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?
I mean, all their laptops looks like that, and they have a pretty good track record of following through. I'm in the market for a new laptop, and a 4-5 month lead time is a bit too far out. Maybe I'll purchase one when they're actually shipping, but by then I'm sure I'll be happy with whatever frankentop I cobble together.
I am typing this on their latest StarBook. It's a great machine. As for durability, it has an aluminium body and seems sturdily built. I expect it to last a good few years.
If you are talking about YouTube reviews. Please tell me where you find in-depth honest reviews.
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.
Linus seems a nice guy, but with 20 or more employees, and a channel that needs to review products first, works with embargoes organized by the vendors. As any YouTube business, competes for views. A really bad (honest?) review won't get him more samples. So the incentives are on the wrong place.
There are pics of a protoype in their Twitter feed. Also you can see lots of pics/videos of their previous model laptops: https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/
(Star Labs has been around for years making Linux laptops)
Do you have an example of a such a laptop at 25-50% cheaper?
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.
> 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.
OK, I seen they have Gen9 models available with ryzen 6000, and still have upgradable DIMMS. However, to the original poster's point, they ask a little over 1700 EUR for an 8 GB RAM machine. Upgrading to 64 would bring it around 2000 EUR, and you'd still be stuck with a shitty screen.
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!
As usual. Not sure why this is, they could just charge for the labor that it actually costs them to put a different SSD in plus material cost, but no, they always mark up ridiculous amounts. It basically forces people to buy a dummy SSD with the device plus a loose one and then put it in yourself... at least that's what I do for myself and family whenever it saves more than 50 euros and takes me 5-10 minutes (usually it saves ~100 euros to buy extra hardware on top of what you already get in the laptop(!)).
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!)
Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, and more limited experience in Luxembourg. (I've been to more places but honestly don't remember what drink prices were like in Finland ten years ago, let alone remembering what the Icelandic króna prices amounted to when I was there more recently.)
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 (edit: that means bottled/branded; the default they'll bring you if unspecified), 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 party. 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.
> Those that offer tap water (that's most places) will usually (not always) charge you the same as a normal water,
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?
Ah, sorry yes, that was bad phrasing on my part. By normal I meant what was on the menu (water that is branded, bottled, shipped, sometimes stolen) instead of my out-of-the-ordinary request (tap water), but calling that the 'normal' is of course a culture-specific way of thinking, and a cultural feature I do not like.
In these places where bottled water is the norm, do you have to specify what brand you want? Like if they ask what you want to drink and you answer "I'll just have water", is that an incomplete response?
Wait until you find out that every place in the Netherlands and Germany charges you money to take a piss or a dump. Even places like McDonalds and gas stations. Some people make sure it goes on the side of the building instead.
Restaurants don't charge you for toilet usage in NL 0r DE when you are a paying customer, neither does McDonald's. (Yes, it's up for debate whether that's a restaurant :))
It does happen, in certain locations and under certain circumstances. And I really can't blame them, when toilet-only visitors start outnumbering paying customers by a considerable margin. When all your anecdotal data is from Oktoberfest surroundings and the like you might come to certain conclusions.
Are there public restrooms available in those places? If not, that's extremely frustrating. I don't understand why more places don't have public restrooms. People are gonna poop one way or the other.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted. I've bought many a device with the minimum RAM and disk space which I will then throw out and replace with third party stuff. I get why many vendors do it, but I hate the waste. I'm more willing to forgive it in a general-audience company than people who are selling to the kind of technical audience who can all do the swap.
If you search for wtallis in this thread you'll find a technical reason for soldered ram. Can't respond with a link since on mobile, did it several hours ago at home though.
Unfortunately low power ddr4 (lpddr4) does not come on SODIMs, soldered ram is the only way to get it. I know everyone likes to shit on apple about this, (and they definitely should about soldered storage) but there are practical engineering reasons for soldered ram. Note that the framework laptop has abysmal battery life relative to the competition.
In-package RAM vs soldered on the motherboard next to the SoC package makes no difference to the bandwidth: GPUs take the latter approach to achieve equal or higher bandwidth. In either case, having a memory bus wider than 128 bits is a major factor in offering higher bandwidth than mainstream platforms. (Wide memory buses are easier to lay out on a PCB when routing to BGA memory packages than [SO]DIMM slots.)
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.
>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’s manufacturing story is complex. They design most of the parts, and they often own the much of the equipment in the factories. Apple’s involvement with their suppliers is much much deeper than companies who resell ODM equipment.
Do they? I was under the impression most small brands simply resell such ODMs as Clevo or TongFang perhaps they add RAM/SSD/such -- but they do not design custom motherboards and chassis.
They did exactly that already for a few years. It doesn't seem crazy to me that after a while of that, they advanced to do a bit more. Still sounds like they mostly employed others, just now a level up from before, employing designers rather than buying finished product.
They’re brought up on every “alternative to the Mac” thread as a brand that’s explicitly not a Clevo reseller but they somehow never get much attention.
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.
A mould is anywhere from a few thousand dollars for a small, simple, high-tolerance part, to many hundreds of thousands for a large, precision, complex mould with moving tools.
I have one of their machines (a StarBook that I am typing this on), and it is excellent. It probably helps to have a $9m seed round -- certainly it means Framework can do much more marketing (including such as the Steam Deck stunt) and hire more people -- and I'm sure it's easier to raise those funds from the US, but it is clearly not necessary. I hope that Star Labs does well enough that they are able to expand, raise funding if they wish, and compete with better capitalized companies.
They have 400k of stock, though. It's common for a company not to keep a lot of cash around and borrow as needed against stock, which I would guess they are doing as they have 200k+ of creditors.
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.
Edited to add:
Actually I misread the statement, they have 200k falling due in a year and a further 700k of debt. So that's nearly 1M of investment, which seems easily enough to do this development, given it's much less complex than the framework devices.
They seem to be real entrepreneurs running the thing from a farm in rural settings [1] where the director lives (same personal address declared). If I read it right they are in ca. 400k debt so far, working it down slowly. I am wishing them quick success as their product looks great. Perhaps if I will be patient enough waiting 5 month for delivery after payment and will not worry about if warranty (or even shipment) could be ever fulfilled by a tiny new company I will make a try myself. On paper this is a quality laptop that is so hard to find in the sea of trash. But perhaps will wait until more experiences are gained by other customers in a year or so (considering the half year delivery lag). I also wish they used less pompous text in the very first two senences of the headline in the style of hustlers with more mouth than content: "exquisitely crafted", "sets a new standard", "groundbreaking technology", "ultimate choice", "users who demand the very best". It is off-putting for me. No need to sugar the honey this hard.
That’s impressive, they are really bootstrap. The quality of their hardware and their support has been fantastic I highly recommend them if you can afford the weight
Frankly, if it's three people, you're lucky it's not riddled with typos and grammatical errors. If "we aren't polished at PR" is your big criticism, it's a nit.
If they are successful, they'll eventually hire someone and likely get some polish on those details.
