The Clacktop: A Thinkpad Yoga with a mechanical keyboard
Impressively home-made, this is the sort of laptop we wish we could buy new
A Thinkpad Yoga, modded with a mechanical keyboard, may serve as a wake-up call to both Lenovo and Framework.
If you break your laptop's keyboard for the second time in a row, most of us would be inclined to just get a different laptop. Unless, say, you're a student on a tight budget. Marcin Plaza is a student, but he's an intrepid one: he measured up his laptop and his mechanical keyboard, designed a new metal laptop case, got it fabricated and rebuilt the machine to have a built-in mechanical board. We're impressed.
His project just showed up on Hackaday and we like it a lot. Plaza describes how he wore out the second keyboard in a row on his Lenovo Yoga 730 laptop. This is a convertible laptop: its screen can fold all the way back to turn it into a tablet.
What's more, his brother's identical model experienced the same failure. As Ian Fleming put it, "Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action". In this case, we'd say that if there's an enemy, it's not Lenovo: it's the wretched trend for thin and light laptops, and once again we're put in mind of Canadiangold's wisdom:
I don't WANT my laptop to be the Thinnest Model Yet.
I want a battery that will outlast the sun, a screen big enough to blind the person behind me, more USB slots than there are apple fanboys in the bay area, a fucking disc reader/writer.
P.S. I will pay extra for it to be heavy enough to bludgeon someone to death.
(We like his hashtag, as well: "#window shopping for computers and angry at the state of the industry". Us too, CG, us too.)
The keyboard he used is from Redragon, and we think it's a model K652, which is described as "ultra-thin" – albeit if not by laptop standards. This quest for thinness means that although there are more robust machines than this, there simply isn't room to fit better-quality keyboards. This is even a key problem with the Framework range of modular laptops: even its bigger 16 inch model is too thin to accomodate a keyboard with more than a couple of millimeters of key travel. (For USians, insert some very small fraction of an inch here, like 1/16 or so.)
This aging vulture is not alone in taking keyboards feel very seriously: other vultures have written about this too. The comments often tell us to go and buy something else, but the point is there aren't any good options left on the market. Some companies do make chunkier laptops aimed at gamers, which means they need to be thicker to have space for a discrete GPU and its ancillary cooling. We took a look a the Tuxedo Stellaris gen 4 a couple of years ago. The thing is that while it's got superb keyboard feel, it's got a terrible, cramped keyboard layout, and it lacks all the virtues laptops had as recently as the 20-teens: it has a very meagre selection of ports, and you can't remove and replace the battery.
This vulture lives on an island, and therefore has to fly a lot. It's very handy to remove a portable's battery and put the bulky part of the machine into checked baggage. It also avoids the spicy pillow problem. Once upon a time – oh, a whole decade ago – you could buy laptops with two batteries, and hot-swap them for a whole day of autonomy. Now, tech has made more power-frugal processors to deliver the same thing, but when that built-in battery fails and plumps up, the whole machine is destined to become e-waste.
We have great respect not merely for Plaza's modding skills, but also for the lengths he went to. He has shared the plans if you fancy replicating his build. He's no stranger to taking on ambitious projects, as his portfolio page shows. We suspect he is going to go far. ®
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