[Note: This thread is intended to be a discussion thread for the topics in this post. Please keep your replies on topic. Some examples of off-topic replies include:
“When is my Librem 14 order shipping?” (We contact people to arrange shipping and update shipping addresses over email, not in a forum thread.)
“I have a support request.” (These are better handled with the Purism support team.)
“I want to air a personal grievance.” (You can do that in your own topic.)
]
We are excited that the Librem 14 is shipping, and we are so pleased with the production model that we wanted to share some brand new pictures of it inside and out:
Purism Librem 14 Motherboard Logo
Read the rest of the post, full of brand new pictures here:
I am sorry @Kyle_Rankin that’s wasn’t mine intention.
i am asking question, because those elements on board doesn’t look right.
probably you mixed pictures and by accident presenting 2 pictures of one of engineering samples, or experimental boards.
in shipping news for example on pictures i spotted additional wires from battery…
so maybe you mixed pictures , or this board isn’t from production??
or actually it’s a production board, then, or some hot fixes were added in factory… (those things happening - look for number of fixes Amiga motherboard had…).
Actually those details are very visible on picture 3 and 5.
Yes this was a production laptop and yes, sometimes individual boards get hot fixes at the factory if a particular board didn’t pass a QA test during production.
When I was part of the Librem 5 devkit assembly that was something we would run into on some boards–they wouldn’t pass the QA test but after more thorough testing and a hot fix they were fine. This was particularly true for the earlier devkit boards we ran before we fine-tuned things based on QA testing of the initial production batches.
Very good looking laptop! Thank you for sharing the pictures!
Are the kill switch’s circuitry integrated into the mainboard’s PCB now? Or are there still wires running to power points of the components needing to be shunted? I didn’t see anything like that, but know that the switches are on the other side of the mainboard. Just curious.
ok, however you need to do not underestimate your clients.
there are here a lot of paranoiacs… and those individuals like look in detail.
so when i see post “here are pictures of our latest and greatest laptop” and see something like that…
i am assuming the worse. i mean i will discover something like that in mine unit, and will not able to sleep.
I don’t know. Someone else more familiar with the motherboard design would have to jump in. Perhaps there are pictures of the other side of the board on Nicole’s “Librem 14 Rave” post that might have clues?
Thanks I forgot that she showed a picture of the top of the mainboard in that post. I just looked and it does indeed look like the switches are now integrated into the PCB.
I suspect that this is a much improved way to implement the kill switches, and if the switches were still in the hinge itself, would have meant for less things cramping the display cable, which would have been a huge plus.
Very nice to see some real serious improvements in this iteration of the Librem laptops.
Yes this was a production laptop and yes, sometimes individual boards get hot fixes at the factory if a particular board didn’t pass a QA test during production.
Well that “hotfix” is looking really bad, and looks like done by amateur with no soldering skills.
Lets hope in mass production you will not have many of “hotfixed” boards…
Thanks for the higher resolution photos of the motherboard.
I’m surprised that a double fan was needed, but I’m guessing that 6 CPU cores demands that kind of cooling. From the design, it looks like the heat spreader, heat pipes and two cooling fans are one unit, and the fans can’t be replaced individually. I really hope that Purism sells replacement parts for at least the cooling unit, because I have had two laptops whose fans died in the past, so I know that they can fail.
I would be interested in hearing people’s impressions of the fan noise. Is the fan speed controllable by software?
Can the screen of the L14 be opened 180 degress, so it lies flat on a table?
I’m surprised that stacked RAM slots weren’t used, but I guess that is all part of the effort to make it as thin as possible. I hope that the screws on the bottom have some sort of lock-tight mechanism or are the type that can’t be wholly removed, since that was a problem with the previous design.
i can see that copper heat pipes are used to transfer the heat from the CPU+iGPU die-combo. i would have liked to see copper fins as well but perhaps at that size it doesn’t matter much.
i hope those lil’ fans have a good few years of life-span in them or at least covered by the 3 year warranty. it just sucks to have an essential hardware component fail just outside of the warranty period. i suggest people grab that 3 year warranty from Purism just for safe measure …
that trackpad/touchpad is huge.
the R-Shift key is so small. does it behave differently out-of-the-box compared to the L-Shift ?
screen looks good. but there is that nasty glare from the ambient … btw how was the ambient lighting condition when these pictures were taken ?
That looks really bad.
Now i am considering cancelling my order…
is it 14 you recieved??
@Kyle_Rankin taking apart quality of those solder work, those pictures prove that “final” design of the board is worse than bad…
and actual engineer who did this “patch” really didn’t know what he is doing. such solder is asking for trouble…
such soldering of additional (unplanned) elements , should be done on THT parts instead of SMD, they have small wires that give you option to compose them into electronics in a more aesthetic way, or even misplace them by cable work…
