Dear MNT Reform Next Backers,

Let’s cut to the chase: I had to make the painful decision to break a campaign promise, which concerns the capacity of the SSDs. Maybe you’re aware of the NVMe SSD and DDR RAM market developments of the last months. If not, the short form: prices for memory and storage have exploded due to chip manufacturers de-prioritizing the consumer/PC market in favor of serving AI companies and their huge datacenter buildout gambles, leaving the rest of us in the rain.

The prices for 1 TB SSDs (2242 form factor) in our budget was 50 EUR per piece, and the 2 TB budget was 95 EUR per SSD. My mistake was that I expected these prices to go down, not up, as I assumed that small form factor SSDs would become more popular (i.e. due to the Steam Deck and other handhelds). I did not anticipate the seismic shift in the industry that happened during the end of 2025, and that the companies like Micron would all but abandon the PC and consumer markets.

The bottom line: sourcing the SSDs with the original capacity, regardless of form factor, would bring us at least 33500 EUR over budget, and we unfortunately just don’t have the cash to absorb that kind of hit. So I decided to replace the 2 TB SSDs with 1 TB, and the 1 TB with 500 GB. Sourcing these was still ~5000 EUR more expensive than planned, but c’est la vie.

I’m extremely sorry to disappoint you with this downgrade, and you always have the option to cancel your order; but I really hope you’ll stay with us. I believe you won’t regret it, because the MNT Reform Next shaped up to be a really exciting and uniquely open machine.

The Upside

Because I wanted something good to come from this crisis, I decided to take the risk and modify the Next’s mainboard so that it gains a full-size 2280 M.2 SSD slot in addition to the existing 2230/2242 M.2 slot. The internal MicroSD Express slot had to go away for this, but if you really need it, you can get it back by installing a passive adapter card in one of the 2 M.2 slots. As 2280 SSDs are more popular, more affordable and in general more available, this change lowers the cost and flexibility you have to upgrade your Reform Next’s storage. You can even combine 2 SSDs, which not many (esp. smaller) laptops allow. Moreover, accessing the "big" 2280 SSD is a lot easier than before, as it resides on the top of the mainboard, under the trackpad:

The previous M.2 slot for smaller size SSDs is still around on the back of the mainboard:

Sourcing and Design Updates

I’ve sourced all the SSDs for backer units, and your RCORE processor modules, even with 32 GB RAM (now also, at least temporarily, unobtainium) are all stocked here, so I don’t expect any more trouble on that front.

We also have all the displays in stock, and recently got a shipment of 1000 new hinge pairs from Smooth, which Rob and Greta had to sort by matching torque (at least the manufacturer labeled them this time).

All the flex PCBs/cable designs are validated, and we’ve sourced small things like the ideal rubber feet (from Bumper Specialties, Inc.).

All the black vegan cactus leather sleeves arrived, designed by Greta and manufactured in Portugal by Nítido, and they’re beautiful.

I did a small test run of the left and right port boards (fully assembled) at JLCPCB and discovered a few bugs which caused some delays, but these are fixed now. I’m preparing a new test production run, incl. the new mainboard design, and if we’re not too unlucky, we should be able to use these for shipping the first units.

In January I traveled to Spain for 12 days and extensively used the MNT Reform Next every day for work and leisure, and came back with a list of small papercuts, like some too-sharp corners or too bright LEDs, or countersunk holes needing to be a bit deeper to not have the screw heads scratch the metal on the opposite side. Ana implemented fixes for all of these issues in the 3D model and I’m preparing a test production run for this hopefully final metal version, so that you’ll have a smooth experience with your Reform Next from the beginning.

Ailurux (of Tangara fame) is working since a few months on porting Linux drivers for the RK3588’s display pipelines to the Barebox bootloader, and already got DSI and HDMI working, and is now making a final push to get DisplayPort working as well, so we’ll hopefully have a bootloader with display/graphics and input support at shipping time.

Wrapping Up

Due to the mentioned roadblocks that we had to overcome, our timeline is a bit delayed again; we expect the first shipment of MNT Reform Nexts to leave our premises in May 2026, and I can’t wait for them to reach you. As always, me and my team are extremely thankful for your patience and support.

Best,

Lucie