I'm intrigued by this, but waiting for the MNT Reform Next.. https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/mnt-reform-next
I wish there is more information about battery life of that laptop.
MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
31–40 of 118 posts
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#32I think 1450 EUR for a 16GB RK3588 is hard to justify. Is the Rockchip open to begin with? I'd go for a framework using the Roma or CIX boards if I wanted to go for an "open hardware but not really" goal.
RK3288 was true open source. It boots with just u-boot and no blobs. DDR init was done by u-boot code and armv7 didn't require a TEE.
RK3588 is "almost" open. It boots with mainline u-boot and device tree from the Linux kernel, but needs two blobs: the DDR training blob and the trustzone blob (BL31). It can run without a TEE OS. I recently heard that the BL31 is now open source, but I didn't look into it. Mainline kernel has support for everything, including 3d (panthor driver) and video codecs acceleration (you find it in the v4l submenu). Mainline Mesa driver (panfrost) also works, but... not great - it stutters/freezes when I move the mouse.
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#33I think 1450 EUR for a 16GB RK3588 is hard to justify. Is the Rockchip open to begin with? I'd go for a framework using the Roma or CIX boards if I wanted to go for an "open hardware but not really" goal.
I thought it was an NXP i.MX? or did they make another revision
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#34Curious why they went with the i.MX8M SoC specifically — was it purely about open documentation, or did the memory bandwidth also factor into the decision?
What's with all these new accounts posting Claude-generated comments?
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#35I've been looking into switching away from apple and try to buy more EU based services and products. I love the concept and might just buy one to support the project, but I want something sleeker for my daily use. So I'm considering slimbook & tuxedo atm as buy-from-eu options.
Where do you want it to be produced? Assembly is not production, essential parts production is.
Then you are left with no options at all. Raspberry pi, maybe.
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#36It's an interesting concept, but perhaps a bit financially and environmentally wasteful, when you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad for 10% of the price that will perform roughly as well as this one. We don't need to bring more low-powered laptops into this world.
Agree, being weaker than an N100 I would argue by large it is already ewaste compared to just getting an old thinkpad or similar. Its over engineered in some ways and woefully under engineered in others. Any real effort in making it more performant or trying to extend it's life will just generate more additional ewaste than it will save by just reusing existing hardware.
Good luck reusing that existing hardware when the bespoke battery is no longer available. As far as I know this is the only laptop maker with an open-access (open source?) charging circuit, no reverse-engineering needed.
Also there's a user story out there where a laptop is a mobile terminal and the actual processing power happens remotely in the cloud. With modern agentic workflows and how fast they're changing it makes sense to optimize for longevity on the client hardware.
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe https://www.ifixit.com/News/94927/how-open-hardware-empowers... helps to get how it's different than "just" getting older hardware that had good repairability scores (indeed like ThinkPabs,cf https://www.ifixit.com/repairability/laptop-repairability-sc... ) namely that the idea isn't to "hijack" a locked-down supply chain and get cheap parts assembled anywhere. Rather it's to challenge that supply chain and ope…
How are they better than framework? Looks a worse product for much higher prices.
MNT is entirely open hardware and much more free-software-friendly, right? If you care about stuff like freedom and autonomy in computing, and you have the money to spend, the Reform seems like a far better product to me.
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#38It's an interesting concept, but perhaps a bit financially and environmentally wasteful, when you can get a 10 year old ThinkPad for 10% of the price that will perform roughly as well as this one. We don't need to bring more low-powered laptops into this world.
Agree, being weaker than an N100 I would argue by large it is already ewaste compared to just getting an old thinkpad or similar. Its over engineered in some ways and woefully under engineered in others. Any real effort in making it more performant or trying to extend it's life will just generate more additional ewaste than it will save by just reusing existing hardware.
I read this as "never buy new electronics because someones old used one is less e-waste".
The motherboard is modular and the compute part of this is replaceable, it's sort of the whole point.
The modules are mostly compatible between all of their products: MNT Reform, MNT Pocket Reform that are available now and the future MNT Reform Next (a more streamlined laptop) and the MNT Station (mini desktop pc).
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are they better than framework? Looks a worse product for much higher prices.
MNT is entirely open hardware and much more free-software-friendly, right? If you care about stuff like freedom and autonomy in computing, and you have the money to spend, the Reform seems like a far better product to me.
What part of framework is less open than MNT?
Re: MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, since all the design files are available, anyone can design an upgraded motherboard for this machine and keep all the other parts out of the landfill.
That’s true. It doesn’t even have to be just „anyone” as they sell compute module upgrades themselves. The thing it though, the old ThinkPads are already here, readily available. It’s still more environmentally conscious to get one every few years instead of buying a new compute module.
I think it’s very important to have someone making new, open, upgradeable computers. Getting an old computer might be more environmentally conscious now, but it doesn’t feel sustainable in the long term. New computers will (need to) continue being made, and the Reform by far seems like the best way to go about that.