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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

This Linux laptop looks too good to be true.

It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen is matte. They claim it POSTs in under a second.

The only real downside is the 4-5 month lead time. Am I missing something?

View on HN

> Am I missing something?

Yeah. The company is three people with practically no money at hand. I can't imagine this being real. Check "full accounts made up to 28 February 2022" https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c... with cash at hand being just 13,887 pounds. How on earth are you making a laptop from that? Framework started with a nine million seed round and had the former head of hardware at Oculus as the founder for expertise in this field. Now, almost eight figures is prolly overkill but I have hard time imagining low five figures being enough. It doesn't mean there's malicious intent here, they just might not be fully aware of the challenges here and will find themselves in way over their head.

Note there's no doxxing here, the CRN is on the contact us page: https://starlabs.systems/pages/contact-us

There's comments in this thread claiming to have already received one. What's your take on that?

From https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/about-us

>In 2017, we started using Clevo as a supplier. The result was; the Star Lite Mk I, the Star LabTop Mk II and the Star LabTop Pro Mk I. There were a vast array of options to chose from in these laptops, from wireless to memory to pre-installed distribution. You may be familiar with Clevo as they have a lot of resellers across the world. It was a step in the right direction but they left something to be desired when comparing them to the competition - the batteries were small, the bezels were big and modern standards such as USB-C charging were not available.

>We had to build our own. When 2018 came around, we started working on our very own laptops. We used a variety of suppliers, design houses and factories. It was 6 long months of tooling and testing on repeat until two new laptops were born in December 2018; the Star Lite Mk II and the Star LabTop Mk III.

Simply put, they have the same business model as any other small brand for laptops, and that business model does not involve owning your own factories. Now, their small size and limited financial resources certainly casts doubt on their ability to provide ongoing support for their products, but it doesn't preclude getting a product out the door in the first place.

> that business model does not involve owning your own factories

Apple does not own their own factories.

Apple’s manufacturing story is complex. They design most of the parts, and they often own the much of the equipment in the factories. Apple’s involvement with their suppliers is much much deeper than companies who resell ODM equipment.

Do they? I was under the impression most small brands simply resell such ODMs as Clevo or TongFang perhaps they add RAM/SSD/such -- but they do not design custom motherboards and chassis.

They did exactly that already for a few years. It doesn't seem crazy to me that after a while of that, they advanced to do a bit more. Still sounds like they mostly employed others, just now a level up from before, employing designers rather than buying finished product.

Wait so they design it in house? That's pretty amazing considering their small size, especially compared to system76.

They’re brought up on every “alternative to the Mac” thread as a brand that’s explicitly not a Clevo reseller but they somehow never get much attention.

If real, it wouldn't surprise me.

A laptop isn't special. The most special part is the motherboard, and those are a dime a dozen designs. The bios soft is the other big component, but given the right partnerships I could see a small company just paying to use one out of a dozen various vendors.

The rest of the work is part sourcing.

What about the custom plastic parts? Aren't those injection moulded? If so, how much is a mould?

Now I'm thinking about whether I could CNC a laptop case from a brick of aluminum...

isn't that what apple did/does?

It is exactly, yes.

However doing this at small scale is very difficult to do cost-effectively.

A mould is anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a small, simple, high-tolerance part, to many hundreds of thousands for a large, precision, complex mould with moving tools.

I have the Byte desktop machine from them. I waited quite a bit for the delivery, but the machine is very nice.

I have one of their machines (a StarBook that I am typing this on), and it is excellent. It probably helps to have a $9m seed round -- certainly it means Framework can do much more marketing (including such as the Steam Deck stunt) and hire more people -- and I'm sure it's easier to raise those funds from the US, but it is clearly not necessary. I hope that Star Labs does well enough that they are able to expand, raise funding if they wish, and compete with better capitalized companies.

They have 400k of stock, though. It's common for a company not to keep a lot of cash around and borrow as needed against stock, which I would guess they are doing as they have 200k+ of creditors.

