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Comment by ziml77 | Hacker News Reader

I probably should have returned mine. I still love the idea of the device, but the speakers, display, and trackpad are subpar. I get that I'm spoiled by the quality of a MacBook Pro in those areas, but they still feel worse than other laptops I've tried.

Also he says he's never heard the fans spin up but I've had the system spin the fans up very high and they get loud. And the spin-up was definitely valid the times when I checked because the device was extremely hot, I think from charging.

Now the laptop is being used as a server. Ended up being good for Jellyfin because I can have the GPU handle transcoding and tonemapping of 4K HDR movies.

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Would be cool if Framework would sell speakers, a display, trackpad and housing comparable in quality to a MacBook Pro. It would have a high pricetag but you could slowly upgrade your machine. Especially since swapping out speakers or a trackpad is so easy.

Right now the Laptop 13 speaker kit is €20 but they could offer a €150 option that performs similar to a MacBook Pro for people who value sound.

They should be able to offer a better trackpad module (and I've been hoping that they eventually do). The speakers seem like a harder problem to solve. The acoustic engineering that goes into designing a good speaker involves every element that can interact with the sound waves, not just the driver itself.

The problem is you need correction EQ built into to the drivers tuned to the enclosure (in addition to loudspeakers that are also designed accounting for their directionality, position, and the volume of the enclosure).

you also need a lid angle sensor instead of a open/closed detector to account for the acoustic reflections off of the screen

It's not only a matter of having better hardware (though it certainly helps a lot). For example, Apple does a lot of software tuning and tweaking to make the Macbook speakers sound as good as they do. And it's been fascinating to read the extent of work Asahi Linux had to do to recreate the software portion of Macbook's audio stack.

https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/audio-userspace/ https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

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