I haven't used one myself but the N200 looks pretty ok for a tablet that's supposed to run a long time on battery. Quad core Skylake-ish cores that turbo to 3.7GHz?
Yes, and in this case 6W TDP and cheap enough for a $500 tablet seem like key drivers of the N200's design. Of course the Apple M1 is probably twice as fast at similar cost and power but compared to everything outside Apple the N200 looks pretty decent.
7040 in its lowest TDP configuration is 15W. Intel N200 is 6W. Even accounting for some differences in how both companies measure TDP only one of these can be passively cooled in that sort of form factor.
The lack of low-tdp products on AMD side was also one of the reasons given by pcengines to discontinue their embedded line. AMD's last 6W APU was the 2-core R1102G which is now a couple generations old.
What’s your experience with StarLite IV? I’m thinking about buying it for heavy note taking - neovim/obsidian/browser (Google docs and excalidraw). What battery life I can expect? Is keyboard nice to type? Is stuff like sleep, Wi-Fi auto connect and bluetooth headphones really solved?
The keyboard is very nice. Short travel for keys but pleasant to use. I use iwd as the wireless deamon and wifi autoconnect works just fine. I do not have bluetooth headphones so cannot comment on that, but my bluetooth mouse works as expected.
Battery life depends largely on how you use it. I have a minimal setup with alpine linux/i3 and just typing in a terminal with screen at 33% brightness results in battery-reported power consumption of just under 2W which is great. Obviously a browser like firefox will impact it quite a bit. Hardware-accelerated video playback works fine.
There are a few minor downsides: the built-in speaker is quite awful (not a consideration for me), the webcam is not great and the microsd card reader is usb 2.0. UEFI secure boot is currently not supported on the coreboot fw. The documentation is sparse.
One weird gotcha is that the power button is one of the keys on the keyboard, so to avoid suspending your device accidentally it will only fire an interrupt after you hold it for a couple seconds. Took me a while to figure out.
That's basically my use case, and I'm quite happy. Battery life for me usually is somewhere between 6-7 hours. The keyboard is pretty decent - not quite as good as a Macbook keyboard or similar low-profile keyboards (e.g. Logitech MX Keys line), but good enough, though the oddball arrow key configuration and sizing for the right-hand Shift and Fn keys is a frequent annoyance. Sleep and wifi auto-connect work well for me on Ubuntu 22.04 w/ KDE Plasma. Can't vouch for bluetooth headphone usage, because I don't really use bluetooth with this device.
I can't tell you who they are as individuals, but I can tell you I bought a Starbook from them in late 2021 and I love it. No problems whatsoever with performance, stability, anything.
(No affiliation, although they do operate out of a barn within walking distance of my house!)
Wow, good point. I just expected it to support a stylus and was really hyped about buying one. Without a stylus, I don't think Linux on a tablet is really viable.
Why did they have to use a micro HDMI port? Couldn't they have done dual USB-C and made one the DisplayPort output? MicroHDMI is not a very nice connector, it's a lot of pins under mechanical stress from the heavy, rigid HDMI people generally attach to it.
DisplayPort has the huge advantage of being incredibly easy to passively convert into the ultra-legacy-weird-difficult HDMI, where-as the legacy-centric-pita-gross HDMI requires active absurd adapters to turn into DisplayPort.
100% more usb-c please, with alt modes. USB4 mandates every port be able to do DisplayPort output.
I really hope we start to see phones and tablets which have >1 USB port. Lenovo has an absurd beast phone, a Legion phone, with both dual batteries and dual USB-c (USB3) ports. If we get to 2030 and phones can't plug in to GPUs something is f-ed and the system is broken, tech has ossified grossly. Hopefully happens sooner, and hopefully we see dual ports emerge midway to then too. Would be such a great capability set.
We had USB 3 with the Samsung Galaxy Note 3 in September 2013. It is now almost a decade. If rumors are true, Samsung will announce a USB 4 (thunderbolt 3) phone before the end of 2024. I agree with the grandparent. While most people don't care too much for eGPU (?), I'm sure if we let people innovate, good things will come.
My dream is much smaller.
I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish the scenario where a phone that is plugged in to a good power source runs directly from the wall, shutting off battery charge completely, not trickle charging all day and night.
Pretty sure most any phone already has the hardware for software defined charging. Android just doesn't have an API call for it, unless they do and I just haven't heard yet.
Maybe we should be filing feature requests for it;
I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other. There is nothing visible on the case or in the OS to indicate this.
I have had an Arm and an AMD Thinkpad which both have only dual USB-C, and both unpredictably switch between one or the other being bootable, with no discenable pattern.
> I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other.
Weird, ever since I had USB-C based Mac Mini or MacBook (two Intel, two M1) they could reliably output video on any of the two, three, or four ports (as long as I don't go past the limit). They're essentially symmetric on all features.
USB4 mandates 40GBps. It mandates DisplayPort. These would be pretty helpful baselines to expect, reasons for consumers to want USB4: they know it will be fairly featureful.
PCIe transport ("Thunderbolt") and Power Delivery are both optional though, I think.
My Lenovo Y700 does passthrough power. It also has a mode where it only starts charging if the battery is below 40% and it'll stop at 60%
Unfortunately its not a phone. Its a mini tablet. But I find the size ideal for daily use - browsing，reading pdfs, small sketches . (no SIM slot though)
My sample size isn't big, but on Linux every laptop I've seen has amazing battery reporting information galore. Oh sure battery level. And various assessments of wear. Things like realtime charge or discharge rates.
But more notably, I think around half also have charge control. It's just been on/off. But it would be a pretty basic bash script to make this happen.
I have a Huawei Mate book 16 and under KDE (Ubuntu) I can set a charge limit in the energy settings
But it depends on the laptop. From what I understand not all laptops have the drivers for power control ie. the ability to from-software tell the laptop to stop charging
But reciprocally, what's the new ultra-hot device? Gaming decks. Lenovo just announced theirs today. Steam, Asus, and dozen of others have amazing devices. And there are still gaming-centric phones galore.
This should be an easy ask. It should be a lock. Android alas is kind of a weird divergent hard to use OS that makes everything difficult. Apple hasn't supported anyone elses GPUs in a long long time. But in general, this should just be easy simple & doable, were it not for the sins of these ultra-bizarre weird not-PC but so close systems. ChromeOS finally found jesus & is now running on Wayland, because it was obviously the correct & only sensible choice all along, And has huge advantages, such as having a huge world of people optimizing & making the system better. I don't know how Android ever pivots (they just steal everything ChromeOS (which runs Android great) is doing), but it should, so that it can make ideas like this unimaginably easy & simple tasks, versus today where this sort of idea is a painstaking slow & awful endeavor to make happen.
So much of computing is a story of niche finding leverage & finding adherents. The early adopters are just those who see potential, and they continually have reshaped what computing is. Writing off "niche" as uninteresting & minor ignores how sensible & clear & obvious so many advancements are & should be.
I wish Android and Linux would just merge. Give people access to a Linux userland that lets you install Nix packages(Most anything but Nix or similar would be a step backwards from Android's reliability during updates), and then Android could very easily be most people's only OS.
If people could plug in their phone and run Linux apps on a full size monitor they'd probably pay a lot more for the phone, knowing they didn't then also need a nice laptop.
The general population only need to run a browser on their external monitor, with Office 365 or Google Docs and Gmail. There is no need for anything else. If one is not a software developer, which Linux apps do you feel are needed?
I used Samsung DEX a few times on my tablet. The mouse plus touchscreen combination works well. The keyboard is a little worse because there is no Esc key on Android and Ctrl [ is uncomfortable.
Gimp/Krita, FreeCAD, more and more games, Inkscape, Ardour, Audacity, Calibre, Sound Converter, Converseen, PrusaSlicer, etc, plus all the other stuff that people would probably discover.
If one IS a software developer of course, then you probably need a lot of Linux apps, and it would be cool to have them alongside a platform that's way more reliable than Linux, so that your browser and email and calendar and music are always there and don't bog down.
Because that’s what standards are for : a single base of universal rules that allows you to build what you want over it.
