Ordered a 1U from them. Going on a month now with no delivery date yet and no indications there would be a problem until after we ordered. Not a big deal for us, we can wait and ordered it because it was cheap, but consider yourselves warned.
I had a pretty crappy experience buying from them in 2007. At that time I think they were just getting started, so I chalked it up to "beginner's mistake", but it seems like these problems persist.
My data-point, as best I can recall:
- ordered a serval laptop
- long delays with minimal communication
- laptop arrived and motherboard died within a few days
After sending it back for repairs and haggling over the warrantee (DHL damaged the case, so they didn't want to pay for the motherboard initially), I got the thing replaced and it ran smoothly for many years.
EDIT: to be clear, I was ultimately happy with the device itself -- it finally died in 2013. It's rather the shipping/service/etc that was disappointing, though I've seen much worse.
I also ordered from them in 2007, but I had a good experience. I was ordering a server (tower form factor), which would be easier than a laptop. IIRC, they were out of the particular CPU I had ordered, so they replaced it with a better one (one of the first dual-core chips) for the same price. That system ran very well, in a musty basement, for a number of years. I recently used the case—an Intel server model—to house a gaming rig.
I got Lemur 14" laptop a while back and absolutely hated the build quality. The keyboard is terrible and the screen has the worst viewing angles of any laptop I've ever owned. I got tired of it after 4 or 5 months and converted it to a home server and it's been super reliable in that mode since 2014. AND it also has the benefit of staying online during power outages.
I got a Clevo laptop a few years back from another company that works similarly. The spec was pretty good for the price, but I'll second the crappy build quality - they're very plasticy, and the heatsinks kept clogging up with dust destroying any cooling.
I'm surprised to see all the negative comments about the build quality and support. I got a Gazelle laptop over a year ago and I've been happy with it so far. For the price, the hardware was a bit better than Dell and others.
My computer shipped with a screw loose inside the case which shorted the motherboard a few times. It didn't cause any permanent damage but it was a little disappointing. I chalked it up to a freak shipping accident knocking something loose but idk. The case design and actual computer specs have been great though.
I'd still recommend their laptops if you need a good computer on a budget :)
"I'm surprised to see all the negative comments about the build quality and support." and
"My computer shipped with a screw loose inside the case which shorted the motherboard a few times."
Same type of experience. I had a Lemur 14" and a Sable Complete. The Lemur just stopped posting one day after less than two years of use. The Sable's screen turned off randomly and smoke came out of the USB ports.
After opening it I saw that various components had melted. That too, was less than two year. They were both babied and well cared for.
Same with my Gazelle which I purchased seven months ago. I definitely would not get another. The build quality of the case is horrible. The keyboard is horrible. The touchpad is horrible. The display is ok and that's about the best thing that can be said for the machine.
Similar experience. My electronics generally get passed on in similar condition to when I bought them. The System76 Galago, I had was completely broken when I finally replaced it. Battery would not accept a charge, had to replace the keyboard, the replacement board was horrible, the door on the cat5 jack broke off, screen had weird discoloration on the edges, finish wore off various places, etc. Our company bought a few and no one is considering purchasing again.
The only advantage it has over the deluge of low end laptop, is that it will with some version of Ubuntu. If you generally don't find installing Linux difficult, then it's not really any advantage.
I'm reasonably happy with Lenovo t560 I replaced it with.
I had the same issue with the Galago keyboard. They sent me a replacement board which was far, far worse than the original--it flexed dramatically with every key press. Replaced mine with a 2013 Macbook Pro, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.
also the ability to RMA faulty gear, get support, yell at someone to send you stuff faster, although ... judging from the comments in this thread, maybe not.
fwiw, nobody in this space really gives a shit about you unless you're spending $50k or more, and realistically $250k or more on an ongoing basis. you're better off going to fry's or buying from a used gear vendor if you want small quantities.
There are plenty of smaller companies you can buy from to act as intermediaries. My experience (in the UK) is that you pay a small premium for it over the larger providers, but you certainly can get providers where you deal with someone who'll remember your name and actually answer the phone/e-mails even if you only order a single server here and there.
we buy from a tiny company located literally down the road from the building where the servers get shipped in from the port.
it cost us a considerable amount of money and time finding this vendor, so i consider it a trade secret (and the oem too). fwiw, their website and marketing are atrocious but they deliver product on time every time. i've been in business long enough to know how these things work.
