I’m talking abundant I/O, great repairability/easy to open, maintain. A laptop from back when laptop manufacturers didn’t hate us.
The closest I got was a dell latitude 5500 which has decent I/O and a pretty modern processor.
If Lenovo were to make a modern T42 or something like that, not sparing the ports.
Framework, as someone else said: https://youtu.be/drxOpMsr6sM
It feels a little more on the closed source side to me. They have modular parts, but it is using their proprietary parts.
MNT reform is more open and modable https://youtu.be/_DA0Jr4WH-4
The MNT might be what you mean when you say old laptops. This thing is a huge slab.