I want one of these so bad, but I just cannot find a way to justify it. I barely even use my Framework laptop anymore because I’m almost always at my desk at home with my desktop machine.
I’m in a similar situation since I started working from home. Every now and then I move to my laptop and work from my bed, for example if my wife has a meeting or something like that (we share the office 😥). But I’m always on my PC. My laptop has been relegated as the “distro-hoping” device now.
I ordered some parts from them a couple weeks ago to build my own custom laptop, and they’re finally on their way and I’m super excited! The article is missing this, but you can order hinges, keyboard (with or without case), trackball/-pad and all these things individually from them, and use them for your own purposes.
It is just mind boggeling how much MNT encourages hacking with their stuff. They even went and made a dedicated logo you can put on things that are made to work with the reform ecosystem / derivatives: https://source.mnt.re/reform/reform/-/blob/master/symbol-for-derived-works/mnt-based-reform.svg
You can also search for the founder Lukas F. Hartmann and find a couple interviews out there.
I would really love to get one of these, but they’re so goddamn expensive for a laptop with at most 32 GB of RAM! Yes, I know how great their build quality is and all that, but with my current financial constraint, it’s hard to justify that purchase…
Why would you ever need more than 32gb RAM in combination with a relatively slow ARM SoC like it has?
There is nothing stopping them to release SoC modules with more RAM in the future, when there are ARM SoCs that that that much faster that more RAM would make sense. IMHO right now even 32GB RAM is total overkill for an RK3588s.
a relatively slow ARM SoC like it has?
You just reinforced my point
There is nothing stopping them to release SoC modules with more RAM in the future
When that time comes, I might change my mind
More RAM does not make a slow ARM SoC any faster.
If you point was that it is too slow in general compared to the price… fine agreed. But total amount of RAM is a really bad measure for “fastness” of a computer.
Alright, I’ll rephrase.
32 GB is definitely nice for most (if not all) cases covered by a laptop. With that said, a lot of DDR5 systems are already on triple-digits. Also, it would be nice to have discrete RAM slots instead of having everything on SoM.
Did the Mutant Ninja Turtles grow up?