I hope that this is just a rebranded system showing the redyness of System76 and raising awareness about such products so that they're better positioned for the ThunderX2 release later this year.
ARM was never particularly power-efficient. ARM was designed for low power, not power efficiency. The only case where an ARM core is more power efficient than a Xeon core is when they're both idle -- primarily because the ARM core was designed to be idle most of the time, while the Xeon core was designed to be in use most of the time.
ARM the architecture has very little to do with power efficiency as it is out of scope (except that the old the ARM 32bit instruction set was amenable for a very low power implementation).
ARM the company does design both low power and power efficient implementations of the ARM architecture. In fact for some specific power targets (mobile for example) they are more efficient than the corresponding Intel CPUs.
This is still irrelevant as Cavium design its own ARM cores from scratch (i.e. it doesn't use ARM reference designs) specifically for server use; now, they are not very good, but that's another story.
> In fact for some specific power targets (mobile for example) they are more efficient than the corresponding Intel CPUs.
I agree, but only if the measurement of power efficiency includes idle periods -- eg. "browse for 5 minutes, lock phone and wait 30 minutes, repeat".
I don't believe you can provide a source showing an ARM CPU executing a particular workload (i.e. not including idle periods) at greater power efficiency than a same-generation Intel x86 CPU.
aah system 76. I hope they have improved recently with their customer service but I had a horrible experience with them back in 2013 when they had to replace a keyboard (the CEO actually sent an email explaining how shitty their keyboard was) and when I asked for a refund, they simply refused. NO refunds. I had to literally open the laptop myself and install the new keyboard.
I am not one of those types who asks for refunds on anything. This was genuinely a defective laptop with a faulty keyboard (turns out that is how they were shipping it back then to everyone) and their answer was to replace with the new one (after the CEO sent a bulk email to every customer) . Why should I have to go through that hassle ? This was the first time I almost thought of doing a chargeback but didn't.
From my experience their repair services are somewhat understaffed: they did a fine job as described but I had to keep asking them for status updates and it took about a month. Kind of a sharp contrast to the ThinkPad overnight shipping, same-day repair, overnight return shipping experience.
I was thinking that System76 might have problems not being in a volume sweet spot; IBM and later Lenovo could invest a lot in a fancy, well-staffed repair facility near a shipment hub, while System76 may get warranty and repair requests that feel only occasional and so just can't support huge investments in being great and fast at it. :-(
I'm still hoping to continue supporting them because of their commitment to Linux-based computing. (Edit: other people in this thread sure didn't seem to like their laptops, but I guess I had a much better experience in other respects.)
> Kind of a sharp contrast to the ThinkPad overnight shipping, same-day repair, overnight return shipping experience.
And an even sharper contrast to the ThinkPad onsite service ;)
(of course, as you can probably tell by my username I'm not a big fan of Lenovo after Superfish etc. So I'll just sit here and wish that Apple would start offering a similar service)
So we have a data point from four years ago and you are still harboring a resentment so hard that you feel you need to air your grievances for a completely different product. I get it. Hell hath no fury like a customer scorned.
It happens. I've done field replacements on Dell laptops for DOA components for non-technical friends, most recently a dvd drive and previously a keyboard. Dell shipped the components and I swapped them out for exchange. Dell quoted moderately long (over a week) round trip if it went to a service center but my friends wouldn't have attempted it themselves.
This is probably the first laptop from them that I could consider buying, judging solely on that small picture of it.
Still super-thick, and I don't know if I would feel comfortable buying that over the XPS, but at least it's got HiDPI, which for the price they sell their laptops for I feel should be included.
You make your laptops super thin and people complain about ports and only 16GB of RAM and no repairability. You make your laptops repairable with three different kinds of USB ports plus HDMI and 32GB of RAM, and people complain it's super-thick.
I owned the previous 14" 1080p Haswell powered Galago Ultra Pro built by Clevo. Build quality was terrible and battery life was horrific when compared to Dell Precision 15 (aka XPS). I quick quickly sold it and haven't missed it.
Agreed about build quality. Our small office ordered a couple models in 2014-ish, to evaluate them.
Lifted the LCD to find it had some much flex, it felt like tagboard. Plastic housings were incredibly flimsy feeling. Those 10" netbooks that were popular for a while never felt as cheap.
We kept them as emergency backups and used one as a server, tucked in the server closet for a bit, but otherwise stuck with Dell.
Who knows, maybe the aluminum one will remove those problems.
