Question for any Purism folks (@Kyle_Rankin?) who might know the answer:
Previous versions of the Librem Laptop have an issue where the audio jack can be broken relatively easily from sideways forces. Other users have mentioned this might be because of how the jack acts as a lever and can break the solder joint. Has the Librem 14 audio jack been redesigned to better handle sideways forces? I think how other laptops approach this issue is by making sideways forces be distributed directly to the laptop chassis.
Well, that’s probably a question which falls rather into my department
Yes, we are aware of the, though quite seldom, failures seen in the L15 headphone jacks. The most probably reason for breaking is if people apply force to the headphone jack - e.g. leaving their computer with still wearing the headphones, which actually also happened to me more than once The L15 is pretty heavy and the force applied to the jack is subsequently high ripping the jack off from its SMD solder pad. In fact the headphone jack itself is the same on the L13 and the L15 but so far we have only reported cases in L15, a bit weird.
Anyway, yes, we learned from it and will make sure the headphone jack in the L14 is not just SMD pads but also has through hole pins holding it stronger on/in the PCB.
@nicole.faerber only marginally related, but are wired headsets (3.5mm jack) supported by the Librem 14, when I plug one in (mic/cam switch enabled of course) I can go to settings and switch the audio OUTPUT device to headset, but I don’t see it for INPUT, so its like the L14 does not see that my headset has a mic, is that a known issue or maybe related to my headset?
Yeah This is a known issue. We still have some problems figuring out the correct codec settings. Codecs these days are scary beasts! And documentation is very hard to get to and even then its incomplete.
The hardware can do jack detect and also can accept mic input from the 3.5mm jack. But we have not yet fully figured out how to tell this to the codec chip. I’m sure we’ll figure it out, but it still needs some time I’m afraid.
This is a known issue. We still have some problems figuring out the correct codec settings. Codecs these days are scary beasts! And documentation is very hard to get to and even then its incomplete.