There was an initial crowdfunding period first which we have almost completely fulfilled now (working on the last shipment of 68 devices atm). The devices you are buying now are from Crowd Supply's stock which we will start fulfilling to them in around 2 weeks.
The US price starts at $999, but you get hit with VAT when ordering from Europe. The VAT situation will be a bit different once we can offer these in our own (EU based) shop in a few weeks.
Keep in mind we're hand assembling these in Berlin, Germany, and the first batch size was below 1000 units.
I understand your perspective for costs, and the economics of a low batch like that are rough as well.
I hope you target larger batches and cheaper labor in the US (even to ship it back to EU) , or if you're paranoid about that, there are places that will help you with the assembly part in Mexico or plenty of other countries. I'm hoping a larger funding round on crowdsupply might help you target larger batches (and gauge interest).
The problem with the current price point is, I might get it for myself out of curiosity but I can't really recommend it to others unless they show strong interest in small and portable laptops.
I did something similar in 2022, also with LiteX, but not self-hosting because it used a Kintex-7 FPGA which at least at the time required Vivado for the actual place-and-route. It did result in a open gateware laptop running Linux and Xorg, though (thanks to Linux-on-LiteX-VexRiscV): https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2022-09-29-rkx7-showcase.h...
This is not true, the panthor driver (previously pancsf) for mesa is actively being developed and funded, and already works quite well (I had a demo desktop running on prototye MNT Reform Next laptop at 37c3).
And the main panfrost developer Alyssa Rosenzweig has moved on, so the pace of development has declined significantly. At this point the Raspberry Pi 5 is more than capable and the Rock 5 has lost the primary advantage it once had.
It's nothing to do with that really. It's much more to do with the gen10 (Gxxx) Mali requiring a completely new kernel driver. Given that nouveau and other drivers required the same thing, this ended up being a long diversion into a lot of new common DRM infrastructure to make things easier for the next drivers who need to do the same thing. By comparison, enabling gen9 in the kernel was more like adding a couple of device IDs. See bbrezillon & dakr's talk here for more details: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/4/contributions/181/
I do want to add that I really hope these sell like crazy so you can get enough volume to get some higher performance ARM chips in future models! I _do_ think these are amazing looking little devices and would 100% buy it for light work and play if I didn't have my Max 2.
In fact, I just placed an order for your Supporter Pack to show solidarity. :)
Simple: we are a tiny company and make this in little quantities, end-assembled in Berlin, Germany. The BOM is >$500 and we have to pay platform fees as well.
You may also add that MNT product are built for the long-term. While the nice macbook today will be an old cranky thing in 3 years and a piece of junk in 8.
Thanks for the feedback! If our campaign succeeds, we'll follow up with next-gen processor modules. After all, CPU/GPU/RAM is on an exchangeable module.
That's great to hear. My wishlist for this would be 16GB of RAM and a faster CPU, preferably something that is at least 3GHz w/ 4 cores if it's ARM based. I'd be happy to trade off battery life for performance here, because it'd allow me to use this with a lightweight Linux setup to do a majority of my work. The challenge is that I am locked into using web applications that would be non-performant on the current specifications, for example Google Workspaces + Slack + Sharepoint/O365 (yes I use /both/ Google Workspaces and O365), so the underlying hardware resources need to be present to run Firefox w/ these apps open without feeling sluggish.
If I could do that, I could migrate off my Mac and use this as my primary work device while traveling, which would be really nice, since I like the keyboard.
Keep in mind this is boutique hardware with very low volume, the device has a mechanical keyboard, and the case is milled and anodized aluminum. We are 3 people in the shop plus a network of freelancers. But unlike Apple, we can make open hardware and happily give you full control over the device, and you can communicate directly with us. This is a totally different scenario.
The CPU/RAM module is not the price defining aspect here, and we're ready for faster chips when they come out. The idea is you can upgrade for a fraction of the price of buying a new device.
Are you saying that it's possible to upgrade the CPU? If so, that would be game changing and would put the price point in a whole new light. I can imagine "upgrading" my computer to a faster processor like we do with RAM. That means you wouldn't have to dispose the old machine and re-install all the software. That's gotta be worth something to some people!
There are a lot of people alive now who were not caring-about-socketed-CPUs-in-laptops-years-old when that was a thing (and even then, I had at least three 386SX laptops with soldered-on CPUs)
I do get that this isn't trying to compete with the closed-hardware market; no-one is cross-shopping the MNT Reform 2 with a MacBook Air (which does also have a milled, anodized aluminum case).
It's mostly just a note of despair about how large the gap is; you really have to care about the open hardware aspect to make the choice.
