MNT Reform: a hackable laptop, not for everyone

jeffgeerling.com

27 points·ingve··3 comments

I'd love to hear from people interested in a device like this to get an understanding of what they'd imagine doing with it. I'm pretty far removed from the world of hardware hacking, so my imagination is limited. Is the completely open nature of the device more about principle, or is it enabling users to do interesting things with it that they can't do with other devices (e.g. Framework Laptop or a standard Raspberry Pi)?

This is pretty much a shitty version of the framework laptop. Yeah, it might be a little bit more open source but these arm chips are finicky, buggy and plainly too slow for any reasonable work.

If you want to replace parts, buy a framework. At least you get an actually usable device instead of spending all these resources on an expensive toy that you'll be bored and frustrated with after a few days.

I don't believe Framework's products are comparable to MNT's Reform. The Framework is mass produced. The Reform isn't, as far as I can tell.

But there are other major differences, of course. The framework is designed to be as close as possible to a contemporary modern machine but also be more user serviceable. The Reform is first and foremost open, hack-able and designed to be completely understood by a small group of people.

For the Reform, the schematics are available to anyone, or at least any user/customer. For the Framework it looks like the schematics are only available under NDA.

https://knowledgebase.frame.work/availability-of-schematics-... https://mntre.com/reform2/handbook/schematics.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com