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Comment by chx | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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.

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.

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

See also “gild the lily”.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

- "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.

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.

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

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 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?

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.

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.

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

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

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