So, my guess is that they used income to build up stock of their clevo lines in order to reduce delivery times and increase their market to delivery sensitive customers, and now they are leveraging that to invest in the custom versions. If they are doing their own sw and there product is an integration of off the shelf parts, maybe it's doable.

Edited to add:

Actually I misread the statement, they have 200k falling due in a year and a further 700k of debt. So that's nearly 1M of investment, which seems easily enough to do this development, given it's much less complex than the framework devices.

They seem to be real entrepreneurs running the thing from a farm in rural settings [1] where the director lives (same personal address declared). If I read it right they are in ca. 400k debt so far, working it down slowly. I am wishing them quick success as their product looks great. Perhaps if I will be patient enough waiting 5 month for delivery after payment and will not worry about if warranty (or even shipment) could be ever fulfilled by a tiny new company I will make a try myself. On paper this is a quality laptop that is so hard to find in the sea of trash. But perhaps will wait until more experiences are gained by other customers in a year or so (considering the half year delivery lag). I also wish they used less pompous text in the very first two senences of the headline in the style of hustlers with more mouth than content: "exquisitely crafted", "sets a new standard", "groundbreaking technology", "ultimate choice", "users who demand the very best". It is off-putting for me. No need to sugar the honey this hard.

I genuinely root for them.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+Labs+Systems/@51.1863...

That’s impressive, they are really bootstrap. The quality of their hardware and their support has been fantastic I highly recommend them if you can afford the weight

It is very promising they are having such good customer feedback.

“Sugar the honey” is a great turn of phrase and new to me. Thank you!

See also “gild the lily”.

Frankly, if it's three people, you're lucky it's not riddled with typos and grammatical errors. If "we aren't polished at PR" is your big criticism, it's a nit.

If they are successful, they'll eventually hire someone and likely get some polish on those details.

I think this criticism is missing the point of the OP. It’s not simply “PR”, it’s how the company views or thinks about their products that matters. It’s disingenuous at best to make such claims with presumably almost no laptops shipped, fraudulent at worst.

I'm a freelance writer and blogger. I see it as a noob mistake sometimes made by sincere, well-meaning but naive folks who don't know anything about PR.

It's, yes, potentially also fraudulent if they don't remotely live up to the claims. In a world of "fake it til you make it" where most small shops have little hope of competing with people with VC money, it's counterintuitive for most people that click bait style PR can come back to bite you.

/2 cents

I wish them good luck, I just wish as you pointed out with the hyperbolic statements they weren’t trying to poorly emulate Apple marketing. I found the page very harsh graphically and full of elementary design mistakes (font ratios, spacing, layout, etc), and not great copy writing. I know people feel the need to maximize their product marketing, but if you’re going to swing this hard, hire someone who is good enough to do it for you.

- "Note there's no doxxing here,"

How on Earth could a customer looking up a vendor's business information be construed doxxing? Do you guys -- I'm asking sincerely, I'm feeling extraordinarily confused and out-of-touch -- think there's some of genuine privacy interest here that you'd wish to respect? Some sort of "right to anonymous business", where you can hide all your sketchiness behind a shell company and people need to *morally* respect your wishes?

Because, if I heard someone "doxxed" a company's ownership and financial documents non-consensually, all I'd have to say to them is "good on you, Wall Street Journal".

Having disgruntled customers show up at your office is not the same as them showing up at your home. It's not at all sketchy to want some privacy before you've gotten your office lease sorted. When starting a business you have all these circular dependencies, where you can't get a lease before you register your business, but when you register your business you need an address on day 1.

There is actually a solution to this in the UK. Directors are permitted to have a service address on the public record instead of their home address, and you can find a bunch of companies willing to allow you to rent one and forward mail.

You still need to provide your home address to companies' house but it isn't available to the public at large as easily.

This is not just possible it is an extremely good idea. Mobile phone companies in the UK are very lax about opening contracts (UK has an aversion to government identity cards, so defaults to "give us a utility bill" like you can't find templates online) and using a valid name/address combination is what scammers love to do. So if you want to avoid getting "welcome to" letters from every mobile provider in the UK 3x over (and your credit rating subsequently trashed) then using a service address is a great idea.

