Hard no on giving Jolla a cent. Jolla rug-pulled [1] people who crowd-funded [2] their tablet in 2014.
Jolla used the crowd-funding campaign to butter up VCs for their next funding round [3] and then decided the Asian LLC handling the crowdfunding would go bankrupt, leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund. [4]
The real kicker was that the tablets were ALREADY manufactured by their ODM, Jolla just never paid them. Took backers money and stiffed their manufacturing partner too. For a while after the campaign folded you could buy Jolla branded tablets (running Android, it was just an ODM model they flashed Sailfish on) on eBay or Taobao [5]. I just checked and there's a Jolla Tablet listed on eBay right now. [6]
10 years later, it looks like they're trying the same thing. Maybe they think the internet has forgotten, but I have zero interest in supporting their next hardware rug-pull endeavour.
As someone that's contributed to the Jolla tablet foundraiser, I mostly got refunded when they canceled it. It took a long time, it was not directly the money I contributed, but I wasn't left with nothing, and I don't feel like I've been cheated. YMMV, of course, it sounds like you're talking from experience.
> leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund.
I'm pretty sure we eventually all got refunds after they got the Russian cash. My refund came a couple years later iirc, with a check for half the amount coming a few months before the check for the second half.
AFAIR, I got refunded the whole tablet price in the end - I think half the price immediately, and the other half a few years later. It doesn't mean others were refunded too, of course. It was long time ago, though, so I may have mixed something up.
afaik the tablet was in development hell for much of 2015, by the time it was ready it was no longer profitable and Jolla couldn't afford to buy more than about 600 units without going bust.
IIRC they were negotiating a startup funding round that failed, so they ended unexpectedly up not having enough money to run the company let alone pay for the tablet manufacturing. Even remember hearing about the manufacturers selling the units with Android by the time they secured at least some funding for the company, so there was really nothing to salvage.
Or it might have just been their excuse back then - if you have some newer details of how it actually all went down with the tablet, please do share! :-)
I remember they had success with a prototype on I think Mobile World Congress, even winning some price. But when they wanted to start manufacturing the screen was EoL and they had to redesign the board for a different screen. This forward pushed the delivery date, resulting in the new manufacturing start coinciding with the funding round failure.
> Pick any app you want and search for it. Ideally it has a pretty unique name and not just a dictionary wod. What will you see? The first result will always be an ad for a completely different app.
This is also the case on the Play Store. Google *always* places the ad above the actual result, even if you search by the app ID (e.g. org.videolan.vlc)
> The problem is that if everyone hops jobs every 9-18 months, it’s not worth training up juniors because the employer will never get to benefit.
It is absolutely worth hiring and training juniors. The quality of your onboarding process and documentation will improve. Not only that but a junior will ask questions that senior engineers take for granted, such as "why are we doing X this way?" which can lead to improvements that your existing engineers might not have considered.
Finally, if junior engineers are joining your organisation and leaving every 9-18 months, you need to take a serious look at your career progression ladder and compensation. I have seen way too many companies that have an arbitrary "you cannot receive a promotion in the first X months" HR policy which is just asinine. You know who doesn't have this stupid policy? The company your junior just accepted an offer from.
If your organisation doesn't have the tools and processes to up skill junior engineers into seniors, then it doesn't have professional development for senior engineers and is just a career dead end.
Xperia 5 IV owner here, don't give Sony any of your money.
Their support is garbage: 1 Android version and only 3 years of security updates for a phone that cost nearly $1000. Google and Samsung offer 5+ years on their flagship phones.
The cameras are held back by incompetent software; the camera app does not even rotate for a left handed mode (they only need to rotate text and icons). Their camera app behaves like a point and shoot camera from 2004, and you have to treat it like that or your photos will be a blurry, underexposed mess. The cameras are technically fine, but the software implementation is truly terrible.
Yes, the phone has a headphone jack and micro SD slot, but those aren't worth it when everything else sucks. Sony is far, far behind other major Android manufacturers when it comes to software quality and support.
