391–400 of 1001 posts
A relatable story - I have an Acer notebook from 2013. I bought it from Microsoft store in Valley Fair mall in San Jose, CA. Over the years I have upgraded its hard disk to ssd, RAM and more recently wifi card to wifi 6 (learnt not to buy before opening the notebook. I bought an m2 card while in 2013 half mini pci cards were all the rage)
What is really needed is a common chassis. A common carcass that allows me the put whatever I want inside it. If I want a pinebook[1], I want to be able to put pinebook guts inside it, if I want a mnt reform[2], I want to be able to put mnt reform guts inside it. Too bad eoma68[3] is still sci-fi. [1] https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ [2] https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p... [3] https://…
Last time I checked the only missing piece was a way to upgrade the display, which didn't age very well (IIRC original resolution was 1280x800 and no HiDPI)
I really want to buy hardware that allows easy repair. That goes for laptops and cellphone in particular. Laptops used to allow easy replacement of battery, memory and hardrives at the very least. All that sacrificed in the name of making the devices "thinner" and the design more attractive. What bits me most is that a lot of younger friends I have, have no such expectations. Talk to them about a cellphone the answer…
I think the other major factor you're overlooking here is battery life. High-end laptops these days are mostly battery (right up to the 100 Wh carry-on limit set by the FAA), with everything else designed to fit into the space left over.
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A Gigabit Ethernet Expansion Card is on our roadmap, though it is going to look a little goofy compared to the other cards, since it won't fit entirely in the current envelope.
I'll second the parent's request for an RJ45 Ethernet port. It can't possibly look any goofier than an Expresscard Ethernet adapter! One easy way to get it to fit would be to make the module thicker. To avoid the whole thing sitting at an angle in the existing envelope, you'd want to replace the little adhesive-secured feet with taller, screw-secured feet to give it clearance. I'm a controls engineer and am constantl…
Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic/hopeful take on it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-de... Edit to add quote from Ars article: Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're c…
"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" was not actually a direct quote from us, but it's nice that the folks at Ars think of our design that way!
Compaq vs Sun:
I was the IT Director for Decide.com in ~1998-ish and we had a bunch of compaq servers and a bunch of SUN servers...
At the time - SUN was *giving* servers to startups to adopt their HW.
I had to build out a ton of systems in various DCs and the SUN machines were not rack-mountable, but were like $50,000 a unit... and they had this *security* feature where-by the machine would not boot up if the external case was not properly put on...
BUT - I could rebuild a compaq server in the dark with my eyes closed. I had a compaq engineer who was delivering a replacement server and watched me rebuild that machine in no time.
The thing was that the engineering of the compaqs was so consistent and well done that it took single digit minutes to rebuild an entire 4U machine vs the behemoth SUNS that bitched when their cover wasn't properly sealed.
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Hello, glad you're here but I'd urge you to remember that while a minority at HN is highly knowledgeable and technical, hn is an hive-mind opinionated niche and hope that you'd make decisions that widen your reach among general populace so that your firm survives to make money and eventually more such laptops. (Also, hopefully your laptop will play with linux as well as Lenovo's at some point in future).
Pretty rude and then you ask them to focus on Perhaps there are more urgent tasks for "targeting the general populace to reach profitability".
That looks a lot like my first laptop, the Sharp Actius MM10. I'd get one of these on that basis alone. The Ars article says the body is aluminium, but if I recall correctly, the Actius was a mag alloy of some kind (which I'd prefer). Either way, I'm curious.
The body is 50% post consumer recycled aluminum. We did consider magnesium alloy, but availability of recycled material, infrastructure for recycling, and costs are all prohibitive compared to aluminum.
Add: * An option for a good quality trackpoint and 3 buttons * A possibility to order a fully assembled model without an OS And you will quickly get a significant share of buyers from the ThinkPad/Linux crowd.