Why would anyone buy that computer? It's too expensive for enthusiasts and too weak for doing real work on it. Not to mention its look and bulkiness.

By pure chance I just spoke to the guys who made it at Maker Faire. Very cool project.

They told me they have the full system running with zero binary-only blobs. I think that alone can be quite a selling point nowadays...

It's... "closely coupled with a Xilinx FPGA. It's designed for users who care about Free Software and open source, and/or want to modify and extend their hardware: all the documentation for the PCBs is open and free to download, the entire OS is buildable from source, and it comes with a variety of features that facilitate rapid prototyping."

More than enough reasons for me. I'd buy one in a heartbeat, if I weren't broke right now.

I found a page where someone made a case on why it might make sense to fund the project and buy novena system. Here it is: http://www.crowdsupply.com/kosagi/novena-open-laptop

The Novena laptop is a neat niche product, but I don't see it taking off, even in a future version. For almost any task one wishes to accomplish, it's better to build specialized hardware that interfaces with a standard laptop than to build a custom laptop. I think a peripheral would have sold better.

It would be interesting to see if you can use the Myriad option to swap it for a Ath9K, and use it as a WiFi card instead. I presume that the LM6002D is going to be wired to the shared FPGA. It'd be neat to have a 100% open firmware wireless card too.

$701,845 raised with 280% funded..

Congratulations Bunnie and Xobs ;)

Their fundraising site, Crowd Supply, seems like quite the underdog. Should I root for them?

Would somebody mind decoding the messages that flashed on the monitor behind him at the end?

Y3Jvd2RzdXBwbHkuY29tL25vdmVuYS1wdXp6bGU= is base64 decoded crowdsupply.com/novena-puzzle