It's a laptop with a mechanical keyboard, so not quite as exciting as it sounds. I was hoping for some sort of mechanical analog computer.

I was expecting something like Babbage's difference engine in portable format.

When I saw the usb hub I was shocked at how advanced it would be. I thought he'd just throw down a high speed at best simple thing. Not a board with frankly a lot of high speed serial and protocol conversion. I'm not surprised it didn't work but I don't know this person's background enough to fully know if that's the expected outcome.

Been using my mechanical laptop, an MNT Reform, for a while now, great experience.

There's a couple threads on the Framework forums with ~100 ortholinear keyboard users asking for Framework to release an ortholinear keyboard. I'm sure they're all feeling very envious of this flurpes guy.