Is this system better than, say, Lenovo Legion 5 or HP Envy, they have similar price, are those System76 laptop offer better build quality, etc?
I had four of these laptops - and on ALL 4 they would have screws come loose and fall out inside the case. You could hear it rattling around when you turned the machine. Two of them had one type of connector for the screen and the other two had a different connector - One got fried and on the other I broke the screen on - so I couldn't harvest parts from one to the other.
S76 wanted $90 for a new charger after one of mine failed.
I have an HP Omen laptop as my primary machine now - here is what is cool:
I had an HP Omen and it failed to power on one day - so I contacted support and they had me send them the machine - instead of fixing it, they sent me a brand new Omen which was way better than the failed unit. The design is super elegant, and it has dual NVME slots, so I have dual drives in it.
The screen is matte so no glossy reflections like my macbooks have...
Yeah - I think I'll stick with Omens for the foreseeable future. HP's support was FANTASTIC.
When my macbook pro caught fire in my sleep and nearly killed me (it was laying on my bed and I fell asleep watching a movie and the machine caught fire - something that that model was recalled for) I took it to Apple's main store in San Francisco - and they kept it for two months "analyzing it" then came back and told me that even though it was a safety issue and the machine was under recall for CATCHING FIRE, they found that one of my moisture sensors had been triggered and therefore, they were not going to replace, fix or help me.
(I had spilled a small bit of water on the keyboard many month prior to the machine catching fire)
Then they tried to sell me a new machine, or have them "replace the machine for $1,500"
A total joke. Ill never buy another apple machine nor a s76 machine again.
HP support is AMAZING.
Also - When HP bought Compaq - we had a bunch of Compaq/HP servers back in 1998 - and the support back then on those servers was top notch - and the HW design was as well. I used to rebuild those servers in minutes in the literal dark.
All the Sun servers we had, like the 650s would bitch if their case was even slightly off center and would refuse to boot.
I'm typing this on a 7 or 8 year old s76 Gazelle. It was my primary work and personal machine for 3 or 4 years and has been my primary personal machine since. I did replace the original drive with an SSD, and I think I may need to replace the fans---they're getting loud. Hardware- and build-quality-wise, I've never had any problems. (Well, ok, I killed one of the USB ports. Probably broke some of the connections.)
The one problem I have had is with the NVidia graphics, which have never worked properly. (I've got graphics acceleration disabled now.) Either it wouldn't go to sleep, or the graphics wouldn't wake up. The last straw was when I got those problems beaten into a standstill, and Chrome started somehow overriding my window manager and keeping the (accelerated) Chrome window front and center, minus WM decorations.
Sure, it's a generic Clio or something, but I've been very impressed. Never had much love for HP, though.
I am quite familiar with breaking down/working on all types of machines...
they had lock-tight paint on the screws, which didnt work.
and the sad thing was that the connector type between the two broken machines had changed, even though they were the same model "Gazelle" - they are also a super pain in the ass to work on. The screen connector requires you to basically dismantle the entire machine...
Obviously this machine was a white-label Clio machine, and S76 has more recently started designing their own machines (supposedly - so I dont know how much of that design is in-house vs them spec'ing things out to other design services...
Can anyone else back this up? Has HP changed? I've sworn off HP products (both enterprise and consumer) because of their terrible customer service and documentation. Dell/Lenovo always offer something very similar in price and performance, and their enterprise support is fine to great.
I was completely dumbfounded when HP just said "we are going to send you a new machine, at no cost, please pick from this list...
And I picked this dope Omen machine and when I opened it up to look at the guts and put in a second SSD, I was taken aback by the elegant symmetry of the design. The only downside is that even though the sound is "bang & olufsen" - its a bit too quiet.
However, the support guy on my case was dope, and I love this machine
I bought one, and didn't like the keyboard. Send to a relative overseas. Months later the Mobo died a few weeks under warranty. Called HP and told i was overseas. They provided a local support number. ship by local post. upgraded new mobo. no charge.
This was a non-business $300ish laptop.
sadly, their shopping experience is abysmal like every other PC manufacturer :(
A Legion 5 will have an Nvidia dGPU, so you have to decide if you want to run PRIME or something else and see how the external monitor outputs are muxed if that's important to you.