c100
caligra.com
caligra.com
This looks well built with a lot of attention to detail. It’s impressive that the price isn’t higher for this level of machining and build quality on a low volume product.
I could see this doing well in some niche studios where they value design of all of the products in the office, but it’s a tough niche. The graphic and video designers are all going to be buying Apple. The CAD and engineering people want something with a real GPU. Most developers want a laptop that they can take with them. It’s nice that parts can be upgraded, but anchoring to that CPU is tough.
The closest such advance in recent years didn't happen and instead turned into the macbook neo. Apple could have released an OS for the iphone pro max model of phones that allow them to boot Mac OS when attached to a docking station. And sold a laptop formfactor docking station.
I find it more likely that Apple are working furiously the other way: to make Macbooks boot iOS.
Is it a window? It seems likely to me that we're going to be paying the LLM tax on all of our consumer electronics for the rest of our lives.
Do they? Is that why they've committed to literally doubling their production capacity in 5 years?
And most of that is just announcements from SK Hynix and CXMT coming online. Samsung's announcements are more conservative, and Micron is barely building shit. All of it put together still drags far behind demand, according to every financial statement by every DRAM manufacturer.
This is intentional because DRAM historically follow boom-bust cycles. Literally, they have all said they are intentionally aiming to build less than demand. Nobody wants to be stuck paying for a fab that isn't running at capacity 10 years from now.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sky-high-dram-prices-set-1229...
In this supply constrained market, DRAM manufacturers literally aren't the ones deciding to increase prices, buyers who are bidding up the price of future capacity are the ones increasing the prices.
If memory manufacturers believed that elevated demand were likely to persist indefinitely, expanding supply to reach the optimal market-clearing price is exactly what taking advantage of the situation would look like.
The extent to which they're not investing in expanded production capacity is the extent to which they manifestly don't believe the current demand spike will sustain over the long term
Personally speaking I was buying it primarily for the design aesthetic (an industrial design partner from Pentagram was involved), but I've come to enjoy the Workbench OS UI features and associated shortcuts; I use it as a secondary work machine for various data science applications.
I can attest to the general build quality which so far seems high to me.
Very rare these days.
There's some words about "oh yeah you can upgrade this" but not many details. The only thing I've seen so far has been a single shot from the Pentagram splash where it looks like a fairly standard off-the-shelf mini PC that's been gutted and put on life support like a Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck.
https://customer-i8ks9tgi5lkllj0i.cloudflarestream.com/c60aa...
https://www.pentagram.com/work/caligra-c100-developer-termin...
There is something very "Apple 1-button mouse" about it, for sure
But https://caligra.com/workbench/#pricing suggests it's an awkwardly-reskinned Fedora with a $240/year subscription fee.
So, er, yes. WTF?
--
§ https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/E1_(Tastaturbelegung)#UmfangI'm left handed and don't think that's a good idea
Site looks good but it might mean c100 have no substance, thus at least had to make the site and their gadget pretty.
The esthetic and form factor is the appeal
its a computer. it does computer things, and you can use it for whatever computer things you want.
You can put things in this box, which is an unusual accessory for a computer.
They also made an OS which will cost a lot of money per seat per year.
Then they took many clean smooth fingerprint-free photos and made a web site to try to sell it.
The web site makes the box look nice but does a poor job explaining the rest.
It sounds similar to System76, where they make pretty PC and OS (like Pop! OS) that goes with it
Oh yes, no matter how good a product is, if marketing sucks, it might not roll.
Am I missing context here that others have that make this website sufficient?
What a waste of material and machining time!
It's an "all in one" in that it has compute and a keyboard. But the mouse isn't integrated (literally just a wired mouse you lug around with it) and no display. So you can't actually walk it right up to a bench and start using it like a laptop. It has built in storage for your "stuff" but again, it's not fully portable so what else are you going to be carrying with it? Is it supposed to be used by a developer or a technician? And if a technician, why portable and why a non-standard keyboard layout? I haven't even gotten to the Workbench software yet, which seems to be appealing to neither an engineer nor a technician and is a Linux OS that somehow costs more than Windows.
This is silly and it bothers me more than it probably should that they say this "is designed for offices, workshops, labs, and factories" when this doesn't seem like they've spent any time in those environments. I'm just gonna keep shipping Asus Nucs running NixOS to my technician workstations and let my engineers use laptops.
It isn't even well thought out. You can fold the keyboard away while you're doing work. But you can only access the storage while the keyboard is open.
but much larger, heavier and with a specific keyboard.
This hardware runs an operating system that requires a subscription for commercial use? https://caligra.com/workbench/#pricing
Does checking work email count? Or buying something from Amazon?
This should be the standard quality for Linux machines.
another step back towards unix I guess, but bell didn't charge yearly.
(edit, remembered it wasnt at&t)
But I'm not a fan of connecting it to the keyboard instead. Why not just a mini pc with a built in battery?
Laptops with built-in screens make infinitely more sense for this population.
You could store the primary tools you use there as to declutter your desk. In my case though the storage box would end up probably covered with clutter over time.
I don't dislike it though, this is not for a person like me.
Is it coming from another project or is it built-in?
I also like the multi-modal scratchpad on the bottom half of the screen.
Edit: ok this is not a distro in the classical sense.
Edit 2: call me perv. but I'd love to see the back of the box where all the connectors are.
* link: https://customer-i8ks9tgi5lkllj0i.cloudflarestream.com/c60aa...
Installing software:
#ssh-keygen
#ssh -T git@github.com