Does anyone here use Starlabs computers? I’m thinking of buying one of their laptops and I’m interested in how well their products are supported in the long term. Specifically, firmware updates and spare parts & repairs.
Thanks
Does anyone here use Starlabs computers? I’m thinking of buying one of their laptops and I’m interested in how well their products are supported in the long term. Specifically, firmware updates and spare parts & repairs.
Thanks
Generally if you want long support windows you go for big boring brands’ simplest business class laptops. Or Apple.
Small companies an make a commitment to support, but they often have neither the money, customer base or manpower to follow through when the going gets tough.
I have found that popularity is a better predictor of spare part availability than any commitment from a company of any size. When they stop selling parts, there’s always the second hand market. When that dries up there’s always third party parts.
Firmware updates are one of the places that dell, Lenovo and Apple shine. Because of their customers expectations they tend to release new updates and drivers as functionality expectations or security conditions change.
Big brands have the money to provide longer support, but not the inclination lol.
This is sometimes true, but big brands have the market penetration to make hardware support very easy through second hand and third party parts and to be enticing fruit for third party support (see opencore and the dosdude patchers for apple stuff).
Although, Apple also just decides to make updates unavailable for your device once it’s a few years old, so there’s that.
Windows on a Dell XPS laptop was a good experience, firmware (and Windows) updates always came instantly. With Linux I have to keep an eye out for BIOS updates from time to time but Dell does not shy away from releasing BIOS updates for an over 7 years old laptop. Probably because their newer laptops use the same BIOS, but still!
The Apple support window is pretty predictable. You get about seven years from device release to no os updates.
It used to be that they didn’t talk about it and it was kind of a “he who has eyes, let him see” situation.
Of course, we’re talking hardware here so that’s sort of neither here nor there.
The enterprise dell experience is indeed very good all around. I’d even include hp in the pile if I had any experience with em. Their scopes used to be decent.
They have done 4 year windows before, and we still cannot know for sure how long for example the macbook m1 will be supported, still.
That said, 4-7 years for a laptop of that price seems short, I also don’t understand why they have to bring mobile OS support windows to laptops in the first place.
When it comes to update support, it seems odd to me to recommend Apple’s computers when they literally have a mobile OS’ support window to the OS.