The Framework Laptop
frame.work
frame.work
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26263508&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26263508&p=3
Apologies for the annoying repetition. It will eventually go away.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-de...
Edit to add quote from Ars article:
Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're completely convinced.
Although we're skeptical, we are hopeful—the fledgling company does have a pretty solid pedigree. Framework founder Nirav Patel was Oculus VR's head of hardware from 2012 to 2017, and he was a Facebook director of engineering beyond that. The company's team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo.
Ouya and the Essential phone are two cases that immediately spring to mind where the founding teams were credible, but the products ended up being massive flops.
Good luck to them anyway. The idea is cool and I think if I were on the lookout for a Linux laptop and they delivered on their quality promise, I'd consider them.
Still, I haven't lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project.
Already many laptops you can easily swap parts like the HDD/SSD, Battery and RAM, and even the GPU (to an extent) if its using a standard like MXM. Building a laptop with more modular parts using existing standards (looks like from the images the modular parts are using USB C Thunderbolt?) is much more doable than a modular phone.
USB 3, and Thunderbolt are also complete disasters power consumption wise, not to say that Type-C, and Thunderbolt chips cost arm, and a leg.
For the older models, even screen replacements are quite common in the ThinkPad community...
Good luck for this project though, we really need more companies like this!
This thing though, I can kind of see it working.
Basically: The pressure to minimize volume + weight is way too high for a mobile phone to become modular. Then add recent requirements like IP68 ratings.
In a laptop there's still some breathing room for modularity. And noone expects a laptop to survive an accidental drop into a pool.
(Tangentially related: I don't really understand why Apple doesn't include this feature, even though they use OLED screens.)
- It comes with quite the price tag, adding connectors everywhere gets expensive fast.
- Some interfaces are very tricky to modularize, RAM & CPU are very closely linked, and it’s very hard to protect them from ESD.
- Which generally points you to the PC solution, don’t protect it, enclose everything and standardize.
There’s also the more “business” part of modular electronics. PC parts are only cheap through massive volume, but building a modular phone requires you to (mostly) build all of your parts. The only way to make it feasible requires more than one device using the same modules, which defeats the uniqueness of the device.
Laptops are way more feasible just because that modularization is already on the market, and you don’t need to build your own RAM SODIMMs or SSDs.
A small hardware project on its own might be doable.
But even then, they're tackling a very hard problem. Branding, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution... So many things can go wrong.
I'm not making a prediction but I'm with Ars Technica in the "healthy skeptic" camp. I do hope they beat the odds.
There isn’t a huge amount of ready to use phone hardware from multiple competitive consumer suppliers I feel like integrating into a phone myself.
But there are those things for a laptop.
If they can make this work at a reasonable price it would be appealing even to me as an ardent Mac user.
I haven't read the details of this specific laptop in the OP but I have seen similar projects go nowhere. What usually happens is the product ends up a lot more expensive and lower quality than a mass produced laptop and the project doesn't live long enough to release a second gen of hardware.
It would make more sense for me to buy 2 Dell XPS laptops over the next 10 years that to buy this hobby project and if I even can, buy the upgrade kit.
I undertand in 99.9% of cases people just want to buy a laptop, turn it on and have it working. But I also think there should be an easy way to opt out of Windows enforced by law so that MS don't bang up numbers due to shady commercial practices.
FWIW, I'd be much more interested in your products as a solid platform for running Linux than whatever junk MS is including in Windows 10 this week anyway. But sometimes small issues can say a disproportionate amount about where a business really stands on some issues I care about, and things like having control over my own hardware and software for reasons ranging from longevity to privacy are high on my personal list.
More and more developers in big tech companies using Linux just expect it to work and aren’t interested in monkeying around with drivers and configs.. not to say they can’t, but why increase friction for your dev setup?
This is one of the reasons why the XPS 13 Developer edition exists. Guaranteed first party support for Linux.. you know the next kernel or major revision won’t Bork your setup... you can just focus on working within the env.
Offering a preinstalled Linux variant captures the market referenced above, and signals to tinkerers that this is a good platform to build on since all hardware is supported without jenky workarounds.
Alternatively, if you can’t make offering dedicated Linux installs an economically feasible thing, then perhaps offer a mirror or set of instructions to set up latest LTS builds of various Linux flavors, to indicate full compatibility? Because that is the real selling point. Knowing all of your hardware is supported as a first party product. That’s one of the biggest reasons why I chose an XPS this time around, and considered a System76 machine as well.
That said, I think offering Linux pre-installed would be very nice as a signaling function to attract technical-minded users.
This may be projecting myself onto others but I wonder if that's actually true, and I would indicate the Dell and Lenovo Linux options as evidence.
I personally run Linux on my laptop to reduce pain and time spent doing unnecessary maintenance - I run Fedora on a Lenovo and it works seamlessly. If I bought a Framework, it would be for upgradability and maintainability rather than for customisation.
EDIT: This isn't a generic "pro-Mac" dig, I want a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).
Edits to respond:
My point is that most tasks are either ① best done in a good text editing / development environment that works well with a specialized text input device — a keyboard — or ② would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device (eg. a gaming mouse, graphics tablet, etc.)
⁰especially here on HN ¹including scrolling through PDFs and other documents ²or Zathura or less ³and/or/including PageUp/Down, Home, and End on luxurious large keyboards. Space and Shift+Space are okay on smaller ones.
Please search the web for "trackpoint drift".
Funny, because I see people complaining about it still in 2020 on brand new Thinkpads. See for instance https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/ken18b/does_your_... and the comments saying "They all drift, it's inherent by the sensor design", "It drifts on all my ThinkPads too", "Mine sometimes drifts".
So unless your definition of modern is "ones that haven't been released yet", I think you might be wrong.
It may be that I've become more zen/accepting, because I'm sure a mouse or trackpad can be more precise pointing tools, but it's worth it for the connection. Input is all about the keyboard and mouse, and the proximity just makes so much sense, especially when using vim mode. I could imagine better systems where typing with a keyboard is still the main input, but they would all involve not taking my hands off the home row.
Or, it's close enough that with hovering hands you can move back and forth between keys without looking. It's much faster to navigate a code base that way, I think, than trying to jump in vim lines at a time. A smooth, continuous scroll at easily controllable, different speeds does wonders for keeping continuity of a file in mind.
This is why I like having not just ^f/b full page, {}() paragraph and sentence, and of course j/k line scrolling but also ^u/d half-page scrolling so much that I mapped them it U and D in Zathura and Pentadactyl just for the centimeter of finger movement that saves.
¹Let me test that. I like digraphs a heck of a lot more than scrolling through a symbol list btw. This was also a nice use for marks.
Because most people don't use vim and mice aren't usable unless you're sitting at a flat surface with the room to hold one. If I'm using my laptop on the couch, a trackpad is probably the best solution. (Trackpoint gave my index finger RSI, when I was was being careful.)
Trackball mice a good solution to this problem. I had work on a bed without a table for 2 weeks last year, and a trackball mouse ended up working great (I didn't like using the trackpad, since switching from the keyboard to trackpad on a laptop is fairly uncomfortable if you do it often enough).
Switching from the keyboard to something an inch away is uncomfortable for you, but switching from the keyboard to something a foot away is not? I don't get it.
See https://imgur.com/a/qeRQIFD
An offset trackpad would also work, though obviously would be less friendly to lefties.
Additionally, when I'm using it on my lap, the trackpad is basically next to my body, which makes my wrist position a little uncomfortable.
Looking back, I think it's not really the switching, but rather the comfort when using one for a prolonged period, for which I found the trackball easier.
