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Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I miss about older laptops is the keyboards. I would love to buy a laptop that is built like a PowerBook G4 or a ThinkPad X61 but with modern displays and modern internals, and with extra bonus points if it has user-replaceable batteries and user-serviceable storage and RAM. I've found the Thinkpad X62 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/) and X210 (https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/) projects rather intriguing. Unfortunately I missed out on the 2017 ThinkPad T25, which I would have purchased had I not been strapped for cash at the time.

One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.

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Have you seen the MNT Reform?

https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...

It's not as powerful as most modern laptops (uses an iMX8 SOM, rather than an x86 CPU), but it's got a full keyboard, trackball (!), replaceable batteries, etc.

This deserves a discussion on the front page.

Previous discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23141667

someone posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24034502

For anybody like me who didn't know: the mentioned iMX8 is NXP's

"i.MX 8M Family - Arm® Cortex®-A53, Cortex-M4, Audio, Voice, Video"

https://www.nxp.com/products/processors-and-microcontrollers...

And:

"i.MX8M has four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 cores, an additional Cortex-M4F core, faster PCIe, USB3.0, a better GPU, and much higher memory bandwidth."

https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2019-05-20-reintroducing-r...

It sounds pretty cool, but that keyboard layout looks atrocious.

> One idea that I have is for a laptop manufacturer to develop a chassis that comes with a high-resolution display and a high-quality keyboard (like those of older ThinkPads), and where the user can supply an Intel Compute Stick or a similar device for computing power. This way the chassis can be used for a long time while the user upgrades compute sticks.

I have been thinking about this and I can see this as being one potential path for the future of personal computing, with phones (unfortunately) being the Compute Stick equivalents. If phone manufacturers made them more upgradable, I may even welcome this; however I don't see them jumping at that anytime soon.

The X61t came out of the box with a modern display, a 1400x1050 AFFS-IPS panel that is still respectable. Unfortunately these machines still sell for much more than $50.

ThinkPad 25 (Anniversary edition) was cool that has good old keyboard with decent spec (at the time).

Not entirely high res and high quality keyboards, but the NexDock offers that ability as a shell wheee you plugin a compute stick, phone, SBC, rack server, etc.

AFAIK there are a few similar ones as well

You can build a hackintosh using a modern Thinkpad.

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