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Comment by dngray | Hacker News Reader

I really want to love the MTNU reform with its Kailh Choc White switches. I wish like there was a laptop that actually had a mechanical keyboard.

That's why I've been thinking of paring my desktop-replacement 16" laptop with a Pocket Reform or something like that.

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Oh yeah I didn't know that one. I do know Logitech has some ultra-thin ones too though. Very good keyboards too. They'd do nice in a laptop as well.

I'd very gladly sacrifice thinness for a decent keyboard. The Thinkpads had an OK compromise for a while but since the Thinkpad T14s gen2 or so they have been horrible as well. My old T490s was still serviceable.

One space that I don't think I've seen explored is building a laptop around a tiny, ultra-low-power passively cooled SoC board that can easily fit beside the keyboard instead of under it in a 12"-16" chassis and saves space that'd otherwise need to be dedicated to cooling. That'd buy a substantial amount of Z-budget for a quality keyboard without blowing up chassis thickness.

Naturally this laptop wouldn't be suited for some types of work due to lack of horsepower, but there's always tradeoffs somewhere.

We're kinda there already. Most recent laptops I've seen have a tiny motherboard not even taking up the whole width of the device. Under the keyboard there's usually the battery.

Don't forget a significant part of the weight has to be towards the front edge so you can tilt the screen back without flipping the whole laptop. Some of my cheaper atom based laptops (with tiny motherboard and batteries) even have a metal bar in there for that purpose.

Right, but my idea was to do something like shove the mainboard up into the bezel above the keyboard and battery into the palm rest, with nothing sitting under the keyboard except maybe ribbon cables. That’d get you a laptop with a thickness of under an inch that still has a keyboard that’s not compromised and keeps weight shifted to the front. It’d simplify repairs to some degree too since there’d be very little stacking.

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