This device is seriously the answer to all my laptop problems. I really like the form factor of the XPS 13, but now I'm stuck with the complete inability to upgrade RAM. In what universe is that normal? Then I accidentally nuked the USB-C ports on the left side when it got wet, and now I'm left with a single port for everything, including charging. What!? Why? I tore the entire thing apart and there's just no way to replace anything besides the SSD drive, everything else is soldered on. I'm in Batch 1 and can't wait to get my full purchase email. I seriously see this as an investment. I'll pay full price for a laptop once more, and then every other incident like this will just be parts and labor to get things back to square one.
In a universe where you want high-performance energy efficient RAM. Premium ultracompact laptops have long moved to LPDDR which is both faster and consumes significantly less energy than regular modular DDR. And LPDDR does not come in DIMMs. And then you have Apple who are using custom package technology with custom RAM chips to cut down RAM power consumption to under one watt active, delivering close to 20 hours battery. You simply can’t have this with socketed RAM. Modularity is not a free lunch, as much as some people like to pretend.
> In a universe where you want high-performance energy efficient RAM [.....] You simply can’t have this with socketed RAM.
You make it sound like a prerequisite. I'm pretty sure the reason LPDDR is Low Power is not due to (currently) being unavailable in socketed modules - that would seem to be a side-effect of the original target market (smart phones).
They are just some BGA packages, I see no reason they couldn't be soldered onto a board with a socket. If you scan through the features that make LPDDR LP, they have nothing to do with sockets, or anything affecting sockets: lower operating voltage, more power states, partial refreshing etc:
LPDDR is low power because it is a more sophisticated device with more complex protocol compared to regular DDR, because it has a higher pinout allowing it to have a more efficient electrical connection and because the computer manufacturer can optimize the connection with specific chips in mind instead of having to support a wide range of devices.
I think the number of pins is a practical limitation. Current DDR DIMMs use 260-280 pins if I remember correctly, while an average LPDDR4X BGA package is 400 balls or higher. Apple uses chips with 877 balls. It is definitely possible to design modular RAM with high-pinout, but would it be economically feasible?
You can't compare balls on the BGA package to signal pins. The vast majority of these are for power and ground. LPDDR4 actually has fewer data lines than DDR4.
You can fit FAR more signals on the bottom of a chip and in a multi-layer PCB than you can on any socket you might think of. There is a practical limit to how small the pitch of the pins on a socket can be if it's going to be field-replaceable; at high pin counts, the length of the socket itself becomes a driving factor.
As an example, even moving away from edge-connectors (which are just a non-starter for 800+ pins) Samtec's highest-density high-speed connector, the NovaRay line [0] advertises 224 signals per square inch, so an 800 pin module would require 4 square inches of connector space alone, not to mention making the system PCB assembly thicker and compromising on speed, power and thermals.
So an FM2 socket (to pick one of the more reliable ones), which has ~900 pins has a 4.5in^2 area and adds ~.25" in thickness, while reducing the maximum speed you can get through the chip at the very low voltages necessary to run LPDDR, which is what I meant by compromising speed and power.
Not to mention that socketting parts reduces your production yield over SMT, increases your assembly cost, and cuts reliability (it's fine on a desktop because you almost never move your desktop, and there's usually a big thermal assembly bolted on top).
Pentium m used to be socketed, pretty reliable, and available for thin laptops. I'm not trying to dismiss the difficulty, just saying they could perhaps be overcome
That's the thing, who is everyone? Such technology would only be relevant to premium-level ultraportable notebooks. Desktops, gaming laptops as well as budget laptops would stick with the cheaper and more ubiquitous DDR. Smartphones and tables will continue to solder RAM on due to space constraints. Apple (who is the driving force in this market segment) won't be interested since they are going fully custom and I doubt that an LGA socket will work with their on-package custom-build wide RAM interfaces. So in the end we are left with things like Dell XPS 13, MS Surface and few others. These are all popular and impactful brands, but they are just a drop in the bucket compared to the total PC sales. And I doubt that technology reserved to only selected premium laptops is going to be cheap.
If LPDDR is faster won’t desktops and gaming laptops also want it?
One possible other compromise could be soldered LPDDR RAM, but with a DIMM expansion slot for DDR as well. I wonder whether the DDR could be switched off and the baseline power draw eliminated if the RAM usage was below needing it.
So I will preface this with that I'm not an expert. But as I understand it, multicore systems are already frequently NUMA, but to a degree that most stuff (I am eliding categories of code here, but you get the idea) don't have to really care. From my understanding of how all this works, the difference of speed and bandwidth for LPDDR versus DDR seems like risking significant complexity for an expandability that few people would use and in turn cause an everything-or-nothing problem, where either high-performance code is written assuming anybody might have this, or nobody assumes it and you get a pile of stalls.
I've never done anything beyond amateur electronics, so sorry if I'm way off base here, but it at least seems intuitively plausible to me that soldering the components to the board allows them to work reliably at lower power. With a pin and socket connection, you've got to try and be at least reasonably resistant to corrosion or other sources of less-than-perfect connection.
That said, I don't know that RAM chips are the hill I want to die on, anyway. Could we get to a better place if we dispensed with the whole, "just the one big motherboard," design, and looked to the old backplane-style physical layouts? Then you could have a module that contains the CPU and RAM and suchlike all in a single package, and move other things that may not want to be quite as tightly integrated off to another package.
Up until relatively recently, a lot of laptops and even phones would put the connectors on separate PCBs connected by a ribbon, so that damaging those wouldn't mean a $500 motherboard replacement.
I definitely remember ordering a replacement headphone socket board for an old MacBook and just putting it in myself, and I've done similar with, eg, the connector port board on a PS4 controller.
But I guess this is one of the hazards of Apple having their AppleCare programme— they can do the math and calculate that saving a dollar on the cost of making and mounting and connecting that extra component still makes them money even if they have to eat the occasional full motherboard in the first three years of ownership.
Not just for the easier replacement, but also to avoid translating the mechanical stresses directly to the motherboard. The separate PCB can mount in a way that lets it move a little.
Seems like this stuff maybe comes and goes— like here's a repair guide for a 2010-vintage MBP which definitely shows all the connectors being right on the logic board:
If you design to a socketed DIMM package, you actually have two trace domains, the CPU to the socket, and the socket to the RAM chips. For that to be reliable, you have to adhere to standards for DIMM (or SODIMM) so that multiple manufacturers can build compliant interchangeable parts.
If you solder the chips down to the main board directly, you only have once domain for the traces, CPU directly to RAM. At that point you can tweak the design for several goals, speed, power, etc.. And you can tune the drive strength on the signalling the same.
That is how you end up with more efficient soldered designs over socketed designs.
Yes, as I wrote somewhere below, LPDDR4 signal is actually more robust than DDR4 signal, and LPDDR4 controllers have more features to fix degraded signals.
DDR5 has more roots in the LPDDR4 than in the regular DDR4.
ribit and others are correct. While this may have been possible in the past, at modern memory frequencies and timings, it's not really plausible to deviate from what the platforms are designed for: LPDDR being soldered and placed a specific layout area relative to the CPU, and for socketed DDR, the sockets being placed in one of a few placements relative to the CPU, with a little layout wiggle room.
Edit: I guess to clarify, the plausibility challenge is that whether or not it is theoretically possible, the platform owner (Intel, AMD, etc) or the memory vendors (Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron) are unlikely to support the lark.
There’s no technical reason not to (I’m no EE but I’m sure it could be done somehow), but there’s no demand for removable memory. The entire consumer PC market is already a rounding error for the semiconductor industry, and the enthusiast market that would be interested in this is a very small portion of that market.
Like it or not, repairable/upgradable laptops are a thing of the past. There’s just not component support or sufficient market demand to make the parts removable anymore.
Way overstating your case. PC's might be on the decline but they are still far far from being a "rounding error for the semiconductor industry".
Laptops also make up a major component of that still very alive market so no, I disagree that there is not enough market demand for having laptops that can be repaired or upgraded. It's the industry themselves that have worked to hamper the right of repair while giving nebulous pseudo-technical rationalizations for it.
Modern laptop motherboards can easily be about the size of a cell phone. Most of the case is battery and the main board is a shrinking percentage of the BOM cost. The entire motherboard is the replaceable component. It’s less “right to repair” than the additional components and design required to make them repairable are more expensive than just replacing the whole board.
Seems like a deliberate design choice, not some inevitable consequence of modernity. Why exactly does the board need to be cell phone sized when the actual form factor of even a netbook is substantially larger?
Which you could also do by simply making the device a little thicker and have a battery run the entire width of the device. Point is past a certain point, thinness becomes more of a drawback than a benefit, especially given the trade-offs involved.
You might want that trade off, but consumers in general have been leaning towards thinner and lighter for years. Just look around at complaints about the thickness of early android watches being too big and chunky. Or the huge popularity when the first MacBook Air came out.
Given the option between thicker w/ a bit more battery life or thinner and lighter, consumers are choosing thinner and lighter.
Of course engineering is always a trade off, and it is possible to go too far in one direction. But it's not all or nothing, Apple is the one feeding us that false dichotomy.
> ...consumers in general have been leaning towards thinner and lighter for years.
> ...consumers are choosing thinner and lighter.
A) I'm guessing actually lighter more than thinner.
B) Are consumers really clamouring all that intensely for "Thinner! Thinner!", or is that a) because that's all that's offered, and b) the relentless hype from manufacturers -- above all, bendy phone maker Apple -- amplified by rarely-critical media?
Battery is a big part of mobile devices of all kind, but it's not “mostly battery” for most of those.
For instance, in a iPhone 11, the battery occupies less than half of the surface of the phone[1]. On a Macbook pro, it's about the same.[2]
[1] see this ifixit video if you want to see it by yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Feyqwf3cYtw&t=161s
Looking at the picture from [2]. it looks like the motherboard is really not much much bigger than a smartphone. There's a lot of space dedicated to ventilation (note the two large fans and the black cooling ducts under the hand in the picture. Some fraction of that motherboard is also the solid state storage. The picture here of the internals of an iPhone 11 https://www.zdnet.com/article/heres-whats-inside-your-new-ip... (I don't do videos) sure looks like it's mostly battery. If I discount the empty space, the insides are more battery than not battery.
It is mostly only a deliberate design choice in the sense that consumers have leaned towards designs that are smaller, lighter, and with longer battery lives.
It doesn't matter that the rest of the form factor is larger: there's not a lot of empty space in these, so a larger main board will still mean a larger and heavier device.
That’s a laptop from 2 years ago; the new M1 MacBooks are more indicative of where things are headed in the future. Things like memory and any custom ICs are just going to be integrated on the same silicon as the CPU in most cases.
Still bigger than a smartphone (it occupies the entire width of the laptop (when counting the heatsink, 2/3 of the width otherwise), and around one quarter of the whole area).
Also, your original sentence was
> Modern laptop motherboards can easily be about the size of a cell phone.
Here we see that the one and only best laptop in this regard comes close to the cell-phone-sized motherboard. That's far from what “modern laptop can easily be” means. Most laptops sold today have a much bigger motherboard than this.
(BTW, as much as I'd like to see non x86 laptops going mainstream, software compatibility is huge issue for an ecosystem as diverse as the Windows one (and Roseta 2 being too much of a coinflip isn't encouraging…), we might get there at some point, put it's gonna be slow and painful.)
So just...put LPDDR on a DIMM? Or some other kind of removable slot?? I see no technical reason you couldn't.
Or, instead of soldering chips, make little LGA slots for the individual chips. I can't imagine the tiny added resistance from an extra millimeter of wire and pin surface contact would impact much of anything and even if it does, I'd rather take that than have no options when the next Windows update makes my machine a paperweight (obviously exaggerating, but it's getting there).
The reason is signal integrity. Running a high speed signal (never mind a bus of 64+ of them) through a connector is hard and takes a lot of power because the connector can seriously degrade the signals. LPDDR can be low power because it doesn't have a "memory stick" abstraction, just memory chips and controllers. It's not the resistance that kills the signal, it's the inductance and the impedance mismatching.
I think you're referring to DDR3L DIMMs, which are just a down-volted version of DDR3. LPDDR has never had DIMMs because of signal integrity issues. They take power to resolve.
I would really prefer that a laptop was just a tiny bit thicker to fit a 100WH battery to compensate for that. My T480 gets 12-16 hours with normal use, I imagine it could easily hit 20 with current processors.
High-end 15" laptops already have 100Wh batteries, and 100Wh is the practical maximum. So abandoning LPDDR would lead to a reduction in battery life on the high end, which probably isn't going to fly.
True, but not that hard. I had some “dangerous experiments for kids” book back in the day and by far the most fun thing in it was aerosolizing flour with a straw to get the right mixture near your Bunsen burner for your own glorious short lived fireball.
1.5 hand granades worth of LOW VOLTAGE ELECTRIC energy released into A CIRCUIT over A DAY or more and protected by multiple safety cut-off circuits with thermal and other sensors.
vs
A grenade releasing that as KINETIC energy into YOUR FACE over the span of LESS THAN A MILLISECOND and protected by a spring and a keychain ring.
Even if a lithium battery of that size experienced a critical failure right in your lap, you'd get away with a few scars and some serious but treatable burns. And I've only heard of one commercial product in the last 15 years that had serial critical battery failures...
Airlines tend to cap lithium-ion batteries at 100Wh, so it’s quite common for laptops and power banks to go to or just shy of that. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/11/apple-introduces-16-i... speaks of a 100Wh battery. My latest laptop has about a 90Wh battery.
Hopefully your laptop and hand grenade have radically different power discharge profiles.
Lithium batteries burn, quite quickly but it still takes a few seconds, that can be pretty dangerous indeed but that's several orders of magnitude slower than a grenade.
There's a subtle difference. One is designed to release that energy in a fraction of a second in a frangible metal casing, the other is designed to release it over a number of hours. Yes, batteries can go wrong, just like any tech, but comparing them to hand grenades is just ludicrous.
> comparing them to hand grenades is just ludicrous
Next, let's calculate the energy input required to heat a small cup of coffee and compare that to a hand grenade. (Hint: The coffee wins easily.) I wonder how many hand grenade equivalents a 10 minute lukewarm shower equates to?
In some universe there's an internal combustion shower powered entirely by an operator ripping out pull rings with their teeth and throwing armed grenades into a heating chamber.
Is it any worse than having 0.75 of a hand grenade on your lap? If it starts to smoke, you throw it away all the same. Besides, this capacity is standard in larger laptops, but not in smaller ones for some strange reason.
Heh. Just what you'd guess. Interfaces allow separation of concerns, parallel dev efforts, competition. Integration allows optimization, at greater risk.
Their core contribution is modeling the options with net present value (NPV) to remove the guess work.
--
Tangentially...
They also explain the dependency structure matrix (DSM), a tool for modeling and visualizing architectures.
One big takeaway for me was their explanation of "complexity catastrophe". The crossover point when the cost of change exceeds the benefit. A metaphor superior to most interpretations of "technical debt", IMHO.
So when you have a DSM, these kinds of problems pop out, can't be ignored.
We believe that socketing memory is a good tradeoff to enable greater longevity through memory upgrades, and also a more useful upgrade path by being able to keep your memory during certain mainboard upgrades.
In the DDR5 timeframe, there is less of a power delta as well between DDR5 and LPDDR5.
I don't think you'll find any. The way I understand it, the savings come from the new LP variant of DDR chips and nobody ever bothered to put them on DIMMs.
And even if the DIMM design (it's more than just a slot) doesn't make sense anymore, we could easily make a new "dumb" memory slot standard that would allow us to swap out the chips directly - like we have for CPUs.
By the way, check out reviews of the Framework Laptop for a first-hand illustration of this effect. They seem to be getting 40-50% lower battery runtimes than laptops with comparable specs. That's example the problem — of you design for modularity, you have to leave some optimizations on the table.
The battery impact for us at this point is likely more a factor of additional firmware and driver tuning that we need to do. We've tested to 10-11 hours in MobileMark 2018, but have actually seen video playback runtime (which should be a lighter load) drop below that due to some audio driver issues that we're working through.