The point is not that phones should be connected to GPUs, that’s a silly idea.
But nevertheless for plenty of reasons including ecology and autonomy of people, it should be the case that any device should work with any other device as long as anyone is able to develop a driver. And there should be no permanent lock against custom drivers.
DP can only be passively converted to HDMI if the source uses DisplayPort++/Dual Mode, which is not supported by the DisplayPort Alt Mode over USB-C spec (Why? Who knows).
Every usb-c to HDMI adapter has to actively convert the signals which is why one end is usually much larger than the other.
>I really hope we start to see phones and tablets which have >1 USB port
We're much more likely to get phones with 0 USB ports (justified by 'security', 'water proofness' or 'simplicity') where the only charging is wireless.
Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted.
Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing bits and whatever's left is a blurry mess.
For the TV situation, you usually don't have a full remote to adjust it, if it even supports that. You often don't have time to look up things in the TV's typically crappy menu system. I've usually found the option to disable over scan, but using full-range RGB seems less common.
Also, HDMI seems to lag DisplayPort capabilities when it comes to higher resolutions and refresh rates. When my 2013 MBP came out, it could drive a 4k@60 screen over DP. HDMI required the 2.0 version to do that, which, IIRC, came much later.
>Also, HDMI seems to lag DisplayPort capabilities when it comes to higher resolutions and refresh rates.
I think that one very much depends on when you chose to look at it. HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4, enough to do 4k@120 which DP1.4 wouldn't be able to do it without dropping color down to 4:2:0. DisplayPort 2.0 devices are starting to come out, but even Nvidia's RTX 4000 series still do not have DisplayPort 2.0 (but do have HDMI 2.1). While TV started supporting HDMI 2.1 around 2019, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X having HDMI 2.1 ports.
So while DisplayPort may be ahead now with DisplayPort 2.0, HDMI was ahead for at least 4 years with HDMI 2.1
That's a fair point. I admit I was judging by the availability on the PC side (I don't follow the console market).
Although, if I'm not mistaken, my particular PC monitor initially didn't support HDMI 2.0, even though it's a 4k panel. There was a further revision which included it. I have that revision, but support is still somewhat wonky, in that it can't seem to switch on its own from 2.0 to 1.4b.
Display support is always last in this chicken-and-egg problem. As far as I know, there's still no DisplayPort 2.0 supporting displays, so any of the higher end monitors require display stream compression. I can't even get a DisplayPort 2.0 MST hub so I can chain multiple 1440p@144 monitors. Which is definitely something that HDMI can't do.
Ok so that sounds like DP has better negotiation protocol spec and/or implementations.
I've only encountered overscan on TVs not monitors, but I don't give conference room presentations, which would be very annoying. On Macs there compensation for that.
I've had trouble with colors where it uses YPbPr rather than RGB, but that seems to be an Apple thing where it's done on purpose for non-Apple-approved displays and it happens for both HDMI and DP. Generating a custom EDID profile fixes that. Can't recall having trouble with color range, sometimes the display has a setting but the default always looked better to me.
I've used 4k@60 HDMI just fine (and 4k@30 on an early Apple adapter), but more often use 1080p anyway. I use USB-C with my 4k displays which likely runs DP on them.
> Ok so that sounds like DP has better negotiation protocol spec and/or implementations.
Right. So... DP is better than HDMI?
The color issue I had was not with a Mac but with an HP laptop on an HP monitor. My understanding is that there's something about "broadcast colors" or something, which is "regular" RGB only with a narrower range. I think the PC thought the monitor was a TV with a limited range, which the monitor was not.
With the TVs I plug into, it's usually harder to judge since their color rendition tends to be all over the place anyway and tend to have the reverse issue (too much contrast).
I remember the overscan control on the mac, but it still was a PITA to have to fiddle with that instead of, you know, just plugging the screen in and being in business.
While I've also had numerous positive experiences with HDMI where things seemingly "just worked", I've never had an issue with DP. It always worked. Hell, even my gaming GPU, which came out a while after HDMI 2, and supported it out of the box, connected to my monitor with full HDMI 2 support, still has weird colors compared to DP. No tweaking in the AMD drivers managed to get me the proper output, so I went and bought a cheap Chinese DP KVM instead. Which worked with no fuss.
All this makes me automatically pick DP if given the choice, and discount any computer or screen that only does HDMI. Which makes it pretty tough to buy a TV, so I just watch movies on my computer monitor.
Yeah totally agree - I’ve had quite a few situations where a monitor or tv looks blurry and washed out with HDMI and it’s immediately fixed with a DP cable.
> I wish HDMI in general would die and let displayport take it place.
That would be an interesting thing for the video production industry. Basically the entire market is divided between "professional" equipment, in which SDI continues to dominate (with some movement towards SMPTE 2110 aka IP), and "amateur" equipment which is all HDMI - with very few products on the boundary and supporting both connectors.
Consumer grade digital cameras have only recently (10 years, maybe less) started being able to output the live video feed over HDMI. Before that, believe me or not I've stumbled upon MANY camera models from 2013 or before that had an HDMI port, but all it was good for was displaying pictures from the memory card on a TV.
It would certainly make life easier in a lot of "small streamer" setups. Currently, if you don't want to torture your camera's battery, you need to get a silly (often third-party) "dummy battery" that you can (hopefully!) plug into an ordinary USB power supply; and on top of that, a separate mini/micro HDMI -> full HDMI cable to plug into a capture card. If you could reduce that to a single USB-C with PD and DP - trust me, every silly cable you can eliminate from your setup is an enormous win.
Even better, if these cameras could talk the regular USB "webcam" protocol in addition to DP, eliminating the capture card for the overwhelmingly common setup of "I just want to look very good on video calls".
But that opens a can of worms: in any non-trivial setup, a camera (one camera) is merely a small piece of a much more elaborate puzzle. Even seemingly simple setups end up converting the signal back&forth between some crazy stuff. On one job, we needed to run an SDI or HDMI cable between the floors, but couldn't do either because the building was untouchable; so we've used a couple of HDMI -> HDBaseT converters to run the signal over existing Ethernet cables. Turns out, it was no longer possible to convert the resulting HDMI signal again to SDI (we've tried many converters, all failed), which limited our choice of video mixers. Would the signal make it through if it originated as DP? Your guess is as good as mine.
Broadcast is a strange place. I still laugh whenever I think of Quad-SDI; only the broadcast industry could ever come up with that. Things need to work with one another and even if every single person in the world agreed that HDMI must die, starting today, I'm fairly certain we'd still see new equipment being made in 2033 that supports it.
I have spent the last few months doing a deep dive on broadcast / audio engineer standards. The lack of reliability and strange standards are interesting...
It seems like the last few standards started really robust and open because of the lack of compatibility, and then greed got involved and vendors just slipped in something to make it difficult cross connect. I assume so people would have to buy more of their stuff.
The focus on "realtime" makes the standards have worse quality in practice (bad handling of dropped or bad bits), and makes it much harder for the IP based standards to be routed (network congestion from high bitrate through uplinks). WebRTC by comparison can be quite nice.
I seriously don't have any hope for sanity in that market.
The Pi also put a nasty old microUSB on the Pi Pico so I'm not surprised they used a crappy connector, when there's way less reason to still use MicroUSB.
At the time Pi Pico came out MicroUSB connectors were around ten times cheaper than USB-C.
Now it has dropped to 2 - 4 times cheaper.
In volume those differences do matter.
Micro HDMI
USB Type C 3.2 with Power Delivery 3.0
USB Type C 3.2 with Power Delivery 3.0
Micro SD Memory Card Reader
3.5mm Headphone Jack
HDMI version: 2.0
USB-C Interface: Display Port (DP Alt Mode)
USB version: 3.2 Gen 2 (up to 10 Gbps)
Maybe I am missing something, but it seems to have Display Port for their USB-C?
There's 2 USB-C ports but it's worded so that possibly only 1 port could support DP out. So even considering just the USB-C ports, there is a likelihood they cheaped out somewhat.
Did you assume it definitely will support DP out for both?
