The banks that lent the AI industry the money are already trying to sell their debt.
My Asus netbook started with basic configuration and was maximised during its lifetime, just like any PC desktop.
Same goes for the standard one year warranty. Should be two at minimum.
I had my country configured to Belgium while testing this.
If not, how would those rules apply to them?
Edit: tbh, the new "user friendly" idea of automatically converting US prices to the local currency of the visitor in spite of the company not having any connection to the visitor's locale always makes me think of drop shippers, not of legitimate businesses.
Especially if i'm in a non USD non EUR country, I am fully aware that there are different currencies in the world, I already have an established process for converting between those currencies and it's likely to be more to my advantage than whatever Stripe offers so please cut it down.
I can see the EU's take on this, and maybe overall this will even be good. I have some nice Anker chargers and can charge everything we have at home with them (added some USB-C to ligthning/micro-USB thingies here and there), but I'd be a bit annoyed if the EU would force my company operating with small margins to have 2 versions of my packaging workflow.
Maybe they should just "encourage" good behaviour? With a law that is less forcing, ie just say: "If you offer a version without charger, the price must be the same as with charger. " That would (slightly) encourage leaving it out, while not forcing companies' hands.
The laptop is being shipped anyway, so I assume the charger in there may be a "sweet deal" if you need one. 65W GaN chargers are a nice sweet-spot at the moment (size/power/price-wise), ie Ikea has one at 14 eur), wouldn't mine having one or two extra.
If you ship to multiple countries you can reduce the SKUs even more as the laptop SKU isn’t country specific anymore.
Offering a version without the charger for the same price would not reduce ewaste which is the point.
You do realize you’re paying for the charger, right? And you don’t like the option of not having to purchase the charger?
I wonder why the price difference between the 8845HS and the 285H is more than the cost of some complete 8845HS based systems. Also a shame one can't opt out of the storage or accessories like (yet another) measly 65W USB C+USB A GaN charger.
Other than those things, it actually looks decently exciting. I love the 16:10 + high resolution. Screen brightness isn't amazing, but also better than average. Glad to see 120 hz+ across all of the options. Privacy kill switch is great but the removable magnetic webcam seems a bit overkill/complicated given the kill switch (a simple physical slide would have been plenty as well). The hardware options aren't too bad for an open/Linux focused device. 6 USB ports + HDMI + audio ports is great, given the thickness it would have been cool to throw in a built in ethernet port, SD slot, and DP out to negate most of the need for the dock.
If I hadn't already bought a laptop this year this would probably be high on my list.
I did this because I manage a fleet of BSD based server (BSD runs zfs and bhyve with VM on it) and I wanted the same base system for me.
I wonder how BSD friendly those laptop are.
In any case I am so happy to see some open hardware solution.
I'd love to see more than 5 years of updates, but there is so much to love here, I can look past that!
They also don't make these computers and are at the whim of their ODM, so unless you opt for Coreboot/Libreboot, there wouldn't be a possibility for that.
https://doc.coreboot.org/mainboard/starlabs/starfighter_mtl.... The previous version is already upstreamed, apparently.
I genuinely don't think there is anything I would want changed on this laptop.
I wish framework laptops could come with multiple possible keyboard layouts like the one on the picture.
If not, I will keep my Intel Thinkpad T14 G2, The Last of the Mohicans that can.
The notebook market is dead for me if the notebook can't sleep on 0.3% battery per hour and if it can't wake up within a second or so.
So far only macbooks and >5 years old Intel notebooks can.
EDIT. Actually it looks like I was wrong about that. They do apparently at least make their own chassis’s unsure about the motherboard’s or screens though.
I recommend looking for a used laptop with a Core Ultra 7 165U (<$500) or a Core Ultra 7 268V (>$1000). Maybe an HP EliteBook. Either one would be faster than your old i9 and run much cooler.
The StarFighter has a metal case, so when running at high power levels (45W sustained according to the spec sheet) it will either get uncomfortably hot somewhere on the case or at least a bit noisy from the fans, but since it's a bit thicker than the 2019 MacBook Pro it should be able to cool itself more effectively. But when running at the performance level you're used to the power draw should be plenty low enough to make temperature and fan noise not a problem: roughly double the peak CPU performance means you can turn down the power limits a lot and still have a better-performing machine.
My aging Thinkpad P1 (1st Gen) has a great LCD, but it's also the last non-OLED screen in my life, and I don't think I can buy another laptop without it. In fact it would be a purchase decision driver/upgrade incentive for me. This and longer battery life.
Even though I build lots of C++ code, I still don't think I need more than the Xeon in the P1, horse-power wise.
