I agree with you on liquid metal. It's just not worth it on a laptop, and a budget one at that.
Unfortunately, I'm a gamer so I need that dgpu. They advertised acer swift 3 as having 12 hours of battery life tho. I guess I'm gonna be fine.
The cheapest hp spectre that I can find is Hp spectre x360 g2 with i5 6200u, intel hd 520, 4gb of ram, 128gb ssd and costs around ~870 usd which is way out of my budget. That thing doesn't have tb3 port too. So I guess I'll pass.