It’s the same design as last year, the main changes are the new chips (Wildcat Lake), so better performance and power efficiency, the backlit keyboard (which happens to use open-source ZMK firmware), and a fingerprint reader that will work OOTB on Linux!
However, it’s still using the same display that has not so great colours (they are “working on it”, but no schedule for when it’ll be released), and memory prices make it too expensive for anybody who doesn’t already have RAM and storage available. For the people upgrading from the old gen, it’s kind of neat that you can just get the fingerprint reader, main board, or backlit keyboard.
It’s also really neat that it will ship with Fedora OOTB, and the prebuilt is now the Sage colourway since they found that to be the most popular over grey (hooray for colourful computers!)
Well, have you seen the price? Of course it will have much better graphics performance, build quality, speakers, haptic touchpad, etc. but the FW12 is far more wallet friendly. I don’t do too much video editing or heavy gaming so the 12 would be perfectly fine for me.
Also, I just love the colour options of the FW12 :D