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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."
You can't "throw shade" at Apple over hardware capabilities in any meaningful way unless you can run OS X / macOS and its applications. Otherwise, you're in the position of a cruise ship boasting that it has roll stabilization in order to try and "shade" a luxury hotel. Pomegranates and kumquats. Irrelevant.
And I say that as a very unhappy Apple hardware user.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
One thing that I can't stand about these machines is that they have a num pad, which pushes the main keyboard and the touchpad way to the left of the device. This means you have to sit either with your arms pointing to the left, or your head pointing to the right.
The number of users who would benefit from a num pad are few and far between, and they could just use a USB num pad.
Strangely, there are only a few laptop manufacturers that align the center of the screen with the center of the keyboard and touchpad. I hope System 76 fixes this one day, because I'd love to replace my MacBook with a Linux laptop.
System 76 is a pretty good value for the machine you get. Lets go over your choices to build a ~$5000 machine.
> dual 1080 SLI
Yes, that would be expensive. It's SLI on a friggin laptop. The "low end" option is a GTX 1070, which totally blows away what you can get on, say, an Apple. The dual 1080 SLI option adds 1500 bucks to the price. This is what you would expect, and also, not something you would buy unless you were actually sure you wanted it. This is a top end graphics card, and you're talking TWO of them in a laptop. This alone is 30% of the price.
> two 2TB HDDs
Lets be clear here: included in the price is an 256 GB SSD. You are adding two additional 2.5" HDDs to this.
The 5 thousand dollar machine you built has a top of the line (which commands a VAST premium) Nvidia graphics card, then it has A SECOND ONE OF THOSE. It has THREE storage media- an SSD, and two HDDs. That sounds about right.
Note that in raw power, this machine totally blows away anything offered by Apple, which can't progress beyond a middle of the line Radeon, and I'm pretty damned sure it can't do three media. Heck, I think the option on that is just a big SSD (which the Bonobo also offers in the configurator). I can't even get close to these specs on Alienware, where I couldn't find the option to get TWO friggin GTX 1080s, nor THREE media in the rig.
My view: If you need the hardware you selected, this is a good deal for it, and you'd be hard pressed to find it at most mainstream shops, because the options chosen are wildly excessive for most users. The main name brands don't even offer this sort of stuff, it's super packed with metal.
Maybe Alienware? System76 is kinda special in the Linux world, right? It is sorta comparable to Apple, broadly.