There is certainly some impact to using DDR4 instead of LPDDR4, but we believe it is still the better choice for most consumers by allowing for greater product longevity at lower cost.
Doubtful, the Framework laptop is pretty much like any other USB-C-based laptop, except that it reserves some space inside the chassis so that the adapter dongles are flush with the case.
Unfortunately, I am not aware of any document like that. There are some papers comparing everything efficiency of different types of RAM, and there is of course indirect evidence of premium notebooks having significantly improved the battery life after moving to LPDDR.
LPDDR does many, many things to reduce power consumption (the current version even does DVFS, which I think is a first for main memory; graphics cards have been doing interface DFS for a long time, but a high end graphics card will burn around 30-70 W in the memory chips, and uses extremely high speed PHYs running at around 20 GBit/s per pin in the current generation).
The only thing that really changes between DIMM and soldered on is a somewhat increased trace length. That accounts only for a very small increase in power.
PHY is only part of the DRAM chip, and trace length is only a part of what determines energy per bit, so increasing trace length by x % wouldn't increase overall power by x %, but a fraction of that. Thinking about it, there is a bigger problem than just energy/bit scaling; since LPDDR switches dynamically between high-speed and lower speed modes, the high speed mode is likely not used a lot. However, the low speed modes rely on being able to turn the termination off, which saves significant amounts of power. A socket may make that difficult to achieve, and if you have to run with ODT in the, I'm assuming, mostly-used low power mode, you might end up with a significant increase in power.
Of course there are multiple factors at play, but that observation doesn’t justify the conclusion that any particular factor makes only a ‘very small l’ contribution. Do you have even a back-of-an-envelope calculation to support this claim? The knock-on effects of increased trace length can be quite complex.
As far as I understand, a number of things make a difference:
- Socketed RAM is limited by the number of pins, DDR SO-DIMM for example has 2-3x fewer pins than your average LPDDR4X module. Having more pins helps running the chips on lower power as it was explained to me by an engineer (something to do with grounding and lower voltage, I am not really sure how it works but I trust the guy)
- Socketed RAM is a least common denominator, there will inevitably be some variance between different modules, which leaves you with less possibilities for optimizing the electrical connection
- Current LPDDR is much more sophisticated than regular DDR, the protocol is different etc. So you can't just stick LPDDR chips on a DDR SO-DIMM and expect it to work
I am sure one could design a modular system based on LPDDR, but the question is whether such system would be feasible. It would be limited to premium laptops only (as modular system would take too much space in a smartphone), it would probably need a higher pinout (which would mean a complex mounting bracket of some sort) and it would require laptop manufacturers to agree on a certain standard.
There are other considerations as well, especially if one wants to break the current performance boundaries. For example, Intel has announced that they will integrate HBM with their upcoming Xeons. How do you intend to make that socketable, that's 2048-bit memory bus. Or consider Apple's new in-house SoCs. By mounting RAM directly onto the package substrate they can potentially deliver high-bandwidth RAM in an energy efficient package without increasing the cost and the complexity of the mainboard. E.g. their upcoming hardware is widely expected to use 256-bit RAM, something that has so far been reserved for workstations. As you make the interface wider and wider, modularity becomes more and more expensive. Why don't GPU's offer modular RAM for example?
Modern CPUs are an order of magnitude more complex and usually built on a smaller process, yet we have no trouble putting them on intermediary PCBs to spread out contacts and allow larger pins. I see no reason we couldn't make LGA sockets for DRAM chips in the same way.
The beauty and success of DIMM modules is that they are a simple slide-in to install technology. It's easy to operate, cheap, robust, and it is very space efficient. Imagine RAM modules in an LGA socket instead... how much space would it require? How robust would it be? What will be the price? I am quite sure all of these issues can be solved, but is it worth it? Let's be honest, users who are interested in having upgradeable RAM in their ultraportable laptop are such a small minority that the practical interest in developing modular low-powered RAM is close to zero.
The practical interest might be close to zero because in the past memory upgrades a number of years down the road were one of the most common upgrades and added tremendous value and another few years of life. Similarly many older laptops got a second life by being upgraded to SSDs. Accidents like that, which prevent sales of new units, can't happen if storage and memory are soldered on.
I don't think this is the driver of these decisions per se, but it is undeniably a bonus for the manufacturer; non-upgradable devices become obsolete faster, necessitating new replacements.
I don't know about other brands, but for ThinkPads (both in the IBM and Lenovo eras), there was often a stated maximum RAM that was based only on the capacity of SODIMMs available at the time of manufacture.
But it wasn't an artificial limitation. In practice, once larger capacity memory became available with the same technology and form factor, it would work fine. I have upgraded several ThinkPads with memory beyond what the original datasheets said was possible.
I have absolutely no idea, but I guess the bus to the processor and other periphery could indeed be a weak point because of EM-interference. We have absolutely crazy data rates here and therefore very high frequency signals so proximity between components might indeed matter.
That said, manufacturers have huge ambition to not allow for modular design.
RAM energy efficiency is not important because very small fraction of the energy consumed by other components.
It only somewhat matters for power consumption in sleep mode when the RAM is the only component being powered, but at least on Windows that’s solvable with a fast SSD and hibernation.
RAM energy efficiency is extremely important because it is a significant part of the baseline power consumption. Power-hungry components like CPU and GPU can be run in the lowest power state most of the time, so it really comes down to RAM and the display. If you have a 60Wh battery and want to get 15 hours battery life, you need to get your idle power consumption under 4 watts. So even 0.5 watt in baseline RAM consumption makes a huge difference.
Performance difference between system RAM and VRAM is an order of magnitude.
Specifically, DDR4-3200 peaks at 25.6 GB/second per channel, modern high-end GPUs peak at 500-900 GB/second depending on the GPU model.
VRAM consumes substantial power to deliver that performance. On many GPUs, VRAM chips are actively cooled. System RAM doesn’t even need passive heatsinks, uses too little electricity to care.
GPUs do use fairly fine-grained dynamic frequency scaling on their memory chips for precisely this reason: having a top-end GPU run at around 15-20 W under light loads simply wouldn't be possible otherwise.
Yeah, but at the time my card only went down half-way, to 1200 MHz IIRC, while I made it go down to 800 Mhz in desktop mode. In gaming it was closer to 3 GHz. This was before my NVIDIA GTX 970, some AMD model.
Just really blew my mind how much heat the VRAM contributed.
I find this to be less of an issue than the noise it generates. If you maximise ram at purchase, the limitations of a laptop seem to be battery and storage more than anything else. A 8 year old MacBook is just fine for a lot of usage, except for the dead battery and limited storage.
Having these easily repairable would make my life a lot easier - this laptop looks great.
You've repeated this in a few places in this thread with this same sort of conspiratorial air, but when you are talking about south of 10W total consumption (sometimes south of 6W!), a watt is a very significant amount and has a very large impact on overall battery life.
Realistically 99% of the corporate and consumer laptops I have been party to are built to order with the right amount of RAM in and never upgraded. Those of us who actually upgrade are an insignificant minority at this point or pulling them out of the ex corp recycling lifecycle.
Another point is stuff that is soldered in is a lot more reliable as a whole. Amazing how many old machines can be resurrected by reseating the RAM.
Really I'm on the fence. I'm sitting here on a 16Gb M1 MBA also.
Now what I really want to see is replaceable USB-C ports. Those have a massive repair and replacement risk over the normal lifetime of a laptop. Lenovo / Dell etc solder them directly to the motherboard. One bad knock and the whole thing goes in the trash. At least Apple stick them on a daughterboard.
Maybe it's because I'm often looking at business-oriented laptops as a consumer, but I usually find the RAM and storage to be on the low side compared to the CPU specs.
I don't need a top-of-the-line i7 CPU (the improvement when going from e.g. an i5 usually isn't enough to really matter), and the premium you pay isn't negligible. On the other hand, the lower-end models that don't splurge on an i7 and come with a mid-range CPU such as an i5 instead still often have only 8 GB of RAM. That's definitely not future-proof or even present-proof for a laptop that otherwise has mid-range specs in terms of performance.
It seems ridiculous that you have to either pay for a top-of-the-line model or be stuck with sub-par RAM for the entire lifetime of the device.
Corporations will of course happily buy the higher-end model for their developers, so this probably isn't a problem in an actual corporate environment.
The approach Qualcomm has taken in their flagship ARM processors is probably correct for laptops as well as phones.
There are four low-power single thread cores. They do grunt work at high efficiency but low capability.
There are three medium-power single thread cores. They suck up more electricity when in use but can get tasks that the user cares about accomplished, and sleep all the time that the phone is not running the UI.
Then there is one high-power single thread core, which is just a turbo-speed variant of the medium cores. That's the one that wakes up for user interaction.
Of course, if you can scale power-consumption and computing together, you would just make an 8-core high-power chip and sleep and throttle on demand -- or, in-between, Apple's M1, which has four low and four high cores.
Maybe they're looking to start on a clean slate with their RISC-V investments then, they're late to the ARM game and will never catch up to apple or probably even qualcomm, their x86 designs are slowly and surely dropping off, and they'd have to make massive strides to change that.
This was definitely a driver for us. We want to let consumers buy exactly the machine they need in the near term (CPU, memory, and storage), and be able to upgrade just the parts that they need to later.
If some of the components such as RAM were made replaceable, that wouldn't be the OEM's problem. They could still ship only a few configurations. When you decided the original RAM or storage isn't enough, you'd just ask your local shop to upgrade.
I'm not even asking for upgradeable CPUs or GPUs. Those could be a bit complicated on laptops due to chipset compatibility, power and thermal design issues, etc. But RAM is relatively cheap, can be made relatively easy to replace, and is a common thing to run low on. The same pretty much goes for storage. It seems weird and counter-productive to have components like that be soldered in and non-replaceable even by a professional.
I don't see why that's the case for Lenovo though (which I'm most familiar with - Thinkpads), since you have to order online. They could do batches of different configurations, it might add a small delay for particular configurations, but that would be ok. What they do now, mostly limiting larger RAM/storage configs to top end CPUs, seems like an upsell (though at least their storage is usually replaceable, and aftermarket offers better price/choice, though the spare small capacity device is a waste).
In Apple's case, it simply seems like an upsell. They must have enough volume to sell lower spec, large storage capacity Macbook Airs at stores, or online.
Most people buy low end machines from Apple. They just keep volume handy. Although recently when I went to Apple store they had no stock at all here in the UK of anything. Literally emptied out.
Yes, but how much does it cost Apple to put a larger volume in, compared to what they charge the consumer for that one feature? I have very often seen Apple users hampered by this, including losing data due to having to juggle external storage. Upsell.
Tell that to European car manufacturers, almost no two cars are identical. I've heard that some models have more possible variations than there are v6 addresses.
The Framework's ports are all on user-selectable, replaceable expansion modules. If one of the USB-C ports dies, you just unplug it and install a new one.
What you're missing is that these ports are actually USB C dongles. If one of the _original_ USB C ports dies, it's dead. Ie the hot swap ports basically connect to USB C ports built into the machine. It's a clever UX hack (which I'm totally for), but it's not solving the technical issue here.
For transparency I actually love the idea behind the Framework laptop, I've been hyped since January!
It would be extremely difficult to damage the internal USB-C ports on the mainboard itself. The USB-C Expansion Cards are what cables would be plugged into and cycled repeatedly, and our Expansion Card bays also have mechanical retention features that mean the insertion of the card itself is always aligned to avoid wear or damage.
They mention that several other such ports like the audio and power are easily replaceable so that seems a fair assumption. The modules are also track-mounted and appear to lock into place somehow, so it seems unlikely that the internal connection will suffer the same kind of torture an external port would.
This is the least Appley thing I’ve heard recently. Making everything as small as possible with every single trade off that entails is their style. I say that as a hardline Mac user.
This reminds me of the day I dropped my new HTC One M8 into water. I grabbed it out within a second. The screen was still on and seemed functional, but rather quickly it started behaving erratically. The little motor that handles vibrate was constantly running. The device was getting hot. I couldn't power it off. The battery couldn't be removed. In fact, the entire case was sealed shut so I couldn't even expose the internals to dry them out more quickly. I basically had to sit and watch as it buzzed away and finally died. I swore I would never again buy a phone that couldn't be opened up.
My next phone was the Fairphone 2. I replaced the battery a few times over it's lifetime and upgraded the camera. I bought the Fairphone 3 as soon as it came out (and I'm still using it happily). My wife switched to the FP3 shortly afterwards. We both bought the camera upgrade and spare battery.
I think phones can be both waterproof and modular. Going by [1], waterproof gaskets usually come from either glue or silicone. Glue obviously inhibits modularity, but silicone gaskets work fine.
The Galaxy S5 is waterproof, has a rubber gasket over the charging port and a removable battery but not "significantly bulkier" compared to all of the current crop of mid-range/flagship phones - it's actually lighter than the glass-backed ones
Sure, but the reason they're nice to have for that one time that an accident occurs, whether a drink is spilled or you drop it in the sink or whatever.
That's just splash damage, which doesn't really equal waterproofing. There are different IP ratings for the two. Splash damage resistance is significantly cheaper and you'll find plenty of models that don't claim to be waterproof, but are still splash resistant. In other words, IP52/IP53/IP54 instead of IP63/IP64: https://www.dsmt.com/resources/ip-rating-chart/
I think Fairphone goes too far towards maintainability at the expense of other aspects. I don’t get a lot more value in being able to replace the camera in 10s compared to 20 minutes.
You better get used to it. RAM is going to move closer and closer to the CPU for speed and power reduction. And every major laptop manufacturer will move that way to compete. Especially now that the M1 Mac has shown what’s possible when every part of the system is optimized for low power.
What we can hope for is that SSD acts more like RAM. Maybe it could have a decent sized RAM chip that the OS can dedicate as cache for virtual memory. There’s a chance that at least some hardware manufacturers will continue to allow for replaceable SSDs.
Once you get to a certain stage, yes, modularity becomes very expensive. I do believe that things like SSDs or WiFi cards should be modular, because there is no reason for them not to, but RAM? We are moving towards high-bandwidth on-package RAM, why would I want to sacrifice 100Gbps of performance and 5+ hours of battery life — not to mention also paying more — just to have an option of upgrading the RAM some time down the line?
Right, and then even if you can upgrade the RAM, the machine may not even be compatible with the best RAM down the line anyway. It's hard to imagine another drop-in upgrade that will be as big as putting SSDs in old machines was.
Common? Yes. Normal? No. RAM is sold by the stick in any configuration you can imagine, yet these products are designed to prevent the simplest of upgrades. It's like being told that you need a new car because you want snow tires.
>RAM is sold by the stick in any configuration you can imagine, yet these products are designed to prevent the simplest of upgrades.
Of course, but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradable, even when it is, so they just buy a new device whenever they want to upgrade, because that's how they've been conditioned by the industry.
>It's like being told that you need a new car because you want snow tires.
Let's not give Tesla any ideas now. Joking aside, your comparison is not apples to apples. You can't easily upgrade the engine of your car from a four cylinder to a V8 if you need more power down the line, can you? Come to think of it, even upgrading the multimedia unit is a hassle in modern cars as each unit is locked to its production vehicle. On this note, when do we go after car manufacturers for this anti-consumer practice?
You're not wrong, but there are a couple of things here that rub the me wrong way.
> Of course, but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradable, even when it is, so they just buy a new device whenever they want to upgrade, because that's how they've been conditioned by the industry.
While that's true, that doesn't mean it should be that way. Having everyone buy a new device whenever they need to upgrade makes business sense for device vendors but IMO we definitely shouldn't encourage regularly tossing out good hardware. Not with the ecological costs of new electronics.
We don't need to turn everyone into a tech enthusiast or a computer service person. But if part replacements and upgrades were possible and people knew about it, a local shop or someone else could do the job for them.
> Come to think of it, even upgrading the multimedia unit is a hassle in modern cars as each unit is locked to its production vehicle.
The original comparison to cars might have been unfortunate (as usual), and you may be right that things aren't that different with cars. But again, things being in a certain way with cars doesn't mean that's how they should be with other devices. Or with cars, necessarily, but I don't know much about those so I'm not going to argue about that.
