Comment by selfawaresoup

MNT Pocket Reform user here, had mine for about 1.5 years now in pretty much daily use

Mostly I use it at university (studying psychology) for reading and annotating literature, writing papers using LaTeX, statistics in RStudio, and email, or at home whenever I'm not at my desktop PC and need something with a keyboard or otherwise more capable than my phone. Sometimes I'll take it with me on a trip in case I want to do some writing while traveling.

It sure is a conversation starter. I"m certainly "the lady with the cute cyberpunk-ish laptop" at uni now (I have the purple version)

Things I like:

- trackball: I wish more laptops came with that option these days. Love it - keyboard: I use a columnar layout on my desktop as well so the ortholinear one was very welcome and afaik the Pocket Reform is the only laptop available right now with such a layout. - case: it's chunky but very sturdy. I used to run a few MacBooks over the years and I always worried about their super-thin screen assemblies. I never worry about damaging my Pocket Reform when chucking it in a bag. This thing is really sturdy. - community support: whenever I had any issue, people on the user forum were quick to help and usually a solution was found very soon.

Things that could be better:

- battery life: I get about 4h on a full charge, which is fine. And I can easily get to 8h with a small USB-C powerbank. There's a guide on how to replace the battery cells with larger ones for about 8-10h of running time on the user forum but I haven't gotten around to trying that. Sounds promising though. - performance: the RK3588 is fast enough for most everyday tasks but it sure has its limits. I'm not going to edit my 50MP RAW photos on this machine.

Issues experienced:

- Debian unstable: by default the device ships with Debian unstable (sid) which has caused a lot of issues for me early on, just software breaking a lot. However there's a really good community project providing stable (Trixie) images for Reform laptops and since switching to that it's been smooth sailing. - some battery charging inconsistency: might be related to an early revision of the charging board and I'll probably switch it out for a newer one soon.

Who is this device for?

I'd day it's definitely an enthusiast device. If I just needed a laptop, then yes, I could have gotten an old Thinkpad or a Framework or even a Macbook Air for less money as others have commented, but I think open-hardware projects like MNT Reform are important. That's why I joined the early crowdfunding for the Pocket laptop.

I like that I can actually repair this thing when necessary, upgrade components (like I've already did with the RK3588 CPU), that Linux is the "original" OS for this and not an afterthought, that I can talk to the people designing it (I've personally been to their workshop in Berlin) and contribute things myself.

Knowing Linux basics is certainly helpful too. I would not want to throw a Windows/Mac user with no UNIX terminal experience into the deep end, especially not when running Debian unstable.

It's a nerdy and unique machine for people who are fine with some level of tinkering and I really like it. No other laptop feels like this to use and that's hard to express in specs.