Exactly. No real laptops so far; no videos with honest in-depth reviews; no information on the dirability of these machines.
If something is too good to be true, it likely is.
Because every channel I have seen on anything...Is claiming independent reviews, while getting product test samples loaned for 1 or 2 years. Engaging on a direct contact with the marketing departments of the vendors, and working under the certainty that if they ever do a thoughtful and true review with a bad rating, the vendor wont send any more samples.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28608132
https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/y95kt4/what_...
(Star Labs has been around for years making Linux laptops)
Laptops with similar specs and features (minus coreboot) are available 25% to 50% cheaper from vendors that care a lot less about Linux support.
The models I've seen from Dell and Lenovo with 4k screens and 64 GB ram tend to be in the 2500 EUR range.
And, for some reason, you usually can't get this much RAM and a 4k screen with an AMD CPU.
HP has EliteBooks with upgradeable RAM (both slots!) so you could do your own upgrade, but you'd have to put up with a ridiculously crappy screen. I also don't know if they've upgraded to ryzen 6000.
They have, I'm typing on one. The display I have is crappy BUT they have four or five different displays in the 14" 16:10 format and swapping one for another is relatively simple.
On my Gen8 model, I have the "high-end" display. It's admittedly very bright, but the colors and viewing angles are terrible. Some say it's because it has the privacy screen. That may be the case for the viewing angles, but the colors are atrocious even judging by the specs. At work, they have no privacy screens and colors still suck. At best, you get something like 72% NTSC (which is smaller than sRGB). The Gen9 models I see on their French website have a 16:10 ratio (which, I think, is great) but only... 45% NTSC!
If anyone is interested in unusably tiny and/or slow SSDs, let me know because right now they're just going in e-waste.
(I have similar beef with drinks in restaurants at, e.g., ~100x markup for tap water. Why not just charge a normal price for both the food and the drinks, instead of me having to guess at how much I should be spending on drinks to compensate the normal-priced food? Or make both cheap and charge a table fee, whatever floats their boat. This incentivizes people to not drink enough; usually it's calories where people overingest, not hydration!)
It's often not offered because it sounds like asking for a free drink instead of paying ~13 euros per liter which seems to be the average norm. Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water, which in turn is the same price as any soft drink (demonstrating that the price has nothing to do with cost, it must be paying for the table or something but it doesn't say so I don't know).
Anyway, it's more about places charging dishonest prices to seemingly cover for something else, leaving the consumer to guessing why in the world this might cost so much and just going with another option. I can't imagine it achieves the intended goal, so it doesn't seem like a good idea for either side. If anyone ever did finances for a restaurant or has a better-than-guessing idea why SSDs are priced this way, I'd be very curious.
I don't think I'll be able to make sense of what you're saying until you explain what you mean by "normal water". Are you referring to branded bottled water?
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
>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.
Apple does not own their own factories.
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.
However doing this at small scale is very difficult to do cost-effectively.
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.
I genuinely root for them.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+Labs+Systems/@51.1863...
If they are successful, they'll eventually hire someone and likely get some polish on those details.
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
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".
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.
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.
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?
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.
Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.
Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great. My 2.5 year old Dell is currently with Dell for out of warranty repairs. I have no other windows machines left. All of them had an 4ish year lifespan are now dead and were not worth fixing. Current machine not withstanding; it’s too young to die.
Edit: I will add that I’m perfectly happy with my other windows machines, just that the build quality was such that I their natural lifespan was simply shorter.
My XPS13 is going strong after years of abuse and being lugged around the world in hand luggage.
My old powerbook and ibook (remember those?!) Both had live current running through the case screws which caused a stingy shock on bare legs.
I've never seen an Apple laptop that didn't look nice but ultimately have weird issues
Last time I looked at second hand laptops. Most of those the +5y old macbooks in the market had huge issues / defects (and also looked like shit) while you could find a lot of decent refurbished thinkpads and HP elitebook from the same era with no advertized defects (and those I bought didn't have any). I am excluding battery life as regarldess of the brand all needed a brand new one.
So they seem to be the gold standard when new. But they certainly don't age so well.
MacBooks may use some nice materials, and their processors are interesting, but for a customer like me that prefers to install the hardware and software of my choice either today or in ten years, they have no products I'm interested in.
I've never had to sell or retire any machine I've had in the last twenty years, they're all somewhere doing something right now.
My Macs usually stay at home if I have a more rugged machine to take with me, just for the peace of mind. It's probably a matter of personal distrust, but I'm a clumsy guy...
A second hand T-series is still what I'd default to if I need a laptop for now (especially for the keyboard), but I'm aware that this is likely not going to forever remain the obvious choice it used to be.
