The original suffered from an underpowered CPU and a high price, along with a fit and finish that looked great but compared favorably to 20 year old PowerBooks more than modern computers (even "thick" laptops today were much thinner).
Seeing this one become quite a bit thinner, using an Arm CPU (RK3588) that is about as good as it gets outside Snapdragon / Apple M in terms of efficiency... I think price may be the major turn-off, as I'm assuming it still won't hit under $1k fully built.
But if they could hit that number, more people would be willing to take a small hit in performance/compatibility to have a fully open design laptop.
Performance-wise it's looking to be miles ahead of the ThinkPad X230's I daily-drive so I'm 100% on board (in addition to all the other gigantic upsides like open source hardware, repairable, LiFePo4 support, etc.)!
The CPU would've been good enough for a lot of things (especially the later revisions) - but it has a lot of other flaws.
A big annoyance is the screwed in acrylic sheet on the bottom - it looks cool, but it makes access very annoying. For something designed to be tinkered with I'd have wanted some quick access solution.
Next is lack of internal USB ports - there are just enough for the peripherals. Now there's enough space in there to add an external USB hub, but it'd have been way nicer to have an additional USB hub on the board, and a bunch of ports you can plug stuff in.
The CPU cards all have a different set of outputs supported - which is annoying, but I was expecting that based on other experience with projects trying to do that kind of modular system. Reality ends up having incompatible interfaces on your SoCs, and then you and up having to do the best with what you got handed.
RAM is also a bit of an issue, but for the use case tolerable (at least for the later modules).
My biggest issue (and main reason I'm rarely using it) is the keyboard, though - I was hoping for a good keyboard after all their talk about mechanical, but it's by far the worst keyboard I've seen in a notebook over the last decade.
Seeing this one become quite a bit thinner, using an Arm CPU (RK3588) that is about as good as it gets outside Snapdragon / Apple M in terms of efficiency... I think price may be the major turn-off, as I'm assuming it still won't hit under $1k fully built.
But if they could hit that number, more people would be willing to take a small hit in performance/compatibility to have a fully open design laptop.