Some interesting choices, some incredibly disappointing.
A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I'd rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out)
Edit: and let's not hear about how closed A15 is blah blah. At the end of the day, something is closed. Did Freescale give you silicon masks? Guess it's not totally open after all.
Single SO-DIMM means max 8GB of RAM, but of course since you're running a 32-bit chip you'll be restricted past 4GB anyway.
100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen? Edit: Several people have pointed out that, thankfully, the 100Mbit port is a secondary port, while the main one is Gbit. This is actually pretty cool.
The case is actually kind of cool, but you can't really call it a laptop if your footprint is normal laptop size + a separate keyboard. Nobody's lap is that big. I think it could be pretty usable for work while on travel but you can't use it on an airplane tray table.
And then the pricing. Oh my the pricing. $700 for a case and a screen. Another $700 for an RC car battery and an SSD. Not even Apple marks up SSDs and batteries that much.
I would really love to get the laptop spec one for $800-1000--you know, the price of a great desktop PC plus a monitor. Sure, the ARM processor is going to be disappointingly sluggish and I'll be beating my head against the 4GB memory ceiling within an hour, but it looks really damn cool and the screen size is acceptable.
Kickstarter-type things are often done as "backers pay more for a unit, but they get it first and they're willing to pay because they believe in the product". However, the prices will go UP by 10% after this campaign is over! So the $2000 "laptop" will now cost $2200, despite the reduction in component cost due to time and scaling.
Edit: oh, and apparently the case, which I think is one of the cooler parts of this project, doesn't seem to be open? So I can't pay a fabricator $200 to make one, then slap a $400 A15 board in there. The totally open laptop, ladies and gentlemen!
I know Bunnie as an incredible hardware engineer with a lot of experience across the entire process of getting a product from design to manufacture. I'm sure the decisions were made for very good reason.
Freescale has extensive open source board support packages for several flavors of Linux and Android. With the exception of the TI's OMAP5, all of the A15 implementations I know of are under lock and NDA and even though Bunnie could source them, the documentation and software support packages would not be as easy and would require working closely with the manufacture to get them. I have no idea about OMAP5 as I haven't even seen one in production. Most mobile ARM processors AFAIK do not support gigabit ethernet yet, save a few Marvell SoCs (less for mobile and more for other embedded).
Smartphones designed with modern ARM processors require teams of 2 dozen engineers working their asses off for months to make a single revision, and this is when they're partners with the chip manufacturers (ala Google, Apple, or Samsung). Bunnie is working with a much smaller team and with different constraints.
Any board like this is going to be expensive to manufacture and assemble. Even if he were to do a run of 100 units at a time, the overhead of assembly and part purchases in such low quantities are likely to run $100+ a unit. Combine with the extra support costs of including an FPGA in there, and it's not unreasonable to charge so much for such a niche, low quantity product.
Edit: Also Freescale is on the low end of the high end ARM market and they know it. I wouldn't be surprise if Bunnie got some extra help from them during integration.
I wouldn't be surprise if Bunnie got some extra help from them during integration.
I've always been happy with the amount of support Freescale puts behind their processors. You don't realize how bad it is with some manufacturers until you're halfway through a project and things just fall apart.
And the i.MX6Q is a snappy little processor for the price.
What Sanddancer said, they are investing in their Tiva (aka Cortex M series) parts and de-emphasizing the OMAP line. (they may have said the OMAP5 is the last of that series) I don't think they felt they were offering a lot of value over the other Cortex A9 vendors.
All of the enclosure design files will be published on the Wiki shortly, so you'll be able to make your own. The desktop/laptop versions ship with a spare bezel, as well, so you have one to modify. You could happily make your own case or pay a fabricator to do so, but the case in the campaign is injection molded, so you'd likely pay a lot more to do so.
The focus of this laptop is really on versatile and hardware-hacking-power, not on raw performance. There are a number of flagship features that you won't find in a typical laptop, and gobs of expandability.
For example, there's an onboard FPGA, for when you're at the coffee shop and you need to MITM a high-speed / low-latency protocol.
As you've pointed out, it seems like a big price jump to go from the bare board to the desktop and from the desktop to the laptop, but you're actually getting a lot of components there, including: very flexible battery charge controller (runs ChibiOS on an ARM7), speakers, speaker mounts, machined SSD mounting rails, and cabling. The screen is a gorgeous IPS panel.
