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Looks interesting, starts at $930 which is not too steep vs other products in the same space, price of upgrades is not stated which is a bit scary. Several Linux distros tested including Ubuntu, but Debian is not in the list. Appears to have a non-removable battery with nothing said about replacing it. And of course the CPU (whether you pick Intel or AMD) is full of blobs, management engine, etc. I didn't notice a mention of a built in microphone but it is a standard thing to find on laptops, so what I was hoping to see was a way to hard disconnect it.

Edit: aha, I see replacement parts including batteries are available if you select "parts" from the menu.

Ordering screen alert says "Production for the StarLite's has now finished, and are in the final stages of testing. Orders placed now are estimated to ship out in 2-3 weeks."

There are some unstated "if"s in that, so I would say until people actually receive units, it doesn't quite exist.

Anyway I will keep an eye out for this. I'm going to need another laptop at some point and this seems like a possibility, as does the Framework, etc.



> And of course the CPU (whether you pick Intel or AMD) is full of blobs, management engine, etc.

It's buried, but their website claims the ME is disabled by default: Go to "Configure", expand "Firmware", and click "Learn More":

> By default, the Intel ME is disabled on both coreboot and AMI.


> There are some unstated "if"s in that, so I would say until people actually receive units, it doesn't quite exist.

Kudos for being wary of marketing copy. I'd like to note that StarLabs has been shipping laptops of their own design for a few years now. They've been super transparent about manufacturing lead times and their order queue too. I don't own anything of theirs yet, but I've been keeping an eye on them long enough to say I appreciate their way of doing business.


If you click on configure, you can see the price of all upgrades.


> And of course the CPU (whether you pick Intel or AMD) is full of blobs, management engine, etc.

ARM is no better. You’d have to get RISC-V for that.


There are ARM boards which have fully open TF-A. Various NXP and Rockchip boards have no boot blobs.

Also POWER stuff is free from most, if not all, boot blobs. Maybe something for ram init... I forget.


POWER9 is 100% blob-free. Not even the ram init.


Last time I checked RISC-V boards were still chock full of blobs.


> And of course the CPU (whether you pick Intel or AMD) is full of blobs, management engine, etc.

And of course it can't do fast homomorphic encryption either, so that's a hard pass here.


Just wanted to confirm / point out this is sarcasm?


Considering no one can do that in reasonable time, yes it is obvious sarcasm.




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