> How on Earth could a customer looking up a vendor's business information be construed doxxing?

I think "doxxing" has in some cases evolved from a sometimes-necessary norm in pseudonymous forums to a context-free knee-jerk reaction to somebody's details being out there.

I appreciate the norm when it allows people to safely be themselves among pseudonymous peers. Yes, by all means let's keep each other feeling safe. But like you, when somebody is doing business with the public, I think we should expect to know who they are. It seems insane to me that MrSquanchy69 can take in gobs of money, execute a rugpull, and have people saying, "bUt WhAt aBOuT tHeIr PriVAcY?!?" Public impact and public accountability go hand in hand.

> But like you, when somebody is doing business with the public, I think we should expect to know who they are.

If you want public accountability, then start with the legislators.

I'll give you an example, the state claims to have the publics interest at heart, especially kids, so why dont they teach law to kids at school?

You cant assume parents have the best interests of their kids at heart. Some state employees will abuse their own kids in order to further the science that wouldn't have got past a University's ethics board!

Where is the public holding the state to account, when it hides behind its own legislated secrecy?

So when you say "by all means let's keep each other feeling safe" do you really mean that or are just satisfying some subconscious desire to divide people?

Lots of businesses run out of disused farm buildings, its cheap space.

Google started from a garage in someone's home. Many businesses run from people's spare bedroom.

What purpose is the doxxing serving other than drawing attention to a location?

Google used to do way more doxxing of people in the early days, like displaying content behind password protected forums on people.

Dont see Google getting called out about that do we?

What?

I mean yes, you talk about some good things. Legislators should be more accountable. I'm already on record as advocating not only for the existing financial transparency at the federal level, but that elected officials should have every financial transaction be part of a public record while they're in office and for years after. Because sunlight is the best disinfectant.

For the same reason, people taking money from the public should be on public record. This is hardly novel. When I had a PO box years ago, the USPS would doggedly protect the privacy of box-holders. But if you were doing business with the public using the box, you didn't get the same protections, because they didn't want people using PO boxes to scam the public and then vanish.

I think forum anti-doxing etiquette is perfectly fine for the contexts in which it originated. But when we enter the public sphere of money and power, I think transparency is an important check on all sorts of malfeasance.

This isn't a new company. They've made and shipped laptops in the past. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6IuzQehsrA

If that's the case then it must be something rebadged. What is it?

It's a real company and many people have laptops from them. Here are a couple HN threads about it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31034024

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986767

I have their latest starbook, just arrived a couple months ago and it is stellar. Covid delayed it almost a whole year, but in that time they upgraded frob adwertised 11th gen intel to 12th gen for free, quadrupling cores. It runs extremeley well with latest coreboot and everything. I considered canceling my pre-order because of the long delay, but Support was extremely quick and receptive and it turns out the trust they earned was warranted. I did a lot of research and really nothing comes close to these guys. This new one is expensive relatively, but the Starbook I have was a surprisingly good deal. No connection to them except a happy customer who can gladly recommend them.

Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.

I just spec'd one out and it was pretty similar to the I9 MBP. Personally, I'd pay that price for a Linux laptop that's on par with a MBP.

Do we really think the build quality of these is even in the same state, much less the same ballpark, as a MBP?

Do we really still think Apple products are the gold standard in hardware?

Apple people think that. They rarely leave their walled garden.

OS agnostic here (I’ve worked professionally in all three major OSes and on both Apple and a variety of Windows machines, currently enjoying WSL2 on my Dell XPS 9700).

Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great. My 2.5 year old Dell is currently with Dell for out of warranty repairs. I have no other windows machines left. All of them had an 4ish year lifespan are now dead and were not worth fixing. Current machine not withstanding; it’s too young to die.

Edit: I will add that I’m perfectly happy with my other windows machines, just that the build quality was such that I their natural lifespan was simply shorter.

My dell XPS has been going strong for 5 years now, replaced the battery and upgraded the SSD in that time but it's been a pretty impressive machine and definitely on par with apple laptops I've had in the past

Another sample, my MBP set itself on fire in the boot of my car (examination revealed, the thunderbolt or whatever chip ignited).