I think this criticism is missing the point of the OP. It’s not simply “PR”, it’s how the company views or thinks about their products that matters. It’s disingenuous at best to make such claims with presumably almost no laptops shipped, fraudulent at worst.
I'm a freelance writer and blogger. I see it as a noob mistake sometimes made by sincere, well-meaning but naive folks who don't know anything about PR.
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.
I wish them good luck, I just wish as you pointed out with the hyperbolic statements they weren’t trying to poorly emulate Apple marketing. I found the page very harsh graphically and full of elementary design mistakes (font ratios, spacing, layout, etc), and not great copy writing. I know people feel the need to maximize their product marketing, but if you’re going to swing this hard, hire someone who is good enough to do it for you.
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".
Having disgruntled customers show up at your office is not the same as them showing up at your home. It's not at all sketchy to want some privacy before you've gotten your office lease sorted. When starting a business you have all these circular dependencies, where you can't get a lease before you register your business, but when you register your business you need an address on day 1.
There is actually a solution to this in the UK. Directors are permitted to have a service address on the public record instead of their home address, and you can find a bunch of companies willing to allow you to rent one and forward mail.
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.
> How on Earth could a customer looking up a vendor's business information be construed doxxing?
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.
> But like you, when somebody is doing business with the public, I think we should expect to know who they are.
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.
I have their latest starbook, just arrived a couple months ago and it is stellar. Covid delayed it almost a whole year, but in that time they upgraded frob adwertised 11th gen intel to 12th gen for free, quadrupling cores. It runs extremeley well with latest coreboot and everything. I considered canceling my pre-order because of the long delay, but Support was extremely quick and receptive and it turns out the trust they earned was warranted. I did a lot of research and really nothing comes close to these guys. This new one is expensive relatively, but the Starbook I have was a surprisingly good deal. No connection to them except a happy customer who can gladly recommend them.
Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.
OS agnostic here (I’ve worked professionally in all three major OSes and on both Apple and a variety of Windows machines, currently enjoying WSL2 on my Dell XPS 9700).
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 dell XPS has been going strong for 5 years now, replaced the battery and upgraded the SSD in that time but it's been a pretty impressive machine and definitely on par with apple laptops I've had in the past
> Apple’s laptop hardware still seems to be the gold standard to me. I have 10 year old laptops that still work great.
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.
Many would agree that the middle years between 2015-2020 were not gold standard. It’s laughable to suggest Apple didn’t win the title back with the advent of the M1.
Genuinely curious what is better. MacBook Pros have been the gold standard for a while and now with the ARM chips they are pretty much unbeatable in my eyes.
Thinkpad for me is the gold standard because I can swap out the components and they have videos and guides of how to do so on their website. Their materials are sturdy and light.
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.
Thinkpads haven't failed me yet, even if it's a cliched response. The display isn't apt to breaking like a Macbook, and the chassis does a surprisingly good job reducing shock (even on later models). Toughbooks are probably a shoo-in with that logic, and I'd like to try one of HP's recent Elitebooks to see how they stack up.
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...
Thinkpad build quality is definitely on a slow decline. There's a lot more plastic casework in a new model than in a T440, say. They don't feel completely rigid in hand any more. And that's before the loss of a removable, upgradeable battery and the advent of soldered RAM.
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.
Agreed, I'm waiting for the verdict to come back on Framework or some Linux OEMs before I upgrade my T460s. The product line isn't headed in a formidable direction, but I'm glad that there have been other manufacturers eying the space.
at least Thinkpad and Gram just from my own direct experience.
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.
Currently, especially with the addition of the ARM CPU, I think yes.
I have a pretty new MBP (~1 year old) and it's great but my previous MBP had cooling problems - almost anything made it go lawn mower mode.
I'm really curious about people that actually use laptop speakers. Even the best laptop speakers I've heard (I've heard MacBook speakers too) sound terrible. Other than for a quick video or demo or whatever, who is seriously listening to videos or music on laptop speakers... And why??? Even a cheap pair of earbuds sounds better to me.
I use laptop speakers a few times a year, when I bring the device to my bedroom and just listen to a long interview with the screen turned off. Laying on the bed with headphones on my head is not something I would do. Earbuds I have not used in 15 years.
I find the MBP 14" and 16" speakers pretty serviceable for lightweight TV watching.
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.
Try good half-open cans like Beyerdynamic DT880, i can wear them for hours. I like the sound better than fully open Headphones, compared them to the DT990s. With my closed DT770 my ears get uncomfortably warm pretty fast.
I have all sorts of headphones. Open backs, half-open, closed backs, some of them are absolutely amazing.
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.
Just to pile on here, the 2019-2021 refresh Intel Macbook Pro 13 and 16 have laptop speakers that rival good portable bluetooth speakers complete with shockingly deep bass, clear midrange and defined treble. They are by far and away the best laptop speakers I've heard. Nice decently powered headphone jack as well.
My partner has a Lenovo Yoga from like 2 generations ago and she's really happy with their sound. Its soundbar was one of the selling points. And it does indeed deliver
this is what i want to know, the part you touch looks on point, what i want to know about is the software, there is so much secret sauce in a macbooks giant glass touchpad that actually makes it a reasonable replacement for a mouse
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
my thoughts exactly. before getting MBP about 10 years ago I couldn't even imagine not using mouse with laptop, but after a day or so with MBP and its touchpad it changed 180 degrees and now mouse feel unnatural (and requires way more movement of hands).
I would love to see Linux laptop that works like that.
I'm seeing conflicting comments about the RAM. You say you're an owner and it has upgradable RAM, other commenters here are saying the RAM is soldered. Is only this new model soldered?
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
The laws of physics and known documented battery technology prohibit an 18 hr battery life with that screen and any choices of CPUs, and the limit of 99Wh battery capacity (you cannot take any individual battery beyond 100Wh on commercial flights in the USA and Europe).
A 16" laptop with no dedicated graphics card is exactly what I would prefer. I would also prefer glossy, tho. But yeah, I don't get why there are no laptops with high power CPUs that don't include a dGPU, for compiling and many other CPU heavy tasks, there's absolutely no need to go over an iGPU, with a Radeon 680m being almost level with an RX 6400.
A lot of people don't need to run the latest AAA blingfest at max settings, run ML workloads on localhost, or drive freaking 8k displays on the go.
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.
I bought a high end MBP nearly 10 years ago with discrete GPU, thinking I would use it for numerical physics simulations, graphics development (I used to be a game engine dev), and maybe even games.
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.
I could see opting for a 15/16” machine with no dedicated GPU, simply because the size of it means the cooling system is likely large enough to keep the CPU at reasonable temps without keeping fans spun up the vast majority of the time.
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.
My laptop (Lenovo legion 7) has a vapor chamber cooling system is shared by the CPU and GPU, so when you're only using the CPU it will have the full cooling power of the laptop.
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.
Wow, looks and sounds just great. If I just hadn't bought a framework this would be tempting, as they even have an AMD option - however not the 4TB SSD (should be simple to add though)?