>but most consumers outside of tech enthusiasts have no idea which stuff in their laptop is upgradeable
That goes for everything though, most people don't know how a car works, yet you can replace every single component. The same goes for desktop computers and household appliances.
This has been the norm across many technical devices that have become part of everyday life. How many regular users know how a radio works? The point is that regardless of how technical they are, these devices have remained repairable by anyone who is so inclined.
The movement to proprietize basic maintenance on the part of manufacturers is purely profit driven, and is carried out at the expense of consumers, the environment, and overall innovation.
Yeah, but we were talking about "user upgradeable" here. Even my local dealer won't upgrade engines and most car owners have no idea how to change their oil or a tyre, let alone perform engine transplants.
One-off custom cars are a different thing same how there are YouTubers putting headphone jacks in their iPhones or upgrading the soldered VRAM of their Nvidia graphics cards.
> most car owners have no idea how to change their [..] tyre
Is this a regional thing? In Germany changing a tire is part of the "theory" classes. It's also fairly straightforward.
Changing oil on the other hand is illegal except in places with special drainage systems (like gas stations) because of the risk of environmental damage from spills, so it's not generally something you can do yourself. This restriction also goes for washing your car I think but some gas stations have places where you can wash your car if you don't want to use a car wash.
Yes, but a lot of car owners do change their own parts, replacing various filters, adding bolt-on parts, changing out suspension, tyres and the like. Just because most people do not do this, doesn't mean that this is something that should be forbidden or designed against. Cars are built to have replaceable parts, why can't laptops be the same? There are issues with the M1 equipped macbooks burning through flash due to users swapping out of the 16 gigabytes of memory that are not expandable. I don't want hardware designers to be legislated out of being able to do interesting things with packaging, like with what AMD is trying to do with integrating memory chips vertically on top of their SoCs, but I would appreciate if there was less hardware turned into e-waste due to a single formerly-user-replaceable chip failing or being deprecated.
Likewise, I'd also like to see less e-waste due to software deprecation (looking at you, Pixel 3).
>Just because most people do not do this, doesn't mean that this is something that should be forbidden or designed against.
And where did I say that reparability must be forbidden?
I was saying hat operations like transplanting a more powerful engine into your car is rare and difficult nowadays since grandparent made a reference to cars being easier to upgrade than laptops when that's not always true.
Cars are still easier to work on than laptops in relative terms of how many parts are user replaceable relative to the total amount of parts. Regardless, changing the engine is more similar to swapping out the whole motherboard and CPU. Not something the majority of enthusiasts would ever do, but there are some boutique shops that transolant modern hardware into X60 thinkpad chassis.
Anyway, swapping an LS into a modern miata is pretty simple and it integrates well due to everything being CANBUS compatible, after a sufficient amount of adapters is applied.
Relatively speaking I guess it is true? If your system is so hard to use that only power users consider it, you’ll only have power users, but those represent less than 1% of the population.
If you make it simpler, you’ll get all 100% of users, but now 99% of them are evidently less capable of using the system.
Does the analogy really work, though? Is RAM more akin to tires or some other component like the fuel tank?
I'd argue existence of interchangeable commodity components in computing has been very abnormal and because of the direction the "computer market" is going, I'm not sure how much longer it'll persist.
For now, it's still most profitable for the manufacturers and OEMs to source cheap interchangeable parts from many sources. If the industry consolidates even more, though, it may be more profitable to vertically integrate. That was the way before the PC clone market. Hopefully not, but we'll see.
What a bunch of nonsense. These are tiny laptops, and every bit of space inside is used. Soldering on RAM chips is an obvious optimization to make the laptop thinner. What were you expecting, a DIMM slot that's taller than the actual laptop body?
>What a bunch of nonsense. These are tiny laptops, and every bit of space inside is used. Soldering on RAM chips is an obvious optimization to make the laptop thinner.
THIS is nonsense. Dell, HP, Lenovo, even Fujitsu-Siemens have been making thin laptops with upgradable RAM for years now (XPS, X1 Carbon and LIFEBOOK series come to mind). Just recently they abandoned this and moved to soldering everything. The Framework Laptop also has upgradable everything and it's not super thick now, is it?
Sure, if you want to set a world record for thinness just because, then sure, soldering everything saves you a couple of mm but it's not why they do it in most cases, but to force planned obsolescence.
> Dell, HP, Lenovo, even Fujitsu-Siemens have been making thin laptops with upgradable RAM for years now (XPS, X1 Carbon...
You're just throwing names out there without even knowing what you're talking about. The very first generation X1 Carbon came with soldered RAM and no upgrade path, and that hasn't changed yet. I know this because I've owned several generations of that laptop. I just checked Wikipedia to back up my memory before posting and yes, every X1 Carbon has had soldered RAM going all the way back to the first generation with Ivy Bridge.
I would point out though that while he might have been wrong on the X1 Carbon, you still have not really dismantled the key argument - that you don't need to embrace soldered RAM to get laptops that are thin enough. At a certain point, you're just going to end up with an experience that is objectively worse since keyboards start having more and more give the thinner you make them (not to mention far worse feel).
I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.
> I'd make the trade off for more mm of thickness anyway.
That's great, then you can buy this modular laptop or one of many laptops that still has user upgradeable ram. Turns out you don't have to make this compromise if you don't want to and people that do can also make their own choice!
Ah yes, the "free market" argument. Remind me of how that one went with the headphone jack. Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier - despite it objectively being a worse device for it with almost no positives except saving a little bit of cost for the manufacturer. I do not accept the arguments on it being necessary for water resistance or providing much saving of internal storage either - since we have devices that demonstrate how these claims are bunk.
My point is that maybe there needs to be an organised pushback against this instead of pretending like customers have perfect knowledge of the drawbacks and benefits associated with a particular design decision and are not at all affected by marketing.
The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist because they're banking on there being enough people that care about this sort of thing to buy into their device rather than buying from a well established brand. That assumption will be put to the test very soon and advocates for this sort of device have a great opportunity to do so. The bitter reality though is that there might be a market large enough to sustain a company like this, but it won't make any big waves in the industry as a whole. Because people generally don't care.
> Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier
You're making a conscious decision about what sort of compromises you're willing to make with regards to your devices, just as everyone else is that buys electronic devices. There are plenty of phones with headphone jacks that have premium hardware specs. Sure, Apple doesn't have it. Samsung doesn't. But plenty of other manufacturers do, and people aren't buying them. Sony's top of the line smart phones have a headphone jack. LG's Vx0 line had headphone jacks and a fancy DAC built into them. ASUS's RoG phones have a headphone jack too. There's plenty of choice if it's actually that important to you. Buy those devices and hope that you can convince enough other people that the feature is as important to them as it is to you.
You don't need to shit on other people's choices nor assume that they aren't informed about the choices they make to want for the things that you do.
Which doesn't really disprove anything. Nobody is arguing that there are armed gunman that target any company that dares deviate from the chosen path of planned obsalescence. The argument though is that the market is overwhelmingly controlled by those that do practice it and furthermore, this practice has nothing to do with serving the interests of the consumer but that of the shareholder.
The fact that there are some that have been persuaded through years of concentrated marketing that bad engineering decisions are desirable is more of an example of manufacturing consent than the "free market of ideas".
It's incredibly arrogant to assume that the only reason why people might come to a different conclusion from you is that they've been manipulated into thinking that way through marketing. It's simply impossible that the indoctrination only occurred to other people and not yourself, right?
Your entire argument seems to be that "not every manufacturer's top of the line devices matches my vision for what is an ideal device, so I want to force them all to change to match that." Not everyone wants the same device as you and no, it's not just because they're all ignorant morons that've been manipulated into thinking differently from you.
Why are you so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions?
I never recall being "so vehemently against allowing other people to make their own decisions". I also am not under any delusions that I have some unique ability of being immune to marketing. Nobody is a moron here and in reality the only way to truly be immune to such things is being literally brain dead. Most people are too busy to absorb tonnes of domain specific knowledge of often questionable relevance to their own lives.
However, it's honestly pretty ridiculous to pretend like marketing does not have an immense influence on the trajectory towards consumer desires or that it cannot lead to worse choices by many objective measures. See cigarettes, fast food, hell, even the stupid obsession with buying bank bustingly expensive diamonds for marriage proposals. There would definitely still be a market for all of the above (and personally I am against any regulations limiting the freedom of purchasing even cigarettes for legal adults) but it was marketing that turned it into a cultural norm, not organic consumer demand.
It also does not need to be something that starts off as a bad thing. Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.
Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7. If your family have been purchasing Samsung devices predominately, chances are you will just assume that it's best to just get one of the latest one because it's reassuring to get a familiar brand and surely the latest automatically means better, right? Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.
Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive. Humans don't have perfect knowledge of the market and the leaders of that market will not only dominate airtime, they can afford to absorb bad PR if they deem that an unpopular decision will lead to better profits long term.
> Thinner devices are better up to a certain point, no argument there. However, it does start leading to usability and maintainability problems past a certain threshold. We have definitely reached and passed that threshold for many devices.
This is entirely subjective and I disagree. As do many other people. Some people want chonky 17 inch gaming laptops and other people want 12 inch macbooks and some people want something inbetween. Some people want products in form factors that don't even exist. I personally want a macbook with an ergonomic keyboard built in! But that's just me talking about what I want. The market for laptops is large enough to sustain a huge degree of choice, but you are insisting that there is an absolute limit on form factors as decided by... you? If not by you, then by what? The government? A standards committee?
> Customers don't exist in isolation, if you are locked in to the Apple ecosystem, you're stuck with their decision to ditch the headphone jack unless if you want to stick to phones before iPhone 7.
No one is "locked" into the Apple ecosystem. Not even remotely. You're right, if you want a headphone jack on an iPhone you'll have to live with using an iPhone 6s or earlier. It's fine to want a headphone jack on your modern iPhone, but that is entirely different from you not having a choice. There are markets where people don't realistically have a choice, but smartphones and laptops definitely aren't those markets.
> Feel free to strawman this as me claiming people are morons but for most normal people not preoccupied with tech, these assumptions are reasonable.
The entire premise of your argument is that consumers need to be protected from manufacturers. Sometimes, I would absolutely agree with that. But with laptop form factors? Or not having a headphone jack on every single smart phone that's out there? That's absurd. If someone buys a Samsung phone and finds out only after buying it that it doesn't have a headphone jack, there's plenty of actions they can take post-purchase if they find that aspect of their new device untenable.
> Also, pretending like blatantly unpopular decisions like removing the headphone jack and expandable storage are somehow in demand based purely on continued sales figures is stupidly reductive.
Is it actually blatantly unpopular? Are you sure this isn't just the false consensus effect coming into play for you? As I previously mentioned, for things like the headphone jack there are a ton of options with top of the line specs out there. Purchasing decisions are always about compromise and not every niche is always going to be accommodated by the market. My ergonomic keyboard laptop still doesn't exist, despite me very much wanting it to. I have plenty of fancy headphones I can't use with my phone without an additional external DAC. I guess that sucks, but given how I use my phone, it has had almost zero impact on my life. For people that find that feature indispensable though, then they will probably also have to think about their purchase and will rightly be upset that one of the features they valued in the lineup of phones they've been buying isn't there anymore. I encourage those people to be loud about it, just as you are. That's part of this whole market thing, and there's plenty of cases where people's voices have absolutely made a big impact on the decisions made by shortsighted companies. Just don't expect everyone to fall in line with you.
I wasn't trying to dismantle an argument, just pointing out that the parent had no clue what they were talking about, and a little research would make for a stronger position to argue from (and save some embarrassment).
I actually prefer laptops with upgradeable components and I'm definitely weighing replacing my two aging Thinkpad laptops (running OpenBSD and Void Linux respectively) with the Framework Laptop. I had briefly considered a M1 MacBook Air but I already have a M1 Mac mini and I try to stay diverse between form factors. The specs on the Framework are fantastic; even the i5 is a powerhouse, comparable to i7 desktops from just two years ago[1]. With the modular bays I could easily have Void on the main storage and OpenBSD on a module and choose between the two. I already have compatible RAM and M.2 storage laying about so the DIY SKU is a no-brainer.
As for keyboards I'm right there with you; the higher travel on the Framework's keyboard is another selling point in my opinion.
Sorry, I got the X1 carbon wrong from a list of 3 laptops off the top of my head. I must have been thinking of another Lenovo and mixed them up.
What I don't understand is why you felt the need to get aggressive and diss me in 2 different posts saying I have no clue what I'm talking about or that I'm making stuff up and calling for my embarrassment, only for a small mistake, when you could have made the same arguments without the personal dissing.
I feel like being kind to others, even if they're wrong, goes a longer way in productive discussions. I definitely will not be replying to you again. Have a good day sir.
I don’t feel that I was aggressive at all in my direct reply to you, maybe a little in my reply to the other commenter, but obviously you took it that way and I’m genuinely sorry. It’s not an excuse, but I just get so tired of people making arguments based on false statements of fact (whether from malice or ignorance) and it moved me to speak out when it seemed like that’s what you were doing. I see now that wasn’t your intention. You’re right, we all make mistakes and I made one too.
A better example would probably be the Lenovo T-series. Recent models eg. T490s have soldered RAM, but if you go back to eg. T460s there were DIMM sockets for upgrading, and the laptop was quite thin. But, that was 5 years ago already.
I too am dismayed by how older models of thin laptops lost DIMM sockets for increasingly diminishing amounts of thickness removed.
I ended up going with the below because I wanted a 360 degree touchscreen Ryzen laptop that I could upgrade the HD and RAM...and I felt like I was searching for a needle in a haystack. Shame on you Dell for never offering Ryzen in your convertibles. Shame on you HP for soldering RAM in your new Elitebook line.
Who's got the balls to disagree with Chuck Norris?
I would usually go for a smaller, lighter laptop (13"). But within that form factor, given choice over trade offs, I would put performance last (any modern system will usually do), size and weight somewhere in the middle, battery life and repairability at the top.
For the very thinnest of laptops it's probably difficult without soldering the chips on board, but many users would prefer a slightly thicker laptop where you can replace the RAM, SSD etc. I have never had a laptop where the thickness has been an issue and I have done a fair share of traveling while working in sales.
It's like a thoughtless race to make the thinnest laptop as if that is something that is useful. I bit like the megapixel race a few years ago. "We do it because it's difficult, but we can" kind of thing.
And then we have the aluminum body used on higher end laptops. Is that really better than high-end well designed plastic? When using my wife's Macbook Air M1 I suffer from the razor sharp edges while typing. (Maybe not related to it's thinness or aluminum body, but a big design issue). Has anyone noticed on the Macbook Air M1 the small vibrations it causes in the hands/palms when you slide them over the palmrest ever so slightly? Extremely annoying.
I bet these "small vibrations" are due to some kind of coupling between the mains and the case. Dunno, not an electrical engineer. See if it still happens on battery power.
No, it's nothing electrical. It's all mechanical. It's the surface which is slightly striped or bubbly or whatever and when sliding the hand or finger lightly over it, it generates a vibrating feeling. It might be less now after some months of use. Maybe the small cracks are filled with finger fat or something :).
Are you sure? I've also had this vibrating issue and for me 100% it was some sort of grounding issue with the power. Have you tried testing it when the ac adapter is disconnected? Its sort of feels like a very low amperage electrocution whenever you rest your hand on the laptop(if you know what getting electrocuted feels like)
I bought a few Acer's for my kids and upgrades were still really easy. I actually bought extra RAM and an SSD and had my daughter install them and it wasn't difficult.
Its great, but I really don't understand why they cannot ship outside like 2 countries (?). Its always such a let down to see a company in 2021 that doesn't offer worldwide shipping, and sells its products just in the usual 2-3 countries (USA, Canada, maybe UK).
At least give some FAQ with reasons or ETA when you will be shipping outside the US
They are working on EU right now. I imagine it's quite difficult for a startup to get licensing and shipping logistics done for multiple countries, and since NA is their biggest and easiest to target market, that's usually where they start.
I understand your frustration. I'm from the Caribbean, we get nothing, ever :`)
We have an ISO layout for UK English and other languages tooled and in testing. There are an enormous number of hurdles to shipping in each new country, across currency, language, customs, fulfillment, support, certifications, compliance, taxes, duties, business registrations, and more. We're working through them as we go, but as a startup we had to focus and pick a couple of countries to launch in first (the US and Canada).