USB-C is equally bad. I really wish they would have the rubber housing of the USB-C go inside the case like an IEC power connector. I break about a USB-C cable every week. Broke one today just by putting it in my backpack while connected to a power brick.
Power bricks of the 1990s didn't have this problem. The barrel connectors were almost indestructible. You could drop bricks on VGA connectors and they'd still work.
When I used an iPhone for a couple of years, I went through approximately a Lightning cable per month, sometimes more. At one point I took a carrier bag of broken Lightning cables to the electronics recycling.
I am full USB-C. I have a kid. Mine are treated very roughly. Not a single one ever broke. Comparatively, microusb has died on me quite a lot from regular usage, and always on the device side, which is so much worse.
(Now the cat chewing on cables in another matter xD)
Yeah, I've never once seen a USB-C cable break in that the physical connector itself was damaged. I've been through plenty that just seem to stop reliably connecting if they are in high-motion environments (the cable connecting my phone to my car's entertainment system, for instance)
I will say that I really wish they had managed to not have that middle section sticking up in the female connectors - cleaning out my phone's USB-C port is about 20x harder than cleaning out a lighting port because I feel like I'm going to break that little thing in the middle.
Like if my phone is low on battery I plug it into a portable battery and shove the phone and portable battery (connected by a USB-C cable) into my pocket, like any consumer would. I then go hiking, snowshoeing, biking, sleeping, like any consumer would. Cables have bent and broken in my pocket in these scenarios, among thousands of others.
My parent comment was yesterday; today's USB-C cable broke when it got stuck in an office chair's wheel caster, bending the sheet metal housing. Thi doesn't happen with ANY connector of the 1990s. BNC, RCA, DB-9, 1/8" headphone jacks, 5.5x2.5 barrel connectors, they ALL withstood office chair crushing and were all probably designed with consumer abuse like office chairs in mind.
I've even run over DB-9 and BNC connectors with heavy duty carts, they were fine.
That sounds like a lot more active life than an average consumer. It would be nice if USB C could handle that kind of duty, but for most people, the 1/8 and RCA, or at least the cheap versions, might die of fatigue before the USB C has an issue. I remember non-pro audio cables as being insanely unreliable, like, you could break them in a week of light use.
USB C doesn't have that issue. There are high end cables and just kind of OK cables, but at least with the braided ones I normally buy, there aren't many terrible ones at any price. They decoupled reliability from craftsmanship and materials.
Pockets should be considered industrial duty environments.
Right next to a person is a much harsher environment than people think it is, stuff people carry tends to break and wear.
I'm not surprised the cables break in pockets in that kind of scenario, although I haven't experienced it myself with my admittedly much lighter and less varied lifestyle (lots of walking, occasional hiking, maintenance work sometimes including light carpentry, but no sports or biking).
There seems to be a very large variance in percieved reliability of cables and tech in general. Are you buying the same brand every time you need to replace something? Do more athletic people with more muscle have problems because their weight or level of force they commonly apply is more likely to break stuff? Probably just unrelated factors but it does seem like people who lift are more like to hate new tech. Is it about what clothes you wear? Is it the phone itself having something about the connector?
Obviously USB C has a problemwith a few specific environments, but I'm not exactly sure what those cases are.
Barrel connectors are easily one of my most disliked. Even if they don’t fail outright, they grow loose and finicky over time even if you’re trying to take care of them. On top of that, there’s numerous different sizes and pole configurations so even if an adapter is physically compatible, you have to look closely to make sure you’re not going to fry your device.
Most new devices don't have enough space for 5.5x anything. And 2.1mm is the more common one from what I can see.
Regardless it's a crappy choice for consumer electronics because it's got no voltage negotiation. You can fry stuff with it, and chargers aren't universal.
2.1mm is a wonderful connector for switches, sensors, solar panels, and power you need to daisy chain, but PD is pretty much perfect for point to point medium power devices.
USBC seems to break far less often than anything else that's cheap and small. I don't see why 19 pins is an issue unless you just really like simplicity.
It absolutely looks like something that would fail all the time... But it doesn't. Somehow they made it so even the cheap knockoffs are durable.
I have a tablet with a i5-7200u (2016) with a small-ish ~34WHr (originally, well worn since!) battery that gets 7 hours usage easy. How is this "power hungry"? For an ancient quad core & inefficient old storage drive.
As with 90% of everything, people take a bunch of highly visible indicators to decide their opinions & then shit on anything & everything that doesn't meet their set conception. People hate Electron because they think of Slack, but Slack has shit ass architecture. Dump it's web data and you'll find dozens of multi-megabyte indexeddb databases with mostly duplicate data. It's just a shit app. You can build shit apps in anything. But vscode being slick fast & smooth doesn't register for anyone, seemingly carries no weight. The negative conceptions dominate & rule, are the things that get posted, actively, and with energy. It's a damned shame.
I tried VSCode on a Librem 14 by Purism. It has a tenth gen Core i7 with 12 threads. With only very basic essential extensions like syntax, Git integration, and a Vim mode, I could type faster than the view updated.
Electron may be great for people who want to write Web apps, but browsers are RAM and CPU hungry beasts compared to the GUI toolkits they're trying to replace.
In short, which environments are running VSCode smoothly? Do I need next gen hardware to run a damn IDE smoothly?
Web apps have some advantages, but performance is nowhere in that list.
Your poor performance seems unexpected in extreme. Folks at work are on m1's with quite a lot of extensions & everything feels snappy.
Having a huge git repo could poyentially hurt; would be interesting to test. Who knows maybe vim mode is partly to blame? I personally still mainly use vim, not vscode, so I don't know what usual suspects there are. It'd be awesome if there's good profiling that can show what plugins are taking significant time in the core loop. We have brutal eslint to apply but that for example all happens async. Once again, we're back where we started, of one bad situation - some random plugin somewhere - creating a lightning rod for disdain.
A Surface Go or Surface Pro, which this is essentially a clone of, will happily run for a school/business day, and that's with the weight of Windows on it.
And of course some rogues had to pass leave some judgement and a "guess what triggered my reaction". In this case, the very annoying and utterly avoidable game of guesses is among the easiest: that it was a banality? But not all of this public may have been there...
Edit: to expand more on the implicit of the original post «not necessary on Linux»: that «an hour or two of battery life» is quite extraordinary, and should really require a bit of expansion: what is it that drains that battery? That is not normal at all, and requires some more detail, like "Android 12 tried to marry my cousin" or similar would.
Agreed - ARM put x86 on the clock, and Apple Silicon - the best implementation of ARM yet - is the death knell of x86. Every opinion to the contrary feels like cope, because it's coming, and fast.
A CPU is not a computer. Apple does not sell its CPUs to other manufacturers. A single vendor cannot supply solutions satisfying every person and every business requiring computers, no matter how good their tech is. Fast ARM merely keeps Apple relevant. It is not such an unfair advantage that everything else dies.
I use an RPi3 with 7 inch touchscreen to listen to webradio all the time. Just the other day I was curious, and measured its power consumption. My laptop with Ryzen 4700u with turned off screen uses less amount of power than the Rpi with screen on (~6W for laptop vs ~7.5W for RPi). I'm really thinking about ditching my RPi's as a radio and even as pihole, as my laptop can do much more while still using close to 0% CPU.
Sure, the screen on/off comparison makes this measurement a bit unfair, but calling x86/x64 energy inefficient doesn't sound particularly correct.
I don't know much about peak power consumption of these chips, but they are crazy efficient when idling / having little load. Plus, ARM support still sucks :-(
Somewhat related - will we ever see linux on old iPads?
Old iPads can't get updated anymore, they can't easily browse the web, apps can't get updated or reinstalled... Basically recycle material or dust catchers.
I'd like to jail break or whatever my old iPads and have them as simple linux tablets.
Would love to see it, but my guess would be only if there's ever regulation to force Apple to allow it under climate concerns or right to repair type policy.
Whenever I read this kind of comment, specially about Apple, I always wonder: What are you suggesting we do?
If the answer is "just don't have a tablet and buy a FairPhone or a feature phone, have less tech", I think that's coherent.
