Technology

The failure rates of these will be the determining factor. The components inside are cheap, all soldered on, and will not be repairable at all (waiting on the iFixIt score).

Its pretty much just their phone platform with a big screen and keyboard, so maybe it'll be okay. It's not built like a phone though, so I'm expecting some interesting testing outcomes. It's either going to be cheap enough that they have a new planned obsolescence hit on their hands, or people are going to be pissed at it sucking so hard.

Honestly, I’m just surprised this is the first time someone has dared to put a phone SOC in a laptop chassis.

It seemed kind of obvious to me that a laptop experience on phone hardware (but like… with a bigger screen, keyboard and mouse/trackpad) was sort of perfect for most use cases. I just assumed that it would come in the form of a phone docked in to a hollowed out laptop. The core issue was just that the software was awful with such a set up. Apple just kind of bypassed that by having their whole OS and everything on it switch over to ARM and just running a non-mobile OS on a phone SOC.

It seems like Google is kind of edging that way by merging chrome OS in to android. And windows was maybe flailing that direction with windows on arm… but… I think that was mostly just them trying to copy Apple without really thinking to hard about it.

The industry problem is mainly that RAM makers do not want to piss off Apple, who has already had long term contracts set prior to rampocalypse. But 8gb linux native is a better product for systems that need to be offered at 8gb for affordability.

I feel the specs are fine for the use case that the device is aimed at (media consumption, some office usage).. you know, the things that a huge chunk of the population use a device for.. if that doesn’t suit, there are more powerful options.

I don’t think it is productive arguing that an ultra cheap/low end device isn’t powerful enough, or specced high enough for activities/use cases that it wasn’t designed for.

8GB of unupgradable ram is unforgivable in today's software landscape. Even if the OS is memory efficient, running multiple software still takes ram. I get it's a $600 laptop, but that's still an inexcusably low amount of ram for anything but grandma and similar.

Given the ram apocalypse, I think you’ll see many entry level pcs with 8gb as well.

Apple is either just that good or just that lucky that they are shipping an 8gb machine right after ram prices went parabolic.

At any other time this would be a harder item to sell.