Trackpads were a great upgrade to laptops when they happened, even though at the time, excessive moisture screwed up the trackpad, to the point that I needed to have a dime handy to put my finger on for a half hour after getting out of the shower.
(Source: I've used mac portables since the PB 100, including most of the major versions)
Your point is only correct if you replace the word "most" with "my." The fact that trackpads are hugely popular indicates that your needs are not typical, and you should not impose your choices upon others with different needs.
would be better done with a specialized non-keyboard, non-trackpad input device
Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.
Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.
But Apple trackpads are not hugely popular, they have a fraction (~10%, likely less) of the global market. Does the fact that non-Apple computers are hugely popular indicate that the needs of Apple trackpad fans are not typical, and they should not extol their virtues to others?
> Show me a better multi-purpose input device that I can use to rotate objects on a screen. Or zoom into a specific object without affecting other objects on a screen. Or configure to have multiple hotspots that when tapped can trigger events or macros.
I’ve previously used a normal Apple mouse and keyboard to do all of these things in Adobe Photoshoshop and Illustrator on macOS and subsequently a random BestBuy mouse and ancient Compaq keyboard to do them in Gimp, Inkscape, and Blender on GNU (with xdotool for hot corners, which I’m counting as close enough to tapping hotspots). A graphics tablet would only work better.
> Again, trackpads aren't your thing. Good for you. Other people love them, and millions of people get real work done on them each day.
Again, non-Apple trackpads don’t seem to be your thing. Good for you. The majority of trackpad users use them every day.
If you've used a Magic Mouse, then you've used a mouse with a trackpad on its back. Glad you liked it!
And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.
My mistake. I used a standard Apple mouse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Mighty_Mouse). I used its clickable scroll ball and squeeze functionality and suspect I would dislike the Magic mouse.
> And no, rotating in Photoshop with the keyboard isn't the same as rotating with a trackpad. It's an entirely different process that is significantly less efficient, unless you already know the exact angle of rotation you want down to the 0.1°.
IMO the ideal mouse + keyboard rotation style is Blender’s, which is more efficient in this scenario than a trackpad. But I still believe a graphics tablet would be objectively superior.
You can as long as you can order x86 Macs with Bootcamp.
> No one is like, “I could have the Mac trackpad for the same cost, but I prefer the stuttery trackpad that moves the cursor and selects bleep when my palm gets too close”.
No, but there are plenty of people who think “I prefer no trackpad to accidentally swipe [—even if palm rejection is perfect, I want total hand —including finger— rejection—] at all”, from people who buy Macs and use the setting Apple provides to disable the trackpad when mice are plugged in, to people who use their Mac as a PC laptop and manually disable the trackpad (https://www.lakshmikanth.com/how-to-disable-trackpad-on-boot...), to people who try to more permanently disconnect broken old Mac trackpads (https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/386625/macbook-pro...), to people who physically disconnect their trackpads, to people who buy old thinkpads because eg. at least some x200s have only a trackpoint and fingerprint sensor.
The person you're replying to said "trackpads are popular" with no mention of Apple. Your entire argument so far has been against trackpads in general. Why shift goalposts?
Yes.
https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/faqs/laptop-faqs/what-is-a-trac...
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-trackpad-settings/...
http://support.blackberry.com/kb/articleDetail?articleNumber...
https://edgeup.asus.com/2019/the-asus-screenpad-2-0-lets-the...
https://wikidiff.com/trackpad/touchpad
Trackpad and touchpad are generic synonyms according to every source I can find.
I don't have the data but I think this is like the motherboard / logic board split. In other words "trackpad" may be Apple for "touchpad".
I gave you data by showing links where other companies like Blackberry, Lenovo, Microsoft, and Asus use the word "trackpad" themselves for their own devices. Lenovo even cutely capitalizes the P to fit their ThinkPad branding. You could also google around and see random people on reddit and elsewhere talking about the "trackpads" on their dells, hps, vaios, matebooks, and so on.
I'm not saying that "touchpad" isn't more common, but the evidence _clearly_ shows that "trackpad" isn't exclusive to Apple devices.
I agree with you in general, but a trackpad is in fact really, truly horrible for these tasks. As humans we are designed to rotate objects precisely, and that design does not involve using two fingers to slide about arbitrary locations on a flat plane. It involves grasping and rotating with the hand. For rotating and/or zooming, a large knob attached to a high-resolution encoder would be a million times better.
A common complaint around here is about how touch screens have taken away better tactile controls, but so have our keyboards.
The obvious answer to the challenge is a touchscreen.
I didn’t mean for it to be that exclusively. I tried to say that keyboards are the best text input device, but gaming mice and controllers are the best gaming input device, graphics tablets are the best graphics input device, and video editing input devices like the ones I linked in my original comment are probably best for video editing (while trackpads are at best decent scrolling/browsing devices, but IMHO I personally prefer keyboard scrolling like in the terminal pager less, the PDF and other document viewer Zathura, and vi-inspired browsers/browser plugins like luakit, qutebrowser, and Pentadactyl).
Obviously it's not as great if the measure you're looking at is "how quickly can I go back to typing?".
¿Por que no los dos? Seriously, I wasn't talking about replacing my keyboard with a trackpad. They are different devices with different purposes and are intended to be used together.
is a good description of what I feel reading PDFs efficiently, near effortlessly (which to me is near the same thing), and comfortably (also similar in that it involves minimal reaching, but also includes automatic semi-smart dark theming, easy good zooming, etc.) with Zathura.
So you want a specialized input devices for every task on a mobile device. That's an interesting choice. And I guess you also want to carry all these specialized devices around with you?
> browsing¹, which IMO should be a slightly glorified text task where Pentadacyl/luakit/qutebrowser/etc.² vi-style keybindings³ are best
Ok. Say you see a headline on HN that looks interesting, and you go to click on it. Wait, no, you...uhh...tab tab tab tab tab over to it and press enter to go to the comments page (like we all do) and start reading the comments. And, oh look, you want to respond to one of them. So you...uhh...tab tab...uhh...tab...tab tab tab tab tab tab tab...tab tab? Or you could just point and click.
Your proposed critical tasks of shifting the viewport and appending text to the current cursor location meet approximately 0% of computing user needs. The vast majority of all computer interaction is putting the cursor in the right place in the first place. The keyboard is terrible for that, external devices encumber portability, vertical touch screens require significant muscle control and effort, and trackpoints drift and do fewer things while being worse at all of them.
Please take a minute to type the name of any of the browsers I named into your favourite search engine or package manager and return when you know what we’re talking about. (This comment was made via Pentadactyl).
> The vast majority of all computer interaction is putting the cursor in the right place in the first place.
This is why it pains me to use browsers where I can’t tap [count]gi to focus input fields.
Enlighten us all. What exactly did you press and what mental decision and awareness process was required to do it starting from the front page?
> [count]gi
"[count]" sounds like one would need to know how many like things on the page precede the thing you're trying to get to. Thanks but no thanks. 150! Oops, 100! Oops, 130!
EDIT: Here's an extremely low quality screencast of me making this comment
In insert mode I may use the simple mixture of emacs/readline and CUA bindings — like ^w to wipe the last word, ^a to go to the beggining of the line and ^e to go to the end (eg. when inserting a > before a blockquote, then appending my commentary) — to write a straightforward comment from beginning to end, or I may use ^i to pop the field open in my $EDITOR (vis), where motions like m to mark my place, G to go to the end, o to open a new line, and M to return to my mark are useful for comments that might be written non-linearly, eg. if they have footnotes. I can save and exit vis (if I use it) with ZZ, and submit the comment with standard CUA <Tab><Enter>.