I gleefully gave Sony money for the 5 IV in late 2022. The phone stops receiving all updates next month (September 2025). Custom ROMs (e.g. LineageOS) are nonexistent because Sony has such an insignificant market share.
I'm writing this from my own Xperia 5 I device, and I can corroborate some of your complaints.
Most of the frustrations can be resolved by liberal use of third-party apps from F-Droid. Lawnchair and the Fossify suite make the basic experience quite reasonable, because the system UI components are thankfully not too heavily modified, only the system apps. With apps such as DAVx⁵ and Fennec it's really very useable.
Unfortunately the locked bootloader (which is completely illegal of course) is a big frustration and the main reason why you can't get custom ROMs running on it. I don't think it's about market share; some less popular brands have better community support because their manufacturers don't build artificial barriers to modifications. For security, this puts Sony's phones right down in my estimation and I too would not recommend them for this reason alone.
> To my knowledge, any switch OEM producing Broadcom-based gear will get their NDAs and silicon access revoked if they so much as dream about making devices with non-Broadcom silicon.
Cisco Meraki did; their low end switches are Marvell and their "high end" switches (MS420, MS425, MS450, MS350, MS355) were all Broadcom based. Were because about a year ago they announced the End of Sale of all Broadcom based switches.
Everything above the low end stuff is now Cisco Catalyst. (Although one can argue everything from Meraki is low end apart from their prices)
> Marvell and Microchip are fighting for the scraps
Realtek also. Lots of smaller L2 managed switches based on the RTL93xx series. [1]
But I am not seriously comparing Realtek to Tofino, that's like comparing Hot wheels to the actual car.
I have a 12th Gen Intel Framework from work. I cannot recommend Framework as a brand.
Yes, they are repairable. That is where the list of Pros ends for me. Perhaps the only unique selling point is being able to upgrade the motherboard later, but...
The screen, keyboard, touchpad, and IO are all inferior to a ThinkPad.
You can only ever have 4 ports, which is considerably less than your average PC laptop of similar dimensions and weight will have.
ThinkPads and other corporate-tier machines are dirt cheap used after 3-4 years, and finding spare parts for them is usually a non-issue as long as you don't mind eBay. Lenovo will happily sell you parts for a few years after the laptop is released, although availability and pricing are not great.
Framework had a partnership to only sell Western Digital SSDs when I ordered mine, and it later came to light that WD had serious firmware issues with these models resulting in sudden data loss. [1]
Additionally, the 12th Gen model has received ONE firmware update in over a year since release. [2] While Framework have committed to delivering more frequent firmware updates, they don't have a good track record there. No LVFS support either, so you have to burn a USB stick to update.
Prior to the firmware update, I've had the laptop completely discharge the battery while powered off, refuse to power up until being connected to a charger for ~15 minutes, and then display a large error saying the screen and battery were not connected (they were).
Even after the firmware update, I still have issues with phantom battery drain when the laptop is completely powered off.
I have the exact opposite experience of this person. My 12th gen framework had been great. I've replaced the keyboard after spilling water on it, the hinges, and they even replaced my power adapter because the right angle USB was flaky. Repairs have been a breeze... I had ThinkPads for over 20 years, probably 7 of them. Their era is over, sorry but the last good ThinkPad was the 220. Fwiw, I tried to buy a ThinkPad before my framework, their site said it was available in two weeks. Three months later, after no reply, my order was canceled due to some US law that automatically triggers if you cannot deliver in a reasonable time frame. Got the framework in three days. Wish I got the AMD one, but whatever I can upgrade later.
Totally agree on older Lenovos. The last truly great laptop I owned was a Lenovo T530. It felt like it was built out of recycled Soviet era tanks, was completely modular, swapped out the CD ROM and replaced it with another hard drive, upgrading ram was a breeze, etc.
It was a bit on the chunkier side, but that thing hummed on for a decade of constant usage with not a single problem.
