This is a discussion to discuss some of the features whose exclusion from the FW16 won’t make the laptop bad, but the inclusion will make the laptop much better for some.
Please give your own ideas.
Self-encrypting SSD, where the encryption/decryption happens within the SSD and its crypto processor, within the drive, for extra security.
Error correcting code (ECC) RAM, for more software stability when executing critical workloads, or just for safety.
Self-healing BIOS (actually UEFI), that can actually be useful for recovering from virus attacks or just user error when tinkering.
User-programmable FPGA connection in the expansion bay at the back.
etc. etc. Please add-on in this topic.
You can also discuss Expansion bay ideas,
That doesn’t require anything from the laptop, just the drive and the os needs to support it. Though these days the performance difference tends to not be worth it compared to os managed encryption anymore.
Those go heavily in favour of (modern)os managed encryption though. But SEDs are still a hell of a lot better than no encryption and covers most threat vectors a normal person might encounter. And they are entirely transparent to the os or the user once opened which is nice in some ways.
I did use them in the 4-6th generation intel days where the performance difference was actually significant but you really don’t need device support for it. Arguably the built in sed management like in a thinkpad is worse than an on drive one because lenovo does weird shit to the password handling so you can’t recover data on a non thinkpad device if the computer should die.
I assume you mean Hardware side-channel ECC. I don’t believe any laptop processors support this, and the memory which is typically used doesn’t have ECC signals.
Depending on the processor, it might support inline ECC, at a capacity and performance penality.
The amd chips all support ecc (the pro models officially so) and ecc ddr4/5 sodimms exist. Mainboard and bios support is the main limitation. Not 100% what you mean by side-channel/inline ecc but if you mean the on chip ecc ddr5 does, that’s not what we ask for, ddr5 has that by default.