It's not exactly an apples to apples comparison, but if you must:

- 8GB on the Air is not the same as it'd 8GB on the HP, macOS + Apple silicon's memory efficiency means it can do more with less.

- The new M2 Air has a better screen by resolution, size, and by brightness (400 vs 500 nits). I wasn't able to find colour gamut specs for the HP Spectre.

- By all metrics battery wise the M2 Air handily beats the Spectre.

- The Spectre comes with bloatware like McAfee LiveSafe and other HP software that aren't essential.

- In ever benchmark (real world and simulated) the Intel® Core™ i7-1195G7 loses to the M1 so it'd be reasonable to assume it'd lose to the M2 as well. I mean it's a 10nm process versus a 5nm so not at all surprising. In some benches the difference is nearly 2x in favour of the M1 which is astounding. Again, we're not even comparing the i7-1195G7 to the M2.

- The wireless chips between are both (802.11ax) so they're on equal footing there.

- The M2 Air has a higher resolution webcam.

- The Spectre does not have fast charging.

- The Spectre has a dual mic array compared to the triple of the M2 Air's. We haven't gotten real world tests of M2 Air yet for it's video conferencing capabilities but if we use the M1 Air's capabilities as a base point then it's safe to safe it'll be better than the Spectre's.

Last year I had a friend who used the M1 Air as a stopgap (from his old Intel MBP) until the 2021 Pros came out and it performed amazingly with a heavy load. I'm talking about running Photoshop+Illustrator simultaneously along with VS Code and node server while have dozens of tabs open all on the 8GB of RAM. I'm positive the Spectre could do the same but the thing is his never made a peep in noise because it literally couldn't since it didn't have any fans.

Hardware is more than it's basal specs, it's about how holistically said specs integrate with one another to create a unified device.

To be frank, comparing a now three year old machine that it's original MSRP is $1600 USD now on sale for $1400 to a 2022 $1500 machine is a bit silly. Even more so when you look closer to the details.

Sources:

https://www.apple.com/macbook-air-m2/specs/

https://www.walmart.com/ip/HP-Spectre-Laptop-Computer-13-5-W...