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from the you-can-change-more-than-the-battery dept.
Olimex just announced the avaliability of their TERES I DIY laptop. The name is from king of ancient times that ruled in the area of Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Return of the netbook? At least once the products stop being out of stock.
This kit lets you assemble a laptop with quad core Allwinner A64 (64 bit ARM Cortex A53 cores), 1GB RAM, 11.6" inch screen 1366 x 768, 4GB eMMC, WiFi & BT, camera, 7000 mAh battery in just under a Kg. Avaliable in black or white, with US keyboard showing a nice Tux. In the assembly instructions you can see two USB ports, HDMI, 3.5 headphone jack, microSD slot, mic and side speakers. Multiple modular cards to update or fix as needed. No fans. Current price 225 EUR incl VAT.
AC opinion: the RAM is soldered and small for modern times, but it could become a plataform upon which to improve without having to throw away everything. Olimex already lists some ideas for future add ons, like FPGA based Logic Analyzer, in the instructions. All spare parts are listed already in shop, some with PCB files (Open Source Hardware, developed with KiCAD) for those wanting to do custom versions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jmorris on Saturday February 04 2017, @09:14PM
Just a lot of bad assumptions going into every product these days, this one suffers from several.
1. The assumption that everyone buying a laptop wishes they could buy Apple; thus they care most about whether it is as thin and light as an Apple. Thin and light are both worthy goals, but not at any cost in other functionality. The cheap ass, thin, no action, reduced layout keyboards required to hit the small and thin target for example, are a bad trade. And since they were shooting at expansion, as in FPGA, etc., both thin and light should have been pushed down the list of priorities a bit.
2. ARM == Cheap. The idea that anyone wanting an Arm laptop is looking for the cheapest piece of crap they can buy.
3. Open == Cheap. The idea anyone who cares about open or "Free" is also looking for the cheapest piece of crap they can buy. 1GB of ram, for a machine with a head? And that has to share memory with the GPU? 4GB of flash? Yea, I get that they are repurposing one of their little embedded boards (different PCB but basically the same bill of materials, so using existing stocks and leveraging their existing bulk purchasing) but design choices that work for a $50 dev board that will more likely than not will not have to run a full desktop (perhaps Kodi/MythTV) won't work for a general purpose computer that does need to run a full browser.
They did get a lot right. Unlike the Novena this looks like an actual laptop. For what it does the price isn't insane.
But I'd be a lot interested if it were a wee bit more usable. Forget making it under a Kilogram, add a few more grams a few more millimeters in all dimensions and use it put in a better keyboard, a big enough battery to assure 16+ hours of full on runtime and a screen that is a wee bit bigger, brighter, more pixels and IPS. Doesn't need to be a huge full HD+ screen, but at least 1600x900 and 13-14 inches. A laptop, not an over sized netbook like the current offering. Jack the hardware inside a bit. 16GB of internal flash, 2-4GB of ram, a 64bit CPU is a waste without threatening the 4G address limit, right?. Keep the CPU since it seems to have pretty good support in the mainline kernel and things are improving. Nothing to be done for the broken video so grumble and accept the blobs for now as long as they can ship a real Distro on it with a GL enabled desktop.
And if it is a bit bigger, and a bigger battery shouldn't take all of it, there should be room for a nice bay in it for expansion. Which would be sweet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 04 2017, @10:53PM
Listen up jack. This is the age of the internet. Everything is cloud. You don't need PC any more. Mmmkay?
(Score: 3, Touché) by Pino P on Sunday February 05 2017, @01:01AM
People still need PC until cellular ISPs stop charging several USD per GB of data transfer allowance.
(Score: 1) by Frost on Sunday February 05 2017, @03:24PM
wat
PC has how much data transfer allowance?
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Monday February 06 2017, @02:41PM
A PC or set thereof connected to wired home Internet has 1000 GB per month (source: Comcast). A PC connected to cellular or satellite Internet has closer to 10 GB/mo. But applications running on a PC have historically had better offline support than Web applications or applications for mobile phones, causing your use of the application to not use your Internet data transfer allowance at all.
(Score: 2) by lx on Sunday February 05 2017, @06:22AM
Your biggest assumption is that this would be someones main computer. As a secondary device or one dedicated to a single task this looks quite attractive.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday February 05 2017, @07:51AM
Even what I described would be nobody's primary computer. Anyone who isn't a geek these days will be using a phone or tablet and we geeks have need of more on a primary PC. ARM machines are slow, An Atom usually wipes the floor with one and we are talking about an Allwinner here, not a Tegra or top of the line Samsung SoC. What I would like is 'good enough' for a laptop.
And 1GB simply isn't enough, no modern browser runs well in that environment now and the direction of the bloat only goes one direction. Same for the puny 4G of internal flash. I have a VM with a Devuan Ascii cut down to the bone, just to see how low I could go, Only the MATE Desktop and enough basics to say it is a desktop and not a ChromeOS like terminal / endpoint. 1206 packages, 3.3GB. You would need to set aside at least 1GB for swap because of the puny ram situation so you are already over budget. No way. Mounting /home on a MicroSD card is bad enough, do you want to put /usr on a slow device?