I am also very excited about this, but the Verge review says the build quality isn't great. We'll see I guess.
I just hope that they release the next gen motherboard when it launches. Intel 12th gen, DDR5 RAM. I'm waiting for that big generational jump before making a purchase, and I really hope I can get a Framework.
XPS13 here also, I love everything about it except my fingers have totally chewed through the keyboard and the keys are all popping off all the time now. you can't get replacement keys, I've tried ordering from those scammy places and what they send you is not exactly the right fit.
broken keyboards / trackpads is why i keep having to throw out laptops and get new ones. so I am very interested in this laptop if they are actually going to make working keyboards / keys / trackpad replacements available.
Yes! We've designed the keyboard, the touchpad, and the full input cover to be replaceable modules. We've published guides for these: https://guides.frame.work/c/Framework_Laptop
We'll be making the replacement modules themselves available later this summer.
How long do you plan to keep your laptop? For my "carry with me" laptop, I just plan to replace it every four years and buy four years of accidental damage coverage. I break the ports or the screen, Dell comes out the next day and replaces it. For the machine I use to do my job, that's a great thing to have.
I can see the advantage of fully serviceable if you're on more of a 7-to-10 year cycle, but then you have parts availability. I trust that Dell will still have service parts four years from now. I don't really have any reason to trust that this company will still exist four years from now, let alone still make a full line of upgrades.
(Ironically, I've found that an old, out-of-warranty Dell is actually affordable to do major component repair on - because there are cheap screens, keyboards, even motherboards readily available. That sweet spot where a bunch of business machines are coming off-lease is when you can get a new screen for $35.)
I’m not advocating for any particular build paradigm but there are shops, at least in New York and here in Baltimore that will repair/replace soldered-on parts for you.
Soldering is not a problem. Your average tech should be able to rework most of the things, maybe except BGA stuff. Problem is no access to spare parts.
I hope you guys slay the market and are able to keep up with the demand that is coming at you.
I hope this is the Tesla moment for the consumer electronics industry where the incumbents are forced, through the hubris yet popularity of an upstart, to start innovating again and doing what is good for humanity rather than peddling incrementally changed products each year that are designed to become obsolete within an ever-shortening timeframe because....it appears to be good for the bottom line.
Repairability won’t be enough to get it there. But whatever company culture forms around this repairability thing could lead them to design a killer feature that Apple and Microsoft would never think of.
And repairability might be a moat for some feature like that.
It’s not inevitable, most new electronics companies don’t hit it big. But don’t write them off before they start!
They’re in the right place: they pulled together a group of contributors with a different way of thinking, a product is on the market, getting good reviews, and a cult following is behind them. That’s exactly where new big ideas come from. Give them a chance to seek it out.
I definitely support their mission and hope to see them do well. And you might be right that they form a culture or feature that proves to be game changing. However, on the surface, I don't believe modularity is something that the average consumer cares about enough to have this become mainstream just on that basis alone.
It could, but I think it will take something like that killer feature: I am a programmer, so probably more likely than most to be interested, but the modularity/repairability interests me only mildly to moderately. Not nearly enough to switch from my Surface Book, especially given that I have my nice little Raspberry Pies if I want to do some Linux stuff or play around with hardware
For me, the Fairphone would be a no-brainer if they sold outside of Europe. Seeing as how the Framework laptop doesn't have that constraint, it at least has a leg up in terms of customer base.
'Tesla moment' is right. They put all-electric cars in the public's consciousness. And then they went into the luxury auto business of charging and arm and a leg for repairs and parts.
I think low compute is actually a pretty interesting niche. By throwing all that compute at people, Apple all but guarantees the quality of software (VSCode extensions, web sites, etc) will be garbage.
I think the next major OS innovation will come from a company focused on architecture, design, and software efficiency over computing resources and device size.
Well, I am not an Apple devotee, either; moreover, my impression has been that, unlike IBM or Microsoft or Sun, neither Apple itself nor any of its products have so far made any impact on my life or work whatsoever. I may well be wrong, but I am not even sure if anything was much different had Apple never existed in the first place.
In what way? It is certainly another step forward in terms of battery life, but it's incremental and doesn't fundamentally change how people use laptops. Don't really think it changes the market either. People with Macs will upgrade eventually and people that don't use Macs now are unlikely to change because of it.
I use a sacrificial USBC extension cable for this situation. It isn't cheap to replace, but it is easier than the USBC hub or power brick I have may laptop plugged into.
> We designed the adapter to be modular, with both the 1m AC cable and 2m USB-C cable detachable and replaceable, reducing waste in case your cat chews through one of them.
Thank you. This is one of my chief annoyances with Lenovo's connector, and it smacks of planned obsolescence, since there is no other conceivable reason for it. I think every brick I've had has failed in the same spot: between the connector and cord at the laptop, which, of course, is the non-replaceable cable.
Yes! It seemed pretty obvious to us that this is the right way to go. Keeping the AC cable removable is also nice for international travel, since IEC C5 cables for different AC plug types are extremely inexpensive.
Our cat likes to chew on cables if we're not careful, and he has already destroyed multiple cables including one older Apple MacBook charger which costs like $80 to replace if bought from Apple.
Been there... I try really hard to keep the cables hidden so she can't see them, and my office is a no fly zone for her. So far so good. But she's ruined something like $300-400 worth of cables. Worse is the risk of fire or electrocution that bothers me.
Key highlights I'd like to point out is that you nailed the screen specs (3:2 and brightness) as well as the 1080p camera which is something that has always annoyed me.
Do you have a timeline of how long you expect to keep the mainboard design replaceable with this frame?
I'd personally love to see an AMD chip in there over Intel but this is right up there for my next laptop purchase (when i need!) - I expect people might wish to swap out the motherboard/cpu combo.
Major thumbs-up for AMD chip. With a replaceable main board, this will be a dream. I ordered a framework laptop at its highest CPU+RAM spec and can't wait to replace my 6 years old ThinkPad x250 with it.
EDIT: would also add that the open source design USB-C based side modules are amazing - looking forward to designing my own modules.
Congratulations! I am really glad to see Framework deliver - I forwared your website to everyone in my contacts list as I was really stoked by what you promised. I certainly hope you can keep up the momentum and consider launching better screens (bigger size, higher PPI, higher resolution) with better processors (AMD). Will definitely be ordering a Framework v2 or v3 (when hopefully you've ironed out all the kinks in v1).
I don't want to use an Apple laptop, but I do want a fanless design with M1-type performance and battery life. Can you do that with anything from Intel or AMD?
No and it's probably not possible to get M1 results out of anything remotely modular. The M1's success is largely due to vertical integration. You definitely can't get as good a laptop using a non-Apple ARM chip (see e.g. the Surface X).
Not sure if this is technically possible. However I would like to see in the future, version with AMD APU but replaceable so you can upgrade as well. Amd seems not selling ryzen mobile that is swappable but maybe possible to design motherboard that will fit ryzen desktop, undervolting it a little when not connected to power to conserve battery - even at the expense of slighty thicker laptop
We aren't able to announce anything yet, but we have certainly designed for being able to support different CPU platforms, and for folks to switch between them by upgrading just the mainboard or the mainboard+memory.
We don't have any plans we can share yet, but we did design the display to be easy to replace by putting it behind a magnet-attach bezel and using fasteners to affix it the lid.
Are you considering OLED as well? The Dell XPS has that as an option and it is a serious draw, especially for coders who stare at a mostly-black screen all day.
This might be a bit much, but if you offer an e-ink with the same interface as the laptop, it would be very cool to have an external usb-c case for it. So people can choose which display for their "main" monitor, and have the other one as an external portable monitor.
It would depend on your meaning. If you mean taking a device like a Dasung or a Onyx and connecting to the laptop and using it as another screen, then sure, that should work fine. If you mean taking out the LCD and popping in a raw eink panel, then no because they have different interfaces. Speaking of which, I don't see any clear specification on frame.work for the LCD connector or power specs.
I see they wrote on their blog.
"
We don’t currently have plans for alternate displays, but we’ve designed the display to be easy to replace and the display connector on the mainboard to be able to support a broader range of possible displays. It’s unlikely we would go lower resolution in this form factor, but I agree there could be an interesting case for a display resolution that works at 2x scaling (at the tradeoff of battery life).
"
But I couldn't easily find on their website the info for what type of connector and what type of power is delivered to it.
No matter how much you qualify an answer: “yes, but it’s extremely early in design, we may not be able to find the right manufacturers so it may not happen at all, but the earliest possible date would be late 2022”, there is a segment of people that will have an expectation that you will deliver the product before 2023 and will be upset if you don’t.
That is right. I’ve answered a few questions in these comments where the answer is basically: It’s technically possible, there is a plausible market need, we think it is worthwhile to do, and we’ve designed for it architecturally, but we can’t commit to a specific date because there are always implementation risks, supplier risks (especially this year), and a large number of programs we have to prioritize between as a small team.
I wouldn't rely on Framework doing this, but if the PCB dimensions were open source, I bet you would have a few companies looking to fabricate custom mainboards with ARM chips that could slot into the Framework shell :D
Hence why i originally asked about how long the motherboard design would stay with the current frame
1. Are you able to limit the min/max charge of the battery to reduce wear / increase longevity? For example, if I'm usually plugged into an outlet then I would want to limit my max charge to 80% or 60% since high charge levels degrade the battery faster, but I wouldn't want to disconnect the charger because then I'd be pointlessly burning through battery cycles.
2. Coreboot: whats the status on that?
3. When I violently yank my laptop in any random direction, the military-grade type-c cables that I forgot were plugged into all 4 ports on my framework laptop will naturally put significant strain on the type-c ports on the modules. My question is: how possible is it that I manage to also damage the interior usb type-c port on the laptop body?
4. What run-time loaded closed source binary blobs are needed for the full use of the hardware in one of your pre-built configurations?
5. Repair shops can get access to your schematics after signing some forms (presumably involving a NDA). Can I sign the same forms to get the same access?
6. If you cease to exist, everyone essentially just bought a bunch of proprietary dongles that are unlikely to be reused due to their size/shape. This would lead to the exact opposite of your goals by directly causing e-waste. Why won't that happen?
7. Is the fan, in any way, a standard form factor / are there models from competing brands that would work in that spot? I don't know how loud your fan is, but if I was unhappy with the noise from the fan it would be good to know that I could consider other competing models.
1) We don't have this yet, but it is on our firmware roadmap.
2) Also on our (long term) firmware roadmap!
3) It would be extremely difficult to damage the internal USB-C ports from force on the USB-C Expansion Card. You'd destroy the USB-C Expansion Card first, which is inexpensive to replace.
4) This is a great question, and actually on our list of blog posts we want to write. I don't have the answer off-hand, but it shouldn't be different than other recent Intel-based notebooks.
5) Currently we're limited to offering it to repair shops, but we're looking at ways to expand that in the future.
6) For the Expansion Cards, since they are standard USB-C devices, you can plug them into other USB-C hosts (though as you note, they are somewhat oddly shaped for that). We've also released open source CAD and documentation for people to develop their own Expansion Cards.
7) The heatsink and fan is custom to the system by form factor necessity.
Thanks! I'm particularly excited about #3 since I am a forgetful clutz, so having a sacrificial layer that ensures the ports attached to the mainboard stay safe is going to be great peace of mind.
I love it when company representatives reply meaningfully to all questions of a thoughtful request instead of just cherry-picking the convenient ones. Thank you for setting a great example.
1. Have you sent review copies to any independent review channels like LTT, Gamers Nexus, etc etc? I've seen the Tested video but that was in a very controlled environment and I'm mainly waiting on independent reviews before buying one.
2. More of a business question that I'll understand if you don't want to answer, without sharing any actual numbers, has the preorder volume been more or less than you expected?
Yes! We can't pre-announce anyone's reviews, but we have sent review units out to a few of the big tech review YouTube channels.
The pre-order volume has been roughly in line with our expectations. The one big surprise for us was just how much more popular the Framework Laptop DIY Edition is than the pre-built Framework Laptop. We expected some preference from early adopters, but it's actually multiples of volume.
> The one big surprise for us was just how much more popular the Framework Laptop DIY Edition is than the pre-built Framework Laptop.
I'd suggest the reason is primarily that it's a lot more configurable -- people can get closer to their ideal feature set for the least spend (if only by not paying for Windows if they just want Linux).
Full-size arrow keys: by adding another column of keys to the right side of the keyboard. That way you get dedicated Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys as well. See [1].
Grouping function keys: also put a wider gap between Esc and F1, F12 and Delete.
Mac keyboard: that'd be nice! How compatible are they to hackintosh BTW?
Hackintosh on this thing would be the ultimate hackbook. Same display ratio (not sure if resolution is exactly the same though), pretty much same form factor, and you can upgrade the ram. While they support intel at least.
Fingers crossed that Apple releases new MacBooks with Intel's 11th generation chips, since it looks like macOS currently doesn't support hardware acceleration for Intel's new Xe Graphics.
Can you give the roughest of indications for European orders (UK for me, if it's going to be that granular)? I've been signed up to the mailing list to be notified since first post here, really looking forward to it; I've been tempted to use Canadian pre-order via a favour ever since that opened up, but should I just be patient, will it be 'soon'?
Do you anticipate that (if this goes as well as I hope and assume it will/is) a v2 model would have an upgrade path from 'v1' (as it were, that for pre-order/sale now) - i.e. buy new case, new motherboard (or whatever) and it's effectively the same as if you bought the new one? Or have you accepted/do you think that not all parts can be fully modular and independently saleable?
We’re aiming to be in the UK, parts of Europe, and parts of Asia by year’s end.
We plan to keep compatible within the current chassis for the foreseeable future. This means that as we support new CPU platforms, existing users can upgrade to them by replacing their mainboard (and in some cases memory).
From the web site, the selling point seems to be around this being a "right to repair" laptop.
What's a bit unclear to me is that it seems the Framework Laptop is not be under an Open Source license, unlike the Pinebook Pro, the Librem 14 or the MNT Reform- the MNT being the most "user serviceable" as well as most repairable.
Is your laptop fully open source, or if not, what makes it special or different from these other products?
I'm guessing you haven't worked on many laptops. They aren't meant to be repaired easily in many cases. Want to upgrade the RAM, you need to upgrade both sticks. One is on the bottom side of the motherboard that requires 16 screws be removed and a pry tool to get the bottom case off. The second stick is under the keyboard that requires multiple levels of plastic pieces to be pried off and disconnecting the keyboard cable which can barely be reached. Want to swap the battery? That's 16 screws and enough force to break the adhesion that you are bending the case. Plus the system will complain about the battery if you buy it from the wrong vendor.
I like open source. I CARE that I have to trash a thousand dollar laptop because I can't source a replacement keyboard when the "S" popped off.
All examples I gave are real life examples which I've encountered.
So this would put the Framework laptop into the same category as a Thinkpad?
My old (8 years) Thinkpad has had: a new battery, a new keyboard (orange juice!), a new screen (upgrade!), new RAM, new HDD and a new charging plug.
All of the above were very simple with just a couple of screws to get the back cover off. No adhesive or force needed. Even the screen simply clipped off. The manual also comes with instructions on how to dismantle the laptop for repairs.
I sourced the OEM parts from eBay.
The only thing I was not able to change was the Wifi card. Apparently it's hard-locked to a specific model in the bios firmware, which I find a bit odd.
It actually would put us in a similar category to Thinkpads from the 2000's and early 2010's, but with modern hardware, a thin and light form factor, an upgradeable mainboard, and customizable ports with Expansion Cards!
I've noticed that you said you're here to answer all questions, but then you've been selectively not answering a lot of questions, like mine, and others who ask pointed, specific questions rather than mostly fluff.
I buy lots of "gadgets"- a Pinephone, LibreM phone, a PiTop, 2 MNT Reform laptops, several OLPC XO-1 laptops- and that's just my current collection (rather than my older collection of even more obscure hardware of the past), but you're not offering much in terms of either being interesting from a social good perspective, nor from a purely practical perspective ala my Dell XPS13 and System 76 Lemur.