But in years past a mbp and an imac that never fell an inch killed themselves from the bad video chips, which Apple and their supposedly gold standard support refused to warranty and by the time they lost in court years later the damage was already done and cost various friends the price of new machines.
Other that those famous examples like that and the keyboards, just in general among all the machines I intersect with, the Apples don't fare any better. They all get busted screens, busted ports, busted hinges, exploded batteries. In fact HP and Apple seem to have to most cases of glued in batteries that expand and break the rest of the machine.
That doesn't work very well if there's more than one of you trying to watch...
I have a 7.1.4 system at home and obviously there's no comparison but they sound good enough for most series I watch when I'm on the go - mostly on travels.
They're also very good for meetings. I find them much better than any enterprise equipment (Jabra etc) I've ever used.
Sure, good headphones will usually sound better, but I'd rather not have my ears covered all the time. To each their own, I guess.
I'd still mostly rather not wear anything most of the time. This is especially true those times when the laptop speakers prove the most useful - when I'm just chilling out, possibly in bed. I'd also rather not have to deal with wires during those times.
My main issue is not so much warmth but mostly the fact that my ears are covered, simple as that. I'm not neurotic about it but I prefer to have them open. Sometimes I'll take the sound quality hit and wear my bone conducing headset over wearing great sounding headphones.
didn't feel that about any touchpad before the macbook, and it's why we loved thinkpad's so much because at least they gave you a nub
I would love to see Linux laptop that works like that.
1.4 kg, so considerably heavier than the LG gram 16 (that unfortunately isn't available in 32G+) but also far from being an outlier in the other direction
- Matte only option is a weird default over a glossy screen with an optional matte screen protector
- Corporate pricing (+324 gbp to go from 32gb to 64gb ram)
- Keyboard looks like crap
- Only 1 year warranty
- Like you said, 4-5 month lead time
- Plastic?
Basically, you can get better for less, with next day delivery
OK, so you are not interested in games, machine learning, 8k60, or any other thing that depends on a dedicated GPU.
But you are willing to blow $2000 on a laptop. That's a very niche situation.
And yet, people want quality hardware, good screens, comfortable input devices, and snappy enough hardware to either do work on them or consume online content without going blind.
I'm looking to replace a T490 to improve on the shitty screen that came with it, get a faster CPU with moar cores to compile code faster, and take advantage of the latest iGPU performance jump to drive the 4k display. That's pretty much it.
Turns out in that nearly 10 years I've hardly used the dGPU at all. The only time I have it enabled is because it's necessary for driving an external display. The things I've run on it in practice just don't use much GPU.
For compute-intensive things I ended up using big, rented servers, which got faster while my laptop aged. For desktop graphics the iGPU has been adequate, and I ended up not really playing games or doing any ML, simulations or video encoding on it. Compiling, editing, filesystem things, code analysis, data storage and indexing, those don't need GPU at all. The browser does but in practice it's so CPU and memory bound, the dGPU vs iGPU difference is not something I've noticed affect browsing.
One game I played for a while, Tux Racer, did work better with dGPU enabled, but that's not enough reason to buy one if it's an optional and expensive feature. However in practice on a MBP you needed the dGPU to get max specs for the other components, which I needed (in fact the RAM was never enough), so it was still a good choice.
For a short while I had a 15” laptop with a high power AMD CPU and high power Nvidia GPU (5900HS/3080) and while the power was nice, it was much more noisy and hot than I prefer in a laptop so I returned it. Now if I need graphical muscle I turn to a tower, which can provide that in vast quantities with a fraction of the fan noise.
If you prefer you can disable the dGPU too.
The keyboard is offset to the left because of the extra row of vertical keys on the right, so touch typists will have their right hand shifted toward the left more than normal. But the trackpad is still centered on the frame... so the right hand will be greatly overlapping the trackpad.
Visually, having the trackpad centered relative to the G/H keys would look imbalanced, but it would be ergonomic. But unfortunately they went for visual style over ergonomics on this one.
But happy that I have the Framework now and thus don't need to choose :D
Other than that, I would not mind paying a premium for a well made laptop with these specs. Still hoping System76 will get there someday.
Other than that it looks good. Kudos for the matte screen the framework doesn't offer.
It's available with an AMD or Intel processor, there aren't any strange ergonomic decisions (other than the stow-able web-cam). In particular, they centered they trackpad + keyboard, and it looks like it has decent thermals. The battery is rated for 18 hours. You can choose between a medium resolution, high frame rate display (UHD @ 165Hz) or a 4K 60Hz display. The screen is matte. They claim it POSTs in under a second.
The only real downside is the 4-5 month lead time. Am I missing something?