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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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)
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
- 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 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.
> 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!
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.
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!
Pricing seems extremely high for the specs once you start to configure.
I really want to see a company do something compelling here but there is always one thing that's off...pricing, screen, last gen processors. I switched back to Linux last year and ended up getting a $900 Lenovo that has been excellent. Would have tried System76 or Framework if their hardware could keep up.
I agree that pricing might be their biggest challenge. Matte 4k X1 Carbon ThinkPads in like-new condition go for around $1k on eBay, and they run Linux fine, so long as you're willing to install non-free firmware. I'm not sure what kind of premium I'd be willing to pay to get the faster boot and libre firmware from a company with no track record at all in the marketplace. I've recently upgraded the SSD in my T480s that's running Debian, and I figure I have another 2 or 3 years before I'll feel the need to go shopping for something better. Maybe when the used ThinkPad T14 Gen 3 AMD machines start hitting eBay in force.
I also own a Framework laptop, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is a killer feature for me. It's really hard to go back to 16:10 after using that for a while.
Prices are extremely high before you configure. These are apple prices without an apple warranty.
When I had keyboard issues I had my laptop flown out with 1 day overnight shipping and the same back to me. When the refurb I purchased has a loose hinge, I got a full refund with no hassle. When my laptop was stolen during delivery, I got a replacement sent out with a 12 minute phone call.
Fair, but you certainly pay for this in other ways with apple. I can afford to buy 2-3 laptops for the price you pay for one. And in most cases those types of events never come into play. Apple crushes on battery life but I've yet to come close to needing that much, performance is similar otherwise.
I missed that! I cheered for the success in a previous comment (despite not willing to give out 1300+ and not having it for long time).
But that is with i3 and 240G SSD?! My base config is 2300GBP, that is ridiculous. Then waiting the minimum of 4-5 months (for some on Twitter over 12 months and still waiting). After giving out this ammount having nothing for looong time. To a 4 person startup in debt and being sligtly longer in the market than the delivery window.
They're selling a privacy-conscious Linux laptop with open firmware that's assembled in a place that isn't so privacy-friendly.[0]
I think a lot of people would pay extra for assembly in a western country. These appear made to order, so the risk of hardware implantation targeting is almost certainly real.
Going all-in on privacy and hardware trust, one could also wish for a Raptor Talos portable workstation running a POWER CPU. I don't think they'd scale down to proper laptop size though.
Except for the wonky webcam (which I can live with), and the lack of GPU (which I'm less sure about; I do a lot of ML workloads), this laptop is exactly the laptop I'd buy, if I knew it actually existed.
Problem is, I'm not confident it actually will exist.
The webcam decision is wonky. My Thinkpad has a little cover I can slide over the webcam. I can buy aftermarket stick-on covers too. Why the complex magnetic mess + storage compartment?
Web cam is also mic and the ability to know it’s completely removed is good because you often see physical mic switches that only disable via software. Also there are facilities that don’t allow any hardware with either
There are many great features in this laptop, mainly no numberpad and 16:10 screen. I didn't check weight and user serviceability. They don't have the keyboard layout for my county (Italy) but I can live with that because my fingers know where keys are and I work with the USA layout most of the time. The only showstopper is the touchpad without physical buttons. I copy and paste text the X11 way by selecting and clicking the middle button. How do you do that effectively without buttons? I always took care of buying laptops with three buttons above and/or below the touchpad.
They have a “custom” option for keyboard layout. It costs more; presumably, they could do Italian. I assume the extra cost is because someone has to physically put it in the exceptions box at the factory, due to small volume (not due to them designing that layout from scratch for you).
This new laptop has soldered-down RAM. It's due to the LPDDR5 which is only electrically able to reach 6400MT/s if the memory socket is skipped, so no blame for it. Just be aware.
Thanks. It seems that the keyboard is the last component in the disassembly sequence. It's the component that I replaced most in all my laptops because I either dig a hole in the most used keys or I break the mechanics below them. They last me two or three years.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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?
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
I genuinely root for them.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Star+Labs+Systems/@51.1863...
>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.
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".
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31034024
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986767
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.
Dead Comment
Fully upgradable SSD and raM as well, I have 64 gigs and the touchpad is really really good.
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.
(Star Labs has been around for years making Linux laptops)
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!)
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.
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.
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.
But happy that I have the Framework now and thus don't need to choose :D
- 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
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.
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Other than that it looks good. Kudos for the matte screen the framework doesn't offer.
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
- 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 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.
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.
- 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".
If you double the DPI it's going to be easier to read those fonts.
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)...
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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.
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.
I really want to see a company do something compelling here but there is always one thing that's off...pricing, screen, last gen processors. I switched back to Linux last year and ended up getting a $900 Lenovo that has been excellent. Would have tried System76 or Framework if their hardware could keep up.
I also own a Framework laptop, and the 3:2 aspect ratio is a killer feature for me. It's really hard to go back to 16:10 after using that for a while.
When I had keyboard issues I had my laptop flown out with 1 day overnight shipping and the same back to me. When the refurb I purchased has a loose hinge, I got a full refund with no hassle. When my laptop was stolen during delivery, I got a replacement sent out with a 12 minute phone call.
I suspect this small operation cannot match this.
But that is with i3 and 240G SSD?! My base config is 2300GBP, that is ridiculous. Then waiting the minimum of 4-5 months (for some on Twitter over 12 months and still waiting). After giving out this ammount having nothing for looong time. To a 4 person startup in debt and being sligtly longer in the market than the delivery window.
No way, it will never work.
I think a lot of people would pay extra for assembly in a western country. These appear made to order, so the risk of hardware implantation targeting is almost certainly real.
[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/2059/5897/products/StarFig...
https://us.starlabs.systems/pages/why-choose-us
Assembled, imaged and programmed in the UK.
Configured by our own engineers, giving you peace of mind that you get what you want with no hidden extras.
Not sure if that's outdated or what to believe.
If you go to their twitter, its a constant barrage of angry customers who havent received their orders in over a year.
I dont think im okay with shelling out $3000, waiting possibly over a year, and being told "we are working on it" the entire time.
I personally just went with Tuxedo for a linux first laptop.
Problem is, I'm not confident it actually will exist.
The webcam decision is wonky. My Thinkpad has a little cover I can slide over the webcam. I can buy aftermarket stick-on covers too. Why the complex magnetic mess + storage compartment?
I’d expect the same tbh.
I do that often even on thinkpad with physical buttons.
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.