I wish you luck, but based just on your HN interactions, you're occupying a market niche that doesn't really interest me- that of people who care a little bit about self-actualization and repair, but not a lot.
LPDDR4 is always soldered. There are Thinkpad with DDR4 if you prefer. They are usually heavier, thicker and/or more expensive (pick two). This includes the X1 Extreme Gen2 or the T14.
> I can't source a replacement keyboard when the "S" popped off.
> All examples I gave are real life examples which I've encountered.
Real life for me, too. The S key on my laptop no longer works. I took apart the keyboard to clean it one day, put everything back together, it all worked, except one key - S. Is there something about that specific key or is this just a weird coincidence?
sure, but the examples he gave are all designed to be easy to service AFAIK. I only have personal experience with a Pinebook, but it is fantastic. Just one bottom panel for most access, and one keyboard to remove for the rest. It is extremely hacker friendly.
But it's not a powerhouse CPU like this. A rock64 is no competition for a current generation Intel I5/7 AFAIK.
> Want to upgrade the RAM, you need to upgrade both sticks.
No. Single channel configuration is slower, unnoticeably on laptops, that’s it.
> One is on the bottom side of the motherboard that requires 16 screws be removed and a pry tool to get the bottom case off.
Wrong choice of laptop brand.
> The second stick is under the keyboard that requires multiple levels of plastic pieces to be pried off and disconnecting the keyboard cable which can barely be reached. Want to swap the battery? That's 16 screws and enough force to break the adhesion that you are bending the case. Plus the system will complain about the battery
Again, wrong choice of laptop brand. Panasonic? Theirs are good as long as you only repair and don’t fiddle with it.
For me, "open source" with respect to hardware would imply getting the PCB layouts and other such info that would enable me to modify the electronics and/or produce my own - like a software "fork".
The "right to repair" tells me that I would be able to get replacement parts from 3rd party suppliers. Once upon a time, Television units also came with the circuit diagrams that helped third-party repair shops troubleshoot and fix TV issues. I am not sure if such circuit diagrams would help with the kind of wave-soldered multi-layered circuit boards that we have, but it'd be nice to have, I suppose.
That's a good distinction to draw, and certainly clarifies things in some ways. The line between the two is somewhat blurry.
Back in the day you're talking about, components were often discreet enough that they could be replaced. Today even something as simple as a capacitor is often difficult to replace on a modern circuit board due to a variety of factors.
Certainly the large companies (Apple in particular) creates legal barriers to buying chips and other components. I think the distinction between availability and open source will be an interesting one to see how it plays out when hardware is involved.
1) We can't announce anything yet, but our current 13.5" Framework Laptop will certainly not be the last product we ever build!
2) See question 1.
3) We've designed the bezel to be color customizable, and there are some photos of orange and white ones on our website. We'll be adding more colors as we go. For the chassis itself, it is anodized aluminum. We don't currently have plans for additional aluminum colors though.
4) We have a custom keyboard with 1.5mm key travel scissor switches, which is longer key travel than most other <16mm notebooks.
5) We can't announce anything on Thunderbolt compatibility until we complete certifications, so keep a look out for that.
I love how you are actually mentioning the 1.5mm key travel.... on so many other laptop review sites, and manufacturer sites, they don't list the key travel. It is infuriating when shopping for laptops.
To hear it has a generous 1.5mm is awesome, i'll definitely be keeping an eye on it in the near future for the 15" version.
I edited the 4th question. Hopefully you see and answer 4b! Thanks for answering my other questions. I'll certainly be looking forward to your product as more information and metrics materialize.
I suppose what this really means is that you have USB4 with support for the optional PCIE tunneling, and support for the slightly higher frequency alternative mode, which is generally enough to function with peripherals labeled as Thunderbolt, since it is literally exactly the same protocol.
Somewhat obnoxious that you need additional certification to actually call it what it obviously is.
I find numpad throws off the alignment of the keyboard relative to the touchpad and to the weight of the device. You clearly want a numpad, but I would suggest most users should avoid them, particularly if the will use the laptop on their lap.
Fully agreed, for me, with any size of laptop the presence of an integrated numpad is a real nuisance due to how it awkward it makes typing and trackpad usage.
That said, there are times when numpads are useful. That’s why on my desktop, I have a discrete numpad sitting to the left of my keyboard, which allows the most used keys to remain centered.
It would be neat if someone made a numpad module for these laptops that can plug into either side of the laptop, and then be tucked away when not in use. The little rails in the module bays should make typing on the numpad almost as solid as typing on the main keyboard.
I would love to have a 10-key option, and to that end I have attempted using a wireless option. That device however won't even pair to my laptop. I would even be willing to use a wired one, but not enough of me to make it viable for someone to make. So many shortcut keys in my software are missing for a laptop keyboard. Instead, I have to use a full sized external keyboard and carry it around with me instead of just a useful smaller external 10-key.
This is so important. I bought a laptop with a numpad thinking it would be a huge win for spreadsheet jockying, ended up never using the laptop due to how much of a nightmare it is to type on due to the keyboard being offcenter. Numpads on laptops are just failure.
Any plans for AMD or ARM processor options? The amd ryzen stuff has nearly good performance per watt that the M1 does. I really can’t see myself buying another intel processor for at least a few generations.
Everyone loves to hate Intel (and rightfully so) but Tiger Lake has better IPC and implicitly better single threaded performance than Ryzen. In real world tasks (web browsing, opening an IDE) it often comes on top of AMD.
It only loses to AMD in multi threaded benchmarks because of the lower core count (everyone loves to flex Cinebench scores online, but I buy my laptop to use, not run benchmarks).
Also, the iGPU in Tiger Lake is more modern and more powerful than the outdated Vega iGPU in Ryzen and it also has AV1 codec hardware decoding unlike Ryzen which is stuck at VP9.
Add in Thunderbolt support and using Tiger Lake makes perfect sense for this form factor. Ryzen shines best in gaming laptops with discrete GPUs.
> In real world tasks (web browsing, opening an IDE)
My real-world task is not opening an IDE, it’s using that IDE. Modern C++ compilers are using all available CPU cores just fine.
> It only loses to AMD in multi threaded benchmarks
These are the only workloads I care about. Not just compilation, many other things as well.
You only need single-threaded performance for 2 things, for the stuff that’s inherently serial like gzip, or to run programs made more than 5-10 years ago.
I don’t normally play games on a laptop, but even videogames use multiple cores for decades now, since the Xbox 360 / PS3 generation.
> You only need single-threaded performance for 2 things, for the stuff that’s inherently serial like gzip, or to run programs made more than 5-10 years ago.
You must not be grand strategy game players. Any titles from Paradox and some other popular games are all limited by single core IPC. They are a great example of the limits of multi-threading, some processes and problems cannot be adapted to take advantage of it. If I get such a laptop I'd spend 50% of the time I use it playing such games.
> They are a great example of the limits of multi-threading
These are examples of lazy programmers and PC-only games. Consoles have many cores for decades and these cores are slower than PCs, developers of cross-platform titles have embraced multithreading for quite some time now.
Multithreading does have limits. Some things are borderline impossible to parallelize, examples include gzip, streaming encryption algorithms, or parsing long streams of HTML and JavaScript. However, vast majority of the CPU-bound stuff found in videogames scales just fine with CPU cores.
For gzip, try pigz. It's the parallel version of it.
I used to want high single core performance for my python code. I've since switched to using VSCode with devcontainers which run remotely on my 5950x. That makes it fast enough ;-).
I am informed by my personal experiences. I had an core i5 laptop from 2019 vs r4800 from 2020 and the experience was night and day running arch linux. Just smoother running everything on the AMD. And my power usage was objectively less and my fans turned on way less subjectively.
A single browser tab is single threaded, but you REGUARLY are forced to run several electron apps, and have many tabs open. Each requiring processes and threads and ryzen blows it out of the water in responsiveness. It was not uncommon for some language-server running to lag out because some chrome shit was blowing up my cpu/memory, which drove me away from vscode again.
The intel is maybe better for gaming or other inherently single program stuff. But at the cost of using WAY more energy and sucking for everything else I do regularly.
Further the m1 macs make them both look fairly power hungry and laggy.
> the iGPU in Tiger Lake ... has AV1 codec hardware decoding
Oh neat, I wasn't aware there were any AV1 decoders in hardware yet, that was always something somebody was complaining about on HN threads (probably MPEG employees HA). Tiger lake was released late last year and AV1 was finalized in 2018; that's got to be a record turnaround time from new codec to hardware decoders in top-selling chips.
Noted in other comments, but we have designed the mainboard to be replaceable and upgradeable by the end user to new CPU platforms. We haven't announced anything yet, but this is a core part of the design and architecture of the product.
One of the biggest causes of (un)planned obsolescence, if not the biggest cause, is an end to firmware and microcode updates. Once they stop coming in, vulnerabilities start piling up.
For how many years can consumers expect to receive these updates?
For the firmware we control, there is relatively little surface area and it is easy for us to continue to maintain. For the firmware that is delivered or embedded by Intel, we're in the same boat as everyone else using the same CPUs.
We've been testing with Ubuntu 21.04 and Fedora 34. We'll be releasing guides around both of these soon and other distros in the future. On Fedora 34 respins that are going live soon, everything works out of the box, including the fingerprint reader. On Ubuntu 21.04, everything works out of the box except the fingerprint reader, which requires manually upgrading libfprint.
Are you considering shipping your own distribution (for instance a modified Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever) and guaranteeing compatibility for that, or do you plan only to issue guides for other distributions?
Yes, we would very much like to rely on the great distros that are already out there for now, working with them as needed to ensure compatibility (which we have already done with a handful).
We haven't tested those internally, but we hope to see folks in the community try them! We are absolutely happy to help anyone who gets stuck, and as we see which distros are popular we can plan out more official support for them.
The Framework Laptop DIY Edition ships without an OS license of any kind. If you want a pre-built Framework Laptop, that does include the cost of a Windows license. The DIY Edition is super easy to set up though: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition...
We'll be posting up step by step installation and use guides for a few popular distros soon. We sent pre-release hardware out to developers and maintainers at a few distros and have been working with them on this. In the meantime, we also have a Linux sub-forum in our community where we expect folks will post their experiences with more obscure distros: https://community.frame.work/c/diy-edition/linux/91
The Debian wiki has a section for hardware-specific install guides, that would be a good place to put one for installing Debian on the Framework Laptop:
Very humbly from a full time linux user of 16 years- Id recommend you avoid their crowd- they are entitled and toxic. (as perhaps urself have noticed in this threas)
I am out of question-answering time for the day, but will respond tomorrow to anything new that comes up. Thanks everyone for the thoughtful questions, interest in what we're building, and belief in our mission!
From what I can find, the documentation on the screen just says it covers 100% of the sRGB gamut. That's nice, but do you have an example of a calibration profile that shows the full gamut coverage? It would be nice to compare it to Adobe RGB and P3 gamuts. Is the screen HDR or 10 bit input capable?
Not affiliated with Framework Laptop, but I’ll reply anyway.
It’s been my experience that when only sRGB is mentioned, only sRGB is supported. Adobe RGB is relatively rare these days, and any amount of P3 or HDR support is common only in higher end laptops with either very bright backlights or OLED. You might be interested in a new standard, DisplayHDR, which commonly focuses on how bright and technically accurate a screen can be. At this point there are often trade offs between screen technologies, but OLED tends to produce the “nicest” picture. https://displayhdr.org/
Also, as a correction, as long as you’re not performing colour grading on footage, you don’t need 10-bit input or output for HDR. It helps, obviously, but technically you can use dithered 8-bit RGB over HDMI 2.0 at 60 fps and still view HDR content with no perceptible difference between the 8-bit and 10-bit or 12-bit formats. For example: https://2020.smpte.org/home/session/325093/perceptually-dith...
That said, especially when using a computer, I really like the way scrolling feels at 120 fps, so I encourage looking for HDMI 2.1 outputs and inputs for that reason alone. Don’t forget you’ll likely also need a new HDMI cable. As an aside, I’ve tried adapters from DisplayPort 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 and they are so far rather unreliable and prone to overheat.
> It’s been my experience that when only sRGB is mentioned, only sRGB is supported.
I suspect this as well, especially at the price point the Framework laptop is being offered, but that's why I'm asking. I feel that manufacturers providing a approximate gamut coverage plot would be an enormous improvement to the status quo.
> any amount of P3 or HDR support is common only in higher end laptops
I disagree with this point. The MacBook Air (at $1000) is advertised to have P3 coverage. That's the exact same price (for a shipped laptop) as Framework. It also has HDR support.
> Also, as a correction, as long as you’re not performing colour grading on footage, you don’t need 10-bit input or output for HDR.
I'm aware - that's why I asked about HDR and 10 bit support separately. Worth mentioning that a bunch of cheap panels only really support 6 bits which then gets dithered, though. You're right that 8 bits in probably sufficient at the 400 nits brightness of the Framework screen.
> The MacBook Air (at $1000) is advertised to have P3 coverage. That's the exact same price (for a shipped laptop) as Framework. It also has HDR support.
True. But then it only outputs to one extra display, runs a chip Apple made from last year and hasn’t yet updated, and the rest of the industry isn’t Apple and can’t find a way to sell the same product in an iPad, mid-range desktop, entry-level all-in-one, entry-level laptop and entry-level pro laptop while manufacturing in quantity during the middle of a chip shortage. I mean, some things only Apple can do.
The closest comparison I can make to the Air in terms of price might be the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro for $999 which has an AMOLED screen, but that’s presumably because Samsung makes their own displays and wants a laptop to show them off. Everything else about the laptop is low- to mid-range and you need to pay extra for 16GB of RAM. Frankly most laptops with fancy displays end up being like the Dell XPS 9710, they ship with dedicated graphics cores and cost upwards of 2-3 grand. The exceptions with nice displays stand out as exceptions. To date, Microsoft’s entire Surface line has yet to go P3 HDR (iirc) with the exception of the Surface Studio, their giant (and outdated) all-in-one PC.
Frankly, if a third-party repairable MacBook Air with Apple silicon existed, I’d be over the moon, and more so if Apple came out with an OLED display, but in a way even OLED panels aren’t very repairable as if you get the tiniest of scratches the entire panel might need to be tossed, etc. And you might consider repairability from the perspective of “how inexpensive is it to replace?” If so, you wouldn’t want a part that’s only affordable if you buy in bulk, you’d want a screen that’s common and easy to get instead. Probably 16:9 aspect ratio too. So… a repairable laptop might not be the laptop to get if you also want the best of everything… for now, at least…
We use a BOE NE135FBM-N41 panel, which you may be able to find some profiles on from other notebooks. We haven't gotten a chance to generate profiles just yet ourselves.
I did find a review of one laptop that used this panel, and it looks like it's a designed-to-standard 8 bit panel with pretty much no coverage beyond sRGB, similar to the panels Apple was putting in MBPs around 2014 or 2015. Support for HDR (e.g. PQ) shouldn't be expected.
For what it's worth I'd be very interested in future upgrades for the screen quality. I'm fine with the current density (~200 DPI or so), although I know some have requested 4K screens. The real selling point would be a 10 bit panel with ST.2084 HDR support and full coverage for the P3 gamut. Something in line with base model laptops from Apple. (Obviously, such an upgrade would carry an understandable price premium.)
Do you have any other keyboard + pointing device design in mind? I've read sibling comments about trackpoint and numpad, but what about a 7-row keyboard and/or a smaller trackpad with real buttons for clicking? Is this possible? Do you see there's a market for it?
The cover that the keyboard and touchpad install into is the limiting factor. The tooling for that part is extremely expensive, so we only have one version of it. We have the ability to install ANSI, ISO, and JIS keyboard layouts with any language in the artwork, but we can't change the keyboard or touchpad geometry beyond that without shelling out big money for a new cover.
A touchpad with buttons is something we believe could fit in the existing cover though, and something we want to explore more when we have time.
How does that work then - do left shift & enter key caps bridge over the cover on the respective layouts where they're bigger?
i.e. on the US/ANSI layout photographed on the site - L Shift is using both L Shift and Backslash holes; Enter is also occupying Octothorpe, but not covering the hole above it where Backslash is in that layout? So you have a fixed, what I think the mechanical keyboard enthusiasts call 'switch plate', and then different sized key caps for the relevant keys making them occupy multiple spaces with dummy switches or whatever?
The current keyboard is not really fit to be used as a primary keyboard. A proper 7-row keyboard with full-sized arrows is really a must for people who use laptop keyboards as their main daily driver. Here's a picture of what one looks like: https://imgur.com/Epo5kBw
With or without a trackpoint, I'd really love to have buttons above the trackpad. I can't stand tap-to-click, and I feel much more comfortable on a laptop with buttons.
Everything else about this laptop looks great, especially the 3:2 screen aspect ratio.
+1, please consider offering this. A track point and 3 real buttons are so much nicer than a trackpad. At least to some of us. ThinkPads success seems to indicate there are a lot of us.
A touchpad with buttons is something that we have explored, and is in theory a replacement module we can create. Inserting a track point would be much more challenging from a cost and engineering feasibility standpoint. We may have underestimated the level of interest around track point...
Their warranty is utterly ridiculous. Even the EU mandates 2+years for all consumer electronics.
I'm not expecting Next Business On Site warranty from a new company (though that would be nice...), but an option for at least 3 years is the very minimum for me.
We'll certainly be complying with EU warranty requirements before we start selling there.
For longer warranties in general, that is something we would like to do. We're giving ourselves some time in market in order to price it appropriately, but since our product is easy to repair, we believe our costs for supporting warranties will be lower than it would be for less repairable products.
> We're giving ourselves some time in market in order to price it appropriately, but since our product is easy to repair, we believe our costs for supporting warranties will be lower than it would be for less repairable products.
Absolutely. In particular, I wouldn't expect an "at-home service" warranty this early in the life of your company, for such an easily repaired laptop. Rather, I'd expect a warranty in which you cross-ship a replacement part, provide instructions to replace it, and say "just put the old part back in the box we shipped you the replacement in and drop it in your outgoing mail".
Joining the chorus of those asking for a trackpoint equivalent and a larger gamut screen option. Love what you're doing and would buy today if those two issues were addressed.
As someone with experience looking into touchpad hardware are there any options that compare to the features and functionality of a mac?
As a predominantly windows based user every time I use a mac touchpad I'm blown away the fluidity and features like the psuedo-click. I've been eagerly awaiting windows compatible hardware of the same quality and functionality.
As a counterpoint, I love ThinkPads but never understood the appeal of the track point. I don't mind it being there of course, but it is not a reason to prefer one laptop to another, and definitely not the reason I like ThinkPads.
I normally don't ever use it however I discovered in some areas I work it is necessary. Attempting to use the trackpad results in the cursor jumping around the screen and the only thing I can figure is that there is electrical interference messing with it.
+1, trackpoint is keeping me vendor-locked to Lenovo. It's just too useful for text editing to pass up. And it must have 3 buttons, middle button is essential for scrolling.
Really love this product and the concept! I'd love if you guys would build a touchscreen tablet too, although at this point I'm probably asking too much. The tablet landscape ain't pretty with much of its electronic component were destined to landfill instead of being reusable like this.
A 13.5" laptop is our first, but certainly not last category. Just about every category in consumer electronics is missing a product like this, with rare exceptions like desktop PCs and what Fairphone is doing in the smartphone space.
Hey! Love the entire concept behind it. That being said, for mass-adoption and a large parts "ecosystem", do you guys anticipate you'll be able to get the initial price for the laptop down in the future with either cheaper casing materials or after recouping the initial R&D cost for the custom motherboard design and such?
It's totally understandable that the first product from a rather small company would demand some sort of higher price, your initial investment into R&D and product design & manufacturing must've been huge! But is this something we can expect to get a bit better in the future?
The base price for a new system will likely stay in this range, barring future lower-end mainboards like one using an ARM SoC. However, one thing that will help on cost of entry in the future is refurbished and used Framework Laptops. Since the product is easy to repair and upgrade, we want to foster a healthy secondary market.
We don't want anyone to put an old Framework Laptop that they are not using into a drawer and forget about it. We want to get them to list it on the Framework Marketplace to find another happy user.
If you ever do start doing bringup of an Arm SoC, drop me an email (in my profile) - I work on an internal BSP team at Arm and would be happy to (unofficially) assist
Some idea about considering other option as well. Would be great to buy your motherboard (original with some adapter or completely differently designed) that would fit into old macbooks or thinkpads - this way people could reuse case, keyboard, touchpad and maybe even battery or screen.
Is there a chance you might produce a fanless configuration? Since I first bought a fanless machine, I'm a total sucker for them and just stopped considering fanless computers for home use anymore (100% confirmed by my later buying choices). I'm happy to notice that the fan seems to be on the mainboard in your DIY Build video, so at a first glance it looks not impossible; but I also understand there's more to that, in overall heat transport and airways design/considerations, that's why I'm still asking and really interested to know the answer!
You can technically unplug the fan, but with a U-series CPU, it will just be throttling most of the time. A lower-power/lower-performance mainboard without a fan is something we could technically do in the future if there is customer demand for it.
Just wanted to say: great job! Am generally skeptical of modular consumer designs but this looks very tidy. As another hardware developer really appreciate the thought that went into this.
1. What was the sort of reaction to your unorthodox modular laptop design from the OEMs who are used to making standard laptop designs? Do OEMs have a preference for making disposable products or do you think that they see opportunity in making more modular machines that users can upgrade piece-meal over years?
2. Is there anything hardware wise that would prevent someone from making an arm based motherboard for this device, or even a RISCV based motherboard?
From our manufacturing partners, there was definite skepticism at first, but as we worked together it became immediately clear that what we had proposed was entirely doable! For consumer electronics brands, I think their challenge will be the business model shift that comes from focusing on longevity instead of short replacement cycles. We have a counter-positioned business model to that!
Nope, it is entirely doable from a technical perspective to build an ARM SoC-based mainboard for the Framework Laptop! I haven't seen a RISC-V SoC that has the necessary interfaces for it to work well in a laptop yet, but I strongly suspect that isn't far away.
I'm also very interested in ECC memory. Historically Intel has leveraged access to ECC memory as a price segmentation tool, so I wonder if it's even possible to support ECC until an AMD-based board is available. Unfortunately ECC memory is also significantly more expensive (probably propped up by Intel's segmentation strategy), but it is available in SO-DIMM form factor which kinda surprised me.
Pretty good already. I mentioned in another comment that Fedora 34 respins as of this week have full support for the Framework Laptop built in. On Ubuntu 21.04, everything works out of the box except the fingerprint reader, which requires a newer libfprint.
We designed the display interface to be able to support a touchscreen, and we've designed the display to be easy to replace, but we don't have a touchscreen yet!
Any plans to "open up" (for a price) the specification for outside companies, so they can build components labeled "framework compatible" or some such?
Absolutely. We’ve already released open source reference designs publicly for the Expansion Card system, and we’re happy to enable third parties on other modules too.
What about the cover with the keyboard and trackpad?I know you've said it's expensive to make tooling for, but perhaps a 3rd party could offer an alternate version with a trackpoint or something?
Have you considered going down the route of MIL-spec and turning this into a Defense-friendly product? Would imagine the armed forces would prefer to repair than to replace their hardware and the ability to upgrade down the line is basically how all of Defense contracting works
Yes. We have the necessary certifications for Europe, and are working through setting up keyboard languages, fulfillment, support, and everything else we will need to have to be successful there.
Great to hear! Checkout page request: please make it so you can buy a different keyboard than your shipping address/locale, in case that's not already on your roadmap.
Apple/Lenovo let you spec an “English International” (ISO) keyboard even if you're shipping to Germany/Austria, for example, so that you're not forced to buy QWERTZ.
It's unlikely we'll add discrete graphics in this form factor, but integrated graphics is actually much better than it has been in the past (e.g. Overwatch and GTA:V can run at 60fps), and there is also support for eGPUs.
We've designed the mainboard to be end-user replaceable for upgrades, and we'll be developing new ones for future CPU platforms as we go.
How is the eGPU support? I had to get a 2018 Dell XPS with 4 PCIe lane Thunderbolt 3 support since the 2017 version had only 2 PCIe lanes dedicated to TB3.
Yes! We're hiring across a bunch of roles in development, marketing, operations, and more: https://jobs.frame.work
We don't currently have anyone on the team in Canada, but we are definitely open to it for the right candidate. Please do mention HN so we know where people are coming from!
It is technically possible, but the cost of custom tooling for it would be unfortunately be astronomical relative to the number that we could reasonably sell. At some point in the future as we continue to grow the Framework Laptop install base, we'd love to revisit that though!
Does the extra connector reduce the quality of the USB-C signal? I am asking because my current notebook seems already a bit flaky with a 4K 60Hz display connected via USB-C, especially with an extra docking station in between. DP and HDMI directly from the notebook seem a bit more stable.
There is a small amount of signal loss from the extra connector pair. This is normally fine, but if your monitor+cable situation is already flaky, there is potentially risk there. We would recommend picking up a cable designed to higher protocol standards or using a shorter cable if you see issues.
The USB-C Expansion Card is purely passive passthrough designed to minimize signal loss and voltage drop, so it depends on the capabilities of the specific mainboard. The current mainboard does support 40Gbps through that card. For Thunderbolt, we can't state anything yet until we complete certifications.
It's a TI BQ40Z50-R3. I would strongly recommend doing a pack replacement rather than cell replacements for a Framework Laptop Battery. We'll be making replacement battery packs readily available at a price point that hopefully makes it the clear choice.
What helps us keep replacement parts available is that we'll be continuing to build new Framework Laptops with form-factor-compatible modules for the foreseeable future. That means we will still be manufacturing new batteries compatible with original Framework Laptops for many years.
Exactly. Apple even have third-party batteries in their supply chain (installed by an AASP), the printing of the warnings on the cells and the PCB date code look very suspiciously shanzhai. Yet Apple Support were able to confirm that the order number is real and the part came from them. They charged me $600 for it too. It'd better be reliable, unlike the $100 third-party one that idles at 12V, and a voltage spike when waking from sleep killed my logic board.
I'm in Auckland, and there's no Apple Store in New Zealand. The $600 price is in NZD, too, which means $418 USD.
It's not possible to replace only the battery - an AASP will replace the whole top case. I also think it's more expensive for older models, because the parts are not easy to find for a 2014 computer.
> It's not possible to replace only the battery - an AASP will replace the whole top case.
Yeah, this is true for Apple's battery service as well. I got a new keyboard and trackpad for the $288 SGD I paid.
> I also think it's more expensive for older models, because the parts are not easy to find for a 2014 computer.
This would only make sense if parts weren't ordered from Apple directly. I would imagine that they are able to as an AASP. Apple products only enter their vintage list after 5 years, and their obsolete list after 7 years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
In this case, it looks like the AASP would still be able to order parts for your 2014 MacBook without extra cost.
The AASP got the part from Apple, but charged me 600 NZD and the parts look shanzhai (blurry printing on the cells, wrong PCB date code).
Apple Support confirmed the order number is a genuine Apple part. Makes me worry about Apple's own supply chain quality.
The AASP also did a pretty shoddy job at repairing: the case screws were in the wrong positions, and the logic board was seated badly so I couldn't plug in USB. I just spent an hour this morning reseating the logic board myself.
We've tested MobileMark 2018 at ~11 hours on the Base config, dropping to ~10 hours on the Professional config (due to more DRAM). Runtime will always depend on workload though.
It would be awesome if you could provide a more real life test like the reviewers you gave the laptop to will do. Having matching claims on your site vs what the reviewers say can only help your credibility, which is much needed as a new product.
If you put 11hs on your site but the average reviewed time is 4hs, it’s not going to look great.
I know you guys are super busy launching this and there are a million things to look at, just sharing my opinion as a consumer.
The other thing that would be useful to know is a clear return and warranty policy. The items I buy from Amazon without much worry are the ones I know I can return easily, for a product as new and unknown like yours, I’ll probably stand back if I don’t know what the return process works like.
You can run 4 4k 60hz monitors simultaneously if you turn off the internal display, or three if you keep the internal display on. The maximum external display resolution is 8k 60hz, but you can't run multiple of those.
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T490 which struggles to drive two 4k displays at reasonable refresh rates. 4k60 + 4k30 is the best I was able to achieve so far (via Thunderbolt and an additional HDMI cable).
We have hardware kill switches for both the camera and the microphone. You can actually also remove that module entirely if you'd like. We published a guide on how to replace the webcam (so you would just stop after the removal steps): https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Webcam+Replacement+Guide/87?...
We're currently shipping to the US and Canada. We're working on adding additional countries, and making sure we can offer proper support in addition to being able to ship the product there.
Yes, I know that. I was hoping to see if he could tell at this point when they would ship with some specificity, eg. first week in August, end of August, etc.
The question was for Nirav. You dropped yourself in with an unhelpful comment. I told you it was unhelpful and you have now confirmed that, correct, you cannot help.
I noted in another comment that we partnered with Compal as our main manufacturer, as they are one of the strongest notebook manufacturers currently and they believe in our mission.
I see the cable from the keyboard in the upper lid not going directly to the main PCB, but first to the same board as the touchpad. Is there some IC scanning the keyboard right in the keyboard module, and turning it to something like usb or i2c?
The touchpad PCB acts as a passive signal passthrough for both the keyboard and the fingerprint reader, so that we can have a single cable going from the Input Cover to the mainboard.
If you want to repair or change anything on an M1 macbook you'd need to desolder components off the motherboard and then also own a spare M1 macbook for donor parts because you can't buy them separately.
> If you want to repair or change anything on an M1 macbook you'd need to desolder components off the motherboard
Exactly. Good luck to anyone upgrading the RAM or storage on that thing yourself. It is beyond risky to do this [0] (The article title is also misleading and ignores the extreme risk).
I don't think that [0] is remotely an option to the end user.
I love 3:2 displays. They're wider than 4:3 but maintain the vertical height necessary to see a bunch of code onscreen. If I only get one display (for portable use), I'll pick 3:2 every day.
Why not? Microsoft Surface devices also have a 3:2 display. Personally I love 3:2 displays as vertical space makes for a far more pleasant experience programming and reading.
Yep! The better experience for writing and coding with more vertical real estate is why we chose it. It also gave us a better form factor to work with for enabling our Expansion Card system.
The trend is going that way again. 16:10/3:2 is becoming very common again and that's great! The extra screen real estate is very useful and the body can accomodate a bigger touchpad. 16:9 limts vertical space a little too much imo.
We're almost all thinking it, so... are you trying to get sued by Apple, or what's the reason for 1:1 copy of the design?
Edit: To be clear, I'm not just trying to dunk on the idea. That would be the reason for me not to buy one if it looks like the vendor can fold because Apple dragged them to court.
The lead-in photo on that email happens to be at an angle that doesn't show off the distinguishing features and functionality. On our website you can readily see just how different it is from an Apple product: https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy-edition
It's such a tired design. I think the goals of this project is fantastic but man the macbook is getting ugly. They really need a refresh. It feels like it has been over a decade now...
Serious question: what would you expect/want in a design refresh? I'm speaking just of the industrial design, not the number and kinds of ports and such.
I'm curious because while I've also thought "yeah, these are increasingly overdue for an updated look," it's hard in practice for me to think of changes that I'd really want. I'm typing this on an M1 MacBook Air, and...I'm not saying it's somehow reached the apex of perfection, but other than a wider range of colors there's nothing that immediately comes to mind as an answer to "I wish the Air had [thing]". Smaller bezels? Maybe, but it's not like they're a glaring huge problem. A different shape? Maybe, but again, this is just such a nice one. They could bring in more of the current iPad/iPhone design language, especially on the MacBook Pro rather than the Air, I guess -- which is widely expected for the next refresh, so you'll probably get your wish in that regard.
Honestly just start with colors and/or black like say the Razer Blade, iPhone, or iMac.
I have a G14 with anime matrix led display and it's pretty slick looking (so cool how it lights up) [1]. I understand it's not as minimalist as a macbook but I've been blown away by the amount of comments I get on it's looks.
It completely goes against Apple's design DNA but maybe it's just the super minimalist approach itself I am finding tired. I like spice & variety.
That's fair. I mostly like a minimalist approach, but I'd like them to find space for just a little more whimsy than they've had in the last decade -- and I'd definitely like to see the laptops in more colors than "silver gray" and "kinda darker silver gray".
With all the other OEMs out there that have used the same exhausted design, do you really think Apple is going to go after some start up?
It has chiclet keys and a black bezel sure, but nothing about this screams carbon copied MacBook anymore than contemporary ultra book.
We’re pretty much in the modern equivalent of beige boxes and CRTs. Consumer computers aren’t very interesting to begin with. This one is a laptop that lets you swap out parts, that’s pretty unique.
Maybe Apple will go after some startup maybe not. As a customer why would I risk not having access to replacement parts because they can't be produced/sold anymore? Having a laptop that looks like Apple design is not a great trade-off here.
I was thinking what if this startup doesn't even exist in 5 years. And what if this replacement part thing becomes done by 20 other OEMs. But I don't see how the widely copied design from the 2008 MacBook would matter.
Also kind of sends the wrong message. Aping the masters of planned obsolescence and unrepairability. You'd think they wouldn't want an even passing resemblance to anything apple.
Great, you "somehow" missed my questions last time around.
>Every module has a QR code on it that you can scan for step-by-step instructions, support information, and a link to order a replacement from the Framework Marketplace
So its a dealer "repair" where you, the dealer, sell me a repair without the labour part in a form of black box to replace?
What about the schematics? the Board files? Firmware?
Who is the ODM? Compal? Pegatron? Quanta? Clevo? Wistron? Inventec? Flextronics?
Did you pay for fully tailor made design? Who else sells a laptop with the exact same design (ignoring form factor)? You dont have a single EE listed on staff. What part of the electrical design do you own? Do you own any part of it at all? This sure looks like tweaked Acer Swift 3 SF313-53, same ODM?
Do you own any part of the firmware that goes into the laptop? Will you be able to patch it?
"Great Webcam in a Laptop" Thinkpad X1 tablet 2nd gen uses same OV2740, isnt exactly known for great camera. Optics and ISP tuning are the important bits. Can you post a demonstration video instead of one 1mpix picture of a laptop screen at an angle?
End users have the ability to order replacement parts for every part of the laptop, down to the granularity of things like individual flex cables. We've also released reference CAD under open source licenses for the Expansion Card system for people to be able to develop their own (https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/expansioncards). Our embedded controller firmware is also open source, and we'll be posting the repository shortly. Full schematics for the rest of the system are available to independent repair shops that get Framework hardware in for repair.
Our main manufacturing partner is Compal, who makes laptops for many other large US notebook makers.
Apart from off the shelf modules like the SSD, RAM, WiFi, and LCD, the Framework Laptop is entirely custom to us, and we own all of the design and tooling. We don't have an EE on the team page, but I am actually an electrical engineer by training (or at least that's what it says on my degree from Carnegie Mellon), and our systems lead Kieran is an EE by background as well.
We own the embedded controller firmware, which is based on Chromium EC, and we'll be releasing the source soon. We use a licensed BIOS that we've customized for this go-around, but we would like to move to an open BIOS in the future.
Some of the reviewers have positive comments on their hands-on experience with the webcam. While it won't be at the level of a standalone plug-in webcam, it is substantially better than what is available in other notebooks.
I don't believe we have yet, but one challenge is that chromium-ec as a whole is in the process of migrating to Zephyr. We'll be needing to move over as well.
Are you trying to start your own company off the back of the research these guys have done?
I didn't see anything about this company claiming 100% open source and private consciousness. I thought that was a different company that never really did anything because of issues you've asked about. If I'm wrong in that, please correct me. Certain chips just couldn't use custom open firmware, so no device was ever going to be 100% open.
Just seems your questions might be a bit off target. No wonder you never got a response "the last time around".
Wow, does look almost identical, except renders/photos are showing keyboard for this laptop removed than bottom case for Acer version. To be fair they don’t seem like a huge ripoff in terms of price though, only ~$300 which is more of a simple reality of low volume products.
Mainboard/logicboard is exactly the same. Left side of the logicboard in the original Acer design is connected via a flex cable, which is where modularity daughterboard goes, which means that that part is custom and probably just a USB-C.
The main opening being on topside as opposed to bottom means the enclosure is custom made. So what.
Overall it’s not something that we are smoking, it’s basic understanding in laptops and modern electronics.
I fail to see the merits of your argument based on some handwaving interpretation of "exactly the same".
Merely speculating that FFC interconnect is "probably just a USB-C" says absolutely nothing of the fact that Acer's system is neither truly modular (because it's fundamentally constrained to specific I/O interface by its own case) nor externally reconfigurable by the user. Nevermind that Framework's design appears to sensibly apply what was intended to be floating interconnect (USB-C male) to a fixed peripheral module interface on both sides, which is a huge value add from a user configuration perspective on the merits of being able to choose what side your charger port is installed on alone.
So what about the enclosure being custom made?? Oh I don't know, nevermind completely disrespecting mechanical design considerations and effort applied towards targeted maintainability which have a direct impact on internal layout, user ease-of-self-service considerations that quite frankly the rest of the consumer laptop market clearly hasn't given an ounce of attention. That Framework completely own their tooling alone tells me substantial work was done.
Without even critiquing layout, Acer didn't even so much as give its prospective customers the courtesy of a fuckin' reach-around by soldering memory directly onto its motherboard and left a substantial amount of internal volume on the table. I suspect comparing display maintainability would be a complete joke of an exercise.
Basic understanding in laptops and modern electronics...yeah, sure.
This practicing hardware EE is far from convinced.
How easy is it going to be to source a mechanically compatible laptop logicboard and matching LCD to today’s design, at a competitive price, 3 years later from now, if it’s just a repurposed Acer parts without long term commitments?
51nb X210 system planar exists, but it also costs $800.
Why keep insisting it's Acer's this, that and the other? I'm certainly under no illusion that Framework fab'd every piecepart in its laptop design, but it's logistically of little to no relevance. If Framework controls its interface boundary spec and the market wills it, what's to stop them from contracting with any display manufacturer to produce a functional equivalent, or purchasing someone else's parts for sale in their planned marketplace dedicated to the application?
I think Framework has put together something that they believe has the potential to be profitable and I believe has the potential to be sustainable.
Nothing---especially with respect to obsolescence of consumer electronics---is without lifecycle risk to both a business and its customers. I choose to put my money where my mouth is now because I believe the problem is nevertheless worth trying to solve and the offering is good enough for my objective usecase.
Whether Framework can truly make their long term vision happen in a way that doesn't disillusion the community is obviously yet to be demonstrated. If the idea ultimately fails in the market, then such an outcome is hardly any worse than what I perceive to be an already regressive state of productivity laptops being overshadowed by consumption-centric mobile in at least the past decade, none of which ever focused on maintainability as critical design paradigm. Where I think the Framework meta truly differs is it lays a notebook form factor foundation that openly invites the hacker community to fill in at their leisure. Such a brazen "go fuck yourself" message to every other laptop vendor on the market earns my respect any day of the week.
Is it the best of all possible worlds? Probably not and there's surely room for improvement, but unlike most entitled consumers who want the future now for pennies on the dollar, that's not what I'm paying for either. I'm paying to support a sensible start towards something that the marketing and design of big companies intentionally ignore, have interim utility during a period of transitory company growth with hardware features and software (non-)options that I actually want, and hoping the rest of the market follows through with qualifying the movement's worth in the long run.
Somehow this is the first I’m hearing of this, and yet I have never hit buy so quick.
Even if, heaven forbid, this company is no longer around in five years when I need new parts, just the ability to upgrade RAM, SSD, etc is so valuable.
If enough people buy, then the supply of parts could be independent of the company itself, as third-party manufacturers would probably see an opportunity.
Absolutely. We see the health of the ecosystem as a positive end state for us, regardless of whether we're selling the most modules or third parties are. We're standing up a marketplace to help foster that.
This looks great. My only comment is whether the population for whom this is interesting wouldn't be more likely to want Linux? I suspect the focus on Windows is misplaced.
I might get one, but I'd want 100% Linux support, notably wrt. power management.
Definitely. We ship the Framework Laptop DIY Edition without an OS under the expectation that folks will bring their preferred distro. We're testing with Ubuntu 21.04 and Fedora 34, and the recent respins of the latter have full Framework Laptop support out of the box.
This is great! Was about to order an XPS or Thinkpad but think I'll go with this instead! How many external displays does it support? Would I need thunderbolt (would that just be a $9 adapter???)? I'd like to connect at least 3 external displays (so 4 total screens including the laptop). Is that possible? Thanks!
You can use up to four displays simultaneously, so three external displays along with the internal display would work. You can connect monitors directly using USB-C (with DisplayPort Alt Mode), DisplayPort, or HDMI Expansion Cards, or you can connect them through a dock.
Will you be able to see different things on each of the monitors or will some of the displays show the same thing (e.g. mirrored mode)? Having multiple monitors is meaningless if they are just displaying the same thing.
Thunderbolt 4 is basically a superset of USB4. It's USB4 with some of the optional features required, and more rigorous testing required for certification.
Ryzen tends to get better battery too. I read an article complaining about high temperatures and bad battery life, both of which tend to be significantly better on AMD hardware. Honestly, it's the only thing keeping me from ordering one today.
Great! I hope you all the best. I know it's kind of a generic comment but I've been waiting so long for a computer like this, I really hope that your crush the market
Thanks! It really is long overdue, and we've seen a ton of enthusiasm from folks who have been waiting for this. It's all the more strange that laptops are so locked down, since desktop PCs are one of the few remaining consumer product categories where repair, upgrade, and customization are the norm.
That was a showstopper for me for the older macbooks and still a showstopper now. It was so bad that Apple walked it back on the newer designs (though their newer magic keyboards still have this problem for some reason...)
It supports coreboot and has most of Intel Management Engine voided.
It's repairability looks good too:
> Open warranty. Laptops designed for open-source software need open warranties. Our 1-year limited warranty allows you to take your laptop apart, replace parts, install an upgrade, use any operating system and even your own firmware, all without voiding the warranty.
Regardless of the questions stated, thank you for mentioning Starlabs Systems, @mateuszf. I’ll be looking for an Intel-ME-free laptop during my next purchase and I had no idea about that particular project.
Hey Nirav - Awesome project. I want to see this succeed. Can you talk a little bit about how you plan to keep this project inline with the original vision. I have purchased from/seen so many startups start with a great cause and good purpose, but then succumb to just simply "too good of offer" to pass up and eventually "pivoting" to something that is more lucrative.
I believe that the the reason right to repair isn't adopted by more companies is simple... it's way better for the bottom line to control everything and increase profits. How do you guys plan on dealing with this in the long run, without becoming an Apple yourself?
We're building our business model to align incentives around product longevity. We want as many people using our products for as long as they possibly can. As a company, we benefit from that by continuing to develop new modules and upgrades and fostering the developing of compatible parts that can be sold through our marketplace. Even after an individual no longer needs their product, we want that product's life to extend by getting it refurbished or resold to the next consumer who can keep using it and participating in the ecosystem.
More detail: It takes a couple seconds for the selection to register, and if you scroll after tapping but before it registers, it scrolls back to your original position.
Thanks! It turns out this was on our backlog, but we had deprioritized solving it. With the massive amount of traffic on the site today, the slowness makes it much easier to hit. We're reprioritizing fixing it.
There really needs to be an option to include Linux or even just no OS. It's really frustrating to have to pay the Microsoft tax for something that's supposed to give me a choice and modularity.
On a related note, Libreboot would be a killer feature for these things.
If I'm being honest, there's very little chance of me leaving my M1 MBA for anything other than another Apple Silicon machine any time soon. That being said, a modular laptop that was also fully open would be very tempting, particularly if it were otherwise competitive (in terms of portability, performance, battery life, display quality, etc.).
All of that would probably also require supporting next-gen desktop ARM SOCs (like the 8cx, but from the future), or waiting for x86 to catch up and then copying Purism in neutralizing Intel ME / AMD PSP.
This would be perfect for me. I have a pile of Macs with various individual hardware failures that would never have been replaced had I been able to easily swap out new parts. (Not to mention the ridiculous hardware failure rate of Macs.)
I also hate having machines with that one piece of hardware that doesn't work on *BSD, because getting it to work is such a pain. It would be much easier to swap out the offending hardware for something more compatible.
I really like the replaceable USB-C ports. From my smartphone I know, these things wear-off when being used multiple times per day and being able to simply replace them is much more useful than it might look like at first sight.
I hear this a lot but only from people with USB-C. Sure, on occasion you'd also hear someone who broke their mobile micro-USB or even USB-A laptop ports, but usually that was from bending the connector accidentally if I remember correctly.
As someone with zero problems finding the correct orientation (it's both tactile and visual) who is in the market for a new phone, makes me wonder if I should look for one with micro-USB again. Replacing that port sounds like hell, and I use devices at least 4 years so if C is prone to wearing I'd definitely have to.
Personally I've had more micro-USB connectors and cables fail than USB-C. Maybe it's just luck, but USB-C has been extremely reliable in my experience.
For context: I am someone who still has a 9 years old smartphone in use (not exclusively). So for the normal 24 months usage the connectors might suffice, but I prefer solutions which are either easily replaceable or hold longer like wireless charging for example.
The Gizmodo review is odd. Comparing this to an M1 based Apple Laptop, with regards to battery performance? You could do that for every Intel/AMD laptop and they all will kind of suck. But if you do not want Apple or you need Intel/AMD than it is not really an argument. They also claim it runs hot, but Verge says something different.
In this thread: “do you think you all will/can/ ship an [even more niche feature fully several orders of magnitude more difficult to make profitable than the product’s existing value offering right as it is shipping, from a startup to boot].
Seriously guys [some commentators], what the hell. They did a good job, I mean I’d consider it independent of the modularity benefit which I don’t care overly much about - if only because it’s bloat free, sports a very pragmatic design without being obtuse and frankly it’s high time PC oem’s had more pressure. With this being their only product there’s a chance QC ends up proving superior to premium laptops from HP, Dell, etc. Certainly these guys’s track record so far doesn’t instill any doubt!
Great job, @ the Framework founders. I love to see any innovative angles or iterations possible in the PC space these days.
This review sounds overly negative. I don't have much interest in either party but it mentions the laptop got to 106f and said "too hot to touch". Well, that's only 41c. If 41c was too hot to touch, some fevers would burn your skin.
Then it mentions that the fn keys area was at 96f. That's body temp. A phone taken out of a pocket will probably be around the same temp and we are not complaining it's too hot.
Little details like that make me think they had some kind of negative bias towards the device and it is not clear why.
I am not defending the device since I haven't used it, but that review reads like "yeah whatever I guess I'll review it, but if it's not perfect I'll trash it".
I guess we'll have to wait for these first batches to go out to see what problems are actually a nuisance
The temperature of your hands is cooler than your core temperature: about 33 degrees Celsius (91 degrees Fahrenheit). Obviously comfort is subjective, but I think the difference is large enough for some to feel uncomfortable. Especially when comparing against other things in a room, which tend to be much cooler compared to the body.
I just read the review. The specific gripes they had are: (1) subpar battery life, (2) middling performance compared to others with the same CPU/RAM configuration, (3) loud fan noise akin to a gaming laptop, and (4) uncomfortably high temperatures on load.
I'm pretty excited about this laptop, but that review does list some specific complaints. Here's a couple lines from the conclusion of the review:
> The Framework laptop offers an awkward port selection to make way for its expansion slots, and it doesn’t have the best battery life. It’s also concerning that the computer runs so hot.
This is fantastic! The pluggable module concept makes it even more appealing. I can easily see a lot of development going in modules for various tasks (multi i/o audio/midi card, A/D signal analyzer/scope front end, LoRa transceiver, ECG analog interface, etc.) so that "only" 4 ports might one day even become a limitation.
Seriously considering one. They will need to arrange with some resellers in the EU however, or shipping+import taxes could make it too costly.
