At the moment I have quite high performing XPS 13 (13 inch), and a low-spec Asus VivoBook (11.6 inch, 2GB mem, Intel Atom). Dell XPS 13 screen is superior as the screen area is really big comparing laptop size, has very tiny edges. Still I find XPS 13 too big and too heavy. Its fast CPU and 4K screen eats battery too fast.
I am data scientist and I should prefer a high perfoming workstation, but light weight, small size and
long battery life of low-spec Asus are giving me so much comfort that I actually prefer the comfort at the cost of doing more computations on a remote server.
Of course having few tabs in a web browser and developer’s IDE at the same time I am hitting resources limits very fast. Lightweight linux distro is very helpful here.
I am looking for a portable machine that could replace my 11 inch Asus.
CPU doesn’t need to be fast, then it could also be fanless, but 4+ cores would be useful. I need as much memory as possible, 8GB is absolute minimum (ideally 64GB). And durability, so it won’t break after a year of usage. Could be even smaller than 11 inch but keyboard has to be comfortable enought for fast typing, which might be difficult to achieve on even smaller size.
Librem 11 seems to be pretty well fitting here, but it dissapeared.
Any plans to re-activate that model? there seems to be a gap on the market for this kind of devices.
Don’t hold your breath. Marketers will tell you the desktop and laptop and tablets are dead and that young people only want phones phones phones. So Purism has a phone.
The Librem phone is currently in the process of sinking/saving Purism. Probably need to see the results of this drama before thinking about new laptop development. It is my impression that the 11 is early in development and so would need a few bags of money to be released. Those bags are spent on the phone phone phone.
If the phone is a big success, I am hoping for the 11 and a Purism NAS. If the phone is not a success, then Purism is gone with the wind.
It seems a little bit too small for fast typing (having tried so I am not sure)
People complain for their bios, and even offer bounties for missing features/bug fixes - librem solves issues like this by having open source bios, so anyone can easily put required improvements.
It seems to be not very power efficient, probably because of modern CPU. I prefer atom cpu and 10h rather than 3h on modern cpu.
The phone is ramping up in production. The third batch (named Chestnut) was just released. The first few batches are generally considered test/development batches. There are known hardware issues that are being fixed. The next batch (Dogwood) will be entering production and shipping soon, and it should have all the hardware nailed down. But it is even still not the final, mass production batch (Evergreen), which will be shipping around ~July.
Purism has stated that they want to bring the tablet back once the phone is fully launched and stable. I’d expect their attention might return to the tablet in a year - January, 2021 or so.
but why tablet? my question was about small 11 inch laptop, not a tablet. For me tablet is a toy, not a workstation. My current 11 inch asus notebook is nice data science workstation for me.
Purism never had plans for an 11 inch laptop - it was always a tablet.
And are there any 11 inch laptops on the market with 64GB RAM? Most 15-inch laptops don’t even offer that. I don’t think there is any way Purism has the means of offering what you want. The economics just don’t support it.
There is now Librem 13 in the offer of purism.
I wish they would go even smaller and make 11 inch version of it, having passive cooling (and slower cpu of course). I would be the first to buy it.
If you want a true ultra portable then you should check out the one mix 1 Netbook series. They run Ubuntu out of the box. Not sure about coreboot, as that isn’t a requirement for me. Full pen and touch support and a 360 degree hinge.
I’ll give it a whirl, but I will say that on Windows, doing normal work (IDE, notes, browser, email, chat, etc.) I get 6+ hours.
Just browser doesn’t mean much these days. If you have a browser with 1 tab or with 20 the cpu load is quite different. 1 browser windows with 10 tabs can be more cpu intensive than 10 different programs being open.
But I can try it, and see what Windows reports.
I don’t really worry about battery life, as the usb c pd means I can just plug into the little portable battery I have for extra juice. It’s like having a battery extender.
The touchpad, is more akin to a trackpoint from a thinkpad. It is optical though. So it is more like a micro trackpad. It works well enough, and with touch and pen input doesn’t feel like a limiting factor. It is accurate.