Yea, decided it was best for them. I would like to see benchmarks of a BEAM app running on the Xeon-D and an ARM server with a huge number of physical CPU cores.
If you're looking for a server dedicated to supporting Linux, I suggest checking out Penguin Computing. They have a much better reputation and have much better servers than this System76 attempt.
I wanted to like System76. I had a dead pixel on a new machine that was to be my new workhorse AAAAAND that's how I learned what a dead pixel policy is!
Turns out, theirs was rubbish. The whole laptop wasn't elegant or well constructed, but it was durable. I had to send it in for repairs once, that went well. Still, I'd never buy anything of theirs again. Ever.
Ugh. That's not acceptable. Ok. I asked because I've seen someone make a huge fuss about a pixel that was simply dead (off) and I probably would not have noticed at all.
But a bright green on pixel no matter where on the screen would be a continuous distraction for me.
When I got my current monitor I noticed it had a dead (on) bright red pixel. I was originally extremely upset with this and it was super distracting, but then 2 days later I didn't notice it anymore, and now I can't even remember where it is. That was like 3+ years ago I think.
Have you tried using some of the pixel unsticking utilities that are available that futz with the surrounding pixels in an attempt to convince it to behave?
I can't begin to guess at the underlying physics of why doing that works for things that persist across a cold boot, but the few times I've had a stuck pixel, they've been useful.
If anyone is interested in buying a System 76 product and have it delivered outside of US, please take into account that the price doesn't include VAT. This has to be payed separately, which usually means that each device is ~20% more expensive (when delivered outside of US).
I ended up having to pay 400$ more for delivery + VAT for a laptop (didn't know about the VAT tax at that time). Very good performance, but rather mediocre quality (1 usb port is completely unusable).
The big deal is on the http://www.anandtech.com/show/10353/investigating-cavium-thu... page: the MySQL transactions per watt is absymal compared to the Xeon D. Really, badly absymal. So... this is not a useful server. When someone says ARM I am thinking "low power" but this is a 120W CPU which is beaten by the 65W Xeon D-1581. Pass. Let me emphasize: very often I do not care about absolute performance numbers because your power budget is almost always limited in a data centre, what I care about is performance per watt. Which here the Xeon D wins. Like, big time. Tangentially: this is where Ryzen battle will be as well. I was crunching the numbers from http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/graph11170/85875.png and the Ryzen 1700 is only beaten in performance per watt by the i7 7700T and only by 5% while in performance for dollar the 1700 has a comfy advantage over every Intel CPU, 62% over the i7 7700T which is a lot to pay for a 5% advantage. This shows the Ryzen is practically on par with the i7 series: the 7700T is 4 cores in 35W, the 1700 is 8 cores in 65W and they are head-to-head. I want to see the 8 and 16 core Xeon D chips battle Naples but I am afraid AMD is simply not yet in the low wattage game. But I really would love to see some competition there!
The TDP numbers from the specs does not necessarily reflect the power draw you will see in practice. Test results here https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/AMD-Ryzen-7-1800X-R... show the Ryzen 1800X (95W TDP) actually drawing 20% more power than a 7700K (91W TDP) and about the same as a 6950X (140W TDP).
Remember Intel is market leader making full-custom CPU's with more money thrown at each one than these small companies have. They also optimize the heck out of single-core performance which most RISC multicores don't. I think it's one of those things where you have to choose best bang for buck supporting an oligopoly or sacrifice some performance/cash to encourage new product development. Market says it overwhelmingly favors the former.
Even in multi-threaded benchmarks, where it should shine, it's getting murdered.
ARM is a very promising platform and there's no technical reason why it can't out-perform Intel. It's just a matter of engineering it with that intent. Right now it's primarily intended to be efficient and good enough for mobile phones.
> there's no technical reason why it can't out-perform Intel
I think "engineering capabilities and experience" is a valid technical reason.
But the real "reason" is most likely branch prediction and caching. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel's NetBurst microarchitecture was more complex than the entire CPU section of an ARM processor. I'm having trouble finding transistor count for the CPU section, for ARM.
No offense to System76, I'm very happy they are entering this space early. I just will wait for one of the biggies (e.g. dell, lenovo) so that I know the hardware could be supported.
I'm really wanting to shake Intel if possible, and I'm struggling to find chassis that support the amount of addons I require... but with these ARM servers and the network I/O they have onboard, I'm quite excited.
Looking forward to riscv here, since it will be possible for tons of competition in the wackass chip features department. We should get some great purpose built servers out of that in 10 years or so.
