Thanks for clarifying, will stop asking now that I know.
@minute Given the fact that the RCORE is available now to buy which is a great achievement, would you say that it is reasonable to have the mnt reform next campaign by this summer?
This may have been asked before - I’m wondering, as I’m in the queue for a Pocket, which is looking awesome. At that time I hadn’t seen this post regarding the “Next”, and am a little concerned regarding support / upgrades across the family of MNT Reforms. Will modules for one be compatible with other reforms, or will they each have their own individual upgrade paths?
Don’t get me wrong - they all look awesome, and I’m loving the innovation and continuing work, just concerned about spreading the net a little wide, and putting a strain on supporting more products with a relatively small team.
I have to say, too, while the Next looks fantastic, it does also look a bit “vanilla” for my taste, but will also follow it with interest.
The chart on this page shows all the current CPU modules and which Reforms they work in. It hasn’t yet been updated to include the RK3588.
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Thanks! Bookmarked! 
Took a roundabout way to get here - was actually looking at the Ampere platform from Geerling - Testing a 96-core Ampere Altra Developer Platform | Jeff Geerling.
This looks like an extremely ambitious project and @minute will probably have to produce around 10X-100X more units than the original Reform.
Absolutely. Seems there are a few framework users here. Hi @2disbetter .
I’m a longtime Thinkpad user that moved to Framework in Aug 2021. As I travel 4-6 months of the year, the height and weight of the current Reform is just a no-go, but the Reform Next looks extremely promising.
There is an entire customer-base that is waiting for a certain minimum spec to swap over to a repairable, upgradable laptop with a nice keyboard. I ended up upgrading from an X60 → X200s → X230 → Framework.
The X60 on the left has the nicest industrial design of any laptop in the past 20 years between the panel, weight, size, and keyboard. The bezels are smaller on the older laptops, so the panel height of X60 > X200s > X230! I suppose this is due to the evolution of screen manufacturing, but why the large bezels?
Anyway, there’s an entire market of disaffected Thinkpad users looking for an open and repairable laptop who are waiting to upgrade. The RK3588 is already faster than the X230. It is slower than the Framework 11th Gen, but I don’t think that really matters to this market. If this was available in 2021, I might have jumped to it instead of the Framework.
| Laptop | Processor | Single Core | Multi-core |
|---|---|---|---|
| Framework 11th gen | Intel Core i5-1135G7 | 1601 | 4552 |
| Reform Next | RK3588 | 704 | 2694 |
| Thinkpad X230 | Intel Core i5-3320M | 514 | 1046 |
What I do think would matter to this market:
- keyboard with trackpoint (installable somehow even from an external source). Many prefer the original keyboards pre-X230 vs the new chiclet, but they just want a trackpoint. There are so many threads about the trackpoint, it’s a bit absurd.
- 3 to 3.5 pounds
- 6-8 hours of battery life
- 20mm to 28mm in height (the older thinkpads taper from back to front)
- decent screen panel with high-nit (preferably matte).
- usb-c charging
- some usb-c ports and 1 usb-a port
- audio jack
- some sort of display out
- ath9k wifi or better
- ethernet (1GB or better)
And my personal preference:
- Small bezels. Seriously look at the X60 picture. Small. Compact. Largest panel that can fit. It’s actually has a larger height than the framework panel and somehow a more compact, but nicer keyboard. Panel is 4:3 instead of 3:2 though. Regardless, it’s a beautiful design.
- Being able to transpose a thinkpad keyboard into Reform Next
I’ve signed up for the newsletter and hope that this materializes and you can keep up with demand.
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I found these numbers in the table intriguing, are they from GeekBench 6? In any case, I just ran the GeekBench 6 aarch64 preview build on my personal MNT Reform with RK3588, here are the results: MNT Reform 2 with RCORE RK3588 Module - Geekbench
I will add more to this discussion in the coming week when I’m back at work.
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I made some other comments in the mastodon thread, but just jumping in to say I would also really support a trackpoint!
USB and USB-C stuff
I know that this is not the direction the market goes towards, but I had thoughts that USB is perhaps not a very good choice for storage or charging. This is because USB can be almost any device, so a USB stick can actually also be a keyboard in disguise or some other (worse) device. And a charger may be a device that tries to get access to your device. I have no idea how realistic these attacks are but, now I started to think that maybe our ancestors got it right and we should have just standardized the power plug to a specific radius or something like that.
