[0xffffabcd]

Am I the only who thinks that it's way too expensive for what it offers? I mean a U i7 processor, 4GB of ram and a 500GB HDD for $1800+. It sounds insane to me (I'm still a college student so my perspective might be skewed a bit)

EDIT: Can anyone explain how they manage to max the memory to 32GB when the intel ark page[1] for that processor says that the maximum it supports is 16GB?

[1]: http://ark.intel.com/products/84993/Intel-Core-i7-5557U-Proc...

[joesmo]

I totally agree. I like all the specs except for the price. Cut in in half and maybe you might have something decent. Otherwise, I can just turn off the wifi, tape a sticky note to my camera, and install Linux myself, thank you.

[walterbell]

Hopefully mainstream manufacturers will adopt some specs, e.g. Thinkpad Retro, http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/retro-thinkpad-survey-2-displ...

[MichaelGG]

Interesting to see how people overwhelmingly chose 7-row and other traditional ThinkPad designs. Despite having implemented their new design changes for a few generations, few people are really loving their changes.

Somewhere on their blog, they noted that the new layouts "didn't take too long to get used to". In other words, they were changing things purely to satisfy some poor design sense, not to benefit customers.

I spent over 2 grand on the X201, yet a new X250 is about $1000 with a reasonable config. I wonder if they're leaving money on the table by not offering better options, or if people like me are just a strange anomaly that's worth ignoring.

[walterbell]

It sounds like the Retro is aiming squarely at that classic, premium segment who know what they want.

[ploxiln]

Re: 32GB memory:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/purism/librem-15/updates/1575

> After our last update regarding Intel’s physical 16GB memory maximum for 5th Generation CPUs, we heard from a backer that Intelligent Memory can run 32GB even though the specification states 16GB! This was corroborated by both PCWorld (...) and our direct contact at Intelligent Memory this morning.

[greglindahl]

Of course it's expensive! Laptops are high volume, low margin products that carry a lot of inventory risk (such as component price drops.)

Doing anything extra, in low volume, will raise the price a lot.

[JoshTriplett]

Thin and light laptops have always been more expensive than boat-anchor laptops. On top of that, you always pay a premium for a device that's higher-end than consumer class. And you're paying a premium for a lower-volume device.

[tajen]

> way too expensive for what it offers

It mainly offers privacy, I'd assume. Besides, target customers may be commercial intelligence agencies, those who can conduct "detective" work for commercial companies. It sometimes implies discrediting a competitor's work, enquiring about their products, etc. It's plain gray-zone job, but there are thousands of employees in this domain.

[pjc50]

$800 of parts, $1000 of non-recurring-expenditure in developing the PCB and casework.

[rozap]

I agree. Currently writing this from an i5, 4gb ram, SSD asus zenbook from 2 years ago, which I bought for $750. The form factor and hardware are almost identical to the 13" laptop here. :\

[jsnell]

Those specs have probably been written assuming max. 2 memory slots, max. 8GB in each, rather than stating some kind of absolute engineering limit in the CPU itself. 16GB SO-DIMMs are very recent and only available from a single vendor, but I have seen reports of them working at least on Broadwell CPUs with just a single memory slot.