If I reference any other material then Pentadactyl’s browsing bindings like go«character» to open a quickmark, s to search, p or P to paste my X11 primary selection as a search term or the url of a current or new tab, b to fast-as-you-type search through tabs, y to yank the current website, ;y«number and/or title of link to yank» and d to delete a tab are useful (along with standard X11 Shift+Insert to paste the primary selection in insert mode).
Ideally though, I should use Pentadactyl only for browsing — for scrolling through and reading web documents — and have a dedicated newsreader that understands what posts, comments, etc. are and could make this several times more efficient. I’m currently dipping my toes in evil-mode emacs, which should enable this. I’ve recently spent less time on HN and more on IRC where I do have a dedicated native client that makes things orders of magnitude more smooth than trying to use a web client in my browser.
> f20 selects this discussion (the 20th link) but I used f4<Enter> to select threads (the 4th link)
So first you have to visually recognize every link in between the beginning and what you want to choose and then you have to count them all? I hope you don't miscount!
> j,D, and <Space> scroll down by a line, half-screen/page and full-screen/page respectively
How many lines, half-pages, or pages is it from the top to here? Just curious.
> fr4 selects the correct reply (the fourth link whose text begins with r);
So first you have to decide that "starts with r" is a good heuristic for getting where you want to go and then you have to find all of the links that start with r and count them?
> gi goes to the first input field and enters insert mode
But if it's not the first input field, then you have to count them or cycle through them?
> Ideally though, I should have a dedicated newsreader that understands what posts, comments, etc. are
So now you want a special bespoke reader for every website?
Oh yes this all sounds so much easier than just pointing at the thing you want! Thank you for clarifying.
> Just curious.
But I sincerely doubt it’s true based on the tone of your comment. I’m willing to walk through each sentence with you, but as I have already sunk significant time into trying to help you I politely request that you first prove my doubt unfounded by investing five minutes in grabbing luakit, qutebrowser, or Pentadactyl — or at the very least a WebExtension attempt at emulating them like SurfingKeys — with your favorite package manager/browser and trying it out for yourself.
Edit: However I will walk through the sentences for the sake of the other people reading this thread in better faith, to respond to the strongest [weakly] plausible interpretation of your comment, although text is a worse medium for learning GUIs than video which is worse than first hand interactive use.
> So first you have to visually recognize every link in between the beginning and what you want to choose and then you have to count them all? I hope you don't miscount!
No, the browser automatically highlights them in a style of your choice (I use a gruvbox theme) and visually numbers them for you. You can also just begin typing any part of the link’s title and it will be selected when you’ve typed a subset unique to it.
> How many lines, half-pages, or pages is it from the top to here? Just curious.
~3 out of 4 screens on my threads right now. But note that I scrolled down one piece at a time and only know this because my bottom status bar happens to display it (as well as the url, mode, a minus or plus signifying pages back or forward in the tab’s history, on a background that signifies the SSL status of the site).
> So first you have to decide that "starts with r" is a good heuristic for getting where you want to go and then you have to find all of the links that start with r and count them?
No, you don’t need to use a heuristic but it saves reaching your left hand to the number row to eliminate half a dozen links by typing fr instead of just typing f10.
> But if it's not the first input field, then you have to count them or cycle through them?
No, you can use ;i to select fields the same way you select links, but it hasn’t taken me the months I’ve been using HN to notice all top-level discussion pages have exactly 2 input fields: one to add a top-level comment and one for the Algolia search (gi or 2gi will instantly teleport you to and insert you cursor in the first or second one respectively).
> So now you want a special bespoke reader for every website?
No, I want a native client for each type of software: a browser for browsing (exploring and reading) web documents, a news reader for news, an IRC client for internet real-time chat, a mail client for mail, a media player for playing media (I copy links and use a sxhkd binding to open them in MPV — https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24509028), etc.
What do you do when the browser doesn't highlight something interactive?
What do you do for, as one person on the web calls it, "fancy javascript shit"? What if you want to draw an iceberg to see how it would float?
I have been using a similar plugin for years and on a very rare occasion I’m using my touchpad to do something as you described.
The development¹ has been continued by the community after Firefox removed support for XUL extensions.
¹Well, tbh basic maintenance is a more accurate term — the updates have been minor, and the patch that enables it in the latest version of Palemoon hasn’t been pushed to the addon store yet, you have to clone from master at the moment.
>fu (click 'reply') >ff (select textbox) >ESC (deselect textbox) >fg (click 'reply')
and a lot easier- not to mention, less RSI-inducing- than mucking around with a mouse, or trackpad, or trackpoint, trying to aim a little cursor at a little box multiple times in a row.
And having tried Apple touchpads, they are actually good, so much that they released a standalone version for desktop computers. On every PC I have tried, at best, they provide you with a pointing device in case using a mouse is impractical. I don't intend to buy a Mac for several reason but I have to admit that their trackpads are not in the same league.
Because it's nice to be able to use my laptop without having to find a tabletop and dig out my mouse. In bed, on the couch, on a bus, as a passenger in a car.
Smartphones have taken over a lot of those situations, but a small laptop is still much better for a lot of tasks. I don't use Macs anymore, but their touchpads are actually as precise as a good mouse, and it just feels really nice.
Same thing with knobs and graphics tablets, though it's not a use case I have personally. A dedicated peripheral is probably more powerful and precise, but sometimes it's nice to use your laptop from your lap.
Also agree that detached keyboards and mice will almost always be superior to their on-board counterparts.
But, I think we're being a wee bit cognitively dissonant if we tell ourselves notebook keyboards and trackpads don't receive a non-trivial amount of use--even from the best of us.
Even more, why are keyboard and external-mouse purists even bothered with even owning a laptop if they rarely/ever intend to use the most major distinguishing features that separate them from desktops in the first place?
But even if you don't agree with any of that, why shouldn't we still demand a damn-good version of a highly ubiquitous tool, even if we don't personally use it that often? (Especially since Apple has proven that it's possible.) On HN (and the rest of the dev community) are perhaps the most demanding critics of anything technology. "Server starts up 8% slower!--dogshit!" "New release consumes 5% more memory--are you kidding me!" "Battery lasts 25m shorter--I'm in tears!" "The new theme is highly disruptive to my workflow--OH THE HUMANITY."
I'm not being critical of our being sticklers. We should be! That's our job! Our fellow devs care about quality; our users care about quality. We should care about what our users care about. We have the voices and power to advocate for good products for all that use technology. The trackpad will be a major way people interact with computers for a long time to come and I'm not prepared to hand-wave away the mediocre.
I've been using Linux exclusively on ~5 different laptops of varying quality the last few years and I haven't been able to relate to the frequent comments about trackpad support being poor - not sure if it's just I don't use it that much, or don't realize what I'm missing since I haven't used a modern macbook.
My biggest gripe applies to all laptops and that's the insufficient ram offered on most models - IMO 16gb should be the baseline, and 32gb approaching normal with the demands of current software (yes software could be more efficient but this isn't the reality we find ourselves in)
That's what I thought as well, but every time I try to use my colleagues Mac it's a struggle, movement speed is really weird as it's not linear, tapping doesn't behave as one would expect (never had a problem with Linux or even windows with that). The whole thing is a weird button which presses when I don't want to.
True, I have used it maybe for 10 mins in total in.my life, so that's probably the main issue (I hope for the sake of the people who actually use it).
On the other hand I have seen long time users and it makes me cringe. What a pain, learn some shortcuts and use it for random text selection only.