But happy that I have the Framework now and thus don't need to choose :D
I do not really get why they would try to support both AMD and Intel .. given that these are obviously small runs. Where do they get the mainboards for this and how can they manage any testing and tuning? They do at least acknowledge that Coreboot for AMD might not be available at the time of shipping. It seems optimistic to say you can adopt it later when it is not ready yet.
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.
Two downsides. One is the lack of number pad even in 15.6 inch laptops. Another is the lack of even a single memory DIMM slot so that I can upgrade RAM. Rest of the things I can live with. The only reason I buy 15 inch laptop is for the dedicated number pad. Many new laptop manufacturers has excellent specs except for the keyboard choice. Just include a number pad in all big laptops please. Thank you!
For sure. People really need to stop complaining about the obscurity of things they can Google. The first hit for "Xur and the Kodan armada" is a page from a fan wiki: https://thelaststarfighter.fandom.com/wiki/Xur
As somebody who plays very few video games and is forever looking up references, I promise that basically everything is now documented.
And about half that for the afaik EU minimum legal warranty of 2 years. Their warranty page says they'll honor local laws, though, which I expect to mean whatever flag is displayed at the bottom of the page for you as opposed to their local.
They probably won't be pleased to learn that the Netherlands, which they seem to have a custom page for so apparently support, doesn't have a minimum duration specified, so you could take them to court if the CPU fails after 5 years since who's ever heard of a CPU failing? Those things usually last decades and so that's what one is also lead to expect if not otherwise advertised. (I don't know of case law in this area, but that's how I've heard consumer law being explained by the consumer market authority consuwijzer and others.)
"1 year limited warranty" for a 2000€ device that usually lasts at least 3, if not 5 years. Do people in the UK commonly put up with that or is the 1 year thing due to their small scale?
UK law is not straight forward since it uses the word "reasonable" in the duration.
"The Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that items must be of satisfactory quality, as described, fit for purpose and last a reasonable length of time. You have these rights for six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland.
Items must be of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose as described and last a reasonable length of time. So, for example, if you have bought a washing machine and it breaks after two years you should still be able to claim. However a consumer is expected to use the appliance reasonably. For example, a washing machine may be expected to be used a few times a week. It will show if it has been used every day twice a day for two years and this may be considered unreasonable and you would not get a repair or replacement.
For an item such as a washing machine, or a car etc., the retailer can take off money for use. This needs to be a reasonable “amount”.
You should familiarise yourself with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 before paying for any warranty being offered.
It is worth stating I have never paid for or used a warranty. I always assert my legal rights.
A retailer may try and fob you off saying that you should have bought a warranty. But your consumer rights are worth more than any warranty."
This isn't a regular warranty. As the website states: "Our 1-year limited warranty allows you to take your computer apart, replace parts, install an upgrade, and use any operating system and even your firmware, all without voiding the warranty."
These actions would normally void the warranty on most laptops.
> Our 1-year limited warranty allows you to take your computer apart, replace parts
The whole point of a warranty is to save me from needing to do those things.
> install an upgrade
Nearly everything inside is either non-upgradeable, pointless to upgrade, or doesn't void other manufacturers warranties (lenovo does not void warranty for replacing ssd) so that's completely meaningless.
Yeah, the equivalent additional coverage for a ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 4 is $111. And that's for their onsite repair, where they come to you. It seems like StarFighter has very low confidence in the longevity of their products. Which would be a dealbreaker for me.
I live in the UK and can’t stand that crackpot layout that thinks the paragraph mark and the negation sign trump bacquote and tilde, so I buy my laptops from the US, except for Apple who allow you to choose your keyboard layout as an option.
Practically as upgradable and maintainable/repairable as the framework. They sell all of the components separately, and this runs a fully up-to-date coreboot and even esoteric linux systems get tested on it. It is a significantly better Linux computer.
The StarFighter has soldered memory, making it significantly less upgradeable than the Framework Laptop. (Star Labs also sells the mid-range StarBook with upgradeable memory.) The Framework Laptop also has the advantage of swappable port/storage modules. However, the StarFighter has higher specs than the Framework Laptop at a higher price, and Star Labs is Linux-first while Framework is Windows-first.
Well, it might be a better Linux computer when it ships. The StarBook Mk VI ran about 6 months behind schedule (pre-orders are still shipping now: https://support.starlabs.systems/status/f38fed83-e6a1-454c-8...) though so I wouldn't set your watch to it...
Who is this targeting besides the 100 or so hackernews commenters who will actually go through and buy it. Why would I buy this over a lenovo for instance.
Okay so privacy nuts who think that removing their webcam and microphone protects from the perceived spyware that is next to them on their desk in the form of an iPhone.
I see nothing good about this. Inexperienced company, inexperienced in manufacturing and hardware design.
actually agree. Also considering their "kill switch" marketing. Who needs to turn their internet off on a whim who doesn't already have some sort of keybind to do this? Why buy this over framework / other laptop for 25% more money. Don't really understand
Because Framework is only available at, what seems to me like, tablet sizes. I know a lot of people love that size and that's fantastic, but I'm happy to see a ~15.6" option also being offered for those that prefer it.
My ThinkPad has a physical switch for airplane mode. There's a big difference between "turning off" the functionality in software and physically cutting the power to anything that can transmit.
It’s one of the only laptops that ship with core boot, Fully up-to-date with upstream commits to work flawlessly with their hardware. Their support has been extremely helpful, and the build quality is amazing. Fully custom hardware, which is extremely rare for Linux computers. I am just a happy customer, no other affiliation.
Sadly, when it comes to Linux compatibility on laptops, "flawless" hardware compatibility is still an extremely rare exception (and even pre-installed and Linux certified laptop models like Dell XPS DE, or Lenovo ThinkPads can have long-standing issues).
Partial agree on the privacy thing. It does make me feel better not to have an eye always pointed towards me no matter what I'm doing, so I do see value in being able to disable it physically. However, being paranoid enough to want to physically remove the webcam is an entirely different ball game than having a webcam cover and silently doing your thing, so I assume that everyone agrees that this is just a marketing gimmick. For the mic, I can see the argument that putting your phone away is easier than not having any sort of modern computing device around when you want to not be recorded, and so that could be useful for some people (but I agree: a very limited number). You might also consider that people currently don't take these privacy steps because it's inconvenient. If it were as easy as flipping a switch, maybe people would use it after all. Having the option isn't bad.
> Why would I buy this over a lenovo for instance.
Lenovo tells you to install Windows when there is any doubt that it's a software issue, and of course that's an easy doubt to cast. There is no support tier that will support Linux, let alone coreboot. Want to apply firmware updates? Again, get yourself a Microsoft license. At least, that's what I hear from colleagues, I don't have a Lenovo currently.
Also, competition. I'm not sure how many other modern laptops still have 5 USB ports, especially when considering the large 85 Wh battery and the gimmicky screen you get (in case anyone cares about >60 Hz or 4k at 16"). It does seem like a rare combo and not a bad one.
