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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

I thought the heirloom part is that a lot of that stuff is user-replaceable on this design, unlike most (all?) other laptops. I assume this is a standard Mini-ITX motherboard?

So you could keep it working with some maintenance over the years.

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Its actually an open source hardware design built around a Freescale quad core arm CPU. It is definitely designed to be user replaceable; you can print your own boards if you want.

Info here: https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/novena

Designing and making boards for this kind of system is very expensive, especially at small scales. The Novena as a whole sold far too little to really spread out the one-time engineering costs and was very expensive as a result. Only 12 of the Heirloom laptops exist and it's unlikely all 12 owners would buy a replacement board; it's just not going to get made unless one of the owners has the skills to do it themselves and is willing to spend far more than the cost of the laptop to do it.

I'm surprised it turns out to have an ARM processor - I wouldn't have guessed that it would need active cooling. When you consider that many phones would use this same CPU, in a smaller package with less airflow and smaller heatsinks, it seems even more surprising that a fan is required here.

The reason phones can do that is because they throttle heavily after a couple minutes of heavy CPU usage. That wouldn't be very good for a laptop.

The success of the Macbook seems to be arguing the opposite. Most tasks we perform don't require sustained CPU usage.

macbooks are giant passive heat sinks though; a wooden laptop doesn't conduct all that well

But that Freescale CPU isn't open and cost big $$$ to develop. That's the problem: can't use something like that if heirlooms. Only exception maybe is if whole platform is tied to a virtual ISA. That way, hardware might change but SW & interface is the heirloom. System/38 did this to be ported to successively new hardware and interfaces as AS/400, then iSeries, then IBM i.

The ports, though? That looks like USB Type A? I think that'll be replaced by USB Type C sooner or later.

If you think about old computers with their serial ports and floppy drives, it's hard to think these ports will still be in use decades from now.

That's a fair counter but one must remember the cost. The PCB board is usually designed for certain parts. Those parts availability often changes. Replacing them requires redeveloping or implementing them at hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of dollars. It can also be hard to replace a CPU depending on how it's packaged into the board.

So, it would have to be pluggable, open, inexpensive to prototype, and enough volume to spread prototype over users in maintenance.

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