My XPS13 is going strong after years of abuse and being lugged around the world in hand luggage.

My old powerbook and ibook (remember those?!) Both had live current running through the case screws which caused a stingy shock on bare legs.

I've never seen an Apple laptop that didn't look nice but ultimately have weird issues

> Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great.

Last time I looked at second hand laptops. Most of those the +5y old macbooks in the market had huge issues / defects (and also looked like shit) while you could find a lot of decent refurbished thinkpads and HP elitebook from the same era with no advertized defects (and those I bought didn't have any). I am excluding battery life as regarldess of the brand all needed a brand new one.

So they seem to be the gold standard when new. But they certainly don't age so well.

Many would agree that the middle years between 2015-2020 were not gold standard. It’s laughable to suggest Apple didn’t win the title back with the advent of the M1.

In term of perf/watts ratio yes. In term or reliability the jury is still out.

How many 10 year old M1s are on the secondhand market?

Genuinely curious what is better. MacBook Pros have been the gold standard for a while and now with the ARM chips they are pretty much unbeatable in my eyes.

Thinkpad for me is the gold standard because I can swap out the components and they have videos and guides of how to do so on their website. Their materials are sturdy and light.

MacBooks may use some nice materials, and their processors are interesting, but for a customer like me that prefers to install the hardware and software of my choice either today or in ten years, they have no products I'm interested in.

I've never had to sell or retire any machine I've had in the last twenty years, they're all somewhere doing something right now.

Personally, I tend to err on the side of hardware that can take a fall from waist-height and not set me back $600. To each their own though, I guess.

What kind of computer hardware meets that criteria? Toughbooks?

Thinkpads haven't failed me yet, even if it's a cliched response. The display isn't apt to breaking like a Macbook, and the chassis does a surprisingly good job reducing shock (even on later models). Toughbooks are probably a shoo-in with that logic, and I'd like to try one of HP's recent Elitebooks to see how they stack up.

My Macs usually stay at home if I have a more rugged machine to take with me, just for the peace of mind. It's probably a matter of personal distrust, but I'm a clumsy guy...

Thinkpad build quality is definitely on a slow decline. There's a lot more plastic casework in a new model than in a T440, say. They don't feel completely rigid in hand any more. And that's before the loss of a removable, upgradeable battery and the advent of soldered RAM.

A second hand T-series is still what I'd default to if I need a laptop for now (especially for the keyboard), but I'm aware that this is likely not going to forever remain the obvious choice it used to be.

Agreed, I'm waiting for the verdict to come back on Framework or some Linux OEMs before I upgrade my T460s. The product line isn't headed in a formidable direction, but I'm glad that there have been other manufacturers eying the space.

So far my Framework has met that criteria. It's taken a few tumbles.

at least Thinkpad and Gram just from my own direct experience.

But in years past a mbp and an imac that never fell an inch killed themselves from the bad video chips, which Apple and their supposedly gold standard support refused to warranty and by the time they lost in court years later the damage was already done and cost various friends the price of new machines.

Other that those famous examples like that and the keyboards, just in general among all the machines I intersect with, the Apples don't fare any better. They all get busted screens, busted ports, busted hinges, exploded batteries. In fact HP and Apple seem to have to most cases of glued in batteries that expand and break the rest of the machine.

Currently, especially with the addition of the ARM CPU, I think yes. I have a pretty new MBP (~1 year old) and it's great but my previous MBP had cooling problems - almost anything made it go lawn mower mode.

How is the sound quality? Is it comparable to a MacBook?

I'm really curious about people that actually use laptop speakers. Even the best laptop speakers I've heard (I've heard MacBook speakers too) sound terrible. Other than for a quick video or demo or whatever, who is seriously listening to videos or music on laptop speakers... And why??? Even a cheap pair of earbuds sounds better to me.

I use laptop speakers a few times a year, when I bring the device to my bedroom and just listen to a long interview with the screen turned off. Laying on the bed with headphones on my head is not something I would do. Earbuds I have not used in 15 years.

> Even a cheap pair of earbuds sounds better to me.