> Okay so privacy nuts who think that removing their webcam and microphone protects from the perceived spyware that is next to them on their desk in the form of an iPhone.
Not sure about your work, but in my field pretty much every person I know who works in industry has their camera taped over. I believe for lots of them this is actually company policy.
This is definitely cool stuff. When you want official vendor support on something like coreboot + various linux distros, I've come to expect you pay double of today's prices but get hardware from a few years ago. This looks like modern hardware and the premium is honestly manageable. Slightly above what I'd want to spend but I could see myself paying this for a great product, also because you get more than just 2 USB-A ports and more than just 1 USB-C port (that seems to be the best most other vendors have to offer)! However, what made me close the tab is the "we are not even going to give you a shipping indication other than to expect close to half a year" (knowing how these types of things like to change deadlines anyway, starting off at four months... no). If I spend thousands of euros now, I also want the product in a reasonable amount of time (say, 3 weeks including customization and shipping; 0.5-2 weeks for a stock product plus shipping).
My current laptop is still performing well enough unfortunately, but ask me again in six months when the units are in and available to be shipped, and good odds that I'll hit that purchase button!
I’m really curious to know what piece of hardware you’re talking about, as you’ve apparently replied to the wrong post. But I really want the hardware you’re describing!
Linus has been very upfront about investing in Framework, so I am not suggesting he is doing anything untoward, but I still assume there is some unconscious biased in his organisations reviews of competing laptops.
Honestly as a business customer I can’t justify buying this unless there is an option to unbrand it.
(Actually if you had a unbranding option we could sticker it with our own company logo and that could be pretty cool)
Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile business meeting with an obviously random and non-corporate laptop (oh that looks like some random cheap overseas brand, uhh ok, are you sure you can afford us)?
Buying anything outside the Dell or Lenovo business ecosystem really puts your head on the chopping block to be announced a crazy person the minute some business critical function (like dual monitors through dock) doesn’t work…
What a strange set of considerations so bizarre they apply to like no one but you. Good thing that is the case and this logic applies to a dwindling number of professionals. I understand how people can judge on such minor things but on that front, might as well not hire any black people or women on your team lest you heighten your customers' subconcious biases.
edit: also, would a linux laptop work for you? Wouldn't you need office or such?
VDI scenario is common now for engineers, so yes it would work to virt into a windows box, but yes there are other friction points such as compact issues with PowerPoint for meetings, and you probably wouldn’t run a PowerPoint over a virt.
It could also take a lot of messing around to get Office 365 MDM working with Linux. I think you'd want to do a Linux desktop deploy and sort out these issues before you tried to deploy [any of these brands of] Linux laptops.
> People get shown the door for just having non-Apple devices with them.
Is this a thing that you've actually personally seen happen? Because I've seen and heard of some fairly messed up companies and that strains credulity. Like, I suppose it happens, because there are enough companies that everything happens, but that feels like the 99th percentile of insane company cultures.
> Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile business meeting with an obviously random and non-corporate laptop (oh that looks like some random cheap overseas brand, uhh ok, are you sure you can afford us)?
So your proposed solution is to... remove all branding? How does that help anything?
I think that building custom no-brand desktops is a pretty acceptable cost cutting measure taken by some companies, so you could pitch it something like “we’re working with a company to build custom laptops exactly for what we need”, or if someone asks about it you can explain it ala “yes, we couldn’t get exactly what we needed so we build a completely custom fleet of laptops”.
Or ideal scenario, with a brand delete you slap a [company] sticker on it and nobody really notices that it’s not a Dell Latitude running Linux.
Unbranded laptops are something I'd also prefer, even though the corporate environment you're describing is very employee-hostile when it comes to technology choice. (Sorry about your situation.)
I know that Schenker sells some of their laptops with their logo on the laptop lid by default and offers a choice to remove the logo for an additional charge. Example (VIA 15 Pro): https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro-m22.html
This option is possible because the laptop is a branded version of an ODM laptop (Tongfang PF5NU1G).
Schenker is a German company. Like with all branded versions of ODM laptops (such as models from Tongfang and Clevo), customer support for Schenker laptops is handled by Schenker and not the ODM.
Tuxedo offers unbranded and individual Logos, like Schenker. Intel Management Engine, Webcam & Audio (on Intel CPUs), and WLAN & Bluetooth can be deactivated directly via the BIOS. Can be ordered without SSD, RAM is upgradable. Just a content customer.
In September they said the Ryzen versions wouldn't have USB4 support [1] but in November they said it would. If it's important for you it might be best to contact their support to confirm which it is.
Back in the old DDR4 people used to say extremely high frequency ram (lets says above 3600MHz), that normally was O.C'd, would make your system unstable.
Any one knows if it still happens in these DDR5 days?
I'm asking because 6400MHz seems ludicrously high for a guy like me that just last week got some good old 2400MHz sticks for my home server and I'm wondering if it isn't marketing just to show high numbers.
The speeds officially supported by a CPU's memory controller tend to lag behind the speeds officially supported by the fastest available memory modules. This gap got pretty wide toward the end of the DDR4 era: Intel's current CPUs that support both DDR4 and DDR5 only officially support DDR4 speeds up to 3200MT/s, but there's little reason to equip a desktop with slower than 3600MT/s memory given the state of the DDR4 market.
6400 MT/s is similarly beyond the fastest officially supported DDR5 speeds for CPUs. But the fine print reveals that this machine is actually using soldered LPDDR5, which is officially supported at 6400MT/s or higher by pretty much every processor or SoC that uses LPDDR5(x). Ditching the DIMM slots really does make it easier to operate the memory bus at higher speeds.
Star Labs needs to correct their site to not refer to LPDDR5 as DDR5, because they really are different types of memory and only one of them is upgradable by the end user.
I don't have an answer to your primary question, but I can say that latency has gone up dramatically as speed has increased. I remember back in the original DDR days, CAS 2 was the stuff to get. Now, we see CAS latencies in the 30s and even 40(+?)!
The actual ram internally doesn't clock that fast, and many in fact run at the same rate as in the ddr4 days. The interface tackes the high rate down to a much lower rate but with more data flowing in parallel. But the ratio is locked, so if you overclock, the ram rate has to go up too, which is most likely what makes it unstable.
So the upshot is that if this 6400Mhz device is not overclocked, it shouldn't be unstable.
Max internal clocks on DDR4/5 are about 400MHz. There's a fundamental limit (rapidly diminishing return) to how fast you can drain and charge capacitors.
They try to make up for it by reading/sending entire row(s) at one time and sending quickly over the wire, but that's clearly reliant on cache line optimization of the program and doesn't do much to improve real-world latencies.
Does anyone here run any of these OSes on any of the offered screen densities and resolutions? I have questions.
- Surely not every old program available from the repositories will work with display scaling, will they? I've never had to use it, maybe Xorg has some hack to scale certain windows at 2x so you don't need support from individual packages. I'm also thinking of things like Burp Suite, which have window-like objects that interact horribly with things like i3 (from what I see with colleagues), so those might have similar issues when you have to tell Xorg to scale individual windows up. Is this something you run into?