But if the answer is just "don't buy Apple, but continue to buy", I'd say they're all just as bad at best, way worse in general. Apple devices have a longer supported life, although others tend to be more hackable.
I think there’s a reasonable argument that manufacturers should be required to open up hardware when they no longer support it. The problem is I doubt that would achieve what most people here seem to expect fur older devices.
You might be able to run a really basic Linux on the older devices, but their very limited RAM will severely constrain what you can run on them.
The native OS is so optimised for the hardware, trying to get better performance, or even matching power consumption on generic Linux is just not realistic.
Frankly other than for hobbyist purposes the last version of the native OS is probably as functional as they’re likely to get.
Having said all that, more recent iPads are powerful machines that are likely to still be very capable fur as long as they will run. Asahi Linux is compatible with M-series hardware.
So while think getting latest gen performance such as modern browsing out of legacy kit is a pipe dream whatever Apple did, I think there are real possibilities going forward.
There's a lot of use cases outside traditional tablet functionality, such as running a webserver or turning those excellent Apple screens into a secondary monitor.
Yeah, it’s really a shame. I have the original iPad and the hardware remains solid. If I could have an updated browser that could display modern websites without crashing, I would still use it.
I had to double-check that, I thought it was 512 MB. Yeah, that's not very much.
I also recall that the final iOS version for that device (iOS 5.x or 5.1.1) left less memory for apps and I regretted agreeing to that upgrade.
I really wish I could install a minimal Linux and the best minimal browser available. That would at least be an improvement over the doorstop that I have.
I have a Retina iPad stuck on iOS 9, which is now essentially an ebook reader and movie player.
I had two of them stuck on iOS 5. Perfectly working, cosmetically perfect, lots of battery life, but bricks.
Whereas I have a 1st gen Pro and a 5th gen (when the stock iPad got the Air form-factor) which both run the latest iPadOS, but their battery life is now a couple of hours if that. They're nearly useless.
I had a new battery fitted to the 5th gen. It is no better but now the screen is damaged with multiple artifacts visible.
There is no battery replacement for the Pro: it's too big and too fragile.
In other words, in important terms, the old ones were BETTER but they are now useless because of an outdated OS.
Another option is to create more progressive enhancement websites which work with such devices.
Giving older devices new life is part of the reason I started developing my framework.
For example, the websites linked in my profile are backwards compatible all the way to Netscape 3.0, while still supporting more modern features like in-place updating vote counters and adding dialogs to a page without reloading it.
And LLM use will only make this type of website easier to build, once you can ask, for example, "operator, please ensure the website markup is compatible with my particular device, which is an iPad 2 running iOS 6.0."
I think we're about to experience an amazing renaissance of the Web, with sites and services which bend over backwards to accommodate each particular user, device, and abilities combination, rather than telling the long tail to fuck off.
And I think it's the right way to go. Each device-user deserves to be catered to and supported, the same way we support wheelchairs and baby strollers with elevators and ramps, even though they're less than 1% of the traffic.
I agree that these devices should be supported, but the only entity that can actually support them is apple.
It's not enough for sites to work, the underlying software also has to be secure enough to handle the internet. That can come from Apple providing software updates to the device to keep it secure, or Apple providing a supported mechanism for someone to install Linux, or some other operating system that can be updated.
Unfortunately, apple does not provide security updates or any way to actually "unlock" them, so they are unsupported. Tailoring your site to work on these insecure clients is in a sense encouraging them to venture onto the internet, encouraging them to try other sites which might have untrusted 3rd party ads that pwn them and steal their bank cookies..... In that sense, it's more responsible to make your site only work with newer secure browsers than the reverse.
For orphaned devices, this is impossible, because Apple has already decided to abandon them. I think they can be still be useful for non-critical information browsing within a closed network of safe websites.
I think the accessibility necessity of supporting older devices is often underrated severely, while the need for security is overstated. New, currently supported devices people use day-to-day are also exploitable.
That would be nice. For now, I really like using the iPad Blink app as a mosh/ssh client to a leased Linux VPS. With mosh, I can be in a Linux dev environment instantly and adding tmux I have several screens to bounce between. Adding a great Emacs setup lets me edit markdown manuscripts and code in Python and Common Lisp.
I am at a relative’s home doing a hospice thing sitting with a loved one who is dying. I only have a small iPad Pro with me, and that is sufficient, but only because I am using my VPS.
Having just normal iPad apps does not cut it for me.
How many heavily-NDA'd Broadcom chips are in those things? Good luck getting working drivers, even if you manage to jailbreak it: https://projectsandcastle.org/status
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but they're actually one of the few vendors who design their own stuff - e.g, their Starbook line is their own, not some Clevo junk.
The wait times last I checked are dreadful but that could've changed. I really like their approach though, whenever I can finally get away from Apple's stuff they're likely what I'll opt for (unless System76 knocks it out of the park with their custom one...).
This looks amazing on paper, but plenty of linux phones/tablets do and end up being underwhelming for some reason or another. I'm going to reserve judgement till I can test out the full software and hardware compatibility and battery life (which will likely be never, because I doubt this will ever show up to a Best Buy near me).
My personal feeling is, there are more modems that do not work under Linux than those that do. Or are detected but happen to randomly stop working during the day.
Because the manufacturers switched to making cheaper hardware and moved trade secrets and regulatory compliance into the Windows driver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Softmodem
Because carriers and hardware vendors don't want to play ball. Some carriers consider the user's modem as part of their network and want to control it, hardware vendors want to keep their precious firmware blobs and private APIs to themselves.
Linux has all the drivers and infrastructure in place to use cell networks efficiently, carriers and vendors just don't want to be part of that.
Source: my only Internet access at home comes from a LTE router running Debian I built myself.
Unfortunately I never got around to writing it down and as it has been running pretty much unattended for the past three years it is not fresh in my mind.
The gist is that since it is a router only (switch and access point are external appliances) it is not that difficult, there are plenty of resources on the web explaining how to turn a linux box into a router. I had to configure a bit of nftables, dhcpd, dnsmask and stubby and that's pretty much it.
The server is a standard PC Engines APU4 and the modem in the mPCIe slot is an Huawei ME906s.
As I alluded earlier, the hardest part is finding a good modem and getting it to work. Once the modem shows up as a network interface the hard part is done.
No USB-A ports and no plain old Debian option... Would be cool if they offered a blank keyboard option, because right now I would just have to pick any ISO language and because I used Slovenian layout, but if I bought it, as is, I couldn't look at the keyboard anyways...
Also the display seems a bit dim at 300cd/m.
And since it's touch, stylus (digitizer) would be very welcome.
I'm sorry, I guess I didn't fully express my thoughts. I'm genuinely excited about the device and had signed up to be notified when it's available. I will, of course, wait for the reviews, but at ~600€ with a keyboard, it's already leagues ahead of my current Chromebook, and this is running a "real" operating system!
I expressed my issue with no USB-A ports because I prefer my devices to be self-sufficient (I hope that's the right word). My mouse that I've had for many many years has USB-A, all of my USB storage drives are USB-A, Wacom tablet is USB-A, external DVD drive is USB-A.
What I'm trying to say is that all of my devices are USB-A, I have a USB charger only for my phone. And I do find it absurd having to use an adapter to use a mouse with my computer. I would be very slightly less bothered if the adapters at least came with device, but they don't, switch means that it's something I have to buy (no, I don't have any USB-C to USB-A adapters, because only my phone has a USB-C port).
I don't believe USB-A is past its prime, I don't really even know what that's supposed to mean. I still love and use my 3.5mm headphone jack on my phone.
With criticism, it's much easier to improve then if you only hear praise.
Of course, your opinion is yours to have, but honestly, the world has moved on from USB-A for new computers/phones/peripherals. I just bought a couple of those: https://www.amazon.com/Basesailor-Thunderbolt-Converter-Gene... and they stay on the USB-A cable - the price is low enough that I can justify the expense for my 5 or so older peripherals.
The USB-A socket is too big for the slim form-factor of ultrabooks and tablets, and it won't make a come-back.