That doesn't work very well if there's more than one of you trying to watch...

Relive the days of being a playground boss: https://aliexpress.com/item/32835649231.html

I find the MBP 14" and 16" speakers pretty serviceable for lightweight TV watching.

I have a 7.1.4 system at home and obviously there's no comparison but they sound good enough for most series I watch when I'm on the go - mostly on travels.

They're also very good for meetings. I find them much better than any enterprise equipment (Jabra etc) I've ever used.

Sure, good headphones will usually sound better, but I'd rather not have my ears covered all the time. To each their own, I guess.

Try good half-open cans like Beyerdynamic DT880, i can wear them for hours. I like the sound better than fully open Headphones, compared them to the DT990s. With my closed DT770 my ears get uncomfortably warm pretty fast.

I have all sorts of headphones. Open backs, half-open, closed backs, some of them are absolutely amazing.

I'd still mostly rather not wear anything most of the time. This is especially true those times when the laptop speakers prove the most useful - when I'm just chilling out, possibly in bed. I'd also rather not have to deal with wires during those times.

My main issue is not so much warmth but mostly the fact that my ears are covered, simple as that. I'm not neurotic about it but I prefer to have them open. Sometimes I'll take the sound quality hit and wear my bone conducing headset over wearing great sounding headphones.

I have a 2019 16" MBP and love the speakers. I regularly use them for music listening, Netflix and Youtube.

Just to pile on here, the 2019-2021 refresh Intel Macbook Pro 13 and 16 have laptop speakers that rival good portable bluetooth speakers complete with shockingly deep bass, clear midrange and defined treble. They are by far and away the best laptop speakers I've heard. Nice decently powered headphone jack as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNUz-cqkjVA

https://youtu.be/LGOmbNRlZdM?t=215

My partner has a Lenovo Yoga from like 2 generations ago and she's really happy with their sound. Its soundbar was one of the selling points. And it does indeed deliver

how does touchpad compare to MBP one?

this is what i want to know, the part you touch looks on point, what i want to know about is the software, there is so much secret sauce in a macbooks giant glass touchpad that actually makes it a reasonable replacement for a mouse

didn't feel that about any touchpad before the macbook, and it's why we loved thinkpad's so much because at least they gave you a nub

my thoughts exactly. before getting MBP about 10 years ago I couldn't even imagine not using mouse with laptop, but after a day or so with MBP and its touchpad it changed 180 degrees and now mouse feel unnatural (and requires way more movement of hands).

I would love to see Linux laptop that works like that.

They are very good, multi finger gestures worked out of the box on fedora

I'm seeing conflicting comments about the RAM. You say you're an owner and it has upgradable RAM, other commenters here are saying the RAM is soldered. Is only this new model soldered?

This new model is soldered unfortunately which allows it to use low power raM

Have they actually made one yet? The pictures on the site all look like renders; and I couldn't find any pictures of an actual prototype anywhere.

I mean, all their laptops looks like that, and they have a pretty good track record of following through. I'm in the market for a new laptop, and a 4-5 month lead time is a bit too far out. Maybe I'll purchase one when they're actually shipping, but by then I'm sure I'll be happy with whatever frankentop I cobble together.

> Have they actually made one yet?

Exactly. No real laptops so far; no videos with honest in-depth reviews; no information on the dirability of these machines.

If something is too good to be true, it likely is.

I guess it was for the discerning - but not too discerning - buyer

YouTube has review videos

I am typing this on their latest StarBook. It's a great machine. As for durability, it has an aluminium body and seems sturdily built. I expect it to last a good few years.

would you be able to share a video or blog review of this thing ?

If you are talking about YouTube reviews. Please tell me where you find in-depth honest reviews.

Because every channel I have seen on anything...Is claiming independent reviews, while getting product test samples loaned for 1 or 2 years. Engaging on a direct contact with the marketing departments of the vendors, and working under the certainty that if they ever do a thoughtful and true review with a bad rating, the vendor wont send any more samples.

linus tech tips?

