Comment by khm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by khm | Hacker News Reader

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I have daily driven this laptop since it came out. It's fine that you are not the target market, but there are enough people who don't care about all the points you made and have other priorities, even setting aside the weird airport comment (I fly with the Reform regularly):

I have schematics for every circuit and case part. I can (and have) use these to make whatever changes I want. If I run into trouble I have direct access to the engineer who designed them.

It uses standardized batteries I can get from many vendors for the foreseeable future.

If the screen breaks there are at least four different part numbers I can order to replace it.

I do not have to use a trackpad. The keyboard is mechanical and several layouts are available, some from third party designers.

The design of the laptop was a public affair in which I directly participated. I can include patches in firmware bug reports and they will be merged.

Instead of buying a new laptop every few years, I finally have one which has no secret sauce and I'm not locked into a vendor. Since I work in IT, I know how to take advantage of networking and distributed systems to leverage faster computers when I want to. In short, it's the computer I've always wanted.

I don't care that it's unfashionably thick, but others do, and I don't see any reason MNT shouldn't cater to them as well.

People can and will pay for a sustainable product made in a first-world country by workers earning a living wage. If you want a cheap Intel laptop, there are hundreds to choose from. The existence of a product which doesn't fit the norm doesn't make it "shit," it just makes it something you personally won't buy.

> I have schematics for every circuit and case part. I can (and have) use these to make whatever changes I want. If I run into trouble I have direct access to the engineer who designed them.

And have you made any change to any circuit? Especially any change that you would have had to make to any of the other linux first notebooks on the market?

> It uses standardized batteries I can get from many vendors for the foreseeable future.

Yup 18650s are cool, yet I have replaced the batteries in many Thinkpads and Dells and never had an issue with finding a new one on ebay. Solution to a Problem that isn't really one if you buy any device not made from glue.

> If the screen breaks there are at least four different part numbers I can order to replace it.

Unless you are buying a Macbook that has been true for so many Notebooks.

> Instead of buying a new laptop every few years, I finally have one which has no secret sauce and I'm not locked into a vendor. Since I work in IT, I know how to take advantage of networking and distributed systems to leverage faster computers when I want to. In short, it's the computer I've always wanted.

There's so much secret sauce in these. Again, the Firmware of the RK3588 isn't open source. No one here has any idea how these chips work and what kind of backdoors or basic security failures they might have. This isn't an RiscV CPU with open specs, it's an off-the-shelf ARM SOC from a chinese vendor that has never managed to release a SOC that has upstream linux support even a year after being released. You are imagining this device as something it provably isn't

> People can and will pay for a sustainable product made in a first-world country by workers earning a living wage. If you want a cheap Intel laptop, there are hundreds to choose from. The existence of a product which doesn't fit the norm doesn't make it "shit," it just makes it something you personally won't buy.

You know, i personally find it pretty offensive to see a website claim their hardware is "Open Source" or "Open Hardware" and asking an unreasonable amount for it and then having to scroll through the website to find an "eh so this isn't actually open source we just screwed an SOM into a 3d Printed case and called it a day. There's still lots of firmware that is closed source".

I wouldn't be writing this if this was REALLY open source. If there were 0 binary blobs. But that's not something they have achieved. So now it's a Product, sold by a FOR PROFIT company and that has to compete with others. And this doesn't. And to argue like this was this ultimate open source no vendor lock-in forever free device this factually isn't is just disingenuous.

Yes, I've modified circuits. I swapped out a capacitor in the audio circuit, I used to have cell protection bodged into my battery carriers prior to the advent of the revised version, and the second half of your question is silly, since there's only one "linux-first" notebook on the market, and the Pinebook Pro is not even nearly the same class of machine. It's a toy.

I have a stack of Thinkpads for which I can no longer acquire batteries. I'm glad you haven't had that experience, but you don't get to pretend I haven't.

The Reform design process specifically involved testing various displays. For other laptops you can, if you're lucky, get a part number for a hardware maintenance manual; failing that you get to disassemble it, find the part number, and look up compatible options. MNT had this information in the documentation at launch.

"Secret sauce" was a vague term. Let me be clear: I have a BOM for the mainboard of this laptop. I have the schematics, including KiCAD, for its PCB. The RK3588 is no better or worse than any other product on the market. For all the talk of RISC-V being open, you can't buy one capable of running modern software which is actually open. So, from my perspective, it doesn't matter if it's IMX.8, RK3588, RISC-V, or x86. It's the entire rest of the computer I'm concerned with, and the Reform is more open-hardware than any other computer, including the Framework.

You seem to be a 'single-issue consumer' with this binary blob fixation. I don't have any problem with that; I just don't care about binary blobs. I like open hardware for the maintainability and the extensibility. But at this point with incorrect comments like '3D-printed case' I'm no longer sure you're even arguing in good faith here, so I won't bother following this comment up.

Because these computers have interchangeable CPU modules, you can indeed have a fully-open-source hardware stack on your MNT Reform. Before you go shitting on people who are trying to do something they believe in (and doing a good job of it), do some research and make informed judgements/comments.

https://mntre.com/modularity.html#our-cpu-modules

The RKX7 CPU module is completely open source firmware, and the LS1028A CPU module is also completely open source if you're not using the eDP display (i.e. in a rack/headless configuration).

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