I get where you're coming from, my mouse and keyboard are also still USB-A, but I don't think this is a major issue when you can just buy a decent USB-C dock. I've got one with 3 USB-C ports + display port + HDMI + ethernet etc. I find this honestly much better organizational wise rather than everything leeching from different parts of the laptop, and you're no longer beholden to each variation of laptop having the ports you need (some don't even have ethernet these days...)
I disagree, it's potentially a much more versatile format.
What's needed for use as a laptop (aside from a disregard for ergonomics) is a k/b with an extra battery for weight/balance, and actual friction hinges to hold the tablet at the desired angle.
The tablet itself could then have smaller batteries and be lighter, maybe as an option.
Looks like StarLite needs a kickstand behind it to keep the display up, the hinge likely has no stickiness whatsoever, it's just like a folded piece of the folio cover. Like a Microsoft Surface. Can't type in lap, hard to use in tight spaces like planes or busy coffee shops.
I have a couple of Pixel Slates with Brydge keyboards that have actual good hinges, that's much closer to a laptop. Still more top-heavy than laptops.
I’m afraid i3/sway have spoiled me and now I find any other wm just awfully bulky to say the least, but also I can’t imagine how to use tiling wm without a keyboard. Are there any projects exploring the idea of tiling wm usage on tablets?
In some ways, tiling WMs are a natural fit for tablets — consider e.g. the iPad’s ‘split screen’ mode, where two windows take up the whole screen between them. It’s easy enough to imagine a WM where you can drag windows to move them around, and drag the splits between them to resize. On Linux, this kind of paradigm is implemented by e.g. Hyprland. I dislike it for desktop, but on a tablet I’d happily use it.
There is at least one: SXMO [0] . There are a few distributions where it's available, at least on the PinePhone, so it's not inconceivable at all that it would possible to use it on an Intel-bsaed tablet.
> Sxmo >= 1.6.0 runs both on Xorg (using dwm) as well as on Wayland (using sway). The X in our name historically referred to Xorg, but is now open to whatever interpretation you prefer (eXtensible, eXcellent, eXperimental, etc...)
Note: I have yet to try it but I'm getting more interested now..
In my limited experience, sway is pretty easy to use on a tablet because it supports moving windows very will using a mouse/pointer. Obviously you need still need a on-screen keyboard and a lot of config to replace other swaycmds but it seems like a decent base WM for a tablet.
LVFS is how you ship firmware that installs permanently into flash on the hardware device (e.g. Coreboot).
Hopefully, at least Coreboot itself stays buildable for the motherboard in the long term so you can keep locally building core system firmware for many more years to come. Star Labs themselves are not committing to continuing to ship pre-built binaries from their side for more than five years.
So I've been using a Tablet PC running Linux for over two years as a primary device, my advice is that if your needs are more as a workstation get something with a reasonable CPU and fans. HP used to make a nice tablet PC, the Asus flow z13 is the second best choice.
Dell also has been selling a fanless XPS 13 tablet for the past year but I haven't heard of anyone using it. This said it's nice to see more vendors considering the tablet form factor with appropriate ports and display resolution.
No one has mentioned the 2880x1920 resolution display. That’s fantastic I’m this price range. $500 laptops are (nearly?) impossible to find with displays above 1080p.
My question is if that resolution is usable with 2x integer scaling (1440x960 effective screen real estate), because fractional scaling under Linux is still a bit rocky.
Though other things don't work well. Like Plasma's whole toolbar with clock widget etc. It freezes, and you can't interact with the frozen widgets. Only answers are kill and restart, reboot, or switch back to X. It'll get there, but it's still not at a level I would say is daily driver (for me - I like my toolbar clock to actually tell me the current time).
(Kubuntu with KDE project's PPA to be on latest stable)
I'd try with a rolling release and see if you still encounter the problems. I use Plasma panels with the clock widget and haven't experienced freezes or had to restart anything.
The DE itself, yes. This is true of GNOME as well once the hidden setting is enabled. Unfortunately there's still individual programs which don't behave correctly, which for now means that 1x or 2x displays are still best if a trouble-free, low-tinkering experience is the goal.
I use 150% on my main monitor and everything looks perfect except for two proprietary apps installed through flatpak: Zoom and Spotify. These two are not really known to be quality software in the first place so I think it is safe to blame them for this quirk.
No. It really isn't. I can tap a keyboard shortcut and change my desktop resolution in .1 increments and everything just works and scales up and down. I've run my internal laptop display at 1.7 for 3+ years. (Sway)
A friend of mine recently (2019 or '20) bought a laptop, new, with a 768p LCD display. It's ridiculous. In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display, and it was 5" so it had a high pixel density too! Why does it feel like consumer electronics are going backwards?
Perhaps because people realized that the pixel inflation is at some point counterproductive. If you can't distinguish pixels, what difference does it make?
I mean, yeah that resolution is ridiculous, but anything above 1080p on a screen less than ~14 inches is going to have diminishing returns and most of those returns will be in how "pretty" it is, not how useful it is.
Looking for a laptop for my Dad more recently (early 2023) there were no models with less than 1080 that were not also incredibly crumby in other respects (dog slow eMMC drives, too little RAM to run current Windows well especially once it swaps to that slow drive, awful looking keyboards, etc.). We checked for lower resolution screens because with his eyes higher is pretty pointless (and it might have reduced the price) but went with 1080 and set it to be scaled in the OS.
> In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display
You can buy a full laptop fur a fair amount less than many phones with high-resolution screens though, possibly more so back then. What spec was his machine beyond the screen? Also: most people are closer to their phone screen in use than they are a laptop, perhaps making the case for higher resolutions there stronger.
Reliably producing those 720/768 displays at common laptop & tablet sizes was cheap so making laptops/tablets around them was cheap, and more than enough people thought it good enough (or didn't know better). Given our experience above, the economies of scale on 1080+ panels have changed such that the 1080 screens are in the sweet zone.
> No one has mentioned the 2880x1920 resolution display.
fyi: On their specification page[0] they list both 2880x1920 (s/b 3:2 aspect ratio) and that the screen is a 16:10 aspect ratio. I'm sure the 16:10 aspect ratio is a typo since 2880x1920 is used in multiple places.
As someone who gave the JingPad a spin, the Linux tablet market has been painfully difficult to pull off. At least this is based on Intel, ensuring that if the company goes belly up, it can be used for something other than a mirror.
Yeah, it has, but it has serious limitations for future ports because of its hardware model. It’s using an SOC with proprietary PowerVR graphics which will limit its future ability.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadhttps://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Processor-N200-CPU-Bench...
The lack of low-tdp products on AMD side was also one of the reasons given by pcengines to discontinue their embedded line. AMD's last 6W APU was the 2-core R1102G which is now a couple generations old.
Apparently this also supports hardware accelerated AV1 decoding and h265 encode/decode.
> 1.00GHz quad-core Intel Alder Lake N200
> Turbo Boost up to 3.70GHz, with 6MB Smart Cache
The keyboard is very nice. Short travel for keys but pleasant to use. I use iwd as the wireless deamon and wifi autoconnect works just fine. I do not have bluetooth headphones so cannot comment on that, but my bluetooth mouse works as expected.
Battery life depends largely on how you use it. I have a minimal setup with alpine linux/i3 and just typing in a terminal with screen at 33% brightness results in battery-reported power consumption of just under 2W which is great. Obviously a browser like firefox will impact it quite a bit. Hardware-accelerated video playback works fine.
There are a few minor downsides: the built-in speaker is quite awful (not a consideration for me), the webcam is not great and the microsd card reader is usb 2.0. UEFI secure boot is currently not supported on the coreboot fw. The documentation is sparse.
One weird gotcha is that the power button is one of the keys on the keyboard, so to avoid suspending your device accidentally it will only fire an interrupt after you hold it for a couple seconds. Took me a while to figure out.
(No affiliation, although they do operate out of a barn within walking distance of my house!)
Is there an option for an active stylus?
>the touchscreen does support a pen/stylus which would be an active capacitive pen type. This would need to comply with MPP 2.0 or WGP.
Cellwriter is a reversion to the comb-based printed inputs of the early 90s.
