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System76 Refreshes Ubuntu Linux Laptops With Intel Kaby Lake, NVIDIA GTX 10 Series, and 4K (betanews.com)
Brian Fagioli, writing for BetaNews: System76 is refreshing three of its laptops with some high-end parts. The Oryx Pro, Serval WS, and Bonobo WS are now all equipped with 7th generation Intel Kaby Lake processors. In addition, all three can be had with 4K displays and NVIDIA GTX 10 series graphics too. While the Oryx Pro already had the option of 4K and GTX 10, it is the 7th gen Intel chips that are new to it. In fact, all of the company's laptops now come with Kaby Lake standard. The computer seller throws some shade at Apple by saying, "The HiDPI displays that ship on the laptops have 3.1 million more pixels than Apple's 'Retina' displays, enabling sharper text, 4K video, and higher res gaming. Beyond that, the displays give video and photo professionals the ability to work more easily with higher resolution multimedia."
I just designed a Bonobo for shits and giggles with dual 1080 SLI, 16GB DDR4, two 2TB HDDs, and 867 Mbps WiFi, with a 3 year P&L Warranty leaving the rest of the blocks at the defaults. 4K is almost 1K too low. Total came to $4,892.
I'm a potential customer of one of these or new MBP. These seem like the only two options for a high end laptop these days. So I priced them out for a similar config.
I compared as close a config as I could between a optioned up mac and Oryx.
So that means 15", because the Oryx only offers the hires display on 15".
Apple only offer 16GB ram on 15" models, so that's what I set it to on Oryx
Oryx only offer up to 1TB on nvme, where Apple allow 2TB. But on the Oryx you can have second drive, so I added 1 TB SSD.
The graphics card options are not choices since you need the max Orix option for the high res display.
Apple: 15.4" retina display 2880x1800. Radeon 455 4GB. 2.8GHz CPU, 16GB Memory, 2TB Storage, $4299. :$3154
Oryx 16.6" hidipi display . Nvidia GTX1070 8GB. 2.9GHz CPU. 1TB NMVe+1TB SSD.
If you drop back to 1TB (which you might because Apple want $800 for the extra TB. It's Apple $3499, Oryx $2695.
Other things you might care about:
I'm personally ok with either macos or Linux. You may or may not care.
The mac looks ok. The Oryx looks butt ugly.
The Orix lets you option it up further than Apple - 64GB Ram for instance.
In the past, claims that Apple were more expensive tended to ignore the horrible screens or limited storage on the cheaper counterparts.
In this instance the Apple for a similar config is $800-$1000 more expensive.
So the Oryx is looking pretty good, except for the butt ugly case.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
In the past, System76 laptops were just rebranded Clevos, which are sold in the U.S. by Sager. This is true of most boutique laptop providers. Theoretically, System76 does extra work to insure Linux works seamlessly on these laptops, but I've had zero issues getting Linux to work on the Clevo that I purchased. Certainly, these laptops aren't perfect, but I do believe the Clevo has some of the best value for the dollar in their laptop line. My biggest complaints are that their mechanical components are only OK.
To give an example, a two minute check for their Gazelle:
https://system76.com/laptops/g...
Tells me that it's probably a rebrand from the Clevo W650 line:
http://www.clevo.com.tw/clevo_...
Clevo tends to refresh their lines pretty often, so it's sometimes hard to get the exact model, but not impossible. Searching by laptop dimensions is the fastest way to get into the ballpark.
I'm on my last Apple laptop it seems. A 2012 15" MacBook Pro with i7 2.3ghz quadcore. It's fabulous but it's been nothing but downhill for Apple hardware since. Every step they take is backwards. When this one dies I'm going to have to make Linux work for everything I do. I didn't mind paying too much for hardware that was useful. Now you pay too much for crap you didn't want while the stuff you liked is removed.