Hi,
I would absolutely love to have a MNT Reform Next, it has many qualities I am looking over
However a few things are dissuading me, I wouldn’t mind using community made things and modding my MNT, nonetheless:
I heard there are plans to improve the CPU module, the RK3588 is.. to state it politely, out-dated. I would like a more powerful cpu than my old thinkpad X230T, I’ve head about the MNT Dragonfly project, where is the development of that so far? Any ETA?
Are there futur plans for a higher speed usb-c port, such as a thunderbolt 4 port? I don’t know if that’s already the case, but is it docking compatible? As in a single usb-c cable and boom, display, mice, keyboard, headset, charger connected
What about wireless? Would there be wi-fi 7 and last bluetooth generation, possibly cellular network too? 2.5 gigabits ethernet port?
Are there plans to provide a brighter screen? Or higher resolutions? or even oled?
Are there plans to include a trackpoint in the mechanical keyboard? That’s one of the things I just love about Thinkpads and I can’t not have it. Especially that I have a program called Trackpoint-3D (which one can find on github) making the trackpoint into kind of a 3D mice combined with very simple keybinds, that would be a huge problem for me to not be able to use that for FreeCAD
Obviously I understand it is hard to put all of that in a open source and open hardware format, but it’s just unfortunate the laptop is actually kinda in the past performance wise
Actually, my apologies for the confusion. I meant dragonwing, which is exactly what you are saying is in development
I don’t know why I understood the name was MNT Dragonwing
There is a community project which is slow going because the one who is mainly working on it has lots of other regular life stuff to handle as well, so any help is welcome: Another alternate keyboard idea - #14 by josch
Yes, it is quite unfortunate that these days the CPUs and other hardware from “the present” are so hard to come by — unless you are a billion dollar corporation churning out millions of devices of course…
How comes it is so hard to get recent devices? Like if I want to get one, I usually can without too much troubles.. is it due to the scale being not one, not millions, but in the hundreds?
I would contribute production delays to several factors. And this is my view:
World economics shifts - example, check the latest prices jump and shortages for RAM chips and SSD storage. Small manufactures are more susceptible to these changes.
Small batch productions for expensive components. These are not stacked at storage, to avoid free cash being frozen at the warehouse.
Unexpected vendor delays and issues with production batches.
Devices are assembled and tested by hand.
MNT Reform keeps updating their products constantly, no point having bunch of older hardware sitting at storage.
MNT team is just few people, each one taking on multiple roles. And the demand for open hardware laptops is not high, to justify scaling up production.
Not all areas can be optimized, but if the interest for open hardware computers rise, I am certain some areas can be improved on. I used to work for computer hardware vendor with assembly line back in the days. Can tell you from experience, just doing assembly of ready components and tests consume time.
There are options if you’re not willing to wait, like the MNT devices at Mouser/CrowdSupply.
But what you get “without too much troubles” is a device which you cannot tinker with. You don’t get documentation and if you do, you have to sign a NDA first. And if you do, often you need to buy an order of magnitude more units than just a hundred. For a CPU board to be included in the Reform, it has to be sufficiently documented such that somebody (actually usually always Lucie) is able to do the work of writing device trees and you need sufficient support in Linux because MNT does not have the person-power to bootstrap a Linux port from scratch (it’s just three people in a basement somewhere in Berlin to be frank…). If you are a company creating CPU boards then who would you rather sell to: a few hundred thousand units to samsung, lenovo or apple? Or would you sell 25 units to a self-employed hacker in Berlin?
Also, sometimes surprises happen and sometimes it becomes possible to buy few units of a CPU board even if you are only small. The Firefly iCore RK3588 is such a pleasant surprise. And even those became unobtanium right now due to the RAM crisis.
And yes, it is possible to create your own CPU board from scratch. This is what LS1028A is. But doing so is extremely expensive when doing it on a small scale so you pay a hefty premium for a device much, much slower than the more proprietary Firefly iCore RK3588 board. It turned out, that there were not enough people who were willing to pay the extra premium for the free-ness of LS10288A, so we are back with less-free boards which you can buy for less money.
If you happen to find one of the “surprises”, a well documented System on Module with decent Linux support, I’m sure Lucie would like to hear about it.
First, thank you both of you for the very clear and descriptive answer, that helps a lot
I have not realized it was THIS complex when you’re a small company to do all of that, I did realize to some extent, but not that much
Especially that they’re developping the motherboard, cpu board etc themselve, it takes a lot of time and money to develop such things, especially complex with a small team, even if very intelligent
Yes you’re right, I didn’t realize that what I can get easily is most definitely not an open well documentated solution, that was really ignorant on my part
I hope I haven’t been rude to anyone, by any mean, I love MNT, in fact I have a MNT keyboard
Obviously I’d love to help, though I don’t have many skills in that field
The hardware is definitely limited to top-of-the-line laptops from other manufacturers. The MNT Reform is not (yet) for everyone because of some remaining limitations. That’s okay. You cannot play the latest games on it and software relying on opengl like blender will not work 100% on the currently fastest module (rk3588). If it doesn’t meet your needs, then that is no problem at all. Things are just limited because this is a comparatively small project.
