People consistently perceive louder music as better quality. That's why volume matching is critical in any audio equipment testing.

Starlite Mk IV is my favourite "netbook" successor. 0.9 kg, 11.6 1080p IPS display and Linux-first, with coreboot. Unfortunately it is a couple years old by now and you can feel that (Intel N5030 and 8GB of RAM). Sadly the company changed the form factor of Mk V to a detachable but if you can live with that it's also an option.

A lot of people picked up building mechanical keyboards as a hobby during COVID. It probably wouldn't have the same impact today.

Few new ICs are made available in DIP format. So you basically have to do SMT at some point.

Hi, did ya see the reply from star labs on your earlier issue?

I didn't, thanks for the heads-up!

I've learned to love numpad when I spent some time working in France. On AZERTY layouts you need to press SHIFT for each regular number.

StarLabs predates Framework by a couple years. Framework just does advertising to geeks better.

Framework actually ships its products and has tons of public reviews etc. way before StarLabs got a single laptop out.

Incorrect: Star Labs have been shipping laptops since 2018, before Framework was even a company.

It also helps that Framework actually releases their products when they say they will.

FWIW I have had a StarLite Mk IV for three years now and haven't run into a single issue with it (except maybe the speakers being quite poor).

Unfortunately the company stopped releasing firmware updates for it soon after they launched Mk V. I don't know if it can be still built from source for the older devices.

I'm also the happy owner of a StarLite Mk IV. The perfect travel laptop. Thin, light, fanless, excellent keyboard and touchpad, matt screen, rock solid chassis, good battery life. I'm dreading the day when it finally breaks as there's nothing comparable on the market today. I wish they could do another run.

Very different niche from the StarFighter but StarLabs make excellent machines.

Their Horizon model is probably closer to a Mk IV successor than Mk V. I would consider it as an upgrade path.

You are not wrong! That certainly looks like the intention.

Thanks for the positive feedback, really appreciated

Just to clarify on the firmware side: we haven’t stopped releasing updates for the Lite Mk IV. The challenge is that the SPI storage on the older-generation StarLites is quite small, so we’ve run into space constraints with some of the newer firmware features.

We’re currently working on optimising the available space, so there should be more updates coming for the Mk IV soon!

Hmm, thought they ship firmware for all recent models at once, though might be mistaken. Are there any fw bugs?

I suppose that depends on how recent is what you consider recent. I'd have hoped with the coreboot upstreaming effort they would keep official releases coming a bit longer.

You can see the last release for Starlite Mk IV is from 2024: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/search?value=starlite

These seem to be the SKUs they are building roms for: https://github.com/StarLabsLtd/firmware/tree/capsules/roms

You might still get the most out of it when the AMOC collapses.

I'm not aware that AMOC collapse is going to significantly alter New England's climate as it will Europe's.

Technically, you can turn off the sun with a nuclear winter. But in that case your main problem would be starvation anyway.

"But if we don't engineer addiction, China will beat us to it! It's a national interest!"

Ironically, China actually mandates time limits on its addictive social media: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-58625934