I find it a bit ironical to have this FakeHtop showing most CPU time wasted as system time (the red bars) just below the tagline ”Seamlessly distribute your services across 96 ARM cores” :o)
In 2013, I ordered a laptop from them as well. First, my screen died within a few months. I encountered hidden fees and rudeness trying to work through their tech support and warranty policy. Then, the motherboard died within the year.
So many product lines for such a small company. Laptops, Desktops, Servers.
Not even Apple is able to effectively manage this many different products.
I don't know much about them, but from my first impression it looks like a company with lack of focus. I'm not sure how they will be able to create killer product in any of the segments they're trying to compete in.
Based on my above observation (admittedly superficial), I would never buy anything from them. I would not trust the quality nor their ability to be able to support it.
Note that they're primarily rebadging existing products, while apple is far more involved in the design and manufacture of new products.
Also note that their niche is shipping Linux preinstalled devices. If they did have a killer mass consumer product, they'd have a difficult time coping with consumers expecting and demanding windows on PCs.
> Not even Apple is able to effectively manage this many different products.
That's funny, because Apple is the exception, it has far fewer products than any large PC or phone manufacturer. Apple is hyper-focused, much to the chagrin of people who'd like to buy an updated Mac Pro workstation.
They assemble machines at a small markup. This is essentially the business model of a bicycle store. The quality is very much related to the quality of the underlying system.
I bought one of their laptops years ago and liked it; I eventually bequeathed it to a sister-in-law, who seems to like it well enough.
I probably won't buy their stuff again, because I only run Debian these days, but I think that they're a decent company and I recommend them to folks who want to run Ubuntu.
Out of curiosity, where do you go for pre-built Debian systems, or completely OS-less systems? I would think that merely having the promise of Ubuntu support out of the box would make it better to install Debian, than on some random Windows machine.
> Out of curiosity, where do you go for pre-built Debian systems, or completely OS-less systems?
I've been pretty happy with Zareason so far, although these days one does often have to contact them ahead of time to be sure Debian will run fine.
> I would think that merely having the promise of Ubuntu support out of the box would make it better to install Debian, than on some random Windows machine.
I'd have thought so, too, except that getting Debian onto my System76 laptop was no fun at all. Ubuntu really is tolerant of non-free software, binary blobs and other things that I'd like to get away from.
Makes sense. System76 will make Linux work, but not blob-free Linux. Which makes it no better than Windows for you. It's not "harder" or "easier" per se, but having Ubuntu guarantees nothing over Windows.
I often forget that other people have different use cases than myself. Thanks for the insight :)
If all you need is a linux laptop, desktop or server, what kind of killer app does the company need to provide besides a system with supported components?
Purchased two linux desktops from them. Neither lasted more than a year. Purchased two small servers, both doing fine. Overall I can't really recommend them.
I think it has some kind of firmware that manages the backlight, so if you switch between really bright and dark windows a lot (like a browser and terminal) then it changes brightness a lot which is annoying, and there's no way to turn it off. Personally the only thing I've had issues with (on Linux) is the soundcard producing low-level noise because of the CPU going into powersaving mode. It's fixable but I can't remember exactly what I had to do to get it to stop.
On the bright side, it does help a lot for the battery life (I get around 8 hours usually).
I also have an older system76 laptop and I would definitely recommend the XPS (13 or 15) over it if you want something lightweight with good battery life.
anecdata: bought a Bonobo from them a couple of years ago at $EMPLOYER for a [semi]portable workstation. Arrived in just few days and it was as expected.
The developer who used it liked it though it didn't move much once it hit his desk. I didn't like the keyboard and thought the finish wasn't polished but I wasn't using it.
thats impressive. 96 cores starting at 6k? did anybody else configure a silverback workstation with all the options to see what it would cost? ($33k...but wow.)
It not the ISA that makes it desirable. It's all the tooling, apps, branding, and talent around it. You have to rebuild that stuff for new ISA's. You also have to get the market to trust a new one after so many perished. That is why companies pay ARM $1-15 million for licenses to use that ISA and brand name.
It's apples to oranges. ARM is designed to be customizable with all kinds of pluggible accelerators and stuff. x86 is what Intel decides it is. I heard they followed AMD in building a semi-custom business but with who knows what limitations or costs. So, you get a lightweight, easy-to-customize SOC with huge ecosystem for both software and hardware accelerators.