Unfortunately the company stopped releasing firmware updates for it soon after they launched Mk V. I don't know if it can be still built from source for the older devices.
I'd be worried about having all of my storage in one place. I like to back up data to more than one place if it's important, and never have huge on-device storage because if something happens to damage it, I'm assuming it's game over for all on-device storage (rather than only part of it). I'd rather my storage was safe and cozy in some place far from where my laptops go.
But if you're not all that worried and happen to do data-intensive work or something, awesome, 8TB sounds like a dream.
Is this an improvement on how long whatever it's talking about usually gets updates for, or is putting a limit on it at all a bad sign? I've only seen this with regards to mobile phones before.
Not sure who the target market is.. but on the homepage it only lists the CPU's in the era of AI/Models etc I'd put the GPU and VRAM somewhere on mainpage as well.
Even when I view "Tech Specs" still don't see the VRAM ? Just some feedback.
Glossy screens are, in my humble opinion, a stupid gimmick because they look a bit better at ideal viewing conditions. For mobile devices the viewing conditions are most often not ideal, so it really doesn't make any sense unless the screen has to be a touch screen. I have had one laptop with a glossy screen and I ended up putting a glare reducing sticker on it because the glare was intolerable.
Does it mean this machine has the potential of having amazing battery life since it can be fully programmed? I am talking as close to MacBook Pro level (not accounting for arm vs intel/amd difference).
I have a Ryzen 5 AI 340 powered machine and average about 6 hours. I might be able to stretch that to 7 if I dimmed the screen a bunch and only did light web browsing.
This is closer battery life to MacBook Neo, not an Air or Pro under the same workload.
My findings on it: https://sjg.io/writing/suspend-battery-drain-framework-13-ub...
IIRC my Thinkpad T14 G2 has S3 and it draws 0.3% per hour, pretty much in line with what Macbooks draw when sleeping.
I wasn't aware that generic laptops had moved to haptic touchpads and up-firing speakers over ten years ago...
I must also mention that I'm happy to see the UHK has a ball-retention ring; this used to be normal for trackballs but companies moved away for it for some reason.
It is still a crazy question though because if you seen most laptops in the last 15 years there is basically no room for them except on the large workstation thinkpads or large gaming laptops.
Everything else about the computer I loved, but the power issue often meant it was not available when I wanted it. I eventually sold it on eBay (with full disclosure of the issues).
- control key in wrong place - camera notch - half sized arrow keys
No, every laptop does not look exactly the same and they are not all macbook clones.
Asus has similar materials in recent models I believe; I rather like it.
Are these a good pick for a non-programmer who is interested in Linux but intimidated by it?
If you're not sure if you want to go Linux yet, it's probably best to try a live USB stick of a few distros on your existing hardware. Get a feel for what the interface is like, how things work, how it works on your hardware, etc, without actually changing anything. Seems like a better bet to me than buying all-new hardware.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/629632/can-you-boot-ubuntu-s...
18 hrs
battery life
if you put it in sleep mode maybe. why do people keep lying about battery life?
It's not MacBook good but it's much better than 3hrs :)
But you aren't seriously suggesting that graphics hardware is irrelevant are you?
1. "AI" is a marketing term used by the likes of OpenAI/Anthropic/Google. LocalLLaMa communities prefer to use "LLM" or "model". So for a lot of people "AI" is just a service (see 4.)
2. "AI capability" is an irrelevant spec and marketing slug. The hardware specs will give you the needed infomation to consider a model[0][1].
3. If you'll want to run a model locally, you'd know that a midrange notebook isn't the device to look for. Instead, look at workstations with discrete graphic cards + lots of VRAM (24GB+), Strix Halo APUs or a MacBook with lots of RAM, or some dedicated workstations like the NVIDIA DGX Spark[2].
4. An inference engine can run anywhere, you can pick any LLM hosting service. LLM clients just expect an API endpoint anyway.
[1]: https://www.caniusellm.com/
[2]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/products/workstations/dgx-spark...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/IBM_Thin...
(though I prefer ISO enter, eg. Hungarian, German or Swedish layout)
But all my keyboards have been TKL over the past 15+ years and I don't miss it. I don't know why anyone needs to use a numpad unless they're in a job where they work a lot with numbers. And if you're not in such a role, what is your hobby exactly that demands so much number punching?
I'd be super happy to yank my numpad out of my laptop, move the keyboard a little bit to the right and center align it with the center of the screen. My head would be centered with the middle of the screen too.
Unfortunately I had to settle with that keyboard because every other laptop was a worse tradeoff.
What do you use a number pad for often enough to not only see it as mandatory for you, but to leave you unable to imagine how anyone could live without it?
