Purism Announces New Laptops Based On 7th Gen Intel CPUs, 4K Option

While Purism remains very busy with their Librem 5 smartphone efforts, today they have announced their fourth version of the Librem 13/15 laptops.

With Version 4 of the Librem laptops, they have upgraded the Librem 13 and Librem 15 to Intel 7th Gen CPUs... Yes, 7th Gen from 2016. Granted, that's done in order to retain Coreboot compatibility with their hardware, but a bit sad to see such dated processors used while the Librem 13 pricing starts off at the same $1399 and the Librem 15 at $1599. In particular, Purism is going with the i7-7500U which is dual-core plus Hyper Threading Kabylake in comparison to Intel's newer Core i7 mobile parts being true quad-core processors plus Hyper Threading, among power efficiency improvements, etc.

The Intel CPUs on these new Purism laptops are at least an upgrade from before and still has Coreboot support. The other notable change with the new laptops is the Librem 15 having a screen upgrade option from 1080p to 4K. That's very nice to have albeit pricey with the $1599 USD laptop having a 4K screen and Core i7 7500U processor with HD Graphics 620 but only 4GB of RAM (upgrades possible to 16GB) and a 120GB SSD.

Hopefully if Intel succeeds at open-sourcing the FSP will help Purism in being able to offer new laptop models with latest-generation processors.

More details on these new Linux laptop options via Purism.