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HP Dev One has sold out. Support is still available

3 points by Scramblejams ↗ HN
Temporary? Permanent? Sounds like it’s permanent. New model on the way, or is this the end of some HP director’s passion project?

https://hpdevone.com/

(Submitted as text because otherwise this fell afoul of HN’s dupe detector with a link to HP’s site from 8 months ago.)

7 comments

[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 29.9 ms ] thread
senttoschool
Why would anyone buy this over a Macbook Air M1 which is routinely on sale for as little as $800? This thing costs $1100 and comes with a 1080p screen.
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Scramblejams
Because a customer might want to run a mainstream Linux distro where everything just works on a nice piece of non-Lenovo hardware with well-funded, competent phone support and a trackpoint. Oh, and more ports.

Over the last month it was marked down $220.

Plays games pretty decently too, including on Proton, with that Zen integrated GPU and an open source driver.

senttoschool
Maybe they found a niche of developers who hate Lenovo for some reason, but requires a trackpoint and phone support for their laptop.

I'm pretty sure you can just install the Linux distro on any laptop and probably on Apple Silicon Macs soon too.

It doesn't seem worth the price. Maybe if it was $700.

Scramblejams
I'm pretty sure you can just install the Linux distro on any laptop and probably on Apple Silicon Macs soon too.

I wish! There are a lot of laptops where Linux works well right out of the box -- Thinkpads, particularly, though new releases usually take a while before the bugs get ironed out. But problems are common, particularly in high power usage and suspend not working correctly, and some wifi chips not playing nice or requiring installation of out-of-tree drivers from source. It can be a bit of a minefield.

And mainstream distros will likely never run on new Apple systems, unless Apple has a change of heart and starts maintaining Linux drivers for all of their hardware. (Spoiler: pigs will fly first.) It was challenging enough when they were running x86, dealing with Apple's other undocumented non-standard components and weird firmware. On ARM? Don't count on it.

Based on your comments I think you're not in the target market for the HP Dev One, and that's just fine.

heavyset_go
> I'm pretty sure you can just install the Linux distro on any laptop and probably on Apple Silicon Macs soon too.

I've been using Linux on laptops for 20 years now, this is not a bet you can make. If you look at the Asahi Linux hardware compatibility list, they are nowhere near complete when it comes to support on Linux.

You also have to be careful even with Thinkpads, as support will vary between models and generations greatly.

The Dev One's upsides are the fact that it ships with full Linux support out of the box, has 2 free SODIMM slots and upgradable NVMe storage. Most Thinkpads have soldered memory, and even the ones with a free SODIMM slot also have soldered memory in the other slot. The ones that don't also have varying Linux support.

I ended up buying one myself for those reasons. I needed a laptop I can run Linux on and that I can upgrade. I don't want to fight hardware just to use Linux, either.

> It doesn't seem worth the price. Maybe if it was $700.

The site had a $220 off coupon before they sold out.

heavyset_go
Linux support and upgradable memory. The Dev One also has a coupon that brings it down to $800.

16GB doesn't cut it as the max amount of memory for an M1 Air, and spec'ing out an M2 Air with 24GB maximum memory and a 1TB SSD results in a $2100 laptop. I can stick 64GB of memory into a Dev One.