I also like the idea of taking a popular device and make your power supply the same as theirs, if that’s allowed, some people do that.
Storage
And then I also heard the opinion that a good backup is “append only” (among many many other suggestions), so that someone who gains access into a system cannot delete or overwrite the backup. And we used to have optical drives (also in laptops), where the DVDs/CDs are append only by nature and everyone who made backup disks, did it right by accident.
Wishes
For a different model:
- almost the same as the current reform
- have optical drive maybe? that would be neato
- a tiny tiny bit thinner if possible
- a little bit faster (without loss of other functions), so that compiling a LaTeX document is almost instant
- wider frame and physically bigger screen, in both directions
- a hard toggle for wifi on the case (like the thinkpads used to have, later shown as aeroplane mode, with a little plane pictogram).
- if the track-ball has to go, and I hope it stays, then one of these red nubs, they are also neat
The mnt reform is a super nice laptop. I hope all goes well.
Hello everyone,
I am new here; I work as an IT security consultant and I made an account here specifically to express my requirements for the next Reform laptop that is allegedly more consumer friendly than the current one. Please see them below:
- data sovereignty through open source/open hardware ,
- fanless (very important – for both peace of mind and reliability purposes)
- 2 hot swappable batteries with individually removable cells so as to facilitate day long uninterrupted work (obviously with minimum 2 backup batteries)
- Integrated camera/microphone, with hardware disconnect switch for both camera and mic
- Integrated 4G/5G modem
- full size space bar and big enter button (German style)
- would be nice if the keyboard could drain water away (as with the old Thinkpads)
- illuminated keyboard is nice, however personally I prefer a “ThinkLight” to an illuminated keyboard
- would be nice to have all “resting” ports at the back (power plug, HDMI, DP, LAN) and hot swappable port on the sides (USB-A, USB-C, microSD)
- would be nice to have the option to add ports as required (eg. RS232, RS485) to as to access legacy applications
- scratchproof transparent polycarbonate back cover
I would like the above laptop both for personal and for professional purposes and cannot wait for the end product to be released so as to recommend it to my employer as a suitable alternative to the currently closed source laptops (which I deem as a latent security risk).
The current’s laptop thickness is unimportant for me. More important is the software as I have read in this forum ~ 70% CPU utilization with 5 videocall participants is just not good enough.
Thank you.
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There are a couple of feature I think would be neat in a laptop.
- I know TPM have a bad rep but having an open source one would allow to verify the kernel we boot and have passwordless encryption at rest
- Having that TPM be removable might please the most security conscious who don’t want to leave a bootable laptop in an hotel room while they roam a convention floor
- With passwordless FDE, it make sense to have user partitions encrypted. Linux can do that, locking and unlocking user partition with user login. Having the login done with a yubikey instead of a password would be a step up in that setup IMO. If the laptop have a built-in NFC reader, the login would be as simple as tapping the yubikey on the laptop above the reader
- A usb A port on the same face as the keyboard would be nice. No need to search where on the side of the laptop is the usb port, it’s under our nose, easily available to plug in that yubikey.
- With my current laptop, I got tired of searching all my connector and draw a different colored line above each of them so I know exactly where they are while looking at the keyboard face. Having a small groove whould accomplish a similar goal and groove can be filled with a posca
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Hello all,
I have been very keenly following the reform next developments on Mastodon. One thing I wondered is based on the new Reform next motherboard specs (and recent images of the brought up board) it seems to only have 1x M.2 slot.
As I understand it this could either be used for a Wifi module or an SSD but not both. The ifirefly RK3588 module does not have built in Wifi and is planned to be the “stock” module on the laptop.
So will the initial laptop rely only on ethernet (or the rk3588 internal storage with wifi) and this is just a tradeoff users will make? Or is there a separate ports/ breakout board that I’ve missed that will provide this functionality.
Hi! There’s a third board going in the back that’ll have a WiFi/BT module and antenna port(s). This way one is not forced to use a specific WiFi chip.
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Oh that’s cool! There is probably not enough height available in the case to add a mini-PCI-E connector for a WiFi/BT card?