[asoneth]

Is it pound foolish, or just a rational business decision?

Let's say they ship 100k laptops per year. Let's say they could meaningfully improve battery life with a team of half-dozen excellent software engineers, which would cost on the order of a few million a year. For the sake of argument, let's say ~$3M/yr. That increases the price per laptop by ~$30 on average. That's a premium I'd pay for improved efficiency, but judging by the comments here and elsewhere, the premium they're already charging above the raw component prices seems to be at the upper end of what most people are willing to pay.

It's fiendishly difficult to become the next Apple, Tesla, Nintendo, or Valve with thick enough margins on your hardware (or services) to afford excellent software engineering teams, so it makes sense that so few hardware companies attempt it, and many who try eventually give up.

[fragmede]

It's a much more interesting question when framed with numbers! But let's say they ship 500k main boards (since it doesn't need to be a totally assembled laptop to benefit), and it only costs $300k, not $3 million (and a couple laptops) to the right eastern European software developer to perfectly tune some Linux config files. Then it's only $1.50 per laptop, and they could arguably just eat that cost.

Framework doesn't have to spend enough to be the next Apple (nor do they have the resources to be), they just need to spend enough to not be so desperately far behind Dell.

The explanation makes sense in isolation, it just seems like a local maxima if you zoom out.

[asoneth]

Sure, it totally depends on specifics! Only Framework knows how many mainboards they sell per year and can make an educated guess at how many of them end up running Linux.

Also, note that Framework already employs at least one person[1] working full time on Linux compatibility and support, so at least some of the low-hanging fruit may have already been picked. I'm sure they could spend an additional $300k, $3M, $30M, or more on improving Linux efficiency. I can't estimate what the benefit would be at each of those levels, nor do I know what the price impact would be, nor the sales impact. I don't know what they currently spend on Linux support except that it's at least one FTE.

We don't have enough information to answer or even meaningfully estimate most of these questions. I'm not saying they're making good decisions or bad decisions with respect to Linux support, I'm just saying neither of us have enough information to know.

[1] https://matthartley.com who was previously at System 76

[the_real_cher]

I think almost anyone on earth would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life on a modular, repairable, hardware up gradable, Linux box.

Apple at the moment has zero competitors for upscale laptops and this would make System76 the only other alternative for a quality hardware machine.

The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers.

It would be the default goto box for a modern alternative to Mac much like Lenovo used to be a decade ago before MBA enshittification set in there.

Battery life is the ONE thing preventing myself and many others from pulling the trigger on a System76 and I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro for an alternative to a macbook with equivalent battery life but linux.

Plus PopOs is open source so there could be cross pollination with the Linux team on battery life optimization which would reap massive benefits for the Linux ecosystem as a whole and push more people towards Linux.

Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed

[asoneth]

> The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers.

Whether it's worth it depends on how much it costs to improve efficiency, and how many more laptops they need to sell at a higher price to recoup those costs.

For background, the AMD Framework 13's 61Wh battery supposedly gets ~9 hours[1] (~6.8Wh per hour), the System 76 14" Lemur Pro's 73Wh battery claims up to 14h [2] (~5.2Wh per hour), the MacBook Pro M4s 72Wh battery claims up to 22h [3] (~3.3Wh per hour).

I am skeptical anyone can get close to Macbook levels of efficiency without soldering components, designing new chips, and spending close to their ~$31 billion in R&D. But let's say we shoot for 4Wh per hour to get us in the 15-18 hour range.

If you could achieve such an improvement with a couple software folks and you can amortize it over a million laptops that might add less than ten bucks per laptop. That'd be great!

Personally I am skeptical it's anywhere close to that easy, and I'm skeptical that these niche manufacturers are selling a million laptops a year. I think it's much more likely that meaningfully improving efficiency would require making each laptop significantly more expensive.

> would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life ... I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro

But would you pay an extra several hundred dollars for a Framework or System 76 laptop if other Linux laptops received the same efficiency benefits without needing to increase their costs to cover developer salaries? Apple can afford to spend billions improving efficiency because they can amortize that across many more laptops and because they can capture most of the benefit of their research. (And because for several decades they had loyal customers who paid an extra couple hundred bucks per laptop even when they didn't have better efficiency.)

> Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed

If we're dreaming, why stop there? If System 76 produced a $10 laptop that can be powered by nothing but sunshine they'd take over the world! But realistically, I think the best we're going to get in the foreseeable future is slow, incremental efficiency improvements that lag a generation or two behind Apple.

(A simpler way Framework or S76 could increase battery life to the ~15-19h range would be to bump up to a 99Wh battery which probably costs on the order of a hundred bucks for the larger battery and chassis, though it would also make the laptop thicker and heavier.)

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/ultrabooks-ultraportabl... (I don't see a manufacturer claimed range) [2] https://system76.com/laptops/lemp13/configure [3] https://support.apple.com/en-us/121553

[the_real_cher]

Well thats the real question isnt it?

Whats involved in improving the power consumption?

Im not an OS engineer so I have no idea, I was simply going by another commenters estimate which was a few OS developers.

And judging by the amount of times you said you were skeptical instead of giving any sort of meaningful information... you clearly arent an OS engineer either.

And idealist and a skeptic walk into a bar. The bartender says two shots of disappointment coming up.

[asoneth]

> you clearly arent an OS engineer either.

Correct, though I do regularly deal with the same class of assumption, where folks suggest that if I just hired a couple people to work on X, Y, or Z that would be well worth the money. The statement seems to come from a place of hope, a belief that there is a simple solution just waiting for someone to point it out, as opposed to something that is very hard or simply impractical.

But it's just not realistic to believe that the only thing preventing a niche laptop manufacturer from matching the battery efficiency of a vertically-integrated product backed by $30+ billion a year in R&D is a couple OS developers. Such a belief can also be demoralizing if every hard-won incremental improvement to Linux power efficiency is judged against such unrealistic expectations.

(I believe that someday we will have lightweight Linux laptops with 22+ hour batteries, but I also believe that by that point Apple will have shifted the goalposts again and people will continue to be dissatisfied.)