Because, once it's working, you have an upgradable laptop: every time a new rPI comes out, you can swap it out.

Eventually you'll have a better/faster computer than the Intel Centrino, with potentially much better battery life, modern hardware (USB3+, better radio connectivity), better software support (for instance, mainstream Linux distros are now deprecating support for non-PAE CPUs).

I've been giving this some thought: I have a gutted MacBook Pro I plan to perform the same surgery on. Someone spilled soda on it, so the mainboard was already fried... therefore it's not even a downgrade. It's an upgrade from a brick.

Reason I'm asking is: I have an old Centrino laptop as well as an RPi2 and RPi3. The Centrino is so much faster than the RPi's, it's not even in the same league. And as long as the Raspberrys are married to Broadcom, I think it will take quite some time until we have an RPi that has similar speed like my old Centrino. Don't get me wrong, I love my RPis, and if my old Centrino breaks, maybe I'd do something similar, but I'd never trash it while it's still working. Just seems wasteful to me.

It could also be not only about pure speed - look at what even the RPi 1 can do in terms of media playback. My (working) Centrino laptop can just barely play youtube html 5 videos. If you want a small mediaplayer (remember those portable DVD players? :P) this sounds totally viable.

Ditto. I have two dead macbook pros with good screens / keyboards. The mobos are dead and nobody will buy them from me. This seems like a possible future project. I make writing software and I've always wanted to make a cut down Linux distro for writers (there used to be one but its no longer available). Rpi would be a perfect target, and a MacBook screen and keyboard would be a nice addition

I'd also love to stick a pi in an old keyboard computer like an Atari ST or Amiga.

My email is in my profile. I'd love to exchange tips and encouragement as we progress on this project.

This is the concept behind the (much-better executed) EOMA68 project.[0] You can buy a single laptop chassis, and then upgrade or swap the processing unit as you please.

[0] https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

According to the article, it wasn't a working laptop, he bought it off eBay for £15 as a parts machine. His only requirement was a working screen and keyboard since he planned to gut it for the Pi.

I was thinking about doing something like this myself a while back, and my oldest laptop, a Dell Latitude CPx with a PIII 500MHz CPU, would be ideal since I could reuse the power supply and batteries (it has two battery bays) with a simple charge controller/voltage converter. But, the laptop is in nearly mint condition and runs so well I can't bear to destroy it. It's easily as fast as the newest Pi, and it runs OpenBSD very well, which will likely never be ported to the Pi.

Definitely get you on 'not fussing with it' and cost/effort - but for completeness:

There are other small SoC/Maker boards would fit the bill:

https://www.openbsd.org/armv7.html

And people are working on Pi support, after all:

http://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=147059203101111&w=2

I was under the impression that Theo had put a hard "fuck no" on ever porting OpenBSD to the Pi until Broadcom fully opens up the hardware (full documentation and blob-free booting). While Broadcom has been releasing documentation, there are no official plans that I'm aware of for ever booting the Pi without the firmware blob.

Don't get me wrong, I will gladly welcome OpenBSD on the Pi if it ever happens; one of my favorite OSes on one of my favorite platforms. But I'm not holding my breath.

As for other SoCs/boards; there simply is no other board with the combination of support, community, power, cost efficiency, and versatility that the Pi enjoys. Pretty much any other SBC is lacking in one or more areas critical to making such an endeavor worthwhile. The only thing that comes close is the Nvidia Jetson TX2, and it's cost prohibitive for this kind of project when you can get a mainstream AMD64 ultrabook for half the price of that board alone.

Broadcom released documentation and driver source code for VideoCore in 2014 so it should be easier to port things to the RPi now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_and_open-source_graphics_...

AFAIK Linux distribution for the RPi still use the closed-source bootloader, which is some commercial RTOS that needs to sit on a FAT partition and runs on the VideoCore chip (!). There is work on a Free Software bootloader: https://github.com/christinaa/rpi-open-firmware

> According to the article, it wasn't a working laptop, he bought it off eBay for £15 as a parts machine. His only requirement was a working screen and keyboard since he planned to gut it for the Pi.

Ah, I missed that part and mistook "everything seems to be in order" to mean that this is a working laptop. My apologies.

Maybe power usage? The Pi3 will probably get way more battery life than the original laptop did. That is, of course, if the battery still has some life left in it. Also, since the rPi is such a popular platform, you can expect everything (WiFi, BT, etc) to work out of the box.

And how will he charge the battery without the charging unit on the mainboard?

He's adding that.. read the article?