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Comment by puzzlingcaptcha | Hacker News Reader

FWIW I have had a StarLite Mk IV for three years now and haven't run into a single issue with it (except maybe the speakers being quite poor).

Unfortunately the company stopped releasing firmware updates for it soon after they launched Mk V. I don't know if it can be still built from source for the older devices.

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I'm also the happy owner of a StarLite Mk IV. The perfect travel laptop. Thin, light, fanless, excellent keyboard and touchpad, matt screen, rock solid chassis, good battery life. I'm dreading the day when it finally breaks as there's nothing comparable on the market today. I wish they could do another run.

Very different niche from the StarFighter but StarLabs make excellent machines.

Their Horizon model is probably closer to a Mk IV successor than Mk V. I would consider it as an upgrade path.

You are not wrong! That certainly looks like the intention.

Thanks for the positive feedback, really appreciated

Just to clarify on the firmware side: we haven’t stopped releasing updates for the Lite Mk IV. The challenge is that the SPI storage on the older-generation StarLites is quite small, so we’ve run into space constraints with some of the newer firmware features.

We’re currently working on optimising the available space, so there should be more updates coming for the Mk IV soon!

Hmm, thought they ship firmware for all recent models at once, though might be mistaken. Are there any fw bugs?

I suppose that depends on how recent is what you consider recent. I'd have hoped with the coreboot upstreaming effort they would keep official releases coming a bit longer.

You can see the last release for Starlite Mk IV is from 2024: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/search?value=starlite

These seem to be the SKUs they are building roms for: https://github.com/StarLabsLtd/firmware/tree/capsules/roms

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