Maybe the QT option is better?
https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/handwriting.html
(but it only shows printing)
I wonder if these can be upgraded to the latest versions?
edit: Now that I look at it again, there are two different "Star Lite" entries, and I'm not sure which one is this tablet.
[1] https://support.starlabs.systems/kb/faqs/is-it-possible-to-r...
100% more usb-c please, with alt modes. USB4 mandates every port be able to do DisplayPort output.
I really hope we start to see phones and tablets which have >1 USB port. Lenovo has an absurd beast phone, a Legion phone, with both dual batteries and dual USB-c (USB3) ports. If we get to 2030 and phones can't plug in to GPUs something is f-ed and the system is broken, tech has ossified grossly. Hopefully happens sooner, and hopefully we see dual ports emerge midway to then too. Would be such a great capability set.
Why? That’s an incredibly minor use case. If you’re expecting something this niche to become the norm then you’re destined to be disappointed.
My dream is much smaller. I just want whatever hardware circuitry is required to accomplish the scenario where a phone that is plugged in to a good power source runs directly from the wall, shutting off battery charge completely, not trickle charging all day and night.
Maybe we should be filing feature requests for it;
And even before then.
I have an M1 Macbook Air which will only output video over one of its 2 USB-C ports, not the other. There is nothing visible on the case or in the OS to indicate this.
I have had an Arm and an AMD Thinkpad which both have only dual USB-C, and both unpredictably switch between one or the other being bootable, with no discenable pattern.
Weird, ever since I had USB-C based Mac Mini or MacBook (two Intel, two M1) they could reliably output video on any of the two, three, or four ports (as long as I don't go past the limit). They're essentially symmetric on all features.
PCIe transport ("Thunderbolt") and Power Delivery are both optional though, I think.
Unfortunately its not a phone. Its a mini tablet. But I find the size ideal for daily use - browsing，reading pdfs, small sketches . (no SIM slot though)
Wish every battery powered device would have a setting for this.
As opposed to always charging when charger is plugged in, and always charging up to 100% (non-configurable).
But more notably, I think around half also have charge control. It's just been on/off. But it would be a pretty basic bash script to make this happen.
But it depends on the laptop. From what I understand not all laptops have the drivers for power control ie. the ability to from-software tell the laptop to stop charging
But reciprocally, what's the new ultra-hot device? Gaming decks. Lenovo just announced theirs today. Steam, Asus, and dozen of others have amazing devices. And there are still gaming-centric phones galore.
This should be an easy ask. It should be a lock. Android alas is kind of a weird divergent hard to use OS that makes everything difficult. Apple hasn't supported anyone elses GPUs in a long long time. But in general, this should just be easy simple & doable, were it not for the sins of these ultra-bizarre weird not-PC but so close systems. ChromeOS finally found jesus & is now running on Wayland, because it was obviously the correct & only sensible choice all along, And has huge advantages, such as having a huge world of people optimizing & making the system better. I don't know how Android ever pivots (they just steal everything ChromeOS (which runs Android great) is doing), but it should, so that it can make ideas like this unimaginably easy & simple tasks, versus today where this sort of idea is a painstaking slow & awful endeavor to make happen.
So much of computing is a story of niche finding leverage & finding adherents. The early adopters are just those who see potential, and they continually have reshaped what computing is. Writing off "niche" as uninteresting & minor ignores how sensible & clear & obvious so many advancements are & should be.
If people could plug in their phone and run Linux apps on a full size monitor they'd probably pay a lot more for the phone, knowing they didn't then also need a nice laptop.
I used Samsung DEX a few times on my tablet. The mouse plus touchscreen combination works well. The keyboard is a little worse because there is no Esc key on Android and Ctrl [ is uncomfortable.
If one IS a software developer of course, then you probably need a lot of Linux apps, and it would be cool to have them alongside a platform that's way more reliable than Linux, so that your browser and email and calendar and music are always there and don't bog down.
The point is not that phones should be connected to GPUs, that’s a silly idea.
But nevertheless for plenty of reasons including ecology and autonomy of people, it should be the case that any device should work with any other device as long as anyone is able to develop a driver. And there should be no permanent lock against custom drivers.
Every usb-c to HDMI adapter has to actively convert the signals which is why one end is usually much larger than the other.
We're much more likely to get phones with 0 USB ports (justified by 'security', 'water proofness' or 'simplicity') where the only charging is wireless.
I might get one anyway, if they ship to SA. At least micro HMDI is still dockable.
(Just out of curiosity - does anyone know of any other option to use an external display with this tablet? Are wireless displays a thing?)
Consistently good colors. Sometimes even PC monitors won't negotiate properly with the PC and start displaying washed out colors. IIRC this had to be forced on a Raspberry Pi on the PI side. Not all monitors can be adjusted.
Consistently no under/overscan. For some reason, the TVs we had in conference rooms figured it would be smart to cut the borders of the image and zoom in, so you get missing bits and whatever's left is a blurry mess.
For the TV situation, you usually don't have a full remote to adjust it, if it even supports that. You often don't have time to look up things in the TV's typically crappy menu system. I've usually found the option to disable over scan, but using full-range RGB seems less common.
Also, HDMI seems to lag DisplayPort capabilities when it comes to higher resolutions and refresh rates. When my 2013 MBP came out, it could drive a 4k@60 screen over DP. HDMI required the 2.0 version to do that, which, IIRC, came much later.
I think that one very much depends on when you chose to look at it. HDMI 2.1 has more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4, enough to do 4k@120 which DP1.4 wouldn't be able to do it without dropping color down to 4:2:0. DisplayPort 2.0 devices are starting to come out, but even Nvidia's RTX 4000 series still do not have DisplayPort 2.0 (but do have HDMI 2.1). While TV started supporting HDMI 2.1 around 2019, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X having HDMI 2.1 ports.
So while DisplayPort may be ahead now with DisplayPort 2.0, HDMI was ahead for at least 4 years with HDMI 2.1
Although, if I'm not mistaken, my particular PC monitor initially didn't support HDMI 2.0, even though it's a 4k panel. There was a further revision which included it. I have that revision, but support is still somewhat wonky, in that it can't seem to switch on its own from 2.0 to 1.4b.
I've only encountered overscan on TVs not monitors, but I don't give conference room presentations, which would be very annoying. On Macs there compensation for that.
I've had trouble with colors where it uses YPbPr rather than RGB, but that seems to be an Apple thing where it's done on purpose for non-Apple-approved displays and it happens for both HDMI and DP. Generating a custom EDID profile fixes that. Can't recall having trouble with color range, sometimes the display has a setting but the default always looked better to me.
I've used 4k@60 HDMI just fine (and 4k@30 on an early Apple adapter), but more often use 1080p anyway. I use USB-C with my 4k displays which likely runs DP on them.
Right. So... DP is better than HDMI?
The color issue I had was not with a Mac but with an HP laptop on an HP monitor. My understanding is that there's something about "broadcast colors" or something, which is "regular" RGB only with a narrower range. I think the PC thought the monitor was a TV with a limited range, which the monitor was not.
With the TVs I plug into, it's usually harder to judge since their color rendition tends to be all over the place anyway and tend to have the reverse issue (too much contrast).
I remember the overscan control on the mac, but it still was a PITA to have to fiddle with that instead of, you know, just plugging the screen in and being in business.
While I've also had numerous positive experiences with HDMI where things seemingly "just worked", I've never had an issue with DP. It always worked. Hell, even my gaming GPU, which came out a while after HDMI 2, and supported it out of the box, connected to my monitor with full HDMI 2 support, still has weird colors compared to DP. No tweaking in the AMD drivers managed to get me the proper output, so I went and bought a cheap Chinese DP KVM instead. Which worked with no fuss.
All this makes me automatically pick DP if given the choice, and discount any computer or screen that only does HDMI. Which makes it pretty tough to buy a TV, so I just watch movies on my computer monitor.
That would be an interesting thing for the video production industry. Basically the entire market is divided between "professional" equipment, in which SDI continues to dominate (with some movement towards SMPTE 2110 aka IP), and "amateur" equipment which is all HDMI - with very few products on the boundary and supporting both connectors.
