There is no standard what red USB A ports mean. Could be fast charging through some proprietary protocol or other special features. Or just a design choice.

USB ports with no symbol just don’t advertise what they’re capable of. Most phones support super speed data transfer. Basic USB-PD and display port output support is also common. They may also support other stuff, like pretending to be a webcam, audio output and much more. But you usually have to look in the manual or data sheet to know what is supported.

It would be obviously “an issue” and drastically reduce performance in many cases, but compared to the buildin igpu, you’d probably still be able to get a much better performance for lots of applications.

Seriously: the GeForce GT 520M, launched January 2011, wants a full PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Same with the Raedeon HD 6330M. You could probably get away with just 8 lanes if you had to, but not only one.

Connecting a GPU with just one PCIe lane isn’t the biggest problem. You’ll just slow down data exchange between the CPU and GPU (mostly loading textures and vertex positions).

If your game mostly relies on shaders and renders lots of rather static stuff, you’ll mostly just get longer loading times but FPS shouldn’t suffer too much.

That doesn’t bother me too much.

With the CPU being that slow, I don’t think you’ll really need a proper SSD. (And the CPU doesn’t have the required PCIe interfaces anyway).

They probably could’ve added socketed RAM, but based on the photo, the main board looks quite full and messy with random chips (likely needed to work around CPU limitations), so it probably wasn’t a high priority.

I’m interested in the cooling requirements and battery life.

I’m not interested in ARM CPUs with all their weird proprietary stuff.

The GPU inside the processor/soc has the following specifications:

• Imagination BXE-4-32 GPU with support for OpenCL 1.2, OpenGL ES 3.2, Vulkan 1.2
• Video Decoder – H.265, H.264 4K @ 60fps or 1080p @ 30fps, MJPEG
• Video Encoder – H.265/HEVC Encoder, 1080p @ 30fps

I don’t think you’ll be able to use a separate/external GPU with it. Thunderbolt support is highly unlikely and that processor has only 1 or 2 PCIe lanes (depending how USB is connected), which is likely already used for WiFi.

They have, the hinges of my Framework 13 AMD model from September 2023 are completely fine.

They’re pretty much the same. Use docker documentation for learning, but actually use podman, because it’s nicer to use (doesn’t require root, easier to install on many Linux distributions).

Who knows. Java is a much bigger programming language than Rust. Might be easier to find developers. But obviously it depends on interest. Who knows.