Any product roadmap for a new laptop?

#1

Hey team!

I have a lot of pi ‘accessories’ from custom/simple hats, to the pi zero cluster hat, and the PiStorms kit. But I just assembled the pi-top[4] DIY a couple of days ago and have to say that this is the first pi accessory that has blown me away in terms of build quality and attention to detail, I’m thoroughly impressed. I don’t think it’s even fair to compare it to other pi accessories as this in on another level.

All of that said, I’m really interested to know if you have any plans for a new pi based laptop?

The Pinebook Pro is proving that there’s a market for it. And obviously you’ve built some of them in the past. Though the pi-top[3] is a bit too big for me, and doesn’t appear to have an internal battery.

I’d love to see something modular, similar to the http://nexdock.com/
Basically a touchscreen on top, and a battery pack on the bottom, with keyboard/touchpad/ports and room to bring-your-own-compute

A modular ‘base’ could handle different options:

  • thin option holds pi 400 and some battery pack/charger
  • thick option could hold a charger, larger battery pack of 18650s and multiple pi’s for a portable pi cluster

I think MNT Reform is a great step in the right direction, but it’s built for a very specific SOC
(https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-personal-computer.html)

RYF/FSF certification alone would probably net you sales worth the effort, if you were interested in supporting it.

Anyway, I hope this letter makes it to the north pole!
Keep up the awesome work!

#2

Pi-top[3] has its own battery, i have been through both versions… Use it everyday…

#3

Oh really? That isn’t clear. My mistake, but the instruction manual makes no mention of a battery: https://static.pi-top.com/documents/pi-top/pi-top_Instruction_Manual.pdf
Also, the ‘getting started’ page on pi-top.com doesn’t even show it, implying it’s been discontinued.
How’s your battery life?

At the size of the pi-top[3], it would make sense to me to not have a pi-specific hub, and instead just have a breakout panel on the back to extend ‘whatever’ connections you want, and an internal power and micro hdmi connections to support putting anything in it…

Then you could use it with an Intel Compute Stick, Pi Zero, Pi3/4, Up-Board, etc… I mean, I assume this is intended for tinkering. Again, I’m not knocking it, it’s just not quite what I’m looking for, but it is close.

#4

Hi @modulusx,
The pi-top [3] does indeed have a battery pack. It’s not on the pi-top.com/start page because it has the instruction manual packed away in the packaging. In an effort to reduce our carbon footprint, all of our future generation of products don’t have printed instruction manuals.

You’re right that the pi-top [3] isn’t that open for those other pieces of hardware, but we’ve focused around the Raspberry Pi. You’ll find that you can install a Tinkerboard or an ODroid in the pi-top [3] as well.

We don’t have anymore pi-top [3]s in stock, though we do have a few resellers who also provide our products, who may also deliver to your location and prices may vary in shipping costs:

#5

Thanks for the detailed response @RezIN!
I think the pi-top[3] is cool, but not really something I’m interested in currently.

#6

Hi @modulusx
We built the pi-top [4] to kind of invert the laptop model. With the pi-top [3] you have a laptop format and put the RPi and experiments in the laptop. With the pi-top [4] the idea is you dock it to the experiments, which opens a huge range of new possibilities.

To get a laptop format, you can dock the pi-top [4] to our screen and keyboard. The benefit of this approach is that the [4] can be either docked to the back of the screen (and act much like a laptop) or be positioned at the side of the screen connected via the display cable, and docked into other projects (currently you can dock into the foundation plate or expansion plate for the robotics kit).

Magpi has a great review of the pi-top [4] with screen in the current issue.

There’s more on plates, the screen, and the robotics kit here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4NRky9mzJQ

Hope that helps!