Also, regarding the airplane tray table: it's actually designed to be hung off the seat in front of you, so you've got the entire table free.
> A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I'd rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out)
There aren't really many choices. Samsung has A15 cores, but it's probably hard to get and there's _no_ documentation. The same for Nvidia Tegra. Not sure how easy it's to get OMAP5, and how expensive.
The i.MX6 SoC is probably the developer friendliest one, has very good documentation, and it has support for lots of stuff.
> 100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen?
Read carefully. One of those ports is 1Gbit (due to SoC limitations only 480Mbps though). The other one seems to be connected via USB 2.0. One could have put an Intel PCIe Gigabit Ethernet chip on the board, but the PCIe slot is probably better used for WiFi.
It's pricy, but I don't think they are able to produce them for fewer money, like HP/Samsung with their $400 Chromebooks.
This is not a commodity, value product. The cost is reasonable for the short production run. The FPGA is a unique feature, and there are plenty of other points you can extend from. If you're not building your own hardware and integrating it with the laptop then it is not for you and you would be wasting $2000.
(Also: "no wireless, less space than a nomad. lame.")
I understand it's supposed to be open for hardware hackers, but lets face it: who wants to hack a laptop? most hardware hackers are happy using a raspberry pi and a Ubuntu laptop. Why would you want to risk breaking a $1k open laptop to open your garage door when you can get a fully functional Linux computer for $35, or a cheap Android for $60?
I do, kinda sorta. I do 99% of my hacking on a Lenovo W500. I have some desktops machines but they serve more as media devices and for background processing of a few things.
Back when, I used a desktop for almost everything. The nice part was I got to build a machine that suited me. If something new and better came along (CPU, graphics card, monitor) I could upgrade my system piecemeal. I typically didn't have to give up the screen I like (unless I was swapping it for something better) or lose the keyboard I've become familiar with.
But now, using a laptop, I'm stuck. My Thinkpad is getting a bit dated. I'd like to upgrade, but buying a new laptop is mostly an all-or-noting affair. Want the higher rez on the new Thinkpad? Well, then you have to take the goofy giant trackpad and lose the dedicated trackpoint buttons. And there's a numpad you'll never use, too, making the main keyboard off-sided. Want a different keyboard layout? Well then you can't get the nicer rez or 16GB of RAM.
In an ideal world I'd be able to upgrade a laptop the way I've upgraded desktops: Better CPU available? Swap it in!. Nicer keyboard? Go use it.
Ideally the display, main CPU/motherboard, and keyboard would all be separate things. I long for the day when my "phone" is powerful and flexible enough that it can be used as a "laptop" by way of wireless keyboard and larger display.
The laptop under discussion isn't for me, but I love the idea of it.
A9 core rather than the virtualization-ready A15? (I'd rather have a 64-bit ARM but those are still a ways out)
Edit: and let's not hear about how closed A15 is blah blah. At the end of the day, something is closed. Did Freescale give you silicon masks? Guess it's not totally open after all.
Single SO-DIMM means max 8GB of RAM, but of course since you're running a 32-bit chip you'll be restricted past 4GB anyway.
100 Mbit Ethernet in the Year Of Our Lord Two Thousand Fourteen? Edit: Several people have pointed out that, thankfully, the 100Mbit port is a secondary port, while the main one is Gbit. This is actually pretty cool.
The case is actually kind of cool, but you can't really call it a laptop if your footprint is normal laptop size + a separate keyboard. Nobody's lap is that big. I think it could be pretty usable for work while on travel but you can't use it on an airplane tray table.
And then the pricing. Oh my the pricing. $700 for a case and a screen. Another $700 for an RC car battery and an SSD. Not even Apple marks up SSDs and batteries that much.
I would really love to get the laptop spec one for $800-1000--you know, the price of a great desktop PC plus a monitor. Sure, the ARM processor is going to be disappointingly sluggish and I'll be beating my head against the 4GB memory ceiling within an hour, but it looks really damn cool and the screen size is acceptable.
Kickstarter-type things are often done as "backers pay more for a unit, but they get it first and they're willing to pay because they believe in the product". However, the prices will go UP by 10% after this campaign is over! So the $2000 "laptop" will now cost $2200, despite the reduction in component cost due to time and scaling.
Edit: oh, and apparently the case, which I think is one of the cooler parts of this project, doesn't seem to be open? So I can't pay a fabricator $200 to make one, then slap a $400 A15 board in there. The totally open laptop, ladies and gentlemen!