The first 15″ laptop designed to protect your digital life | Hacker News Reader

The first 15″ laptop designed to protect your digital life

puri.sm

37 pointsfsflover27 comments

I bought a Purism laptop last year for around $3,000 USD. It is ok.

Purism had a bizarre falling out with their former CTO. I am inclined to believe the CTO [1].

The documentation is basically non-existent. There is no end to end hardware tear down, at least a fully complete one, which I found kind of shocking. The special privacy first operating system is a very lightly modified Ubuntu OS. System76's popOS, almost a clone itself of Ubuntu, is probably more customized.

The manufacturing seemed shoddy, although not terrible. Just a lot of air-space when opening the thing and pieces jiggle around a little too much.

The USB keys they send you are awesome (micro usb, usb c, and usb A in the same key!) and I wish more vendors did the PGP smart card setup they do.

In general the German open source movement has grown...strange...the last two years. Recently I was shown that one of the main contributors to the a small but important part of the Linux library that handles multimode to Usb devices...runs an overpopulation Institute that reminds me of the bad guy from the James Bond movie Moonraker [2]. They also added a "HuaweiAltModeGlobal" which causes no end of trouble for anyone in the networking field who commonly uses say tcpdump and USB router sticks.

[1] - https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...

[2] - https://www.draisberghof.de/usb_modeswitch/

> They also added a "HuaweiAltModeGlobal" which causes no end of trouble for anyone in the networking field who commonly uses say tcpdump and USB router sticks.

I'm not familiar with this. Could you explain what this means? I couldn't find anything on it besides a Reddit post which wasn't very elucidating.

I respect what Purism are doing, but I really wish they wouldn't resort to this sort of hyperbole to sell their computers:

> All other laptops use hardware chips coupled with software that can betray you. News stories have shown how these chips can surreptitiously transmit voice, networking, picture or video signals. Other chips are used to install spyware, malware or viruses.

This advertising copy implies, without basis, that other computers are deliberately designed to be insecure and contain hardware that is intended to "install spyware, malware or viruses", and that their computer is completely free of any firmware vulnerabilities (or, by another reading, contains no firmware at all).

I don't think that either of these claims stands up to any real scrutiny. At best, it's a wild exaggeration of the facts that 1) computers have network hardware which can be used to transmit information, including audio and video recordings, under the command of software; 2) driver and firmware vulnerabilities exist; 3) there have been a small number of incidents where computers have shipped with a BIOS that triggered a Windows feature to automatically install software from the BIOS.

None of these are problems which Purism can claim to have solved with their computer design. Hardware "kill switches" are at best a clumsy workaround -- isolating a computer from the network severely limits its utility -- and using open-source firmware is not a guarantee of safety.

Besides, if they're so proud of their hardware choices, surely they should be willing to go into some more detail about the hardware they decided on, and the reasons they made those choices?

>> I don't think that either of these claims stands up to any real scrutiny.

I think they mean in particular the Intel ME. It all probably is more true than false. See

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#intel

https://puri.sm/learn/intel-me/

> This advertising copy implies, without basis, that other computers are deliberately designed to be insecure and contain hardware that is intended to "install spyware, malware or viruses".

The Intel ME has full access to your RAM and has its own TCP/IP stack. To think this is not intended to be a backdoor is blatantly lying to yourself.

Whilst I’m really happy purism is doing what they’re doing, it’s always a little sad to see the handful of things that get in the way of this being a fantastic machine. Firstly, the WiFi card being 802.11n really doesn’t cut it in 2020. Next, the bezels look really large. I’ve fallen in love with my precision 5530’s tiny bezels. I really want a machine with some good I/O, made sturdily, with an AMD cpu/GPU, and free software. I don’t think such a thing really exists though.

Now that the 4700U is out I'd expect a decent set of laptops to come out for it if not already. I recently settled on a Precision 7740 (17", full keyboard+numpad, Intel+AMD GPUs, 128GB RAM, 4 NVMe bays, 4k, aluminum body) myself which gives you pretty much everything except the AMD CPU (which I wanted but couldn't wait to see how the 4700U panned out). Not sure if the 15" 7540 has the same options or not.

Larger bezels allow you to open the laptop without putting fingerprints on the screen.

I haven't a clue why you'd be touching the screen to open your laptop, anyway. All the Apple laptops I've had since the PowerBook G4, I only need to touch the outer edge, and the few PC laptops I've had haven't been too dissimilar.

> with an AMD cpu/GPU, and free software

Last I checked the AMD story was worse than Intel. At least on Intel you can go the ME-cleaner route to disable the Management Engine backdoor. On AMD there's no equivalent for the PSP AFAIK.

AIUI Purism ships Intel laptops with both ME disabled and Coreboot.

Damn, they want $1500 for a Core i7 7500U? You can get a laptop with a Ryzen 4800 HS for the same price. It's not particularly clear to me what you're getting versus a $600 computer with equivalent specs running Tails or something.

Genuinely thought those chips were EOL, maybe they got a good deal on a pallet of them that Intel were about to throw out?

My assumption is this is related to the ability to neuter Intel Management Engine.

I’m happy they finally moved to 4K. Now, if they’d just center the keyboard and trackpad under the screen (by getting rid of the number pad), I’d be sorely tempted to buy one.

I don't understand the need for a "Purism Key" (AKA Search button). Any device I had them on I never used it. Rather do something like Spotlight/Alfred/Wox, where you can customise the hotkey.

The picture suggests this is Super_L, a key most people use all the time. Typically you use it to open some global menu or shortcuts related to your window manager.

Windows devices normally have a Windows logo printed on that key. Purism just decided to print their logo instead.

It's just a super key with a custom logo, every keyboard has one. Customize it to do whatever you want.

I'm on the market for a $2k 15" laptop, and would buy this one in a heartbeat -- it has looks, performance, quality -- if it had a NVidia 2070 GPU. As it is, it's fairly useless to me.

I do like the hardware switches. Nothing says "You're in control" like being able to interrupt the electricity with a physical toggle.

Having NVidia anywhere near my Linux machine is the deal-breaker for me.

Glad to see the prices are getting somewhat more reasonable. Configured it the same way as my XPS and the price is pretty close (apart from the processor being a generation behind, but if you're doing CPU-intensive tasks on a laptop you're doing it wrong anyway).

I wouldn't trust Purism with my money after Librem 5 disaster.

Which disaster?

Apparently it's a bit better now, but things looked rather dire a year ago, when I've last checked.

In their quest to avoid binary blobs, Purism have chosen modem more fit for IoT devices. At one point in 2019, when they still didn't have a device able to make calls reliably, Purism announced that devices are being shipped to backers (they weren't) and started another round of sales.

Here is a writeup that exemplifies attitudes in community around that time https://telegra.ph/Why-Librem-5-will-never-succeed-in-my-opi...

> In their quest to avoid binary blobs

I don't think you're the target market for this device.

Poor choice of words on my part - I didn't mean to sound dismissive about an idea of a phone with exclusively free software - only about Purism's solution at the time.

I would say that our current situation with "choose ios or android" is a more meaningful problem.

I would love to see someone solving this problem, but I think that it will take a company with a significantly better track with transparency to do that.

BTW, Pinephone is a (significantly cheaper) option.

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