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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

These look fantastic, what's the catch? Who are Star Labs and why should I trust them? The "About Us" Section doesn't tell me who us is.

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Star Labs is trustworthy (typing this on a Star Labs StarLike Mk IV right now), but small hardware brand. They're based in the UK.

What’s your experience with StarLite IV? I’m thinking about buying it for heavy note taking - neovim/obsidian/browser (Google docs and excalidraw). What battery life I can expect? Is keyboard nice to type? Is stuff like sleep, Wi-Fi auto connect and bluetooth headphones really solved?

Not the parent but I have a StarLite IV as well.

The keyboard is very nice. Short travel for keys but pleasant to use. I use iwd as the wireless deamon and wifi autoconnect works just fine. I do not have bluetooth headphones so cannot comment on that, but my bluetooth mouse works as expected.

Battery life depends largely on how you use it. I have a minimal setup with alpine linux/i3 and just typing in a terminal with screen at 33% brightness results in battery-reported power consumption of just under 2W which is great. Obviously a browser like firefox will impact it quite a bit. Hardware-accelerated video playback works fine.

There are a few minor downsides: the built-in speaker is quite awful (not a consideration for me), the webcam is not great and the microsd card reader is usb 2.0. UEFI secure boot is currently not supported on the coreboot fw. The documentation is sparse.

One weird gotcha is that the power button is one of the keys on the keyboard, so to avoid suspending your device accidentally it will only fire an interrupt after you hold it for a couple seconds. Took me a while to figure out.

That's basically my use case, and I'm quite happy. Battery life for me usually is somewhere between 6-7 hours. The keyboard is pretty decent - not quite as good as a Macbook keyboard or similar low-profile keyboards (e.g. Logitech MX Keys line), but good enough, though the oddball arrow key configuration and sizing for the right-hand Shift and Fn keys is a frequent annoyance. Sleep and wifi auto-connect work well for me on Ubuntu 22.04 w/ KDE Plasma. Can't vouch for bluetooth headphone usage, because I don't really use bluetooth with this device.

I was thinking it was extremely familiar before realizing I was remembering the fictional Star Labs wherein Barry Allen got his Flash powers from.

I can't tell you who they are as individuals, but I can tell you I bought a Starbook from them in late 2021 and I love it. No problems whatsoever with performance, stability, anything.

(No affiliation, although they do operate out of a barn within walking distance of my house!)

Yeah but a 1 GHz N200 yeesh. Everything else looks great.

I haven't used one myself but the N200 looks pretty ok for a tablet that's supposed to run a long time on battery. Quad core Skylake-ish cores that turbo to 3.7GHz?

Notebook check says equivalent to a Core i5-8250U. That is not good in 2023.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Processor-N200-CPU-Bench...

It depends on what you're doing. My 4th low power i5 in my laptop and my i3 7100 in my main desktop are just fine for web browsing and development.

Yes, and in this case 6W TDP and cheap enough for a $500 tablet seem like key drivers of the N200's design. Of course the Apple M1 is probably twice as fast at similar cost and power but compared to everything outside Apple the N200 looks pretty decent.

If they make a Ryzen 7040 APU version, I'll take it as my daily driver.

7040 in its lowest TDP configuration is 15W. Intel N200 is 6W. Even accounting for some differences in how both companies measure TDP only one of these can be passively cooled in that sort of form factor.

The lack of low-tdp products on AMD side was also one of the reasons given by pcengines to discontinue their embedded line. AMD's last 6W APU was the 2-core R1102G which is now a couple generations old.

It's a tablet, not a workstation PC. I have a Surface Go w/ 4GB of memory running Fedora 37 that's plenty fast for what I use it for.

Apparently this also supports hardware accelerated AV1 decoding and h265 encode/decode.

Where did you get 1Ghz from? The N200 has a max clock of 3.7Ghz.

From the Specification section of the website:

> 1.00GHz quad-core Intel Alder Lake N200

> Turbo Boost up to 3.70GHz, with 6MB Smart Cache

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