All the news on Purism is all centered on the Librem 5 phone. There’s been no more updates about cleaning out the Intel ME or FSP or anything else regarding the laptop line in a long time.
It gives the impression that you’ve diverted literally all resources to the Librem 5. I’d like to hear some news about the laptops and maybe potential info about a Librem 15v4 or something.
I know I said wait for IceLake before, but it looks like Intel’s pushed that way down the chain. Now we’re gonna get Whiskey Lake, Cooper Lake, and Cascade Lake before then and it looks like Ice Lake is a 2020 release. So… no sense in counting on that anymore. I just hope that one of these new releases has hardware-level fixes for Meltdown/Spectre.
I also hope you can eventually just get Intel to agree to put out a ME-less design eventually.
There was some chatter on the Matrix community/general room a few weeks ago that suggested the laptop line hasn’t been forgotten, but that they aren’t quite ready to publicly announce things. Still a few things left to iron out I imagine.
as i’ve just been informed. all librem devices (laptops and phones) will use removable batteries just NOT hot-swapable.
you first have to unscrew the chasis and then unscrew the battery inside before you can take it out. not exactly straight forward. this is supposedly to mantain a slim profile.
whatever my interest in this hardware trend is pure 0. give us easy to mantain and replace, functional, modular, honest devices. take inspiration from great hardware designs like Blackberry before 2013 and implement FLOSS on top of it.
Of course, the phone is the flagship, but they are well aware that the laptops keep their business running.
My educated guesstimation (based on publiclyavailablesources) is that they currently ship about 500 laptops (or 1000 with optimistic growth) and take 100 phonepreorders per month.
This can tell you a lot. For example, they surely know where the money is coming from and they will not neglect the laptops. It can also tell you that Intel is probably just mildly impressed by their order quantities. 5000 a month would surely be more impressive, but even that might be insufficient to change their mind. You need a long breath to bring such changes about.
My expectation is that Purism will, at some point, add a laptop line that is either ARM-based (maybe i.MX8? Could re-use the existing software stack of Librem 5) or even going fully libre with a RISC-V CPU design. The result might of course be more like a netbook, not a bleeding-edge laptop. But liberated
While I agree that it would be nice to know more closely what they are currently fiddling with, I don’t see any evidence that they are not actively working on improving the laptop line. On the team page you can see who’s working on what.
A lot has been announced: Heads (Demo), Nitrokey/Purekey, and possibly a a Nextcloud NAS. And of course the reverse-engineering of the FSP continues, but what should they announce if it is not done yet and Intel forbids progress reports with internal details? (Find the original with the wayback machine )
All of theses things take time, and PureOS is also continuously improved. There, again, I’d also like to see some textual updates instead of just “391 packages can be updated”.
Actually, one thing where I would love to get an update is libreboot on librem5v2. It is 99% done, the only missing element is the firmware blob that we could be extracted out of a librem13 (but if you don’t have thi extra librem13, you don’t have the missing blob).
i wonder for how long this will hold true ? we live in the day of specialized Ai and 10 nm snapdragons. have you seen the new 10 inch surface from M$ ? laptops and tablets will be soon a thing of the past.
things are moving so fast it’s not even possible to keep up anymore. my IO is so limited … sigh
This will stay true until a laptop is redundant. Right now you cannot replace your computer with a smartphone. By this I mean, if you do work, and not just consume data, and while you can do a lot on your phone now, you can’t do it all. You need a laptop/desktop still.
The point here is that computers will always be needed. The format is the only thing that changes.
So whether it’s a laptop, smartphone, whatever, computing is their main market.
I personally think that laptops still have quite a long life ahead of them. Turns out using a phone as your primary computing device is not as simple as just having the hardware capable of it .It is the software that is the real difficulty. Software takes much longer than hardware to mature and perform.
BTW, the post above this (emmawatsun) is SPAM and the link is probably not legit. I’ve flagged it for deletion.
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