MNT Pocket Reform Retrospective
I wanted to love this machine but couldn't.
2026-08-27
In 2023 the crowdfunding campaign for the MNT Pocket Reform open source laptop started and I backed it right from the beginning, securing one of the first devices of that batch.
This week, about three and a half years later, I sold that same device. If there’s a time for a retrospective on my experience, it is now.
Spoiler warning: Given that I just sold my Pocket Reform, it shouldn’t be surprising that I have more negative than positive things to say. I will keep the good stuff towards the end before I wrap up.
Wait, what’s a Pocket Reform?
Reform is a series of open source portable computers made by a little company called MNT Research, based in Berlin. The first of these devices was the Reform laptop, introduced in 2019. It was a 12.5’’ laptop, very thick compared to modern mainstream devices but aimed for open documentation and repairability at a time when laptops generally were nearly impossible to maintain or repair. This was the age of the butterfly keyboard MacBooks after all which were a nightmare in terms of maintenance, with everything being glued in place and hard to access.
I had taken notice of this project but it didn’t seem like a device for me, it was simply too big, too much of an experiment, but I was very curious where this would go in the future.
In 2022 they introduced the next device: Pocket Reform, a smaller version with mostly similar internals, e.g. the same same CPU modules. It also looked much more refined with a metal frame, very nice surface finish, and overall extremely cool industrial design.
I had just left my last job in tech behind and was planning to go to university again where I would need a laptop for sure to read papers, run some statistics in R, work on presentations, and other usual university stuff. I hadn’t owned a personal laptop since 2020 because I generally prefer a desktop computer unless I really need it to be mobile.
From the original crowd funding campaign:
A Perfectly Sized, Versatile, On-the-Go Platform
Often on the go? Whether you need to take notes at work or in the classroom, write your novel in a cafe, or journal on the bus, Pocket Reform’s super compact, ortholinear mechanical keyboard has you covered. It’s quite inconvenient to use a full-sized laptop while commuting on a crowded bus or train, yet getting work done on a phone can be nigh impossible. Pocket Reform is a handy in-between device for using your time in transit efficiently without taking up too much space or drawing too much attention.
This adorable little machine seemed prefect. So in 2023 when the crowdfunding for the first production run started I backed it immediately.
Intermission: The ClockworkPi uConsole
As many will remember, in 2023 global supply chains were still in shambles due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s no surprise then that a small production run of a weird niche laptop faced some delays. However my university schedule didn’t care much for those delays so I had to find something to use until the Pocket Reform would arrive.
I settled in the uConsole from ClockworkPi, a funny little device that’s basically a handheld case around a Raspberry Pi CM4 with a screen, batteries, and a keyboard. It’s certainly not made to be a work computer, but a machine for tinkering and retro gaming. But it works surprisingly well for some basic productivity tasks, although the screen really is too small in some cases, and it’s not something I’d recommend for prolonged use with it’s thumb-operated keyboard. I would absolutely not want to write my thesis on this thing but it did get me through the first few months of university. I was particularly impressed with the battery life. It got about eight hours of runtime out of two standard 18650 LiPo cells.
First try: i.MX8M+
The crowdfunding model of the Pocket Reform shipped with the i.MX8M+ CPU module and 8GB of RAM. To be honest, the performance of this CPU was very underwhelming and made many of my use cases quite difficult.
Pretty much any modern web application was running at a few frames per second or was sometimes entirely unusable. And as as student who has to collaborate with others a lot I am often forced to use things like Google Docs so this was a pretty big problem. The other big problem was RStudio which is also just an instance of Chromium bundled as a desktop application and was also quite sluggish.
This iteration of the Pocket Reform was severely limited and only really usable with command line tools, and very simple things like a basic email client.
Another major issue with this iteration was the WiFi. Reception was notoriously bad and unstable, especially when the device ran hot, which it pretty much always did after a few minutes of uptime.
Second try: RK3588
The RK3588 CPU with 16GB of RAM is one of the configurations that the Pocket Reform ships with today and for a while it was the only one. The i.MX8M+ is no longer available from the MNT Shop. I upgraded to this CPU module as soon as it became available because performance was really the biggest problem for me.
The RK3588 was absolutely a big improvement over the i.MX8M+, but still struggled with a lot of tasks, although it was much more manageable than before. With it the Pocket Reform finally outperformed the Pi CM4 in the uConsole I was using before, although not by much. Given the price of the upgrade, I was hoping for a lot more.
More importantly, the RK3588 upgrade kit shipped with an additional WiFi adapter to slot into one of the Pocket’s M.2 slots. This massively improved the reliability of WiFi connections. It certainly felt a lot more like what the device was intended to be.
Battery troubles
The second big problem area after the device’s performance was battery life. It was designed to run for about 4h on a full charge, and it did that more or less. An early problem though was the not all USB-C PD chargers would charge the laptop. It took a few firmware revisions to get most chargers and powerbanks to work, and to get through a full day of use a powerbank was absolutely necessary. This was amplified by the lack of suspend support, meanig I had to fully shutdown in order to preserver battery life when I was not actively using the machine for a while. This happens quite a lot in a university setting where you often switch between periods of listening to a lecture and working on something and each of those activities can last anywhere between a few minutes and maybe an hour but you never know ahead of time.
What made the battery situation worse was the inconsistent charging behavior. Sometimes the device would just not fully charge and instead get stuck at something like 40%, which may have been a problem with the battery monitoring and not the actual charging, but a laptop the reports 40% in the morning after being plugged in over night does not inspire confidence. The fact that the battery drained significantly when the laptop was shut down also added to the overall battery anxiety. Leaving it unplugged over night would easily drain 20-30% of a full charge and the only way to really power it down completely was a hardware switch for disconnecting the battery, but that switch was not reachable without a tool.
