Yes, I've modified circuits. I swapped out a capacitor in the audio circuit, I used to have cell protection bodged into my battery carriers prior to the advent of the revised version, and the second half of your question is silly, since there's only one "linux-first" notebook on the market, and the Pinebook Pro is not even nearly the same class of machine. It's a toy.
I have a stack of Thinkpads for which I can no longer acquire batteries. I'm glad you haven't had that experience, but you don't get to pretend I haven't.
The Reform design process specifically involved testing various displays. For other laptops you can, if you're lucky, get a part number for a hardware maintenance manual; failing that you get to disassemble it, find the part number, and look up compatible options. MNT had this information in the documentation at launch.
"Secret sauce" was a vague term. Let me be clear: I have a BOM for the mainboard of this laptop. I have the schematics, including KiCAD, for its PCB. The RK3588 is no better or worse than any other product on the market. For all the talk of RISC-V being open, you can't buy one capable of running modern software which is actually open. So, from my perspective, it doesn't matter if it's IMX.8, RK3588, RISC-V, or x86. It's the entire rest of the computer I'm concerned with, and the Reform is more open-hardware than any other computer, including the Framework.
You seem to be a 'single-issue consumer' with this binary blob fixation. I don't have any problem with that; I just don't care about binary blobs. I like open hardware for the maintainability and the extensibility. But at this point with incorrect comments like '3D-printed case' I'm no longer sure you're even arguing in good faith here, so I won't bother following this comment up.
I have a stack of Thinkpads for which I can no longer acquire batteries. I'm glad you haven't had that experience, but you don't get to pretend I haven't.
The Reform design process specifically involved testing various displays. For other laptops you can, if you're lucky, get a part number for a hardware maintenance manual; failing that you get to disassemble it, find the part number, and look up compatible options. MNT had this information in the documentation at launch.
"Secret sauce" was a vague term. Let me be clear: I have a BOM for the mainboard of this laptop. I have the schematics, including KiCAD, for its PCB. The RK3588 is no better or worse than any other product on the market. For all the talk of RISC-V being open, you can't buy one capable of running modern software which is actually open. So, from my perspective, it doesn't matter if it's IMX.8, RK3588, RISC-V, or x86. It's the entire rest of the computer I'm concerned with, and the Reform is more open-hardware than any other computer, including the Framework.
You seem to be a 'single-issue consumer' with this binary blob fixation. I don't have any problem with that; I just don't care about binary blobs. I like open hardware for the maintainability and the extensibility. But at this point with incorrect comments like '3D-printed case' I'm no longer sure you're even arguing in good faith here, so I won't bother following this comment up.