Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design upside down

Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by noir_lord on Monday October 31, 2016 @10:04AM (#12836758)

That might be an interesting approach, I was thinking more set 4 price points and let people then vote which trade-offs to make to meet those price points.

At the moment I'm looking at a new developer laptop (though next year is more likely) and you can see that striation already.

I want a QHD display, 16GB RAM (or better) and an SSD, I'm not really fussed about the processor anything i5 or graphics but most machines with my requirements have a monster i7.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by Taek on Monday October 31, 2016 @11:38AM (#12837734)

I would pay a pretty premium for a 4K display, no graphics card, big battery, ~15" diagonal.

Companies seem to think that if you want a 4K you also want Performance. No, seriously I just want this as a glorified text editor. Give me screen resolution, and give me battery life. I'll pay more if you leave out the GPU because then it'll be lighter and draw less power.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by pjc50 on Monday October 31, 2016 @12:55PM (#12838596)

I think if you actually had one of those you'd be very disappointed. 4k is rather a lot of pixels. You need at least a reasonable 2D GPU if you want to be able to move windows around without ghosting everywhere. Blitting everything through the CPU would be far more power-hungry than delegating it to dedicated hardware.

Not to mention that a lot of people would be upset at not being able to watch Youtube fullscreen in decent resolution, for which you would need hardware decoding.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by pedrocr on Monday October 31, 2016 @01:14PM (#12838757)

OP probably means no discrete GPU, which these days means intel graphics. The latest ones should be able to drive 4K without issue.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by noir_lord on Monday October 31, 2016 @02:53PM (#12839790)

They can comfortably and on linux really well, I like them for everything but gaming/heavy 3D they are great.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by pedrocr on Wednesday November 02, 2016 @04:19PM (#12858852)

Compared to nVidia and AMD, Intel used to be much better. These days the driver situation isn't as rosy. There's a spotily maintained X driver (no releases in 3 years, updated by git snapshots) that is even being replaced by the generic modesetting driver in some distributions to avoid bugs. If you want flicker-free GUIs, tear-free video and general lack of bugs it's a bit of a crap shoot right now. The kernel driver does seem to get steady progress though, which is why the generic modesetting X driver seems to be a way forward.

Meanwhile both the AMD and nVidia situations have improved with more robust open source drivers appearing. I don't have experience with those to know if they've surpassed the Intel drivers in general quality though.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by geon on Monday October 31, 2016 @10:13AM (#12836829)

The price could be one of the clustering axes.

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Re:Intel-backed Finnish startup has turned laptop design ups... by Tantonos on Monday October 31, 2016 @10:36AM (#12837072)

Unless it's like these guys. They are doing one plus style direct sales. So they could effectively cut at least 30% off. The drawback is that you have to order online and wait.

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