Linus seems a nice guy, but with 20 or more employees, and a channel that needs to review products first, works with embargoes organized by the vendors. As any YouTube business, competes for views. A really bad (honest?) review won't get him more samples. So the incentives are on the wrong place.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28608132

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/y95kt4/what_...

There are comments here from people that have them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760276

There’s an entire subreddit that has people discussing theirs.

You can buy the Starbook, and there are reviews on youtube.

There are pics of a protoype in their Twitter feed. Also you can see lots of pics/videos of their previous model laptops: https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/

(Star Labs has been around for years making Linux laptops)

Soldered ram is pretty unfortunate. They're also charging a ton for storage upgrades (e.g. $300 vs market rate of ~$80 for 1TB pcie 4.0 ssd).

As usual. Not sure why this is, they could just charge for the labor that it actually costs them to put a different SSD in plus material cost, but no, they always mark up ridiculous amounts. It basically forces people to buy a dummy SSD with the device plus a loose one and then put it in yourself... at least that's what I do for myself and family whenever it saves more than 50 euros and takes me 5-10 minutes (usually it saves ~100 euros to buy extra hardware on top of what you already get in the laptop(!)).

If anyone is interested in unusably tiny and/or slow SSDs, let me know because right now they're just going in e-waste.

(I have similar beef with drinks in restaurants at, e.g., ~100x markup for tap water. Why not just charge a normal price for both the food and the drinks, instead of me having to guess at how much I should be spending on drinks to compensate the normal-priced food? Or make both cheap and charge a table fee, whatever floats their boat. This incentivizes people to not drink enough; usually it's calories where people overingest, not hydration!)

I have literally never seen a restaurant anywhere in the world that charges for tap water, and I eat out constantly. Is this a thing now somewhere?

Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and more limited experience in Luxembourg. (I've been to more places but honestly don't remember what drink prices were like in Finland ten years ago, let alone remembering what the Icelandic króna prices amounted to when I was there more recently.)

It's often not offered because it sounds like asking for a free drink instead of paying ~13 euros per liter which seems to be the average norm. Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water (edit: that means bottled/branded; the default they'll bring you if unspecified), which in turn is the same price as any soft drink (demonstrating that the price has nothing to do with cost, it must be paying for the table or something but it doesn't say so I don't know).

Anyway, it's more about places charging dishonest prices to seemingly cover for something else, leaving the consumer to guessing why in the world this might cost so much and just going with another option. I can't imagine it achieves the intended goal, so it doesn't seem like a good idea for either party. If anyone ever did finances for a restaurant or has a better-than-guessing idea why SSDs are priced this way, I'd be very curious.

> Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water,

I don't think I'll be able to make sense of what you're saying until you explain what you mean by "normal water". Are you referring to branded bottled water?

Ah, sorry yes, that was bad phrasing on my part. By normal I meant what was on the menu (water that is branded, bottled, shipped, sometimes stolen) instead of my out-of-the-ordinary request (tap water), but calling that the 'normal' is of course a culture-specific way of thinking, and a cultural feature I do not like.

In these places where bottled water is the norm, do you have to specify what brand you want? Like if they ask what you want to drink and you answer "I'll just have water", is that an incomplete response?

They charge more for these things because people will pay it and they like making more money

Also because the labor costs of service don’t change based on what people are carrying around.

Wait until you find out that every place in the Netherlands and Germany charges you money to take a piss or a dump. Even places like McDonalds and gas stations. Some people make sure it goes on the side of the building instead.

Restaurants don't charge you for toilet usage in NL 0r DE when you are a paying customer, neither does McDonald's. (Yes, it's up for debate whether that's a restaurant :))

It does happen, in certain locations and under certain circumstances. And I really can't blame them, when toilet-only visitors start outnumbering paying customers by a considerable margin. When all your anecdotal data is from Oktoberfest surroundings and the like you might come to certain conclusions.

Are there public restrooms available in those places? If not, that's extremely frustrating. I don't understand why more places don't have public restrooms. People are gonna poop one way or the other.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've bought many a device with the minimum RAM and disk space which I will then throw out and replace with third party stuff. I get why many vendors do it, but I hate the waste. I'm more willing to forgive it in a general-audience company than people who are selling to the kind of technical audience who can all do the swap.