- How much of an impact does that resolution have on battery life and GPU performance? I do not need more than 1920x1080 pixels on a 16" diagonal, my eyes can hardly read small fonts on that DPI as it is (I'm ~30) and they're not going to get better with age. This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?
- I also don't see flickering at 60 Hz (heck, 24 Hz TV looks smooth to me), so 165 Hz seems again like a battery drainer and performance reducer. How much of an impact does it have to try and render 2.75x as many frames per second on a GPU? Does it simply use 2.75x more power for the GPU or reduce the number of drawing operations you can do on the GPU by 2.75 times, or does this not work that way?
Edit: this is currently at the top, but I don't want the top comment to be criticism. This product is awesome in virtually every other regard besides shipping time. Good physical size, decent number of USB ports, customization of the keyboard, c-c-coreboot?! Officially supported? I am definitely impressed. Heck, even the payment methods impress me, being able to select iDeal at a small foreign shop.
- AFAIK, it's usually the toolkits that do the scaling. So, it's indeed possible that very old apps, if they're still using old versions of the toolkits, don't support scaling. They'll appear non-scaled, so "at 100%".
- I don't have a 4k display on a laptop so can't comment on battery life. But for "desktop use" (read: non gaming) GPU performance has been fine for a long time. I have an old desktop at work with a 4th gen i5 and whatever the integrated GPU was at the time. It can drive a 4k panel at 60 Hz just fine. A somewhat newer laptop, 8th gen i5 with a uhd620 integrated GPU could drive its internal FHD panel and an external UHD display without any issue.
- For your eyes comment: the small fonts may be illegible because they're blurry. On FHD screens, I've found that bitmap fonts are much more legible at small sizes. I've seen some Dell with a 4k display at work, probably 15", and the small text was much more legible than on my 14" FHD laptop (compared using Windows 11 - the guy was a Windows dev).
- TV has a blurriness to its movement, so it looks smooth enough because it's never actually sharp. The point of higher refresh rates is not "flickering", but a smooth movement. Try reading a scrolling page on a 30 Hz, 60 Hz, 120 Hz screen. I mostly look at static text on my screens, so 60 Hz works well enough for me, and I prefer higher resolution / better colors to higher refresh rates. Don't know how this affects GPU usage, though I don't expect it to be "free".
I only have experience with this on Linux, where at least it supports scaling, so that if you use a constant one (my case), then it's OK.
Older ones will simply ignore the scaling settings and draw the interface 1-to-1. One such application that comes to mind is VMWare's remote console (for esx). I haven't used it in a few years, but I remember at the time it was painful to run on a 24" UHD screen.
On the windows side, I think things are somewhat better than on Linux, but there still is confusion, including Windows 11 22h2's start menu. If you start the computer in 100% mode, then plug an external screen scaled at 200%, it works OK for the app list (what it shows on first click) but if you start typing everything becomes a blurry mess.
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Edit: I actually think QT is one of the better toolkits, at least on Linux, in the case of scaling. IIRC it's able to adapt the scaling based on the screen DPI reported by X, so a full qt desktop should be able to handle situations like a high-DPI laptop connected to a low-dpi monitor.
It's not that it ignores it, it's that it tried to handle it and gets confused. I move fairly frequently between my 3x laptop screen and a 1x external monitor, and at this point I've got used to either the app logo randomly being a third the size it should be in the start bar or the text rendering three times as big as it should in the app.
Xorg has a lot of accumulated hacks that make scaling work ok-ish. It falls apart when you have multiple monitors with different scaling, but for a laptop, just close the lid when you dock it and it should be good enough.
Wayland, after much feet dragging (why this wasn't a day-1 feature for a supposed Xorg replacement is beyond me), finally managed to cobble together basic support for non-integer scaling [0], so it should finally Just Werk (tm), regardless of if you scale at 2x, 1.75x, etc. without looking like a blurry mess.
I don't have experience with 4k displays in laptops, but I will say this: considering AMD's ongoing problems with idle power draw on >120 Hz displays [1], I'd recommend not getting the 165 Hz display if you're getting an AMD CPU.
> It falls apart when you have multiple monitors with different scaling
Yeah that's my colleagues! This is why half the monitors in the office are not being used :D. Someone thought it was a great idea to get three or four 4k screens but only one person actually wants them; everyone wants their laptop as a second or third screen. (Personally I'm a single-screen type of person anyway, but what made me commandeer a 1080p screen is the very noticeable lag that my 2018 i5 Lenovo had when trying to drive a 4k screen with or without display scaling. Got a new work laptop now that ought to not have that problem, but I haven't bothered trying yet.)
Anyhow, thanks for the pointers! Especially that 120 Hz AMD thing sounds like a big caveat.
Running an xrandr script with ’--scale’ when you plug in the externals works okay for me. I have a 4k laptop monitor and 2 X 1k externals. It's perfectly fine for work use cases.
Couldn't you just feed a 4k screen a 1080p resolution? It's a bit annoying if it defaults to 4K every time you plug in I guess. If you can use HDMI, you could get an inline EDID adapter.
Fractional scaling in Wayland still needs some work in my experience. Primarily, apps running through XWayland look blurry which sucks because there’s a decent number that font natively support Wayland yet (or have it behind an experimental flag with caveats, like how Anki loses its native titlebar and window shadow when Wayland support is turned on).
Regarding scaling: If you use 2x scaling it should be easy with any distribution. Fractional scaling is a bit trickier to get.
I am using a Framework with 1.5x scaling using Fedora KDE and it’s amazing. Didn’t find any app yet that doesn’t conform. One difference to years ago is Wayland vs X. With X it was a constant struggle for me while with Wayland and more years invested, scaling became a non-issue on Linux (for me).
Regarding burp suite, iirc this is a JVM based app. I am running Jetbrains products without any issues and no configuration needs. Assuming burp suite uses swing, I would assume no issue. Generally, you can quickly check with a VM. Using Fedora KDE is a great „Just Works“ experience.
I have a bad left eye. I haven’t noticed increased readability from higher dpi screens. I went from a higher dpi to a 14” 1080 screen and notice no difference at equivalent font size. Of course that’s still pretty high pixel density.
Higher pixel density can help a bit if your vision is bad enough that you use a lot of screen magnification, as it means that the magnified text will be better-rounded and fuller, rather than almost unrecognizably pixelated.
For some visual impairments, though, the improved sharpness from higher DPI may be basically undetectable, which sounds like what you're reporting.
> This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?
From their configuration site:
"The 4K display consumes more power, averaging 8W but provides incredible detail and excellent scaling support that allows you to change the UI (User Interface) to a size that's comfortable for almost everyone.