Consumer grade digital cameras have only recently (10 years, maybe less) started being able to output the live video feed over HDMI. Before that, believe me or not I've stumbled upon MANY camera models from 2013 or before that had an HDMI port, but all it was good for was displaying pictures from the memory card on a TV.
It would certainly make life easier in a lot of "small streamer" setups. Currently, if you don't want to torture your camera's battery, you need to get a silly (often third-party) "dummy battery" that you can (hopefully!) plug into an ordinary USB power supply; and on top of that, a separate mini/micro HDMI -> full HDMI cable to plug into a capture card. If you could reduce that to a single USB-C with PD and DP - trust me, every silly cable you can eliminate from your setup is an enormous win.
Even better, if these cameras could talk the regular USB "webcam" protocol in addition to DP, eliminating the capture card for the overwhelmingly common setup of "I just want to look very good on video calls".
But that opens a can of worms: in any non-trivial setup, a camera (one camera) is merely a small piece of a much more elaborate puzzle. Even seemingly simple setups end up converting the signal back&forth between some crazy stuff. On one job, we needed to run an SDI or HDMI cable between the floors, but couldn't do either because the building was untouchable; so we've used a couple of HDMI -> HDBaseT converters to run the signal over existing Ethernet cables. Turns out, it was no longer possible to convert the resulting HDMI signal again to SDI (we've tried many converters, all failed), which limited our choice of video mixers. Would the signal make it through if it originated as DP? Your guess is as good as mine.
Broadcast is a strange place. I still laugh whenever I think of Quad-SDI; only the broadcast industry could ever come up with that. Things need to work with one another and even if every single person in the world agreed that HDMI must die, starting today, I'm fairly certain we'd still see new equipment being made in 2033 that supports it.
It seems like the last few standards started really robust and open because of the lack of compatibility, and then greed got involved and vendors just slipped in something to make it difficult cross connect. I assume so people would have to buy more of their stuff.
The focus on "realtime" makes the standards have worse quality in practice (bad handling of dropped or bad bits), and makes it much harder for the IP based standards to be routed (network congestion from high bitrate through uplinks). WebRTC by comparison can be quite nice.
I seriously don't have any hope for sanity in that market.
So cost and complexity increase. MicroHDMI does suck, but despite that raspberry pi 4 has two of them.
They're a great company but MicroUSB? Really?
But the 2x HDMI are visible + listed. :(
> USB-C Interface: Display Port (DP Alt Mode)
Did you assume it definitely will support DP out for both?
Power bricks of the 1990s didn't have this problem. The barrel connectors were almost indestructible. You could drop bricks on VGA connectors and they'd still work.
I have never yet broken a USB-C cable. Not one.
When I used an iPhone for a couple of years, I went through approximately a Lightning cable per month, sometimes more. At one point I took a carrier bag of broken Lightning cables to the electronics recycling.
You must treat equipment exceptionally roughly.
(Now the cat chewing on cables in another matter xD)
I will say that I really wish they had managed to not have that middle section sticking up in the female connectors - cleaning out my phone's USB-C port is about 20x harder than cleaning out a lighting port because I feel like I'm going to break that little thing in the middle.
Like if my phone is low on battery I plug it into a portable battery and shove the phone and portable battery (connected by a USB-C cable) into my pocket, like any consumer would. I then go hiking, snowshoeing, biking, sleeping, like any consumer would. Cables have bent and broken in my pocket in these scenarios, among thousands of others.
My parent comment was yesterday; today's USB-C cable broke when it got stuck in an office chair's wheel caster, bending the sheet metal housing. Thi doesn't happen with ANY connector of the 1990s. BNC, RCA, DB-9, 1/8" headphone jacks, 5.5x2.5 barrel connectors, they ALL withstood office chair crushing and were all probably designed with consumer abuse like office chairs in mind.
I've even run over DB-9 and BNC connectors with heavy duty carts, they were fine.
USB C doesn't have that issue. There are high end cables and just kind of OK cables, but at least with the braided ones I normally buy, there aren't many terrible ones at any price. They decoupled reliability from craftsmanship and materials.
Pockets should be considered industrial duty environments.
Right next to a person is a much harsher environment than people think it is, stuff people carry tends to break and wear.
I'm not surprised the cables break in pockets in that kind of scenario, although I haven't experienced it myself with my admittedly much lighter and less varied lifestyle (lots of walking, occasional hiking, maintenance work sometimes including light carpentry, but no sports or biking).
There seems to be a very large variance in percieved reliability of cables and tech in general. Are you buying the same brand every time you need to replace something? Do more athletic people with more muscle have problems because their weight or level of force they commonly apply is more likely to break stuff? Probably just unrelated factors but it does seem like people who lift are more like to hate new tech. Is it about what clothes you wear? Is it the phone itself having something about the connector?
Obviously USB C has a problemwith a few specific environments, but I'm not exactly sure what those cases are.
While not saying USB-C is a great choice instead. Personally I just wish everyone could have generic magnetic Magsafe style connectors.
Just terrible overall.
Inventing a new standard with a weak sheet metal connector and 19 pins to deliver + and - isn't a solution to the above.
Regardless it's a crappy choice for consumer electronics because it's got no voltage negotiation. You can fry stuff with it, and chargers aren't universal.
2.1mm is a wonderful connector for switches, sensors, solar panels, and power you need to daisy chain, but PD is pretty much perfect for point to point medium power devices.
USBC seems to break far less often than anything else that's cheap and small. I don't see why 19 pins is an issue unless you just really like simplicity.
It absolutely looks like something that would fail all the time... But it doesn't. Somehow they made it so even the cheap knockoffs are durable.
As with 90% of everything, people take a bunch of highly visible indicators to decide their opinions & then shit on anything & everything that doesn't meet their set conception. People hate Electron because they think of Slack, but Slack has shit ass architecture. Dump it's web data and you'll find dozens of multi-megabyte indexeddb databases with mostly duplicate data. It's just a shit app. You can build shit apps in anything. But vscode being slick fast & smooth doesn't register for anyone, seemingly carries no weight. The negative conceptions dominate & rule, are the things that get posted, actively, and with energy. It's a damned shame.
Electron may be great for people who want to write Web apps, but browsers are RAM and CPU hungry beasts compared to the GUI toolkits they're trying to replace.
In short, which environments are running VSCode smoothly? Do I need next gen hardware to run a damn IDE smoothly?
Web apps have some advantages, but performance is nowhere in that list.
Having a huge git repo could poyentially hurt; would be interesting to test. Who knows maybe vim mode is partly to blame? I personally still mainly use vim, not vscode, so I don't know what usual suspects there are. It'd be awesome if there's good profiling that can show what plugins are taking significant time in the core loop. We have brutal eslint to apply but that for example all happens async. Once again, we're back where we started, of one bad situation - some random plugin somewhere - creating a lightning rod for disdain.
I have one, running Linux on it, love it and consider best Linux device I ever had had, but I wish there were fewer quirks.
Interesting, but that must be some bad configuration, something that must be fixed on that specific line of tablets. It is not necessary on Linux.
Edit: to expand more on the implicit of the original post «not necessary on Linux»: that «an hour or two of battery life» is quite extraordinary, and should really require a bit of expansion: what is it that drains that battery? That is not normal at all, and requires some more detail, like "Android 12 tried to marry my cousin" or similar would.
Sure, the screen on/off comparison makes this measurement a bit unfair, but calling x86/x64 energy inefficient doesn't sound particularly correct.
Maybe the architecture, but not the products.
You can consume 3 watts on some Intel based laptops.
Old iPads can't get updated anymore, they can't easily browse the web, apps can't get updated or reinstalled... Basically recycle material or dust catchers.
I'd like to jail break or whatever my old iPads and have them as simple linux tablets.
If the answer is "just don't have a tablet and buy a FairPhone or a feature phone, have less tech", I think that's coherent.
But if the answer is just "don't buy Apple, but continue to buy", I'd say they're all just as bad at best, way worse in general. Apple devices have a longer supported life, although others tend to be more hackable.
