this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Pricey for non x86_64 laptop.
The cheapest option is € 1,200.00.
You can choose between A311D and RK3588 SoC modules.
I'm not able to watch the video at the moment: is it ARM instead?
I think arm architecture are only going to become more prevalent with the success of the M line macs
https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform
Yes.
I dunno. They have a long battery life (though somebody that is just having a large battery in the laptop). But...
This comes running Debian. If you're just running open-source software, like stuff out of a Linux distro, then you can use Debian's ARM build of everything. But if you're gonna run Steam on it, then you're gonna be running x86 code, and that emulation is gonna cut into battery lifetime.
EDIT: Cool, the trackpad is modular, and they even have a trackball option with mechanical buttons. Haven't seen those in ages.
EDIT2: Oh, that's also hot -- they just use standard 18650 batteries. You can just pick up more off Amazon or whatever and replace 'em.
Not huge battery capacity in total, but they say that the hardware is open-source. I wonder if there's some mod to stick more cells in somehow and clue the battery controller into the fact?
EDIT3: Oh, that's cool as hell. The firmware has its own little tiny display right above the keyboard independent of the main display. I'm kind of surprised that no other laptop manufacturer I've seen has thought of doing that.
EDIT4: Hah, awesome. It defaults to having swapcaps (caps lock and control swapped). I have to go through and do this on every computer that I buy.
EDIT5: The reviewer says that he likes their keyboard more than anything else he's used on a laptop -- they made the thing thick, so they've got space for it. goes looking Apparently they not only tell you the mechanical keyswitch type on the store page (Kailh Choc) but give you a choice of either of keyswitches (Brown or White). I'm not familiar with Kailh. Looking at Kailh's store, it looks like the whites are clicky, and the browns quieter -- looks like they have color conventions that follow Cherry's conventions.
EDIT6: Yeah, the reviewer liked mechanical buttons, but not the trackball. I wish they could put a Synaptics trackpad on there, but it sounds like they're only using open hardware, which might constrain them.
EDIT6: Hah, the reviewer swapped in his own Pi compute module, so I guess it's compatible with the Pis. listens further Yeah, the reviewer says that it should be possible to stick in a future Raspberry Pi 5 compute module.
Please remove your suggestion for buying 18650s on Amazon. They are full of counterfeit cells, or rewrapped cells with dangerously inflated specs.
Get lithium cells from a reputable vendor that tests the batches they receive. Illumn and IMR Batteries are two such vendors.
Thanks for the clarification on reputable vendors! I've always wondered where the right place to buy lithium was.
Kalih Choc are great. I like that plan.
I mean, there are plenty of devices with them out there. !flashlight@lemmy.world seems to only really be interested in lithium-battery-driven flashlights. I don't think that an 18650 is intrinsically unsafe.
My understanding is that you can get (slightly cheaper) unregulated cells, but that normally, for end users, one uses regulated cells. The electronics on each cell aren't smart enough to do things like measure and report charged capacity, but they should be adequate to avoid fires if the battery is shorted.
And there's no standard for a "smarter" battery pack that would do things like report more information.
Yeah, that's true -- some games are going to be GPU-constrained, and the instruction set isn't gonna be a factor there.
A significant chunk of what I'm getting at, though, is battery life. Like, my understanding is that Apple's got somewhat-better compute-per-watt-hour ratings on their ARM laptops than x86 laptops do. But having that is contingent on one running native ARM software, not running emulated x86 software. Apple can say "we're just gonna break compatibility", and put down enormous pressure on app vendors to do so because they own the whole ecosystem. They have done multiple instruction set switches across architectures (680x0 to PowerPC to x86 to ARM) and that ability to force switches is something that they clearly feel is important to leverage.
For people who are only gonna run open-source Linux software -- and this thing is shipping with Debian, which has a native ARM distribution -- then it is possible that you can do this, because for open-source software, you can recompile against a new target architecture.
But Windows can't do this, because there's a huge amount of binary software that will never be retargeted for ARM. You're going to be burning up your battery life in translation overhead. And you can't do it with Linux if you want to run binary-only software -- often Windows software -- which is what Steam distributes. That library of software is just never gonna be translated; some of it probably doesn't even have the source around anywhere. I don't even know if Steam in 2024 has a native way to distribute ARM binaries (though I assume that one could have the game handle the target and running appropriate code).
I don't think regulated 18650 cells is a problem, but most users don't know the difference. With every other laptop, you can pop out a battery and replace it with a model with the same part number, but with 18650 cells that's a lot harder to accomplish. I'd rather see them "package" a bunch of 18650 cells together with its own part number and lets the people who know how batteries work figure out how to add their own cells (anyone with background knowledge will recognise the pack configuration the moment they take out the screws!)
I don't know about M4, but with the M3 Apple's compute-per-watt was already behind some AMD and Intel chips (if you buy hardware from the same business segment, no budget i3 is beating a Macbook any time soon). The problem with AMD and Intel is that they deliver better performance, at the cost of a higher minimum power draw. Apple's chips can go down to something ridiculous like 1W power consumption, while the competition is at a multiple of that unless you put the chips to sleep. When it comes to amd64 software, their chips are fast enough for most use cases, but they're nowhere close to native.
A lot of Windows programs run on .NET, which is architecture independent, especially if they target UWP (which is more common than you might realise). The remaining applications will need porting to get decent performance, but the most important applications (browsers and Office) already work.
Re: Windows: Windows on ARM already has a binary translator, developed in part by Qualcom, that comes pretty close to Apple's Rosetta2 for many types of software. It's not as complete as qemu-static is, though it is faster for the software it does support. The worst part of the translation layer is that the ARM chips made by Apple's competitors just aren't very fast in comparison.
I believe Steam can distribute different binaries (there were games with x86 and amd64 binaries for a while!), but until ARM laptops with decent GPUs start coming along, I don't expect any game devs to use features like that. Still, apparently current ARM devices can hit 50-60fps with current gen devices already, and the upcoming Snapdragon chips are supposed to compete with Apple's CPU, so who knows!
Microsoft already tried (and failed) to make Windows on ARM a thing before with the Surface RT. I hope they don't go all Windows 8 over their current attempt...
Oh, that's interesting, thanks. I may be a year or two out-of-date. I believe I was looking at M2 hardware.
Is is arm, and they charge a leg for it
RK suggests RockChip, which is likely to be ARM. But I haven't watched the video yet.