It really shouldn't be linear. That would force you to make unnecessary tradeoffs between precision and the ability to get the cursor from one side of the screen to the other in just one or two swipes.
> tapping doesn't behave as one would expect (never had a problem with Linux or even windows with that). The whole thing is a weird button which presses when I don't want to.
Tap to click is an option that can be toggled on and off, on every trackpad I've ever used. Additionally, Apple trackpads since 2015 let you adjust in software the amount of force required for a press on the trackpad to register as a click.
> What a pain, learn some shortcuts and use it for random text selection only.
I can just as easily turn this around: configure and learn a few multi-touch gestures and you won't have to keep moving your hand off the trackpad to perform keyboard shortcuts.
Conflating novice users with mac users seems a bit unreasonable, especially given how many people have used both at various times.
https://bill.harding.blog/2021/02/11/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26102894
Many millions of people will benefit, but the project only has 129 supporters, if anyone wants to chip in!
My XPS has the advantage of two physical buttons for left and right click. They require just the right amount of force to press (like a slightly softer mouse button with deeper travel). It makes dragging things around (which I do a lot because I don't use a tiling window manager) very easy. Which doesn't feel like something I should have to comment on, but doing this on a MacBook is pure suffering. Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable. Because of the physical buttons I can actually play some games on my XPS without needing an external mouse (or putting up with misclicks)
In terms of hardware, what people are looking for is mostly surface feel, size, features. It's the former where cheap laptops fall down. Most of the ones I've used really suck, actually. Some of them are bad enough that the manufacturers actually texture the surface to try to slow your finger down, I guess because the accuracy of the touchpad isn't very good. High end touchpads like the one on the XPS or MacBooks have flawless feel: extremely low friction surfaces.
It's not commonly noticed, but software contributes at least as much to how a trackpad feels as hardware. Given the limitations of its hardware, I have no quarrel with Apple's software quality. (Though the defaults are weird, like not being able to tap-to-click. They really want you to have to use that damn button.)
Windows has historically sucked at this. I've seen about half a dozen trackpads that seemed absolutely terrible, and no Windows settings could make them better. After moving them over to Linux (on the synaptics driver) they suddenly became quite okay to use, even if the hardware was crappy. I'm afraid this era might be ending, sadly. I've had nothing but bad experiences with libinput. It lacks the kind of configurability you need to improve on the performance of a bad touchpad. (It's even quite bad under Wayland for the XPS touchpad - you can't set the combination of low speed, high acceleration that feels natural to me for this touchpad.)
Not wishing to detract from your personal experience but "quite a bit of force" is at odds to mine - on this M1 MBP, it takes less force to activate the trackpad click than it does to activate a keypress. And once you've clicked, you can use a second figure to drag; no need to try and drag with the force finger (I use my thumb to click for power*, then index to drag for accuracy.)
My understanding is that Apple has made the clicks much lighter in their later models - along with doing the exact same thing with the keyboard keys, which for me goes much to far in the other direction.
- keyboards were reverted similar to how they were around 2015. - all the new trackpads are don’t require a physical actuation to activate. You can apply the same amount of minimal pressure anywhere on the trackpad and it “presses back” at you to simulate a physical click. It’s quite convincing.
One can leverage the haptic feedback to make the TouchBar a bit more lively[0]. The illusion breaks a bit since the haptic device is farther away from the touch surface but it's still quite a transformative experience for the TB.
One thing I would definitely expect a recent migrant to apple trackpads to experience as negative would be "force click". The apple trackpads sense force in some analogue way and if you push hard enough you can activate another action called force click. It's ridiculously easy to activate on accident when holding click while dragging -- but this "feature" can be turned off (and probably should be for most people I'd wager).
I've never tried using the middle finger for dragging -- seems awkward but i'll give it a try ... won't that activate the two finger drag operation?
No, because you've clicked which makes it a different operation than just two fingers scrolling or zooming.
But the touchpad can be configured for the bottom side of the touchpad to function as buttons: if you touch it directly, it won't register as mouse movement. If you press on the left, it's a left button, right is a right button. So while not actual physical buttons, it's pretty damn close. I don't actually use this so not sure houw this would work out in practice for your needs.
Regarding the dragging situation, there's another setting that's now been buried in "Accessibility" for some reason, but that was present in the touchpad settings before: "drag hold".
This allows you to lift the finger from the touchpad for a brief period while dragging without stopping the dragging. This, to me, is the pinnacle of touchpad experience. You can start dragging wherever you want on the pad and go as far as you like, you never run out of space.
There's also a similar option that some people like: three-finger drag. It works like scrolling, except that if you use three fingers it starts dragging.
In fact, I think I like the trackpad on my cheap Logitech K400 just as much as the Macbook, I'd be hard pressed to point to a significant problem with either.
Two-finger scrolling on the K400+ is painful. (Actually physically painful; I have RSI in my right arm and poorly-tracking touchpads can be a trigger.) It requires fairly heavy pressure on the touchpad to trigger gestures consistently (though they can be triggered inconsistently with light pressure which is also frustrating). And especially on macOS, it's difficult to actually scroll a consistent distance with a two-finger gesture with the K400+.
I'm fairly certain this has to do with the K400+'s touchpad not being recognized as a touchpad by the OS. The device is instead emitting mouse wheel events in firmware when a two-finger scroll gesture is detected. macOS will then, of course, apply mouse wheel acceleration, which makes sense for some mice but absolutely does not make sense for a touchpad.
Unlike so many other brands. The vast majority I've used have been an endless stream of frustration and flakiness.
100%. On my personal devices I don't want to compromise on trackpad or keyboards (I like that apple went back on the butterfly keyboards).
The rest of my comment is just my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. I've found the trackpad experience on the XPS and Thinkpad X1 laptops to be excellent under linux. The libinput [1] drivers seem to work really well and the gesture support seems nice too. What I miss from MacBook's touchpad is force-touch. Not having to worry about which part of the touchpad i'm pressing was really nice when I used a macbook.
I'm contemplating purchasing a m1 macbook air as my next laptop, but I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money.
May I suggest sponsoring Hector Martin on GitHub[0]? He’s working on building first-class support for the M1 architecture (including drivers) into Linux.
Actually manufacturing the trackpad hardware might be difficult/expensive, but since that's already a given, the driver can be tweaked in tons of ways to fit the regular macOS experience...
I think this is the case I remember:
https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
You make "properly handling any type of free-form user input" sound like rocket science, when it's the regular multi-touch kind of driver we have on billions of mobiles, and laptops...
The "properly" here is just the sauce for macOS handling, not some inherent difficulty of "handling any type of free-form user input" on a 2D surface...
And I've never used a PC trackpad with satisfaction rate of > 30% ;-) They are all shite.
I guess it is just a matter of preference. As I said, if you care about the trackpad, you will never touch a PC laptop. If you don't, you think you have a 94% trackpad, and that it doesn't matter.
We'll see how that ages, but rock on with your mac.
Also note that Lenovo itself has a huge variation in trackpad quality. My relatively new thinkpad (thinkpad-branded but I think the model number was yoga 360) from work has a trackpad that is just barely usable. My personal yoga c740 has a trackpad that is actually pretty nice and gets close to MBP quality when it comes to movement/accuracy (it does still lack gestures and good right-click support though, and that is likely a software issue).
I really hope these guys pick good trackpads. I can grudgingly live with a stunted feature set (gestures etc) for now because I know X makes it difficult or impossible to get right, but I absolutely cannot abide a trackpad that feels shitty and inaccurate just for moving the mouse around.
What your parent comment (the comment you replied to) said refutes the reply you made.
They installed OSX on a ThinkPad, and observed the desired OSX-like trackpad behavior. Apple does not write firmware for thinkpad pointing devices, so it cannot be firmware-specific behavior.
I realize a sibling poster had a different hackintosh experience. I think that maybe supports my suspicion. Good hardware and good software are both necessary, but not sufficient, conditions of a good overall experience.
My conclusion was to disable the trackpad and always carry an external mouse. I do a lot of CAD work and there's nothing that compares to a real mouse for speed and precision.
I'll use my Trackpoint nib in a pinch, but the trackpad ecosystem is so bad that I just write it off entirely. Yeah, keeping a mouse on hand is annoying, but it's like a physical keyboard: Would you ever buy a laptop where you had to input reams of text with a touchscreen keyboard? No, that's absurd, keyboards are a necessary part of a computer. Would you ever buy a trackpad for a desktop PC? I wouldn't, I'd use a mouse.
That's what happens when you're the most successful technology company in the world, and you hire the best engineers in the world and laser-focus them on thr user experience.
Funny that
Commenting on a thread about a non-apple laptop that you'll never buy a Non apple laptop.
That is true and unadultered fanboyism.
The touchpad. Nothing else. Just the touchpad?
I'm not given to hyperbole but methinks there's a lot of info and technical requirements that go into purchasing an expensive item such as a laptop. Screen size and quality, keyboard quality, ports, batter life, weight, performance, looks - oh you know...normal stuff.
At least for us normal people. Maybe my mistake was there.
Apple did it right 15 years ago and why do others still suck at it?
I mean... Apple will also "confidently" sell you four little castor wheels for 700 quid[0]. I'm not sure we should view their eagerness to take money off you as a sign of how great they are.
[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pr...
It even feels amazing, physically. It's smooth and your finger just glides right over it and still registers the touch with barely any pressure. The combination of the hardware, the size, and the software (drivers, OS, whatever else) is just the best I've ever used. Best of all, it's like that right out of the box.
For laptops, at least, I'm solidly Apple for the trackpad alone, I like it that much.
Design and UX-wise, the current laptop market is a shitshow and Apple seems to be the only company that consistently cares about the little things. Sure, they've messed up in the past (butterfly keyboards), but there is still a sense of progress.
Perhaps it needs to be a score via a user test e.g click these small randomly appearing boxes in the shortest time possible
Not only was that not the case, it was worse than my own pessimism that I started with.
The fan noise and the trackpad were so bad to the point that it felt like a joke, even though I knew it wasn't. People are just oblivious to this stuff and march onward none the wiser, even the people who should be doing things like comparative analysis on quality against their competitors' products.
I returned it after doing all the windows and driver updates, choosing "quiet mode" in the Dell Power Management software. The fan would kick on while cpu strolled along at 10 or 15%. Replaced it with an xps 13 which has been fine. (I have had several xps so decided to chance it).
The gulf continues to be so big that after so much time of nobody else even appearing to try to compete, I assume it's patents.
In fact, that line of chromebooks had the best overall package. Slim, but very sturdy plastic body, a surprisingly good keyboard, ~10 hour battery life. The 13" FHD screen was OK, but not amazing, I would have liked an IPS panel instead of TN.
The major downside is that it was a 32-bit ARM-based chromebook and everyone was going 64-bit x86 instead. So it got slower and slower with each successive update, eventually it couldn't even play 1080p Youtube videos anymore, or even 720p60. Such a shame.
Always an external mouse in the backpack and the nipple as a fallback.
That thing on a macbook is so absurdly large that it's impossible to type without cursor doing some action.
Look at Firefox for an example of the latter. I'm typing this on a Chromebook intended to run ChromeOS, but it's actually running Ubuntu. The touchpad experience from the factory is as good as it should be. When you wipe the machine and install Ubuntu and use Chrome, it's still pretty good. Running Firefox on the same system gives you its same janky scroll behavior that you get anywhere else that isn't a MacBook, for no good reason.
People act like there's some yet-to-be-understood law of nature that make MacBook touchpads good and everything else bad. This is demonstrably false. We have existence proofs to the contrary.
My solution has always been to just keep a wireless mouse with rechargable AA's in my backpack. If I'm using my laptop on a couch at home, I have a wooden lap desk with ample mouse space to accommodate it.
Additionally, the thinkpad I have now has both an eraser mouse and touch screen + stylus (as well as a trackpad), so if I do have to leave my mouse at home, I at least have options. I like the eraser mouse because I don't have to move my fingers away from the keyboard - and even if it feels it takes slightly longer to move - it's more pleasant tactile experience for me.
I strongly suspect most of the complaints about PC trackpads are a bit like Windows/Linux/Mac users complaining about the current font rendering on any of the others. I can't help wondering how much is just personal preference + a bit of echo chamber.
If you run linux on the XPS this project (https://github.com/iberianpig/fusuma) is great for configuring multi-touch gestures that work like the Mac.
> 4TB or more of Gen4 NVMe storage
Suggests to me that this will be targeted at the "money is no object" market. (And it might still be something you don't need, I keep all my media on a server, so 1TB would be more than sufficient, thank you very much.)
Of course, asking people to trust that long-term calculus for a new product from a new company is nontrivial.
Compaq vs Sun:
I was the IT Director for Decide.com in ~1998-ish and we had a bunch of compaq servers and a bunch of SUN servers...
At the time - SUN was *giving* servers to startups to adopt their HW.
I had to build out a ton of systems in various DCs and the SUN machines were not rack-mountable, but were like $50,000 a unit... and they had this *security* feature where-by the machine would not boot up if the external case was not properly put on...
BUT - I could rebuild a compaq server in the dark with my eyes closed. I had a compaq engineer who was delivering a replacement server and watched me rebuild that machine in no time.
The thing was that the engineering of the compaqs was so consistent and well done that it took single digit minutes to rebuild an entire 4U machine vs the behemoth SUNS that bitched when their cover wasn't properly sealed.
Also, $50,000 sounds like a lot of money. Was that price considered giving it away?
Edit: in hindsight it was a terrible marketing strategy. It meant that 100% of new customers had budget left over to spend on risky whitebox machines.
I have fond memories of an AMD Linux cluster that ran circles around a Sun workstation. The workstation cost 10x more than the entire cluster.
For a server in the 90's, it sounds pretty cheap to me.
Apple's Xserves started at $3,000, and I've read they were considered underpowered. Sun was a premium company for heavy lifting.
The company I worked for at the time was into Silicon Graphics, and those machines were five figures a pop just for desktops.
One small note on SGI - the 02 had a "feature' that cost you ~$2500 extra for access to a particular port - can recall if it was USB or Serial or what not, but you had to pay for this port...
But this port was just blocked by a plastic cover - EVERY machine had this port/ but they were covered by a plastic cover.
The $FEE that you paid was to simply have SGI remove the plastic cover on top of the port.
The 02 was an extremely over priced piece of shit and the only reason it existed was to have Softimage and Maya run on MIPS
Avid was later based in seattle - but it was based on tech that LucasFilm invented - as was CG rendering called "the death star" which Steve Jobs bought from George for $10,000,000 and turned it into pixar.
George didnt think that CGI was going to be profitable, hence selling to Jobs.
Source: on the Presidio design team, I designed a majority of their data center in that facility - and had designed a cable interconnect matrix with the design requirement that any given workstation in the four-building facility could be made a render node when the engineer was not at desk (so at night)
Lots of crazy experiences from that --
1. being asked why I couldnt provide power over fiber
2. Being asked if I could design a facility in Singapore because paying "us Prima donnas" was too expensive when they could pay asian animators far less for the same work
3. Having see them in-bed with Force 10 networks
4. Seeing all their equipment stolen from the parking garage after delivery but before installation into the data-center by some construction guy
5. Them turning down my initial datacenter design which made it look like the inside of the death star. Telling me they hated it.
6. Watching the power struggle as the then CFO took control of the empire as Lucas stepped away.
7. Watching the distaste of all the employees as Lucas sold for four billion dollars to disney, but his accomplished and skilled staff got basically nothing because they didnt own stock in the company they built for lucas.
Yeah - fuck george lucas.
OMG do you want to hear war stories about SGI?
Turning SGI machines into keg-or-atores at Lucasfilm when consolodatiting to the presidio when all these Octanes and others were at ILM in Marin?
Yeah - many a machine was turned into a bar...
Heck the team building exercises at FB were to "build a bar for your team..."
Are Presidio and "the death star" you referenced above related to RenderMan? I've done research on hardware for image processing (https://aetherling.org/), so it's interesting to hear about these systems.
I, personally, am tired of the brushed aluminum with black bezels and keyboard look. The materials can remain the same, but some colored options would be wonderful - like the HP Spectre x360's with blue and black options, etc.
Everything else looks wonderful, particularly the mobo upgrades for newer CPU/GPU combinations... and even better - getting to choose the ports I need! Love that!
Extra colors add cost. You have to plan for which colors might be popular, and which won't, in which case you'd have to sell at a discount to get rid of inventory. I'd be surprised if Framework offered that out of the gate.
Apple literally has buildings filled with thousands of CNC machines milling aluminum laptop cases.
Apple does not manufacture things the same way as the rest of the industry, as they have the money and the scale to do whatever the fuck they want.
https://beneinstein.medium.com/no-you-cant-manufacture-that-...
If it came in certain tasteful colors, that would get my wife to switch from Apple to Linux. (She works in the fashion industry.)
While it's commendable that framework is picking those materials to environmentally conscious - I have had such terrible past experiences with "aluminum" body laptops triggering eczema outbreaks[1] - that I avoid metal cases as a rule now.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/291384767_Allergy_r... TLDR: many metallic cases have nickel or cobalt present, and it releases when you sweat. Sometimes this triggers contact dermatitis (eczema) if you're sensitized to it.
That said, when I had the option to get a laptop where I wouldn't have to think about it at all (plastic cased thinkpad), I jumped for it. Maybe I've just developed a deep-seated, emotional resentment for metal bodied laptops in general after spending so long dealing with itchy/oozy hands, wrists and forearms. Also all the doctors who just prescribed steroid creams and blamed stress...
You're also not in the majority, but as I stated, I'd prefer a non-metal looking laptop. I've got a Razer Blade Stealth 13 which I had to put a skin on because it's a fingerprint magnet. Skins really aren't that bad, and they're designed to not block the vents.
Not everyone has skin allergies, but if you are mass producing devices that will be in close contact with skin for long durations, made with metals that are well known to cause skin irritation - sooner or later you're going to run into people that are affected.
So while I'm "rare", in that I know I've got an allergy with a very noticeable reaction that can be triggered by laptops - many people don't know that they are at risk of developing it, even though they are. Or maybe they know they have a nickel sensitivity (this issue is very common with people who wear cheap jewelry) - but they don't know a laptop can trigger it.
Unless there's a big push to do some sort of widespread contaminant testing on laptops, I imagine this issue will grow if metal-body laptops continue to be the norm.
For me I have 3 concerns: 1. I'd never use a 13" laptop it's too small for work for me. Any chance of a 15" version? It'd be also cool if it could be used to light gaming (e.g. an Nvidia 1650 included)
2. Pricing. If this will be priced as Macbook pros you will have a very niche segment as customers (basically silicon valley tech people)
3. As I'm in the EU shipping needs to have a sane price (I can understand if this is not the priority at the start)
Also, will you consider establishing an EU warehouse to reduce shipping and customs overhead?
Good luck!!!
Also looking forward to AMD or ARM instead of Intel.
~ typed on a Lenovo T440s (4GB soldered RAM unfortunately): swapped the touchpad for the one from the 450s, replaced the fan, after it made noises, started with a tiny m.2-SATA, then upgraded to a spare SATA from the Desktop, updated the screen after it broke. Now the bottom shell has a dent in it (full backpack) but I think I'll let it pass. Still seems pretty repairable to me.
What they are promising sounds awesome. And AS a Brit, that is not a word I use often :)
I really, really hope this pans out, and this summer - this is something I'd very much like to get my hands on!
now let's have a pocket variant that revives the old google modular project
They should avoid the appeal to authority fallacy. Those companies hire tens of thousands of people each. Statistically speaking, half of them could be idiots. Just because I worked at Cisco doesn't mean I'm some product genius. (Hell, I came from an acquisition!)
Maybe its me but I suspect they're referring to decade old ThinkPad that have since evolved a lot to thin performance beasts.
Passive aggressive remarks towards things your target market holds nostalgia for is likely not going to end well.
It's also setting themselves up for failure if their cooling solution doesn't beat a modern ThinkPads dual fan solution.
The aluminium case is also extremely questionable. Is your target demo thinkpad users or Dell users that want to take things apart. Hate to break it to you but Dell users don't give a fuck. It's why they have a Dell. Most think pad users value plastic chassis. They're lighter (13" at 1.3kg, are you nuts?) more durable, and more palatable on your lap when they warm up they're also more cost effective.
Dell started soldering RAM in the past couple of years though, so if this thing exists when I next need to buy a laptop and it remotely justifies its high price I'd be interested.
This project looks unbelievable! I am super excited for this, as many many others are too obviously. I’ll be honest I’m not even going to click on the Ars Technical article, their opinion couldn’t be less interesting to me.
No doubt this company still has a lot to prove. Can they put their money where their mouth is? Remains to be seen.
But the fact that there is a real company out there, making an attempt to build a product like this makes me so happy.
Read: please send us a free one
The Fairphone company was surprised by difficulties upgrading and patching android without support from their BSP vendor, causing many months delays of updates _and_ years shorter support life than they were planning for their earlier models.
I purchased the Purism Librem 13 laptop from their kickstarter, and they had great plans for firmware and drivers, but also great difficulty following through. The trackpad chosen for the first models took much longer than expected to get upstream linux support, and it was never great (it turned out to be impossible to reliably detect their variant automatically). They finally hired someone with sufficient skill to do the coreboot port _months_ after initial units were delivered, and delivered polished coreboot firmware for their initial laptops _years_ after they started the kickstarter.
So, why should we have confidence in the firmware and drivers that Framework will deliver :)
Whereas if x86 systems have support on the mainline kernel, future kernel upgrades will be supported.
Any reason there couldn't be a "canonical" ARM64 standard for SoC?
The problem is a lot of ARM SoCs have tightly integrated, custom hardware which requires modified or new drivers, and the tweaks needed to use them are often either very dirty and won't be accepted into mainline Linux without basically redoing them, or are occasionally just hooks for proprietary userland blobs to interface with, and are effectively obfuscated, satisfying the "letter of the law" for GPL but no more.
There are some devices like this on x86 too, FWIW -- Google's Pixelbook, as an example, has a few devices that effectively need a custom fork of Linux to get the audio device to function correctly, because it's driven over i2c (IIRC) and needs special blobs uploaded and an out-of-tree driver to function.
ARM SoCs could be more "PC like" but it'd be more expensive, which as far as I can tell is a big reason it hasn't happened. No real incentive as people don't seem to care if their OS goes out of date in 4 years.
Luckily it seems like Framework do have this well under control (somewhat quietly :)
> driver stability across both Windows and Linux
Is "Linux" in this case mainline linux or does entail to use nvidia/ati proprietary drivers? If mainline linux, is it a free driver, or a binary blob? (see linux-libre)
> a mature off the shelf BIOS solution
Is coreboot/libreboot on your roadmap?
I'm not trying to nitpick. Congratulations on the hardware design that looks amazing (replaceable port extensions, clever!). I strongly believe software is also an important part of reliability/durability, that's why my questions :)
Sorry, I'm having trouble parsing this statement. Your 'embedded controller' (whatever that may be) firmware is based on a web browser?
[0] https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromiumos/platform/ec/+/m...
I have no intention of using the Ubuntu provided with a Lenovo laptop if I buy one, but the fact that that there is a fully working Linux distro for that machine means that all of the requisite bits and pieces are somewhere in the Open Source community (and because I use Fedora, I'm almost certainly using a new enough version of Kernel, Gnome etc. that they're already there).
Can others build a Framework laptop without approval? Can others build cards without approval? Will it be a platform?
Tell me how this isn't a Nespresso machine for silicon pods. :-)
Edit: To be clear, even a "we have a generic base laptop and you can pick your I/O" concept is potentially a nice value prop, but it'd be good if the picture (and roadmap) was clear.
[1] https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/t14_gen1_p14s...
> For those of you who love to tinker, we’ve also created the Framework Laptop DIY Edition, the only high-end notebook available as a kit of modules that you can customize and assemble yourself, with the ability to choose Windows or install your preferred Linux distribution.
Thanks for your info
Perhaps there are more urgent tasks for "targeting the general populace to reach profitability".
Ps. That's why I hate potential sarcasm.
If this laptop doesn’t support Linux, it’s a big missed opportunity.
I imagine their could be vendor-specific expansion cards for SBC's, like one that is just an HDMI extension which only works with the vendors SBC and doesn't use USB-c. Maybe vendors could implement one "framework" compatible expansion port and provide several of their own expansion cards that only implement SBC features, and plug directly into the SBC instead of generic usb-c.
What if they don't want to sell through the Framework Marketplace?
Favorite hardware form factor ever ...
This is an unpopular opinion, but I think this proves that Apple was right to dump legacy ports. This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space that could have been spent on a bigger battery. USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.
(the Nespresso analogy is ridiculous, a laptop doesn't exist to consume adapters. But I presume you were enjoying a little tongue-in-cheek with your coffee)
Well, sort of :-) Nespresso is a famous implementation of a "your basic machine stays static, you swap out a different element of the system based on temporary/current needs, but you can only buy those elements from one vendor" pattern. Printer ink cartridges are another.
Yeah, add-on cards to a computer aren't consumables per se - but the entire premise is that as time goes on you might want to get new ones (because your current needs change), i.e. upgrade. Whether I can pick upgrades from different vendors, and what the tax imposed on creating and/or selling upgrades is, matters.
Every laptop I've ever owned has at least one port I never use, and after a couple years it's missing some other port I'd rather have. This one seems to solve that problem, extending the life of the machine and/or avoiding dongle hell.
But if you can only buy the dongle from one vendor, it's going to be more expensive than if there's a market where multiple vendors compete. It's that "you can only buy the adapter from Apple, and it's really expensive" thing, just moved into the chassis.
Hence the question which one of those we're looking at here, and it was kindly answered by a rep above.
Apple is content to push everything into dongles (which you have to carry around anyway) to get it thinner. The point at which I can't have a wired RJ45 ethernet port is already ridiculous - that is not a thick connector. Same with fullsize USB ports.
Battery life there are hard limits as well: nobody is making a laptop with more then 100Wh, because that's the limit that you can carry onto an aircraft.
……………
Only Fujitsu use them AFAIK.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/8/16750574/p...
If your uses case requires you to constantly plug/unplug ethernet cables in your laptop then you need a workstation class laptop with a full sized RJ-45 jack, not a sleek thin and light.
it's perfectly feasible to integrate one.
just look a the dell latitude 7390. really, look at it:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/eB6gGRDZWSYT4XW6SeSMtf-120...
For me the dongle is annoying but probably sufficient.
I've also worked in offices where the Ethernet was better because it didn't require VPN access and was more reliable, but in those situations I plugged it into my monitor rather than directly into the laptop.
Everyone who understands collision domains.
Everyone who understands bandwidth.
> By connecting each device directly to a port on the switch, either each port on a switch becomes its own collision domain (in the case of half-duplex links), or the possibility of collisions is eliminated entirely in the case of full-duplex links. For Gigabit Ethernet and faster, no hubs or repeaters exist and all devices require full-duplex links.
So is a wifi connection full or half duplex?
I don't think you understand collision domains.
One had WiFi that only gave internet access, the other had no WiFi at all (in 2017).
I mean. Really. That strikes me as willfully ignorant and arrogant. Clearly it's heavily used, especially in professional/corporate environments.
FWIW I use WiFi if I have to on the move.
But at home and office it's hard wire all the way.
In the office it's not even an option, everybody must.
At home, it's a quality of life thing.
The speed drops and disconnections and unpredictability of WiFi are not thing of the past yet. For some there's a security issue as well, real or perceived.
Wire just works.
Edit: other examples - gaming laptops; secure networks; dense environments either urban or corporate; anything that needs predictable connectivity, bandwidth and lag really :-/
Both my own laptop and the laptop from my employer (a large company) are used almost all the time on wired Ethernet, the main exception being during business trips.
It's so clear that they removed it from their lineup? Clearly you're wrong. I have two Macbooks work/home, and a USB-C dock has been life changing in its awesomeness.
And yes my dock has RJ-45 ;)
They also removed scissor switches, sd card readers and hdmi. But they're bringing those back (or have already), so they don't seem like a good authority to appeal to here.
There are discussions on:
1. Is a particular connector still used/useful on laptops - my statement is that RJ45 is absolutely still used on laptops, and went into some examples / use-cases.
2. Separate discussion, hopefully informed by the first, is how do we do that - built into laptop or via a bunch of dongles.
Apple in particular removing it from their laptops does not speak one way or another to corporate/professional environment requirements. Their approach is "use a dongle/dock" which in their view is compatible with whatever use case is needed (and some people disagree, which is fine - lots of vendors and in particular HP/Dell/Thinkpad all have robust professional/corporate/roadwarrior models with dock, port and even pointing stick capability).
My laptop is sitting at home 1,5 m away from my Unifi access point and the network cable is still measurably more reliable and performant. Wifi might have won the amateurs.
Still very much useful in corporate environments.
Edit: Actually, didn't spot the Ethernet port on the first glance, might be worth a deeper look. :)
If you are bringing your laptop to a coffee shop, you probably won't need an ethernet port anyway, so you can leave the dongle at home. Lots of mobile use-cases don't involve plugging in to a ton of things, so why waste space having ports for it?
We're mostly programmers here, with nice keyboards and big screens as a necessity for work. On the other hand, lots of people are completely content with the base laptop. Making things easier for us at their expense is probably not a great business decision.
Luckily, macOS is going downhill as well, therefore my pain will end when the next version has not resemblance to a Unix system any more. The day Apple starts migrating its desktop OS to hamburger menus, I'll wipe and sell all my remaining Apple hardware.
I dunno. I've never owned a macbook because Linux has been good enough for most of the time I've seriously been using computers for work stuff. Even if you aren't a Linux enthusiast, the time to switch for developers was more than a decade ago, IMO.