I love mine and have had it for a few years now and upgraded it's motherboard from 11th gen to 12th gen i7, and successfully easily replaced the keyboard after a coffee spill, upgraded the battery to a new slightly higher capacity one when the original battery puffed up.
And this is all true. I love mine but frankly I have to admit I make excuses for it. It's almost really good. It has a lot of really good qualities, and lot of bad qualities that erase the good.
That 11th gen motherboard I replaced? I bought their official extwrnal case, (and some ram and a wifi card with antennas from a local microcenter to make it functional) to make it into a stand alone computer, even though I have essentially no use for it. Well it's a good thing I have no use for it because a bios update bricked it.
They don't put out enough updates to actually fix problems and so problems just remain for the entire life of the thing, and the few updates they have put out are complete and utter dumpster fires that break in a dozen different ways.
That battery I replaced? It was only about 2 1/2 years old. Why did a brand new battery go all explody in only 2 1/2 years? I have 10 even 15 year old laptops with pouch cells inside that never puffed up. Maybe longer even. They no longer hold a charge but they never puffed up.
My screen never looked 100% good. It has uneven lighting and uneven color, and is overall a bit pink. I have tried to correct the pink with color profiles in X but never got it to look like the neighboring external monitors. But a profile can't fix uneven color or uneven lighting anyway. Luckily I just don't care that much since I use larger better external monitors for most things and I don't do any art work. But that is really a ridiculous thing to have to just accept when most other brands just have good looking screens.
Battery life is garbage. Do every possible trick you can in either linux or windows, get 4 hours.
Why do I even say I love it?
I don't know. As far as I can tell, I should not say that. I love the idea. I love the sales pitch.
The sales pitch is repairability right?
My daily driver before the Framework was a X1Carbon 5th gen. About a year after I got the Framework I decided to refurbish the thinkpad because it was still awesome. I got a new battery, cpu cooler, and usb port all pretty easily (though frim ebay and aliexpress not from Lenovo), and they were all easy to install. The machine came apart all with screws just like The Framework. The Framework just makes it official with help and documents, but actually I've never even looked at a single one of those qr code instruction links. I'm sure they're nice, and I'd preferr if Lenovo did the same thing, but in fact I don't actually need instructions for things that are screwed together and don't have obtuse hidden land mines where something will be destroyed by doing the obvious thing.
The lenovo repair was essentially exactly as easy even though it was totally unsupported by lenovo themselves.
But that X1 Carbon is 50x better to use. Way tougher. Screen is even. Keyboard is way better. Actual mouse buttons (something I personally value highly, I hate huge touch pads with no buttons like Apple and Framework has).
I don't know if a current X1 Carbon is as easy to work on as one as old as 5th gen, so this comparison may no longer be valid.
> Both MacOS and Windows offer that without all constraints and privacy negligent services from Google/Alphabet.
As yes, Windows, the famously privacy respecting OS. [1] [2]
Apple has also been hard at work developing new ways to gatekeep users from running their own software. [3] macOS updates are also widely known to be small, quick to install, and never leave the computer unbootable. [4] /s
I, like the author, have had Chromebooks for many years. They are, bar none, the most easy to use and secure by default computer I have ever used.
Chromebooks are cheap and are supported for longer than any Windows/macOS release and the update process is utterly seamless and without issue.
It has all but removed IT support requests from my elderly relatives. The worst thing they can do is install a sketchy Chrome extension, but that's painless to remove compared to malware.
The author has a good point but I am surprised they neglected to mention the most important aspect for any aspiring appliance maker:
The BSD license
Yes, thanks to the magic of the BSD license you can ship an appliance that is nothing more than a vanilla BSD and some hacky scripts and never have to worry about your customers demanding to see how much jank you have shoved into the box.
As a user, that is precisely the main drawback of the bsds (as much as I love them, especially OpenBSD). If I'm using a bsd in some third-party computer, some icky middleman may have changed stuff in the system for which I'm not allowed to see the patches. If the license was GPL, I would have the right to see these changes!
Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..
> Forbidding your users to see the inner workings of the system (hiding the jank that has been shoven into the box, as you say), does not seem like a positive thing..
Indeed, I don't consider the BSD license a good thing from a user's perspective. Companies love BSD/MIT licensed software though.
Has nothing to do with the licence, if you need a lawyer (GPL) to see the magic changes in your appliance, you should probably not trust that vendor.
Also, if the appliance vendor has put in some binary blob/module, you have no right to see that either (only the changes to the kernel). In the end, it really doesn't matter.
> Has nothing to do with the licence, if you need a lawyer (GPL) to see the magic changes in your appliance, you should probably not trust that vendor.
Of course! But trust is unnecessary with code in hand.
But there's plenty of jank in e.g. Android phones. And of course anything the vendor doesn't feel like open sourcing they can just cram into something like 'google play services' to keep it closed source.
And vendors who want to TiVo-ize Linux can do it just fine, thanks to the Linux kernel embracing the TPM.
>every software/firmware using custom Risc-V instructions is tivoized
I disagree. Tivoization means using hardware restrictions unrelated to the core functionality of the hardware to make it difficult to run modified code. The original Tivo checked digital signatures in the bootloader. This isn't core functionality, because it could be deleted without harming anything.
Merely writing software for unique hardware doesn't count as Tivoization. It's very common for software written for older machines to only run on that exact machine, and nobody calls it Tivoization. There has to be some feature added specifically for the purpose of restricting user freedom.
TiVoization is about the inability to patch a system you bought to run different software. The TiVo boxes would refuse to run the proprietary TiVo software that did the whole magic if they detected a modified version of any of the system software, this is what annoyed RMS and led to the GPLv3. It's nothing like custom instructions.
> All the other manufacturers have really really shitty BSPs in comparison, even if you're just offloading everything realtime to an MCU.
The irony here is that other SOC/SBC makers are focused more on throwing a barely stable design onto AliExpress for $20 than investing in good upstream support that would allow them to charge a premium.
Raspberry Pi wasn't always able to charge a premium, that benefit came from years of investment into software and community. I have not yet seen another SOC vendor or board partner realize this in any significant way.
> The TS-7250-V3 is an industrial grade SBC based on the NXP i.MX 6UL with a 696MHz Arm® Cortex®-A7 core and 512 MB or 1 GB DDR3 RAM
This is their latest "High performance industrial grade embedded computer" that I can see on their website
Of course you'll have good upstream support for something as old as the i.MX6UL, it's been out for 8 years (7 years at the time they released the TS-7250-V3).
No wonder Raspberry Pi has upended the market, when a single core Cortex-A7 is the competition.
Even an Allwinner chip that has a terrible BSP at release has good upstream support 7 years later.
Jolla used the crowd-funding campaign to butter up VCs for their next funding round [3] and then decided the Asian LLC handling the crowdfunding would go bankrupt, leaving backers with no tablets and most with no refund. [4]
The real kicker was that the tablets were ALREADY manufactured by their ODM, Jolla just never paid them. Took backers money and stiffed their manufacturing partner too. For a while after the campaign folded you could buy Jolla branded tablets (running Android, it was just an ODM model they flashed Sailfish on) on eBay or Taobao [5]. I just checked and there's a Jolla Tablet listed on eBay right now. [6]
10 years later, it looks like they're trying the same thing. Maybe they think the internet has forgotten, but I have zero interest in supporting their next hardware rug-pull endeavour.
[1] https://together.jolla.com/question/97695/information-regard...
[2] https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/jolla/jolla-tablet-wor...
[3] https://jolla.com/content/uploads/2017/02/46_JOLLATABLET_STR...
[4] https://blog.jolla.com/second_phase_refund/
[5] https://old.reddit.com/r/Jolla/comments/3x2s7e/jolla_tablets...
[6] https://archive.ph/Ncf17