You might be able to run a really basic Linux on the older devices, but their very limited RAM will severely constrain what you can run on them.
The native OS is so optimised for the hardware, trying to get better performance, or even matching power consumption on generic Linux is just not realistic.
Frankly other than for hobbyist purposes the last version of the native OS is probably as functional as they’re likely to get.
Having said all that, more recent iPads are powerful machines that are likely to still be very capable fur as long as they will run. Asahi Linux is compatible with M-series hardware.
So while think getting latest gen performance such as modern browsing out of legacy kit is a pipe dream whatever Apple did, I think there are real possibilities going forward.
I also recall that the final iOS version for that device (iOS 5.x or 5.1.1) left less memory for apps and I regretted agreeing to that upgrade.
I really wish I could install a minimal Linux and the best minimal browser available. That would at least be an improvement over the doorstop that I have.
Which means iPad mini 2, iPad Air, iPad Pro 1, iPad 5 and greater.
[1] https://astropad.com/product/lunadisplay
I have a Retina iPad stuck on iOS 9, which is now essentially an ebook reader and movie player.
I had two of them stuck on iOS 5. Perfectly working, cosmetically perfect, lots of battery life, but bricks.
Whereas I have a 1st gen Pro and a 5th gen (when the stock iPad got the Air form-factor) which both run the latest iPadOS, but their battery life is now a couple of hours if that. They're nearly useless.
I had a new battery fitted to the 5th gen. It is no better but now the screen is damaged with multiple artifacts visible.
There is no battery replacement for the Pro: it's too big and too fragile.
In other words, in important terms, the old ones were BETTER but they are now useless because of an outdated OS.
Giving older devices new life is part of the reason I started developing my framework.
For example, the websites linked in my profile are backwards compatible all the way to Netscape 3.0, while still supporting more modern features like in-place updating vote counters and adding dialogs to a page without reloading it.
And LLM use will only make this type of website easier to build, once you can ask, for example, "operator, please ensure the website markup is compatible with my particular device, which is an iPad 2 running iOS 6.0."
I think we're about to experience an amazing renaissance of the Web, with sites and services which bend over backwards to accommodate each particular user, device, and abilities combination, rather than telling the long tail to fuck off.
And I think it's the right way to go. Each device-user deserves to be catered to and supported, the same way we support wheelchairs and baby strollers with elevators and ramps, even though they're less than 1% of the traffic.
It's not enough for sites to work, the underlying software also has to be secure enough to handle the internet. That can come from Apple providing software updates to the device to keep it secure, or Apple providing a supported mechanism for someone to install Linux, or some other operating system that can be updated.
Unfortunately, apple does not provide security updates or any way to actually "unlock" them, so they are unsupported. Tailoring your site to work on these insecure clients is in a sense encouraging them to venture onto the internet, encouraging them to try other sites which might have untrusted 3rd party ads that pwn them and steal their bank cookies..... In that sense, it's more responsible to make your site only work with newer secure browsers than the reverse.
I think the accessibility necessity of supporting older devices is often underrated severely, while the need for security is overstated. New, currently supported devices people use day-to-day are also exploitable.
I am at a relative’s home doing a hospice thing sitting with a loved one who is dying. I only have a small iPad Pro with me, and that is sufficient, but only because I am using my VPS.
Having just normal iPad apps does not cut it for me.
The wait times last I checked are dreadful but that could've changed. I really like their approach though, whenever I can finally get away from Apple's stuff they're likely what I'll opt for (unless System76 knocks it out of the park with their custom one...).
Linux has all the drivers and infrastructure in place to use cell networks efficiently, carriers and vendors just don't want to be part of that.
Source: my only Internet access at home comes from a LTE router running Debian I built myself.
The gist is that since it is a router only (switch and access point are external appliances) it is not that difficult, there are plenty of resources on the web explaining how to turn a linux box into a router. I had to configure a bit of nftables, dhcpd, dnsmask and stubby and that's pretty much it.
The server is a standard PC Engines APU4 and the modem in the mPCIe slot is an Huawei ME906s.
As I alluded earlier, the hardest part is finding a good modem and getting it to work. Once the modem shows up as a network interface the hard part is done.
But very probably: new battery, low screen brightness, network off...
Reasonably less than 12h - say, 8h, 10h - probably well achievable.
Also the display seems a bit dim at 300cd/m.
And since it's touch, stylus (digitizer) would be very welcome.
Your post contains only negative points.
There will never be a perfect device because everyone has different wants, so enjoy it for what it is.
I expressed my issue with no USB-A ports because I prefer my devices to be self-sufficient (I hope that's the right word). My mouse that I've had for many many years has USB-A, all of my USB storage drives are USB-A, Wacom tablet is USB-A, external DVD drive is USB-A.
What I'm trying to say is that all of my devices are USB-A, I have a USB charger only for my phone. And I do find it absurd having to use an adapter to use a mouse with my computer. I would be very slightly less bothered if the adapters at least came with device, but they don't, switch means that it's something I have to buy (no, I don't have any USB-C to USB-A adapters, because only my phone has a USB-C port).
I don't believe USB-A is past its prime, I don't really even know what that's supposed to mean. I still love and use my 3.5mm headphone jack on my phone.
With criticism, it's much easier to improve then if you only hear praise.
The USB-A socket is too big for the slim form-factor of ultrabooks and tablets, and it won't make a come-back.
USB C to USB Hub 4 Ports ($13)
https://syntechhome.com/products/usb-c-to-usb-hub-4-ports
What's needed for use as a laptop (aside from a disregard for ergonomics) is a k/b with an extra battery for weight/balance, and actual friction hinges to hold the tablet at the desired angle.
The tablet itself could then have smaller batteries and be lighter, maybe as an option.
which doesn't exist. You can't just design half of a device and tell customers that 3rd parties will come up with the rest... in time.
Or, BT keyboards with trackpads (they do not consume much power) including hinges could be in commerce.
Let me know if you find something on the market that may work with this specific tablet.
Do any decent fanless 12" Linux laptops exist now?
I have a couple of Pixel Slates with Brydge keyboards that have actual good hinges, that's much closer to a laptop. Still more top-heavy than laptops.
0: https://sxmo.org/ "Simple X Mobile"
Extra quote from their docs:
> Sxmo >= 1.6.0 runs both on Xorg (using dwm) as well as on Wayland (using sway). The X in our name historically referred to Xorg, but is now open to whatever interpretation you prefer (eXtensible, eXcellent, eXperimental, etc...)
Note: I have yet to try it but I'm getting more interested now..
Hmmmm. Why a five year cutoff? Does this have some custom firmware not in mainline Linux that would preclude updates beyond five years?
Hopefully, at least Coreboot itself stays buildable for the motherboard in the long term so you can keep locally building core system firmware for many more years to come. Star Labs themselves are not committing to continuing to ship pre-built binaries from their side for more than five years.
Probably.
My specific setup is here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ErgoMobileComputers/comments/vzs8mm...
Dell also has been selling a fanless XPS 13 tablet for the past year but I haven't heard of anyone using it. This said it's nice to see more vendors considering the tablet form factor with appropriate ports and display resolution.
(Kubuntu with KDE project's PPA to be on latest stable)
> In 2014 you could get a phone with a 1080p display
You can buy a full laptop fur a fair amount less than many phones with high-resolution screens though, possibly more so back then. What spec was his machine beyond the screen? Also: most people are closer to their phone screen in use than they are a laptop, perhaps making the case for higher resolutions there stronger.
Reliably producing those 720/768 displays at common laptop & tablet sizes was cheap so making laptops/tablets around them was cheap, and more than enough people thought it good enough (or didn't know better). Given our experience above, the economies of scale on 1080+ panels have changed such that the 1080 screens are in the sweet zone.
fyi: On their specification page[0] they list both 2880x1920 (s/b 3:2 aspect ratio) and that the screen is a 16:10 aspect ratio. I'm sure the 16:10 aspect ratio is a typo since 2880x1920 is used in multiple places.
[0] https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/starlite-specification
I wrote a whole thing about this about eight months ago: https://tedium.co/2022/11/30/fydetab-duo-jingpad-comparison/