Preface to the First Edition

It’s become a tradition that I write the preface to the Operator Handbook for a new MNT computer on that computer itself, and that is what I’m doing right now. I’m so grateful for having arrived at this moment. It took more than two years to develop this machine, and getting it ready to ship it to you. It was hard to get here. I remember that roughly in the middle of 2025, I said to some members of the team, “Looks like we figured out a way to break even [with MNT], we have a processor that works well enough for a lot of people, we smoothed out a lot of bumps in our supply chain, maybe we can finally just focus on refining what we have, and have a vacation sometimes.”

Totally jinxed it. The AI industry, driven by unfathomable new levels of greed, gobbled up all the memory chips, prices for SSDs and DRAM exploded. Luckily, we had already sourced the processor modules for the MNT Reform Next campaign—but not all of the SSDs. By New Year’s Day 2026, parts of the tech press had already declared the personal computing market over (we disagree). I have to admit that I had some sleepless nights over how to make everything work.

But we didn’t despair, and thanks to your unwavering support, we’re still here. Open hardware computers—developed and understandable by actual humans—are needed more than ever. Every new crisis emphasizes the points that we’ve been trying to make since the summer of 2017, when we started the original MNT Reform project. 10 years ago, people with mainstream tech industry backgrounds didn’t get why we were trying to make laptops that are repairable and upgradable by anyone, and why we were giving away the design files and sources, so that the computers and their parts could be manufactured in low-tech ways in different places, if needed. Then came COVID-19, a total disruption of electronics supply chains, a comeback of (techno-)fascism, and more global crises. Making less resource intensive and more independent computing devices doesn’t look so far-fetched today.

MNT Reform Next is our tiny contribution to improve the status quo. This laptop is the result of many lessons that my team and I learned along the way, including lots of feedback from people who used our earlier models. While it looks and feels more streamlined from the outside, and is designed as a “daily driver”, it’s even more modular and hackable than the “classic” MNT Reform if you peek beneath its surface. This book is meant to be your companion for when you do.

—Lucie, Berlin, 2026-09-07