I have daily driven this laptop since it came out. It's fine that you are not the target market, but there are enough people who don't care about all the points you made and have other priorities, even setting aside the weird airport comment (I fly with the Reform regularly):
I have schematics for every circuit and case part. I can (and have) use these to make whatever changes I want. If I run into trouble I have direct access to the engineer who designed them.
It uses standardized batteries I can get from many vendors for the foreseeable future.
If the screen breaks there are at least four different part numbers I can order to replace it.
I do not have to use a trackpad. The keyboard is mechanical and several layouts are available, some from third party designers.
The design of the laptop was a public affair in which I directly participated. I can include patches in firmware bug reports and they will be merged.
Instead of buying a new laptop every few years, I finally have one which has no secret sauce and I'm not locked into a vendor. Since I work in IT, I know how to take advantage of networking and distributed systems to leverage faster computers when I want to. In short, it's the computer I've always wanted.
I don't care that it's unfashionably thick, but others do, and I don't see any reason MNT shouldn't cater to them as well.
People can and will pay for a sustainable product made in a first-world country by workers earning a living wage. If you want a cheap Intel laptop, there are hundreds to choose from. The existence of a product which doesn't fit the norm doesn't make it "shit," it just makes it something you personally won't buy.
I have schematics for every circuit and case part. I can (and have) use these to make whatever changes I want. If I run into trouble I have direct access to the engineer who designed them.
It uses standardized batteries I can get from many vendors for the foreseeable future.
If the screen breaks there are at least four different part numbers I can order to replace it.
I do not have to use a trackpad. The keyboard is mechanical and several layouts are available, some from third party designers.
The design of the laptop was a public affair in which I directly participated. I can include patches in firmware bug reports and they will be merged.
Instead of buying a new laptop every few years, I finally have one which has no secret sauce and I'm not locked into a vendor. Since I work in IT, I know how to take advantage of networking and distributed systems to leverage faster computers when I want to. In short, it's the computer I've always wanted.
I don't care that it's unfashionably thick, but others do, and I don't see any reason MNT shouldn't cater to them as well.
People can and will pay for a sustainable product made in a first-world country by workers earning a living wage. If you want a cheap Intel laptop, there are hundreds to choose from. The existence of a product which doesn't fit the norm doesn't make it "shit," it just makes it something you personally won't buy.