If you search for wtallis in this thread you'll find a technical reason for soldered ram. Can't respond with a link since on mobile, did it several hours ago at home though.

It might have to do with cost, although I'm not sure.

They've clearly learned some things from Apple.

Unfortunately low power ddr4 (lpddr4) does not come on SODIMs, soldered ram is the only way to get it. I know everyone likes to shit on apple about this, (and they definitely should about soldered storage) but there are practical engineering reasons for soldered ram. Note that the framework laptop has abysmal battery life relative to the competition.

Note that modern apple ram is not just soldered but actually in the SoC package. Sucks for upgradability, but that’s how they get 400Gb/s UMA speeds.

In-package RAM vs soldered on the motherboard next to the SoC package makes no difference to the bandwidth: GPUs take the latter approach to achieve equal or higher bandwidth. In either case, having a memory bus wider than 128 bits is a major factor in offering higher bandwidth than mainstream platforms. (Wide memory buses are easier to lay out on a PCB when routing to BGA memory packages than [SO]DIMM slots.)

But why doesn't it come on SODIMMS? Is there a technical reason for that or does nobody make the modules because all vendors use soldered?

I would argue the main "catch" is the price.

Laptops with similar specs and features (minus coreboot) are available 25% to 50% cheaper from vendors that care a lot less about Linux support.

Do you have an example of a such a laptop at 25-50% cheaper?

The models I've seen from Dell and Lenovo with 4k screens and 64 GB ram tend to be in the 2500 EUR range.

And, for some reason, you usually can't get this much RAM and a 4k screen with an AMD CPU.

HP has EliteBooks with upgradeable RAM (both slots!) so you could do your own upgrade, but you'd have to put up with a ridiculously crappy screen. I also don't know if they've upgraded to ryzen 6000.

> HP has EliteBooks with upgradeable RAM (both slots!) so you could do your own upgrade, but you'd have to put up with a ridiculously crappy screen. I also don't know if they've upgraded to ryzen 6000.

They have, I'm typing on one. The display I have is crappy BUT they have four or five different displays in the 14" 16:10 format and swapping one for another is relatively simple.

OK, I seen they have Gen9 models available with ryzen 6000, and still have upgradable DIMMS. However, to the original poster's point, they ask a little over 1700 EUR for an 8 GB RAM machine. Upgrading to 64 would bring it around 2000 EUR, and you'd still be stuck with a shitty screen.

On my Gen8 model, I have the "high-end" display. It's admittedly very bright, but the colors and viewing angles are terrible. Some say it's because it has the privacy screen. That may be the case for the viewing angles, but the colors are atrocious even judging by the specs. At work, they have no privacy screens and colors still suck. At best, you get something like 72% NTSC (which is smaller than sRGB). The Gen9 models I see on their French website have a 16:10 ratio (which, I think, is great) but only... 45% NTSC!

> strange ergonomic decisions

The keyboard is offset to the left because of the extra row of vertical keys on the right, so touch typists will have their right hand shifted toward the left more than normal. But the trackpad is still centered on the frame... so the right hand will be greatly overlapping the trackpad.

Visually, having the trackpad centered relative to the G/H keys would look imbalanced, but it would be ergonomic. But unfortunately they went for visual style over ergonomics on this one.

I do not really get why they would try to support both AMD and Intel .. given that these are obviously small runs. Where do they get the mainboards for this and how can they manage any testing and tuning? They do at least acknowledge that Coreboot for AMD might not be available at the time of shipping. It seems optimistic to say you can adopt it later when it is not ready yet.

Other than that, I would not mind paying a premium for a well made laptop with these specs. Still hoping System76 will get there someday.

Wow, looks and sounds just great. If I just hadn't bought a framework this would be tempting, as they even have an AMD option - however not the 4TB SSD (should be simple to add though)?

But happy that I have the Framework now and thus don't need to choose :D

Two downsides. One is the lack of number pad even in 15.6 inch laptops. Another is the lack of even a single memory DIMM slot so that I can upgrade RAM. Rest of the things I can live with. The only reason I buy 15 inch laptop is for the dedicated number pad. Many new laptop manufacturers has excellent specs except for the keyboard choice. Just include a number pad in all big laptops please. Thank you!

