I'm not sure many laptops that would withstand a drop. I wouldn't count on it
here either. There are fragile parts including the screen itself.
Originally Luke (lead designer) was thinking of a smaller laptop/screen.
Fortunately I convinced him that a 15.6" screen was the way to go for a
variety of reasons. One of these was mass appeal, the fact it would get a
full keyboards, be a real usable laptop, etc. The cost and availability of
parts was another factor. A smaller laptop would not be feasible without a
major redesign either. I believe one of the issues with a smaller laptop is
that the battery we're using would not fit into a smaller laptop.
Now there are other reasons that certain features are not included in the
design. You may have noticed that there isn't a PCIE wifi card, a SATA port
for a hard drive, etc. There are multiple reasons for this. None of the newer
SOCs that would be feasible to use have this. Some SOCs might look like they
would work, but either they are older, A10, or they would eat up too much
power (and there were other availability issues). While you could add a
separate chip to do SATA or PCIE or similar it would increase the power
consumption and that would result in more heat and lead to the need for a
fan/heatsink/etc. The battery would also need to be changed out as well. The
battery is a single cell ebike battery. This is good because it means we
don't need to build off proprietary system/parts. It's a simpler more cost
effective design. Thanks to the work of others there is a freedom friendly
controller for the keyboard/power/screen/etc that we can build off.
