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 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).
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.
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.
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.
One thing that doesn't come up here yet: our partners RBZ have developed an open hardware alternative SOM for MNT Reform based on NXP LS1028A with 2 Cortex-A72 cores and 8 or 16GB RAM. This is currently in the first bringup phase, but sources are already released:
I'm also personally working on a Kintex-7 (FPGA) SOM. This will allow us and others to implement RISC-V or other architectures, incl. retrocomputers and carry them around in a laptop form factor.
Hi, we offer MNT Reform with a custom glass trackpad as well! You can even swap the trackpad and trackball modules, and we offer them separately if you want to try another one later: