Laptops

Modular laptop is designed to be hacked, tweaked and customized

Modular laptop is designed to be hacked, tweaked and customized
The MNT Reform is built to be customized
The MNT Reform is built to be customized
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The Reform is chunky by today's standard, but it invites users to get under the hood to find out what makes it tick, swap components, and customize the system to suit specific needs
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The Reform is chunky by today's standard, but it invites users to get under the hood to find out what makes it tick, swap components, and customize the system to suit specific needs
The Reform is powered by eight LiFePO4 batteries, which can be replaced by the user when performance starts to drop
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The Reform is powered by eight LiFePO4 batteries, which can be replaced by the user when performance starts to drop
The MNT Reform is built to be customized
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The MNT Reform is built to be customized
The MNT Reform can come fully assembled or as a kit
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The MNT Reform can come fully assembled or as a kit
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Laptops have been getting thinner, more powerful and increasingly difficult to customize. The Reform from Berlin's MNT Research dares to be different with open software and open hardware that invites modders to get under the hood and go wild.

Currently raising production funds on Crowd Supply, the MNT Reform is not tied to any contracts, cloud services, user agreements and so on. It doesn't come with any internal microphones or camera modules, and if you want Wi-Fi, you'll need to plug in a removable PCIe card. But it has been designed to be taken apart, studied, modified, reassembled and more.

Within the CNC-milled 6061 aluminum shell you'll find an NXP i.MX8MQ processor with four 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 cores and one Cortex-M4F core, with support from 4 GB of LPDDR4 RAM and 256 GB of SSD storage.
A Vivante GC7000Lite GPU serves up graphics to a 12.5-inch Full HD display, and there's a 128 x 32-pixel OLED panel above the keyboard to view interactions with the system controller. It comes with Debian GNU/Linux 11 loaded onto an SD card, but if you want to run another operating system, you can.

The Reform is chunky by today's standard, but it invites users to get under the hood to find out what makes it tick, swap components, and customize the system to suit specific needs
The Reform is chunky by today's standard, but it invites users to get under the hood to find out what makes it tick, swap components, and customize the system to suit specific needs

Rather than a slim, chiclet-style keyboard, the MNT team has opted for a more satisfying mechanical keying experience. A five-button optical trackball comes as standard, but there's a capacitive touch trackpad if you want it.

Connectivity shapes up as a Gigabit Ethernet port, three USB 3.0 Type A ports, along with two USB 2.0 connection inside for input devices. A HDMI port is also on the spec sheet, though it will need firmware to work. And sound is served up by stereo speakers or via a 3.5-mm headphone/microphone combo jack, with a Wolfson DAC handling audio conversion.

A bottom cover milled from semi-transparent acrylic can be removed for access to the internals, should you wish to swap anything out. And you can get at the eight 18650 LiFePO4 battery cells too, which offer about five hours per charge. The included manual features full system schematics and a complete parts list.

Pledges for a fully-assembled 29 x 20.5 x 4-cm (11.4 x 8 x 1.5-in) MNT Reform start at US$1,300. For $200 more you can pledge for a Max version with 1 TB of SSD storage and mPCIe Wi-Fi, or you can choose the $999 level for a kit you can assemble yourself, though you'll have to option in storage if you need it. If all goes to plan, shipping is estimated to start in December.

Source: MNT Research

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3 comments
3 comments
paul314
So you're paying a serious premium for that freedom. You pays your money and you takes your choice.
aki009
I don't see much of a line forming to buy an overpriced ARM-based system, no matter how configurable it is. The specs aren't that stellar either, but at least it has all the basics. However, if one is looking for a system where all source code is available and there isn't a dotted line to any government agency anywhere, this is probably pretty appealing.
Valerio Lamantea
So this means that one has to pay more than 1300$ to get this laptop which has an average performance and they claim that it is all open source...Linux was always open source and it is for free. So get an older laptop, install Linux on it and modify the components by the old fashioned way and you get an laptop equal or better for 200 bucks