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System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

blog.system76.com

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Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#231

Post by ghostly_s »

sithadmin wrote: post #219
solatic wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The market of people who want something rugged/durable/functional are already taken care of by the Thinkpads. Are mostly unhappily taken care of by the Thinkpads. The brand has gone downhill since IBM sold to Lenovo, which has steadily eroded the level of quality that can be expected from a Thinkpad-branded laptop. Modern Thinkpads aren't nearly as serviceable or as durable as the Thinkpads of IBM's era. People who…

>Thinkpads >the enterprise support is still relatively solid That's not the experience I've had with my own company's support requests with Lenovo, and the lousy support relative to Dell is a prime reason why most clients I work with are dropping Lenovo for Dell.

Seconded. We are a major enterprise customer of Lenovo's and have been deeply disappointed with the level of service particularly vs. what we used to get with Dell (~6 years ago).

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#232

Post by vladimir-y »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #229
vladimir-y wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny that you wrote about Thinkpads, for example currently Thinkpad X1 Carbon (5 gen) is the best ultrabook on the market (including macbooks pro, yes nowadays macbooks pro are ultrabooks).

"best" is subjective - it doesn't have a "click anywhere" touchpad (it's still a mechanical hinge-based design), there's no 2x display option, battery life still doesn't come close, and so on...

> battery life still doesn't come close

Сlose to what?

FYI https://www.notebookcheck.net/Lenovo-ThinkPad-X1-Carbon-2017... Among other things pay attention to the weight - 1.144 kg and don't forget ThinkPad's still have the best keyboard ever.

A recent ultrabook selecting topic https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/66ad57/why_i_went...

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#233

Post by vladimir-y »

sacul wrote: post #153
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

MBP-quality trackpads and MBP-equivalent battery life. I can't understand why battery life isn't higher on the list of "must haves" for people who want a nice linux laptop.

There are many laptops on the market that have MBP-equivalent battery life. Trackpad is another matter, but for example Thinkpad's have a better keyboard.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#234

Post by ihaveajob »

Sir_Substance wrote: post #76
sniglom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I have no issues building a desktop, but if somebody asked me about what (modern) components to choose for no driver issues, I wouldn't know. Avoiding issues and getting support could certainly be worth something.

I agree, but this is more of a documentation issue than anything. I stopped bothering to look at the Ubuntu "supported hardware" page a few years ago because I could tell from the graphics card listed (and not listed) that it hadn't been updated since about 2011. I appreciate that hardware testing is complex and expensive, but I'd love to see an annual "high spec" and "low spec" Ubuntu reference build, with a price t…

Someone could do the legwork of selecting one such system each year, put it up somewhere and collect referral commissions. Much like voter guides help those interested to gain political clout just by doing their own research and publishing it.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#235

Post by cwyers »

cassidyjames wrote: post #227
cwyers wrote: post #218

> Today, we can’t design and manufacture our products. We outsource this work. It’s similar to how Tesla used a Lotus chassis for their first car. (Like their Roadster, the outside of our computers might look similar to others but it’s the inside that counts.) The strategy was cash efficient and allowed us to focus on developing high value areas of the company. However, knowing what we wanted to build but without the…

There were plenty of electric cars before the Model S. You might say that "electric cars" was a solved problem space. Around that time, Tesla was "selling rebadged European sports cars" in low quantities as a proof of concept. Of course there's no way they could beat GM and what their mountains of cash could put out. But Tesla steadily built out their Model S production, and rapidly became the poster child for the vi…

There were electric cars before the Model S. None of them were especially commercially viable. The Tesla has the potential to be something like the iPod or the iPhone, in terms of transforming a product category. Yes, there were MP3 players and Blackberries and PalmPilots, but they didn't deliver the same level of experience as what came after. I don't believe that there are similar opportunities in the PC desktop and laptop markets, which are contracting, commoditized markets.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#236

Post by andrepd »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

If portability is important to you I suggest checking the Xiaomi Air 13. It's as lightweight as an XPS 13, and almost as small (+0.5cm in length and width), with arguable better keyboard, touchpad, screen and general build quality for about 1/2 the price.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#237

Post by andrepd »

0x27081990 wrote: post #170
sacul wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MBP-quality trackpads and MBP-equivalent battery life. I can't understand why battery life isn't higher on the list of "must haves" for people who want a nice linux laptop.

This. I've always been a Linux and OpenBSD user, but I'm buying a MBP 13" next week mostly for portability and battery life, planning to run macOS instead of Linux just because of this.

As an example, the Xiaomi Air 13 is smaller and lighter than an MBP 13, with an equivalent trackpad, albeit slightly smaller battery (8h web browsing), for ~750$. Also aluminium unibody but easily serviceable (even has a second SSD slot).

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#238

Post by maerF0x0 »

sithadmin wrote: post #221
maerF0x0 wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me battery only needs to be about 2-3 hours. Otherwise I am moving from plug in to plug in (I leave chargers in many places like work, office, living room). Long enough to take a short flight without plugins.

I suspect that as more and more workplaces move to open-layout plans and have an increasingly mobile workforce, max unplugged work time is becoming more and more valuable as a feature.

At previous jobs we were just very generous with the chargers. Everyone having a single charger connector (MBP) is super valuable . This is good because then you dont bring a charger with you, because you know each meeting room has one or more chargers. Each seat in the office has a charger etc.

Companies sometimes say "Yeah but $90* X is too much" ... But it costs a lot to have people wiring/unwiring chargers all the time. 3 minutes at $1 a minute adds up to $90 really fast.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#239

Post by mschuster91 »

They're prototyping desktop PCs with acrylic? How does that even work, given that metal sheets are vastly thinner than plastic?

And for the laptops: with the rate of tech innovation I am afraid that when they release a laptop it will be one or two generations of CPU behind... and I also doubt they'll be able to produce something that comes into range with the 2015 MBP (not the awful Late 2016 model). Key points are fan loudness (I have yet to see a powerful AND silent x86 laptop other than the MBP), the trackpad (again, Apple wins with size and functionality by far) and the battery life - I can get 4-6h of Netflix on a single charge, hard to beat this given that Apple has literally billions of cash available to tweak OS X to their hardware for maximum power efficiency.

Re: System76 is moving product design and manufacturing in house

#240

Post by ajacksified »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #145

The posts comparing various laptops to the Dell XPS 13 and calling them similarly sized are missing a key point: the XPS 13's lack of bezels. It is a 13" screen, but due to the lack of bezels, it basically fits in an 11" chassis. I think that's an often overlooked detail and one of the pieces of "sexiness" that makes it very difficult to want to switch away from an XPS 13: it's so damn portable. System76 needs to com…

I used to covet my friend's Dell due to the lack of bezel (after making fun of his laptop choices for years.)

Then - we got on a video call. To compensate for the bezel, the webcam is on the BOTTOM of the monitor... which meant looking up his nose.

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