The second revision charging board did improve on these issues to some extent but they never fully went away. I basically never left the house with the laptop without also carrying a powerbank, either to extend runtime or as a backup just in case the internal battery would give up earlier than it should.
Daily driver vs. hobby project
I think a lot of the issues I described so far would be fine, if the device was purely a tinkering project to figure out how open source hardware can work. And I think to a large extent that is exactly what it is to many people. However that is not really what it was sold as (see the above quote from the crowdfunding campaign). The next MNT laptop model, Reform Next, is advertised as a “daily driver” which to me suggests a certain level of reliability that is just not there.
That’s where I think the main issue is: There are some early choices in this platform that make a reliable operation basically impossible, mainly the fact that the official default operating system is Debian unstable which is the bleeding-edge branch of Debian so anything might break every time you run sudo apt upgrade. This is very different from what people usually associate with Debian stable, the main release of Debian that is known for it’s stability and safe updates. I know there were reasons for using Debian unstable as the OS, like certain kernel versions that were just necessary but not available in the stable and testing branches of Debian, but from a user’s perspective this decision has caused so many problems down the line and nowadays the technical necessity doesn’t even exist anymore.
A Debian stable system image for the Reform devices exists, thanks mainly to one single maintainer’s efforts, and it was the thing that made this machine much more usable for me, but that setup is not officially supported by MNT so if you’re running into a problem like a new firmware version being incompatible with the older Kernel in Debian stable, you’re kind of on your own, maybe with some help on the user forum. And this is not a hypothetical scenario. This exact issue was the last straw for me after which I decided to move on.
It seems to me that the priority of this project seems to be largely to make and improve the hardware incrementally with the assumption that users will figure out the software side on their own through community efforts. And while this sounds nice, it doesn’t really work like that. On a standard PC it does because you can basically install any Linux distribution you want, but this isn’t the case on a Reform device unless you have quite substantial expertise in messing around with Linux internals. The Reform laptops in practice are a much more unified ecosystem of specific hardware and software than any mainstream computer running Linux is and deviating from this setup is a very involved process that you attempt at your own risk.
I think, if it had been more clearly communicated upfront how much of an experimental project this is, I would not have bought into it in the first place. And it shouldn’t go unmentioned: that buy-in is quite expensive as low volume hardware often has to be.
If you need a laptop for daily use that just has to work because you need to get stuff done with it, this is not that machine and you’ll be much better off with something like a ThinkPad from a few years ago. It’ll be much cheaper and perform better.
Now, is that a fair comparison? No, of course not. A company like Lenovo has decades of large scale production experience, advantageous supplier contracts, and benefits hugely from economies of scale. It’s just not the same as a small indie operation like MNT. But I think it’s important to be clear about what you’re buying, what to expect of it, and whether it can realistically suit your needs.
All the good stuff
I don’t want this retrospective to be all negative, despite having a lot of frustrations with this device so here are the things I was really impressed with:
I think the industrial design of it is nothing short of outstanding. It feels great and looks extremely cool. The purple anodized aluminum and PCB top and bottom covers with the copper trace logo is an incredible look.
The mechanical keyboard, while obviously smaller than a typical laptop keyboard, works surprisingly well. With a little practice I got quite good at typing on it at my usual typing speed.
Having a trackball on a laptop is something I am going to miss. It’s such a good option for a small device like this where a trackpad just wouldn’t fit, and it works much better than other small solutions like some ThinkPad-trackpoint-inspired rubber knobs for example.
Easy access to every single internal part is also great, although I will say that something like a ThinkPad T480 isn’t that far behind in this regard. It’s a big difference though compared to many modern laptops that come glued together with no intention of letting the user do any sort of maintenance, a trend that gladly seems to be reversing a little overall. I think devices that go all-in in repairability like the Reform laptops are important to have around, if only just to show what is possible.
The sleeve it comes with? Really nicely made, sturdy, and easily the coolest laptop sleeve I’ve ever seen. Another point for MNT designing and making rally good physical stuff.
Where am I at now?
There were some tricky emotions to work through with this. I really wanted to love this machine and I do believe that projects like this should exist and thrive. But it just didn’t come together for me despite substantial effort. The more I tried to make it work the more frustrated I got and ultimately I much prefer computers that don’t frustrate me.
I said goodbye to the MNT ecosystem for now. I sold my Pocket Reform for a decent price to someone who will probably appreciate the tinkering more and I used the money to get a ThinkPad X13 gen2 from 2021 and a ThinkPad T480S from 2018 as an emergency backup device, and I still have more than half the money left. Both those laptops actually fit my needs of a somewhat repairable laptop that is still very reliable and fast enough for anything I throw at it, and I expect to use them for several years to come running Debian, just like my desktop PC at home. The X13 is my daily driver now and it’s pretty much perfect. I was able to replace the keyboard with a different layout, replacing the battery is easy, and that’s what I really need. And it cost me less than 25% of a what new Pocket Reform sells for today.
I think I will continue to observe the developments at MNT because I still believe it’s an important project, even if it wasn’t the right thing for me. I have a lot of respect for the engineering and design work that goes into these devices. I’m sure this is tremendously difficult work and dealing with production supply chains must be a nightmare. But I also hope there can be some better alignment of what is advertised and what users can actually expect.
Links
- Other reviews of the Pocket Reform from various people:
- Official MNT Reform website
- Debian stable images and installers for Reform computers
- MNT Community Forum