The QHD display supports a refresh rate of 165Hz, which offers a silky smooth experience. It consumes less than half the power of the 4K display at 3.2W. Limited scaling support on Linux means that the UI on this display is relatively small compared to other display resolutions"
It seems like the QHD display would be the way to go for lower power. I'd guess the power would be lower if you didn't run it at the full 165Hz refresh (there's probably a 60Hz mode)...
It's not the screen that I was afraid of so much as the processing power. From my understanding, the main power draw of a screen comes from its light output and area size (they advertise with about double or triple the nits mine has) rather than from how many pixels it has. Regardless, it's a good point that I should not ignore the screen while considering the processing power needed to drive said screen!
Well, there is the backlight, but also the power usage of the TCON (timing controller board) for each display that will vary greatly. Usually the 4K ones end up being less efficient. If you get the 4K display, you can of course set the output to 1080p which would solve the "processing power" end. I think the difference between 1080p and 1440p (or their 16:10 equivalents) at 60Hz would be negligible from a GPU perspective (especially if PSR is set on), but ultimately you'd have to test the two different models with different resolution settings to really be able to tell.
With imperfect eye sight, I find it much easier to read text with higher DPI. For me 11-12” is the limit for 1080p. At 16” I’d want at least 1440p. Even 4K starts getting blocky above 24” or so, 27” is barely ok.
Display refresh rate isn't necessarily just about one aspect like flicker or smoothness.
For one thing, it affects the latency from human input to graphics output. How the graphics stack is implemented, especially with modern desktop compositors, there's typically at least 3 frames of latency. 3/60 is 50ms. 3/165 is 18ms. Whether or not you consciously notice it, the 165hz display is going to feel more instant when you push a button.
There's also what's referred to as "judder". When you're watching 24Hz video content on a 60Hz display, the frames of video get repeated 3 times, then 2 times, then 3 times etc. This results in a 16ms "judder" from frame to frame. It's subtle, and has been the norm for decades, but it is quantifiably less than ideal. A 165Hz display drops judder down to 6ms.
Another aspect of the refresh rate has to do with the frequency response of the display technology itself, and what many might call "smoothness". Looking back at CRT technology, the image is instantaneous wherever the electron beam is currently pointed. The overall image looks stable due to persistence within the human eye. If you film a CRT, it can look pretty wonky. With a CRT, 30Hz is too slow because pretty much everyone can see the flicker. 60Hz is borderline on a CRT, and I personally can see the flicker in my peripheral vision. Motion looks smooth regardless, though, because all the persistence is in your eyes. With traditional LCDs, the pixels are always on, and they are relatively slow to change; there's persistence in the display itself. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, and all motion looks blurry no matter what. It just sucks other than being a conveniently flat screen. With modern LCDs and OLED displays, the pixels are still always on, but they are back to being very fast to change. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, but motion is no longer blurry, but instead of flickering it looks jerky rather than smooth. At 60Hz things look pretty smooth, but you're still at the limit of some folk's peripheral vision.
A GPU doesn't have to render frames at the refresh rate. An old frame will be repeated if there isn't a new frame ready yet. If the GPU can't keep up, a 165Hz display effectively becomes an 82.5Hz display, or a 41.25Hz display. There certainly is going to be a power penalty in the GPU circuitry driving the display at a higher rate, but it's marginal vs. the cost of rendering the frames themselves. 82Hz is still luxury compared to 60Hz, in that it's better than good enough for 99% of people.
What it boils down to is that pushing the refresh rate higher gives the GPU/software more fine grained control over the display than otherwise. That control allows the software to optimize latency, judder, and smoothness better than the display itself can given a lower refresh rate.
I emailed System76 in 2013 asking them to accept Bitcoin. They said no, and continued to say no every couple of years when I emailed to ask again. Glad to see Starlabs is accepting crypto, but a little puzzled by there's no option for stablecoins like USDC. In any case, I'll take it.
ThinkPads are still popular, so I don't see this as a joke. A pointing stick (TrackPoint) is excellent for people who want to use both the keyboard and the mouse while moving their hands as little as possible.
Unfortunately, the StarFighter has soldered memory, which is one of the main drawbacks of new ThinkPad models. Star Labs also sells the mid-range StarBook laptop with replaceable memory and the low-end StarLite laptop with soldered memory. On the other hand, Star Labs is Linux-first and pays the developers of the pre-installed Linux distribution configured in the order, which is an advantage over Lenovo for Linux users.
The HP Dev One follows the HP EliteBook's poor design of pairing the pointing stick with 2 mouse buttons instead of 3. Without the middle mouse button, you can't scroll with the pointing stick and you'll need to use the trackpad (or apply some hack to the 2 available buttons), which makes the pointing stick a less effective tool.
I've tried that, and it was so uncomfortable to hold down both mouse buttons with one thumb that I did not find this workaround worthwhile. It was awkward using both thumbs to do the same.
The Elitebook model that the Dev One is based off of has a SureView screen, which is what the Dev One ships with. That's to say it is an intentional privacy filter. I didn't find it to be washed out and the gloss is comparable to a MBP from a few years ago.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 328 ms ] threadIt'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?
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 (edit: that means bottled/branded; the default they'll bring you if unspecified), 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 party. 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.
Edited to add:
Actually I misread the statement, they have 200k falling due in a year and a further 700k of debt. So that's nearly 1M of investment, which seems easily enough to do this development, given it's much less complex than the framework devices.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31034024
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986767
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNUz-cqkjVA
https://youtu.be/LGOmbNRlZdM?t=215
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.
As somebody who plays very few video games and is forever looking up references, I promise that basically everything is now documented.
They probably won't be pleased to learn that the Netherlands, which they seem to have a custom page for so apparently support, doesn't have a minimum duration specified, so you could take them to court if the CPU fails after 5 years since who's ever heard of a CPU failing? Those things usually last decades and so that's what one is also lead to expect if not otherwise advertised. (I don't know of case law in this area, but that's how I've heard consumer law being explained by the consumer market authority consuwijzer and others.)
"1 year limited warranty" for a 2000€ device that usually lasts at least 3, if not 5 years. Do people in the UK commonly put up with that or is the 1 year thing due to their small scale?
"The Consumer Rights Act 2015 states that items must be of satisfactory quality, as described, fit for purpose and last a reasonable length of time. You have these rights for six years in England and Wales or five years in Scotland.
Items must be of satisfactory quality and fit for purpose as described and last a reasonable length of time. So, for example, if you have bought a washing machine and it breaks after two years you should still be able to claim. However a consumer is expected to use the appliance reasonably. For example, a washing machine may be expected to be used a few times a week. It will show if it has been used every day twice a day for two years and this may be considered unreasonable and you would not get a repair or replacement.
For an item such as a washing machine, or a car etc., the retailer can take off money for use. This needs to be a reasonable “amount”.
You should familiarise yourself with the Consumer Rights Act 2015 before paying for any warranty being offered.
It is worth stating I have never paid for or used a warranty. I always assert my legal rights.
A retailer may try and fob you off saying that you should have bought a warranty. But your consumer rights are worth more than any warranty."
https://thecomplainingcow.co.uk/what-is-a-warranty-what-is-a...
These actions would normally void the warranty on most laptops.
The whole point of a warranty is to save me from needing to do those things.
> install an upgrade
Nearly everything inside is either non-upgradeable, pointless to upgrade, or doesn't void other manufacturers warranties (lenovo does not void warranty for replacing ssd) so that's completely meaningless.
4th of Ju\y
AZERTY is a crime against humanity.
Okay so privacy nuts who think that removing their webcam and microphone protects from the perceived spyware that is next to them on their desk in the form of an iPhone.
I see nothing good about this. Inexperienced company, inexperienced in manufacturing and hardware design.
Just becoming a fetish at this point.
> Why would I buy this over a lenovo for instance.
Lenovo tells you to install Windows when there is any doubt that it's a software issue, and of course that's an easy doubt to cast. There is no support tier that will support Linux, let alone coreboot. Want to apply firmware updates? Again, get yourself a Microsoft license. At least, that's what I hear from colleagues, I don't have a Lenovo currently.
Also, competition. I'm not sure how many other modern laptops still have 5 USB ports, especially when considering the large 85 Wh battery and the gimmicky screen you get (in case anyone cares about >60 Hz or 4k at 16"). It does seem like a rare combo and not a bad one.
Not sure about your work, but in my field pretty much every person I know who works in industry has their camera taped over. I believe for lots of them this is actually company policy.
My current laptop is still performing well enough unfortunately, but ask me again in six months when the units are in and available to be shipped, and good odds that I'll hit that purchase button!
Not sure whether to re-post it there or flag my own comment or something.
And only a short while after the M1/M2 are out and Asahi got GPU acceleration working. :D
Intel was so close.
(It also maxes out at 4TB of flash; the MBP can be configured with 8.)
(Actually if you had a unbranding option we could sticker it with our own company logo and that could be pretty cool)
Can you imagine the backlash if there’s some IT issue and someone realises that it’s not a Dell or Lenovo (why didn’t you just buy from big 2?), or how embarrassing it might be to go to a profile business meeting with an obviously random and non-corporate laptop (oh that looks like some random cheap overseas brand, uhh ok, are you sure you can afford us)?
Real companies have IT provision laptops for employees.
If you are consultant remote, sure just Citrix into the envroment. But if your laptop breaks its on you.
edit: also, would a linux laptop work for you? Wouldn't you need office or such?
It could also take a lot of messing around to get Office 365 MDM working with Linux. I think you'd want to do a Linux desktop deploy and sort out these issues before you tried to deploy [any of these brands of] Linux laptops.
Oh, sweet non-corporate bullshit child.
People get shown the door for just having non-Apple devices with them.
Is this a thing that you've actually personally seen happen? Because I've seen and heard of some fairly messed up companies and that strains credulity. Like, I suppose it happens, because there are enough companies that everything happens, but that feels like the 99th percentile of insane company cultures.
Yes, I saw situations where the things which were not conforming to the status led to... or more like didn't led anywhere.
Also, two things:
1. There are people who scoff off at green bubbles.
2. "It has doors that open like this"
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
[2] https://media.tenor.com/9GE7Vhf9MAEAAAAd/silicon-siliconvall...
So your proposed solution is to... remove all branding? How does that help anything?
Or ideal scenario, with a brand delete you slap a [company] sticker on it and nobody really notices that it’s not a Dell Latitude running Linux.
I know that Schenker sells some of their laptops with their logo on the laptop lid by default and offers a choice to remove the logo for an additional charge. Example (VIA 15 Pro): https://bestware.com/en/schenker-via-15-pro-m22.html
This option is possible because the laptop is a branded version of an ODM laptop (Tongfang PF5NU1G).
Do they have on-site support like HP,Dell or Lenovo?
https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en/Linux-Hardware/Linux-Note...
You've got it wrong.
Yes, I imagine some prehistoric corporations might have a problem with non corpo laptop.
Luckily the rest of the world has moved on.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/16189462
[1] https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/status/1574860315254263830
[2] https://twitter.com/starlabsltd/status/1593525807682568192
Any one knows if it still happens in these DDR5 days?
I'm asking because 6400MHz seems ludicrously high for a guy like me that just last week got some good old 2400MHz sticks for my home server and I'm wondering if it isn't marketing just to show high numbers.
6400 MT/s is similarly beyond the fastest officially supported DDR5 speeds for CPUs. But the fine print reveals that this machine is actually using soldered LPDDR5, which is officially supported at 6400MT/s or higher by pretty much every processor or SoC that uses LPDDR5(x). Ditching the DIMM slots really does make it easier to operate the memory bus at higher speeds.
Star Labs needs to correct their site to not refer to LPDDR5 as DDR5, because they really are different types of memory and only one of them is upgradable by the end user.
Memory numbers are just dumb.
CL32 at 6400MHz (3200MHz doubled) is 10 nanoseconds.
CL2 at 266MHz (133MHz doubled) is 15 nanoseconds.
So the upshot is that if this 6400Mhz device is not overclocked, it shouldn't be unstable.
Max internal clocks on DDR4/5 are about 400MHz. There's a fundamental limit (rapidly diminishing return) to how fast you can drain and charge capacitors.
They try to make up for it by reading/sending entire row(s) at one time and sending quickly over the wire, but that's clearly reliant on cache line optimization of the program and doesn't do much to improve real-world latencies.
- Surely not every old program available from the repositories will work with display scaling, will they? I've never had to use it, maybe Xorg has some hack to scale certain windows at 2x so you don't need support from individual packages. I'm also thinking of things like Burp Suite, which have window-like objects that interact horribly with things like i3 (from what I see with colleagues), so those might have similar issues when you have to tell Xorg to scale individual windows up. Is this something you run into?
- How much of an impact does that resolution have on battery life and GPU performance? I do not need more than 1920x1080 pixels on a 16" diagonal, my eyes can hardly read small fonts on that DPI as it is (I'm ~30) and they're not going to get better with age. This laptop ships with either double or quadruple that, making me wonder what the trade-off is like of having this (for me) gimmick. Surely it doesn't double/quadruple the battery drain or halve/quarter the performance compared to a normal screen?
- I also don't see flickering at 60 Hz (heck, 24 Hz TV looks smooth to me), so 165 Hz seems again like a battery drainer and performance reducer. How much of an impact does it have to try and render 2.75x as many frames per second on a GPU? Does it simply use 2.75x more power for the GPU or reduce the number of drawing operations you can do on the GPU by 2.75 times, or does this not work that way?
Edit: this is currently at the top, but I don't want the top comment to be criticism. This product is awesome in virtually every other regard besides shipping time. Good physical size, decent number of USB ports, customization of the keyboard, c-c-coreboot?! Officially supported? I am definitely impressed. Heck, even the payment methods impress me, being able to select iDeal at a small foreign shop.