- A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card.

- Matte only option is a weird default over a glossy screen with an optional matte screen protector

- Corporate pricing (+324 gbp to go from 32gb to 64gb ram)

- Keyboard looks like crap

- Only 1 year warranty

- Like you said, 4-5 month lead time

- Plastic?

Basically, you can get better for less, with next day delivery

A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card is exactly what I would prefer. I would also prefer glossy, tho. But yeah, I don't get why there are no laptops with high power CPUs that don't include a dGPU, for compiling and many other CPU heavy tasks, there's absolutely no need to go over an iGPU, with a Radeon 680m being almost level with an RX 6400.

> A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card is exactly what I would prefer.

OK, so you are not interested in games, machine learning, 8k60, or any other thing that depends on a dedicated GPU.

But you are willing to blow $2000 on a laptop. That's a very niche situation.

A lot of people don't need to run the latest AAA blingfest at max settings, run ML workloads on localhost, or drive freaking 8k displays on the go.

And yet, people want quality hardware, good screens, comfortable input devices, and snappy enough hardware to either do work on them or consume online content without going blind.

I'm looking to replace a T490 to improve on the shitty screen that came with it, get a faster CPU with moar cores to compile code faster, and take advantage of the latest iGPU performance jump to drive the 4k display. That's pretty much it.

I bought a high end MBP nearly 10 years ago with discrete GPU, thinking I would use it for numerical physics simulations, graphics development (I used to be a game engine dev), and maybe even games.

Turns out in that nearly 10 years I've hardly used the dGPU at all. The only time I have it enabled is because it's necessary for driving an external display. The things I've run on it in practice just don't use much GPU.

For compute-intensive things I ended up using big, rented servers, which got faster while my laptop aged. For desktop graphics the iGPU has been adequate, and I ended up not really playing games or doing any ML, simulations or video encoding on it. Compiling, editing, filesystem things, code analysis, data storage and indexing, those don't need GPU at all. The browser does but in practice it's so CPU and memory bound, the dGPU vs iGPU difference is not something I've noticed affect browsing.

One game I played for a while, Tux Racer, did work better with dGPU enabled, but that's not enough reason to buy one if it's an optional and expensive feature. However in practice on a MBP you needed the dGPU to get max specs for the other components, which I needed (in fact the RAM was never enough), so it was still a good choice.

I could see opting for a 15/16” machine with no dedicated GPU, simply because the size of it means the cooling system is likely large enough to keep the CPU at reasonable temps without keeping fans spun up the vast majority of the time.

For a short while I had a 15” laptop with a high power AMD CPU and high power Nvidia GPU (5900HS/3080) and while the power was nice, it was much more noisy and hot than I prefer in a laptop so I returned it. Now if I need graphical muscle I turn to a tower, which can provide that in vast quantities with a fraction of the fan noise.

My laptop (Lenovo legion 7) has a vapor chamber cooling system is shared by the CPU and GPU, so when you're only using the CPU it will have the full cooling power of the laptop.

If you prefer you can disable the dGPU too.

You can pay for a longer warranty however if they are shipping this to Europe they need to warranty it for 2 years irregardless in Europe.

Memory is soldered. Their other laptop has upgradable memory.

Lpddr5 can't be made on a dimm.

Key travel is not specified. I wonder if it's decent.

Other than that it looks good. Kudos for the matte screen the framework doesn't offer.

Just the number 1 most important spec of any large screen laptop: the weight?

https://de.starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter-specification

1.4 kg, so considerably heavier than the LG gram 16 (that unfortunately isn't available in 32G+) but also far from being an outlier in the other direction

ISO keyboard layout.

You can select "English (US)" for ANSI

The laws of physics and known documented battery technology prohibit an 18 hr battery life with that screen and any choices of CPUs, and the limit of 99Wh battery capacity (you cannot take any individual battery beyond 100Wh on commercial flights in the USA and Europe).

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