1a) up to 60Hz
1b) IPS
2a) right, up to 2666, depending on availability we may also ship lower speeds but try to get 2666 as much as possible (RAM sourcing can be a problem sometimes which is why we need to keep this open)
2b) we can confirm two SO-DIMM slots, the laptop will also work with just one module installed but best performance is achieved with two identical SO-DIMMs, then dual channel RAM access becomes available
3a) Thunderbolt is not available, right. We will have two type-C connectors, one left and one right. The right one is a full function type-C including PD (power delivery, for charging) and DP alt mode (i.e. Display Port alt mode for video output
4a) yes, the QCNFA222 Atheros card uses the 5GHz ISM band for WiFi, though it does not support the higher bandwidth of 802.11ac
4b) the ath10k is a different hardware so you would at least have to replace the M.2 WiFi/BT card for that
4c) yes, see 4b), it is a standard M.2 2230 wireless card
5a) max. is 720p
6a) the speakers are connected to the main board with detachable connectors, so this is pretty straight forward, but you have to open the case for that. The case is kept close and steady by a number of screws, no glue.
7a) we are currently looking into giving two choices, 45Wh and 55Wh. The 55Wh option has 4 cells, the 45Wh 3 cells, i.e. the 4 cell battery is larger and will block the second M.2 2280 SSD slot. Some may choose a larger battery over two storage slots, some may prefer two storage slots. We will announce the options shortly.
7b) we are ATM still developing all the firmware stuff and due to the CPU shortage we described in a recent blog post: https://puri.sm/posts/librem-14-status-update-shipping-starts-in-december/ we have not yet been able to test this fully with the final CPU, the samples we have received from production so far had smaller CPUs of the same generation - good enough for firmware development but not for power consumption testing. We will update this as soon as we have real numbers. But I expect the battery life time to be pretty good.
Though let me add a word or two concerning battery run time. There are a number of major power consumers in a laptop:
- LC display backlight
- GPU driving the display output
- SSDs
- CPU itself
- RAM
Power consumption will vary a lot depending the use of the above units. Cranking up the display backlight to 100% will eat heavily into your power budget and we can not do much about this. If you constantly drive a changing picture to the display rendered from the GPU, this will cost additional energy. Accessing the SSDs for reading or writing will prevent them from clocking down the high speed interfaces, eating power. And then of course there is the CPU consuming really a lot if it is busy, along with the RAM - DDR4 RAM also consumes quite some energy.
What I want to stress here is that even trivial stuff like some animation of something on a web page in a browser window can significantly eat into your power budget reducing your battery run time by hours - seriously. So if you want to get the maximum battery run time it is also in the user’s hands to be careful when opening applications and what these actually do. This has become more and more important in recent years where CPU makers like Intel optimize power consumption mostly for the idle case and less for the busy case.
Cheers
nicole