Ah, I didn’t realize vpro was a differentiating factor. Still funny that intel ARK has them at the same price regardless. Who knows what the actual pricing is anymore though.
My other concern is how many corporations are going to buy a framework laptop? I know the enthusiast community loves them but mr blue chip is going to just tell their Dell or HP sales rep to get them whatever.
Probably small business IT staff I’d guess. You know, the “IT guy” that gets contracted out to 3 or 4 small businesses. Our guy has a macbook so maybe a framework would be better for him? Tough though because we don’t use vpro so I do wonder what scale you have IT guys buying their own (or requesting) individual computers but also using vpro.
vPro is for anyone who wants a hardware-based remote management solution. Which I agree isn’t for everyone. Think iDrac on a Dell server but more modern. I bought the vPro version intentionally and will make use of the vPro capabilites.
A few examples from past experiences:
Son is at his mom’s house who doesn’t have any concept of security or web filtering. Son goes to… questionable sites… and downloads something malicious that wrecks his system. Best course of action is a full wipe and OS reinstall (and put him back in as a limited account which I had him in but took him out because I got tired of him asking me to login for GTA5…) but he is nowhere near close to me. Enter vPro.
Girlfriend is on a business trip wrecks her system and is frantically asking you to restore it from a cloud backup, which in our case means boot off Acronis’ Linux-based OS. Enter vPro.
You are away from your house and due to a power outage (or w/e reason) the machine hosting the service you are trying to connect to is powered down. You do not want to drive all the way home to turn the machine back on and enter your password to decrypt your drive. Enter vPro.
There are software solutions that can handle some of the things vPro does. Like connecting to the box over VNC (if it’s online). And if you are like me and have your own home lab, standing them up and maintaining them isn’t too bad. But having a solution that gives me a lot of capabilities, that is hardware based – so pretty reliable and low maintenance, is worth the $400 because in the long run it is going to save me a lot of time.
If you are not going to use any of the vPro capabilities, then the difference between those two processors (because they are actually the same) is that the 1185G7 ended up with better binning because it was manufactured slightly better than the 1165G7 ones. So Intel will not throttle the speed like it does for the 1165G7, add the vPro additions, etc because they have higher confidence that the quality of the chip can handle the load.
Hope this helps.
Lol precisely. Happy wife happy life.
Good description of uses regular people might have for vpro. I didn’t realize it was something you can use without some sort of massive and expensive infrastructure. Part of me now wishes my aunt’s computer had vpro, while the rest of me is glad she doesn’t!
So basically vpro is Intel’s stab at IMPI. (nomb85 is correct, and I typo’d it)
@Andrew_Holden Lol yea that struggle is real!
@2disbetter I can’t find anything on ipme what is that?
Oh wait you mean IPMI, I found it.
So both IPMI and vPro/AMT are made by Intel. vPro/AMT actually uses some of the code/features from IPMI. But IPMI is geared more towards servers while vPro/AMT is focused more on laptop/desktops in an organization. Meaning the feature sets will be a bit different.
Yeah I’m aware that it is a server feature but the underlying features are the same, I would assume. I’ve never used vPro personally. I do think the reasons you are stating are good reasons for its inclusion, and it does look like vPro is turned off by default in the BIOS from the Framework factory (kudos). As most will have no need to mess with it, I think this is the best position for it.
I was giving a bit more thought to the pricing for the I7 chips, including the discrepancy between Intel’s price difference and Framework’s price difference, and I think I understand. I think it comes down to the primary markets for the different chips.
The I7 without vpro is probably aimed at consumers. In that market, it’s surprisingly important to run sales, even if that means artificially inflating the MSRP so vendors can “mark it down” to the real price and call it “a sale”.
The vpro cpus are primarily marketed to corporations who want multi-year contacts where they can budget the total price for hundreds or even thousands of computers purchased over several years. In that context, sales are worse than useless.
End result: Intel’s MSRP for the non vpro cpus is inflated to almost the same price as the vpro cpu. Since I didn’t see mention of sales on framework’s site, I assume Framework is ignoring the MSRP and showing the real price difference.
Of course, this is all speculation from my decades of exposure to the slimy world of marketing.
I just don’t feel like it’s communicated well enough that the high end i7 is mostly targeted to enterprise users. You end up with people buying the more expensive one for basically no benefit which feels pretty bad. Hopefully they make it a bit more clear on the order page. In fact when I check the order pages I’m not really informed much about it at all.
The prebuilt options don’t list much on it unless I read the FAQs which are still kinda vague. It mentions vpro as something consumers won’t usually need, but really vpro is only mentioned on the wifi card, not on the cpu when you read the product description.
The DIY page is a little bit better, now that there’s a “which CPU should I buy” section.
All three CPUs offer excellent performance. The i7-1165G7 has more cache and supports higher clock frequencies if you need higher performance. The i7-1185G7 is a bit higher performance and also adds vPro management functionality for enterprises
Still a little vague and doesn’t really convey that you’re paying 400 extra bucks for the vrpo itself. I’m mostly just bothered by the lack of info on the pre-built page. I feel like they should do a bit better communicating that to consumers.
