This laptop has been scrolling through my Fediverse feed for quite a while now, and I’ve found myself scrolling through that CrowdSupply page every time it comes up. It is an Open Hardware machine, meaning for most pieces, detailed schematics and data sheets are available, so that it could be easily modded. Specifically, the motherboard and keyboard are entirely open. The CPU itself, the Rockchip RK3588, is not open. But small steps.

All of the above is nice - but it is not directly interesting for me. I’m not at all a hardware guy. The less hand-eye coordination I need, the better. But it’s still nice, just for the fact that other people could extend the machine, for example coming up with different connector boards for the external connectors. To me, the machine’s openness is more an ideological advantage than something I expect to benefit from directly.

Far more interesting to me is the modularity of the machine. Have a look at this page and scroll down to the table with the CPU modules. Have a look at the “Compatible with…” rows. Their previous laptop, the MNT Reform, can be equipped with everything from a Pi CM4, an FPGA up to the RK3588 the new Reform Next will have. This is what sold me on wanting to make this my new laptop. For this kind of modularity, I’m perfectly willing to pay a price.

And the price is quite high. For the variant with 32GB of RAM and a 500GB NVMe SSD, I’d have to put down 1.5k USD.

Another draw for the MNT Reform Next is that it has a mechanical keyboard. On a laptop. 🎉

It also has a damn network jack. Sure, it needs an adapter, but still: Network jack.

There’s one big red flag waving in the wind though: It comes with a bespoke Debian image. Nothing against Debian, at all. But rather against vendor-specific Linux distro images. Support for the EDK2 UEFI is already on the way, but not yet implemented, from everything I can find.

Otherwise, the Reform Next has everything I’d want from a laptop. The 12.5" screen size is a bit on the low side for my taste, but eh. It supports an external monitor, so I’ll be fine. It also has WiFi and Bluetooth of course, as well as USB-C charging and a copious amount of other connectors. The RK3588 should be more than powerful enough for what I’ve been doing with a laptop in the past few years. For me, it’s mostly a tool for having a computer while I’m away from my desktop. I’m using it on the train or when visiting family, but otherwise it sits unused. In the past, I also used to game on it when visiting my family over a longer period, but I don’t do that anymore these days. So the fact that the RK3588 isn’t going to be usable for AAA gaming isn’t a blocker. As long as I can use it for browsing and development, I’m fine.

The main reason I haven’t hit the “Buy” button yet is that my current laptop, an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 GA401 from 2020, is still fine. It has an AMD 4800HS CPU with 8 core CPU and an RTX 1660. I wanted a gaming laptop back then, but never really got the Nvidia graphics card working properly under Linux. Back then, I payed 1.7k € for it. And especially in the recent past, I could have used double the RAM a lot more than the GPU. The main issue is that that laptop is still working perfectly fine.

Which leads me back to the title: I don’t need a new laptop. But I very much want an MNT Reform Next. Not least of all for ideological reasons - Open Hardware and Open Firmware are definitely worth supporting. And the fact that I could likely update the machine with newer SoCs once MNT develops them is really enticing as well. Then there’s also the fact that I want to support a German company which does cool things in the personal computing area and is committed to Open Hardware and Firmware.

So yeah. Give me a few more weeks or an announcement that support for non-bespoke distros is available now, and I will likely hit “buy” without much further thought.