Any plans to sell one without a Windows license? If I bought one I'd immediately format it and run Linux, so would be nice to not have to pay the ~$100 extra.
Having been delighted with a 13" e-ink display with roughly comparable display resolution, I've got to say "dayuuuuum" on the display specs. Aspect ratio, resolution, DPI, and nits all look excellent.
(E-Ink differs notably in characteristics, but simply on density, 200+ DPI is amazing to look at.)
The rest of the specs and design intent also look impressive. Very nicely done.
Really happy to see this news. I hope these folks succeed. I'd order one right now if I hadn't just bought a new System76 machine a month or so ago.
Still, if I can find some free disposable cash anytime soon, I might order one anyway, just to support the concept and to have a spare machine. I'm sure I could use an extra machine for something-or-other.
We use a T5 bit to make it really hard to strip, but in the event it ever does, you can remove the fasteners with a bit of effort and probably another tool to apply force to get the thread to bite.
I’m not sure how to feel about this warning notice?
“This product can expose you to chemicals including Nickel (Metallic), which is known to the State of California to cause cancer, and Bisphenol A (BPA), which is known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. For more information go to www.P65Warnings.ca.gov“
The warnings are required by a 1986 statewide proposition, numbered 65, for chemicals posing chancer, birth defect, or other reproductive harm, and though they're obligatory only if the risk is greater than 1:100,000 over a 70 year lifespan, many companies feel it's safer to include the warnings regardless to avoid nondisclusure actions.
I wish they had a transparent or even translucent option for the case. I think that that level of honesty, where a company can show off the internals of a product with confidence, is very much missed.
Plus, considering the complexity of the hardware, it would look amazing with a transparent case. It'd be almost like swiss watch.
Very excited to see modular and repairable tech in production! Just wanted to make a top-level comment in support of a trackpoint option. Given modular design and the Marketplace it could make sense to have a simple drop-in replacement for the keyboard module that would potentially lure many hardcore Thinkpad fans.
Super disapointed. Just a few weeeks ago I bought a macbook pro with an M1 from Apple, it's kind of the default choice at the moment. I love the concept of this laptop so much though. If it was available when I was making my choice, I would have seriously considered it as an option.
I would think apple products are the antithesis to the Framework laptop. How can you go from the M1 being "the default choice", and being disappointed that this wasn't a possibility? Wouldn't there have been a myriad of other choices closer to the Framework laptop, than the M1?
I see. I suppose that might make sense. I would personally trust the ThinkPads to have higher build quality than a non-battle tested new brand.
But, then again, I would also consider the ability to change a faulty part as part of the build quality equation, and as such rank apple products much further down than most.
Very specific question but how much is a replacement screen and can you do the repair yourself with just a screwdriver? I’ve somehow broken my screen twice with each of my last two laptops and at least for the MacBook, screen replacements were like $400 a pop.
You can replace the screen with just a screwdriver (in fact, the screwdriver we include in the box with every Framework Laptop). We haven't set pricing for this replacement module yet, but our general philosophy around repair part pricing is to make it the obvious choice to do the repair.
Does Framework [the company] offer, or plan to offer internship opportunities for students at any point? As a student, I would love to have the ability to work at a company like Framework that is innovating for a good cause.
When job offers were getting rescinded in summer 2020, we opened up an internship and brought in an awesome firmware intern. We didn't have the bandwidth this summer for interns (and the job market is much better), but it is something we'll do again in the future.
We've since announced that we're making full schematics and assembly drawings available to independent repair shops who get Framework hardware in. We actually chatted with Louis a couple of times to get his feedback on the plan.
Is there a possibility to install more exotic peripherals like 4g modem (or a smartcard slot)? I don't see them mentioned anywhere, but I'd expect a hackable laptop to have these.
The concept sounds more like "user serviceable" than "hackable" to me.
But still, knowing the physical dimensions of the slot and having the USB-C port itself providing retention, it should be straightforward for 3rd parties to design more peripherals.
Why are the higher end cpu options so much more when the price difference is only about $100 according to intel and they all have the same core count? Do you plan to offer 6 core or more versions? AMD zen 3 or 4? Im guessing you will release a version with 12th cpus in the future?
Will you have a version with two m.2 storage slots and maybe a bigger battery? A version with lpddr5 in the board?
Are the usbc slots also thunderbolt 3 or 4 slots like a macbook pro? How is egpu support?
This looks really great, with some good choices for my kind of use - 3:2 screen, 1080 webcam, better than normal travel on the keys, and being able to easily upgrade memory and storage is a big deal.
The reviews seem to be finding concerns with thermals while battery life and overall performance seems pretty so-so.
I expect that battery life and performance could be improved through upgrading in the future, but it seems like thermals might be a difficult problem to fix.
Hope it succeeds, the HN-crowd is obviously very tacky and already know some well established alternatives (used thinkpads, librem laptops, pinebook, MNT reform) that may be even better for a niche audience (open hardware, no management engine, trackpoint option, etc.), hence the criticism.
But marketed directly to the people that buy all the "normal" laptops out there, it could be a great success.
Just one year of warranty? I should hope their hardware lasts longer than that on average. Is that actually legal to sell to EU customers? The EU minimum on new electronics is 2 years, and the Netherlands has an unlimited period so long as you could reasonably expect it (which shops then translate as 2 years, but if it dies one day after then you aren't necessarily out of options).
Thanks! I read after posting the comment that you currently don't ship to the EU in the first place, so that makes sense. Great to hear you'll support the longer warranty requirement!
I'm super thrilled to see this design, it's really cool. Particularly the adapter thing, I can't believe I've never seen or thought of that solution before, it's so much better than loose dongles. Personally 13" isn't for me though, but I saw the reply to people asking for a larger version elsewhere in the thread. For now I've linked it to some friends, perhaps they're interested in the 13" version :)
All the best, I would love to get a Framework laptop in the future!
Thinkpad X1 user here, but would change to the framework as it is upgradable. My problem is the black lines between the exchangeable port - why not just make a black / matt black version?
These exchangeable port look so big not giving the choice to have 2 USB C, 1 USB a and 1 Hdmi. That would be my min configuration.
Cheers from switzerland (swiss german keyboard necessary;))
I don't feel like buying it this time because I have just bought a rather good new laptop recently and don't have money to spare, but I really hope this isn't going to be a one-time single-batch device project. I will definitely lean towards this (if something like Purism won't beat it too hard) for the next laptop I buy.
Hey guys, love your idea. Just a question about the keyboard. Any particular reason why the keys |\ are making the Enter key smaller and not the left Shift? Personally prefer a big enter than a big shift. I don't have issues finding the small shift, but I do have trouble finding the small Enter without looking at the keys.
It must be a lot of work to design a laptop. The PCBs look very complicated and the components are tiny.
What I don't really like is the price. I think a good laptop should cost somewhere around $400. It is not necessary to install the most expensive CPUs because they usually have lower performance to cost ratio than cheaper models. Webcam, fingerprint reader and Wifi 6 are not necessary.
The laptop doesn't have space for a HDD which means that user has to buy an expensive SSD storage. 13 inch screen is too small to work with code or texts. Also, modern websites have gigantic font size so only several lines of text would fit on such a small screen.
64 Gb RAM limit is higher than most of laptops which is good. But why not 128 or 256 Gb? It it difficult to add several more address lines?
They have written that they would love to hear a feedback on keyboards. Well, here you go.
Sadly the keyboard is a Latin-oriented 26-letter model. Russian language has 33 letters so I would prefer a 33-letter keyboard with two dedicated keys for switching layouts. This means that 9 new keys should be added. Currently nobody makes such keyboards, even Apple. Manufacturers seem to have no interest in adapting keyboards to needs of Russian users and instead use inconvenient 26-letter western keyboards. Adding more keys for me seems more important than unnecessary back light. Also, I think it would be better to make up/down keys larger and make Home/End/PageUp/PageDown as separate keys. These keys are useful for browsing or editing texts. On the other hand, CapsLock is useless and can be removed.
The touchpad doesn't have buttons. How does one do a right or middle button click?
As someone who lives in Russia, by the end of your second paragraph I was thinking to myself "This guy must be Russian". and I was right. I swear, Russians bitch about everything. no matter how good something is, some Russian will find something to complain about.
I had a surface pro throughout university and I found 3:2 to be perfect for productivity. Also it's nice to be able to see more code if you're into that.
> Also it's nice to be able to see more code if you're into that.
I guess that depends on font scaling but if there is code that long there is usually something wrong with it :D
I like to have views side by side but the 3:2 doesn't really help with that either (at least for code on 13")
> Why don't you like that they are American?
That usually complicates payment and shipping (at least with smaller companies) plus I don't really like (indirectly) supporting a government that thinks human rights are for citizens only.
What about extending "right to repair" to OS software and supporting open source OS like Linux or FreeBSD? Current product page only lists Microsoft Windows. I do not see an option to purchase it without, so Microsoft tax seems to be collected :(
We've been testing with Ubuntu 21.04 and Fedora 34 so far. The latest Fedora 34 respins actually have full functionality out of the box, including the fingerprint reader: https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/live-respins/
Too bad the arrow keys are gimped and the edit cluster are multiplexed like 99% of other laptops. These aren't netbooks. It wouldn't kill them to use the available real estate for a better keyboard layout.
How easy is it to replace the battery--for example, can I carry an extra battery around in my backpack and expect to swap it at a coffee shop, or is it necessary to bring tools / do it on a workbench?
We use M.2 2230 WiFi cards, with both PCI-e and CNVi routed to the socket. For the pre-built systems, we install an AX201 card. For DIY Edition, we offer AX210 or you can bring your own card.
One of the pics on the product page indicates that this may be able to be opened to lay flat, but I don't see a definitive spec regarding how far it opens. Anyone know if this is the case?
Does it look to anyone else like all the screen images on the website are pasted on in Photoshop, with some slightly misaligned angles that hit prime "uncanny valley"?
We actually do take photos with the screen on, but we use super bright studio lighting photography, which makes it hard to get enough dynamic range to show both the product and the display well. In the future, we'll take the time to build a flow to do stacking with multiple exposures for product photography, but for now for some of the images we just used a screenshot and composited. You can go onto our blog to find some of the display-on photos, like in this post: https://frame.work/blog/1080p-webcam
Is there any public documentation about the expansion card interface? Is it USB 3 or Thunderbolt or something custom? The storage expansion card says it's using USB 3.2.
We need to put out more documentation around the host side of it, but it is USB4, supporting DisplayPort Alt Mode on all four ports. For Thunderbolt, we can't state anything until we can complete certifications. For the device side, we've published open source reference designs to let folks develop their own cards: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/expansioncards
Speaking of website bugs, whenever I change any options on https://frame.work/products/laptop-diy- edition/configuration/edit it reloads a page, scrolling to the top. Probably not something that would stop me from buying if I was going to, but annoying nonetheless.
I like giving people a choice whether they want to buy something repairable/configurable or not. Minimal government intervention. Let the market decide.
We are fans of proving there is a market for this by building and selling it ourselves, but there are categories where the start-up costs for new entrants are impossibly high and the incumbents are actively opposed to repairability. Even for notebooks, the capital required is non-trivial.
Yes, it is nice when people have many choices. History and economics show that markets left to their own devices often give fewer choices than smart combinations of (markets & oversight).
The screen resolution, sadly, is only 2256x1504. This is not retina. I don't get how new laptops can be sold today with non-retina screens. The most common resolution these days is 1920x1080.
My current laptop is Samsung ATIV Book 9, which is more than 5 years old. The 13" screen is 3200x1800. The best screen ever made. Possibly the best laptop ever made. The industrial design, the backlit keyboard, touchpad, everything is perfect. Sadly even Samsung does not make laptops like this anymore.
I saw a Surface laptop at Costco last weekend, which is also 2256 x 1504, and I could see individual pixels. My current 5-year-old Samsung has spoiled me, I can't use a laptop where individual pixels are discernible. If this tech was available 5 years ago (and at a low price) why has the industry gone backwards?
I've been using it outdoors in the California sunshine. It goes up to 400 nit. It has an anti-glare coating, but it is still a normal glossy screen (meaning no matte layer added on top).
Could you please share the exact screen measurements? I purchased one but strongly prefer matte screens so I’ll be trying to look for a matte screen protector that fits.
the keyboard looks very fragile, like that of a macbook. For me these tend to develop problems after a years use. I am not very fond of this type of keyboards. The old thinkpads used to have a solid keyboard, but that was once upon a time.
Unfortunately one also needs to swap the firmware for the top row of the keyboard to function. I wouln't dare to do all this, out of fear of thrashing the laptop.
I suspect that these new fangled butterfly and chicklet style keyboards were especially designed as means to extract more money on inevitable keyboard repairs. (and don't dare to eat any potato chips in front of the keyboard).
Why such hostility towards accepting crypto as a payment option? I'm sure you know there are payment processors that convert the crypto to cash in the bank with minimal effort.
Your company's statement that you won't accept crypto because it is "bad for environment" seems more political than operational/technical.
Shame they don't offer a touchpad with separate buttons. I will never understand why people tolerate clickpads. They're just ok with not being able to feel where the dividing line between left and right clicking is? The way the pointer slightly jiggles every time they click doesn't bother them?
Well, I'm not sure about repairability of the case, but I suppose that after buying you can always buy/hack your own build with separate buttons. This is the beauty of full repairable hardware
If this is a popular idea you can even monetize pre-built touchpads
In another comment thread someone mentioned LTT already released their review on their own platform, I think called Floatplane, which comes before their Youtube release.
Great initiative, but who decided to put the user-hostile return/backslash keys together? Key gaps exist for a reason, and it's especially important on certain keys.
Windows is not mandatory at all? You can literally combine whatever you want in the laptop, including the preinstalled windows or not. Look under the DIY section
We currently have the Framework Laptop DIY Edition, which ships with no OS installed. We're in the process of writing guides for Ubuntu 21.04 (works out of the box except fingerprint) and Fedora 34 (works entirely out of the box on the latest re-spin images!).
I guess it would vary depending on the model of ThinkPad, but in general we follow the equivalent reliability test standards to what other laptop makers use for their premium models (e.g. the drop height and surface, hinge cycle count, etc).
Um, this thing has actual buttons, so clearly not a rip off of a MacBook. It also has what appears to be a dedicated power button. Also, this thing is user repairable. That's clearly not copied from Apple.
Edit: so not a dedicated power button, but an integrated finger print reader. uh-oh, case is getting weaker ;-)
(For the record I'm not bothered by the similarities; I honestly think that if you go minimalist with your design language you kind of converge on this look. I would offer the gentlest of criticisms, though, in the way the up and down arrow keys are half-height but the left and right are full. That's another trend Apple started and it is bad. Ironically, Apple's current laptops are moving away from it again!)
Actually, my 2019 Macbook has all 4 arrow keys half-height, but the left/right keys are bottom aligned with the down key rather than .keys { vertical-align: center; } I try my best to never use those keys.
That was the first one that switched back, I think. Personally, I prefer that design to the full-height left/right and half-height up/down keys, because it's just easier for me to find the right arrows that way. (I'd prefer full height on all of them, but I recognize a laptop keyboard is space-constrained, at least if it's 13" or below. The 16" MBP has less excuse.)
I don't really care so much about half-height left and right keys versus full-height ones, but I've discovered that what I really hate is when half-height PgUp and PgDn keys are on either side of a half-height Up arrow key. This means I constantly hit PgUp/PgDn with my pinkie when reaching for Left or Right (and ultimately on my current machine I had to override this with a keyboard remap).
Apple nailed the “generic laptop” design with MacBook but they also has their own design language like the iconic fillets. I guess that’s how they draw a line and I guess that’s enough for each sides.
OMG, when the first picture on the website appeared, I thought it was a Mac. Isn’t it too look alike? I mean maybe they get sued or something, which would be sad, because I love the design and the idea
3:2 screen, windows key, fingerprint reader, non touchbar row, no gap in keyboard above the left and right arrow keys, much wider filet below the touchpad, no "Macbook" text below the screen, no speaker grilles to the left and right of the keyboard, enter key and backslash key appear 'merged' (common for iso supporting layouts)...