- I don't have a 4k display on a laptop so can't comment on battery life. But for "desktop use" (read: non gaming) GPU performance has been fine for a long time. I have an old desktop at work with a 4th gen i5 and whatever the integrated GPU was at the time. It can drive a 4k panel at 60 Hz just fine. A somewhat newer laptop, 8th gen i5 with a uhd620 integrated GPU could drive its internal FHD panel and an external UHD display without any issue.
- For your eyes comment: the small fonts may be illegible because they're blurry. On FHD screens, I've found that bitmap fonts are much more legible at small sizes. I've seen some Dell with a 4k display at work, probably 15", and the small text was much more legible than on my 14" FHD laptop (compared using Windows 11 - the guy was a Windows dev).
- TV has a blurriness to its movement, so it looks smooth enough because it's never actually sharp. The point of higher refresh rates is not "flickering", but a smooth movement. Try reading a scrolling page on a 30 Hz, 60 Hz, 120 Hz screen. I mostly look at static text on my screens, so 60 Hz works well enough for me, and I prefer higher resolution / better colors to higher refresh rates. Don't know how this affects GPU usage, though I don't expect it to be "free".
Older ones will simply ignore the scaling settings and draw the interface 1-to-1. One such application that comes to mind is VMWare's remote console (for esx). I haven't used it in a few years, but I remember at the time it was painful to run on a 24" UHD screen.
On the windows side, I think things are somewhat better than on Linux, but there still is confusion, including Windows 11 22h2's start menu. If you start the computer in 100% mode, then plug an external screen scaled at 200%, it works OK for the app list (what it shows on first click) but if you start typing everything becomes a blurry mess.
---
Edit: I actually think QT is one of the better toolkits, at least on Linux, in the case of scaling. IIRC it's able to adapt the scaling based on the screen DPI reported by X, so a full qt desktop should be able to handle situations like a high-DPI laptop connected to a low-dpi monitor.
Wayland, after much feet dragging (why this wasn't a day-1 feature for a supposed Xorg replacement is beyond me), finally managed to cobble together basic support for non-integer scaling [0], so it should finally Just Werk (tm), regardless of if you scale at 2x, 1.75x, etc. without looking like a blurry mess.
I don't have experience with 4k displays in laptops, but I will say this: considering AMD's ongoing problems with idle power draw on >120 Hz displays [1], I'd recommend not getting the 165 Hz display if you're getting an AMD CPU.
[0]: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/i...
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/k92b2x/psa_if_you_have...
Yeah that's my colleagues! This is why half the monitors in the office are not being used :D. Someone thought it was a great idea to get three or four 4k screens but only one person actually wants them; everyone wants their laptop as a second or third screen. (Personally I'm a single-screen type of person anyway, but what made me commandeer a 1080p screen is the very noticeable lag that my 2018 i5 Lenovo had when trying to drive a 4k screen with or without display scaling. Got a new work laptop now that ought to not have that problem, but I haven't bothered trying yet.)
Anyhow, thanks for the pointers! Especially that 120 Hz AMD thing sounds like a big caveat.
This is on i3wm btw
I am using a Framework with 1.5x scaling using Fedora KDE and it’s amazing. Didn’t find any app yet that doesn’t conform. One difference to years ago is Wayland vs X. With X it was a constant struggle for me while with Wayland and more years invested, scaling became a non-issue on Linux (for me).
Regarding burp suite, iirc this is a JVM based app. I am running Jetbrains products without any issues and no configuration needs. Assuming burp suite uses swing, I would assume no issue. Generally, you can quickly check with a VM. Using Fedora KDE is a great „Just Works“ experience.
If you double the DPI it's going to be easier to read those fonts.
For some visual impairments, though, the improved sharpness from higher DPI may be basically undetectable, which sounds like what you're reporting.
From their configuration site:
"The 4K display consumes more power, averaging 8W but provides incredible detail and excellent scaling support that allows you to change the UI (User Interface) to a size that's comfortable for almost everyone.
The QHD display supports a refresh rate of 165Hz, which offers a silky smooth experience. It consumes less than half the power of the 4K display at 3.2W. Limited scaling support on Linux means that the UI on this display is relatively small compared to other display resolutions"
It seems like the QHD display would be the way to go for lower power. I'd guess the power would be lower if you didn't run it at the full 165Hz refresh (there's probably a 60Hz mode)...
It is close to twice the number of pixels.
1080p = 2.073.600
1440p = 3.686.400
2160p = 8.294.400
For one thing, it affects the latency from human input to graphics output. How the graphics stack is implemented, especially with modern desktop compositors, there's typically at least 3 frames of latency. 3/60 is 50ms. 3/165 is 18ms. Whether or not you consciously notice it, the 165hz display is going to feel more instant when you push a button.
There's also what's referred to as "judder". When you're watching 24Hz video content on a 60Hz display, the frames of video get repeated 3 times, then 2 times, then 3 times etc. This results in a 16ms "judder" from frame to frame. It's subtle, and has been the norm for decades, but it is quantifiably less than ideal. A 165Hz display drops judder down to 6ms.
Another aspect of the refresh rate has to do with the frequency response of the display technology itself, and what many might call "smoothness". Looking back at CRT technology, the image is instantaneous wherever the electron beam is currently pointed. The overall image looks stable due to persistence within the human eye. If you film a CRT, it can look pretty wonky. With a CRT, 30Hz is too slow because pretty much everyone can see the flicker. 60Hz is borderline on a CRT, and I personally can see the flicker in my peripheral vision. Motion looks smooth regardless, though, because all the persistence is in your eyes. With traditional LCDs, the pixels are always on, and they are relatively slow to change; there's persistence in the display itself. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, and all motion looks blurry no matter what. It just sucks other than being a conveniently flat screen. With modern LCDs and OLED displays, the pixels are still always on, but they are back to being very fast to change. So, 30Hz doesn't flicker, but motion is no longer blurry, but instead of flickering it looks jerky rather than smooth. At 60Hz things look pretty smooth, but you're still at the limit of some folk's peripheral vision.
A GPU doesn't have to render frames at the refresh rate. An old frame will be repeated if there isn't a new frame ready yet. If the GPU can't keep up, a 165Hz display effectively becomes an 82.5Hz display, or a 41.25Hz display. There certainly is going to be a power penalty in the GPU circuitry driving the display at a higher rate, but it's marginal vs. the cost of rendering the frames themselves. 82Hz is still luxury compared to 60Hz, in that it's better than good enough for 99% of people.
What it boils down to is that pushing the refresh rate higher gives the GPU/software more fine grained control over the display than otherwise. That control allows the software to optimize latency, judder, and smoothness better than the display itself can given a lower refresh rate.
In any case, neither your opposition nor my fanboyism will determine crypto's long term success. Only its inherent utility will.
Unfortunately, the StarFighter has soldered memory, which is one of the main drawbacks of new ThinkPad models. Star Labs also sells the mid-range StarBook laptop with replaceable memory and the low-end StarLite laptop with soldered memory. On the other hand, Star Labs is Linux-first and pays the developers of the pre-installed Linux distribution configured in the order, which is an advantage over Lenovo for Linux users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34760461