speaker than a metal-clad tower of whirring fans and microchips.

“Today’s desktop customers want sleek, innovative and powerful designs that enable new experiences,” said Mike Nash, vice president, customer experience and portfolio strategy, HP Inc. “The HP Pavilion Wave is the result of HP engineers and designers reinventing the desktop by rethinking its shape, size and look while adding functionality to enable new use cases.”

The HP Pavilion Wave is 85 percent smaller than traditional tower PC, measuring just 10 inches tall. It looks carpeted because HP wrapped the computer with acoustic fabric “engineered for room-filling sound.”

The triangular design houses three main zones for components: the motherboard on one side, the hard drive on the second side, and thermals on the third side. The thermal design uses heat pipes to extract heat from the motherboard and the graphics card to push out the top of the PC to keep the device running cool.

The Pavilion Wave is small and curious, but it’s still a typical HP workhorse: it can support two 4K displays and run a quad-core i7 processor setup.

The computer starts at $550 and is slated for launch later this month.