Assuming that's correct, I think it's kinda clever... it's basically a dongle system that allows the modules to sit flush instead of jutting out of the side of the laptop.
How it proves it? Those guys do not drop ports, they just make them modular.
All the "saved space" in Apple laptops become amazingly wasted space in your bag with tons of adapters and wires.
I still dream to meet the one who made such 'wise' decision to tell him what I think about it personally!
>USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.
I am not sure you can know what anyone needs. For instance you do not know what I need.
I wish you'll be around when I need to copy my files from the camera with idiotic dongle in the field when time is precious.
I would love then to hear how sticking card directly into the slot without any headache is less comfortable than looking for some dongle in the bag while holding your camera equipment and then hanging dongle on it's wire because there is no table around to put your laptop on or put it somehow on your lap and try not to move to avoid it breaking during the transfer because then you'll have to start again transferring your important pictures. Then pray it will work because some times it will not when you need it most.
Removing sd-card reader slot is example of the most idiotic design decision I can imagine. It is taking what works perfectly and destroying it for no reason at all. It is pure damage without any benefits taking size of it into account.
It was done by people who never used laptop for transferring photos from the camera using sd-card.
They never thought that while you transfer with the sd-card your other card is available to continue shooting in critical or unexpected situations. This is what makes the difference between making some shots and not! I would never understand this idiocy of removing sd-card slot to "save space".
The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG! Not in the laptop itself by making it useless. Such a dumb decision to remove useful ports. Goodness.
If I'm heading to someplace where I think I might need more than 1 usb-a port or a situation where I might need a bit of a usb hub I just pack this little 'dock dongle' that's about three inches long and an inch wide that has three usb-a ports (2x3.0 1x2.0), an hdmi port, a sd and tf card slot, an ethernet port, an audio jack, and a usb-c power input port... cost me all of 60$.
I do not want to search for this 'little guy' in the dark and be stuck without it when I forgot to take it because a lot of other things happening in the same time around or I lost it or somebody took it because he thought it belongs to him by mistake.
Having the dongle headache or not in certain situations means missing shots or not. And I speak from experience of shooting intensively in addition to doing other things during 5-7 days in a arrow where you do not always have time to eat/sleep and surely no time to waste for this dongle BS.
Get the machine that suits _you_. Unless you want to run Apple OS because then you're not given choice.
And that is exactly the point. I used to be a very happy customer of multiple Macbook Pros over almost a decade. Currently, I am still using my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" with maxed out specs when not in my home office. But all the later models went downhill for my needs. The new Macbook Air M1 is the first model that I am thinking about buying. It is probably powerful enough to work on it, and I think I actually get some value back from the saved spaced due to dropped ports. Even the 2015" Macbook Pros with 15" are at a thickness were I simply see no point to remove even half a milli-meter of thickness. I would gladly use a thicker, heavier variant if it had multiple different ports including Ethernet. One problem that I had over the time with all Thunderbolt dongles was that the physical connection became unreliable over time. That is hassle I don't want to deal with.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/guide/14-inch...
If "using it on your lap, without something hanging" matters to you (like the parent) and you wanted something more 'rigid', things like this exist: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/product/B07PCP5J4Z
I have one buried in my bag that I almost never use. It's surprisingly rare that I need an Ethernet or HDMI port but they're there if I need them. In the meantime, there's more room inside my laptop for battery.
Even an extra 5Wh of capacity is about an extra hour of use.
A good dock solves this- it's not mobile, but I find that I'm not really that productive when I'm travelling anyways.
I only wish that docking solutions became standard offerings with the laptops that skimp on ports.
It doesn't solve it. Look at my use-case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271855
>it's not mobile, but I find that I'm not really that productive when I'm travelling anyways.
Laptop is for real mobile usage. In a way you have no need for it according to your description.
Maybe that's the case for you, but that's far from universal. I have zero need for any adapters. At work, I can use usb-c to connect to my monitor, and if I need to present in a meeting room, I do it wirelessly.
At home, I can use airplay to share my screen to my TV.
It's a reasonable tradeoff. Imagine your laptop with the power supply built in instead of as an external brick.
Saving 0.1% of space for micro-sd-card reader and having headache of dongle for every photo/video transfer? Doesn't appear reasonable at all. They have found space for micro-sd-card reader on raspberryPi Zero ... It's absurd not to have it even on the phone.
Look at my use-case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271855
> Imagine your laptop with the power supply built in instead of as an external brick.
You know what? Great! One thing less to care separately . It would be bad thermal solution though.
By the way the brick itself was coming with extension cord. Now it comes without it. Imagine during your travel squeezing it in some public place with bad socket to charge it when it doesn't fit well enough and could even fall and break and your life depend on your ability to charge it. Do it few times during few travels, then you will understand how "reasonable" was to even to remove the extended power cord from the brick.
Many things appear 'reasonable' on the paper until you use them in real life.
In the case of the framework laptop, most of the "modules" just seem to be USBC/Thunderbolt-to-X dongles that fit flush with the case.
For those who use a laptop outside office desks, there is a lot of difference between flimsy setups with dongles hanging on wires, and the mechanically solid laptop case. Much easier to carry it around in one piece.
It's completely logical.
> The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG!
It most certainly is not. The point of a laptop is to strike a balance between portability and usability. Requiring the extra like two cubic inches of space in your bag for a dongle is assuredly not a design concern.
Further, those readers seem to be made /just/ fast enough to read ahead of the current speeds, so when new speeds come out, you need a faster reader. That works fine if you have a USB 3.1 or USB 3.2 adapter, but not so great if the reader is built into a laptop with an otherwise much longer life.
That's the issue - you are speaking only from an Apple user perspective. Android (and other non-apple) phones allow us to extend our storage with sd cards, and they are mostly used to store and transfer photos and videos.
/me looks glumly at my Apple-ized Samsung Galaxy S6Edge, with no SD card or removable battery. (Both of which would make the S6/GearVR combo significantly more useful...)
Can we explore that a bit? Laying around your house? Or like on the ground at work?
I seem to remember some corporate espionage that relied on people looking at random SD cards they found on the ground...
Thankfully random SD cards should be much safer than random USB devices, but it's probably better to be careful.
You could hav put your laptop on a network with heaps of monitoring going on, and then mailed it back to NSA/GRU/MSS/Mossad as required based on the ip addresses your machine started connecting to...
;-)
More recently there's the PinePhone as well. It's not just expandable storage, you can boot off the SD and have all your OS and files there.
I would say I definitely use SD cards more than flash drives now.
Dongles are both cheaper and more flexible than replacing the cable, at the cost of having a slightly shittier experience.
It does. Micro-sd-card reader fits even in raspberryPi Zero ... Neglectable "space saving" advantage vs huge usability disadvantage.
> The point of a laptop is to strike a balance between portability and usability.
I think MacbookPro should be about philosophy of amplifying creative person with power tools for creativity in a portable way. Not a dumb machine mimicking more and more some TV . While this it should also do easily it shouldn't do just this, I think.
Look at my use-case: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=26271855
From my perspective of extensive use of a laptop some people barely use laptops at all and thus perhaps they better be designing something else because for me it appears they have no idea what 'Pro' usage is. When you travel you never know what environment you'll have and therefor ports and connectivity make a difference between: Creative idea done/ not done.
>Requiring the extra like two cubic inches of space in your bag for a dongle is assuredly not a design concern.
It's not 2 cubic inches. It's huge adapter with all missing ports. Why Pro Laptop should consist of two parts is beyond me.
Again look at my use-case. I have no place for dongles nor time for dealing with them.
If those real 'Pro' requirements are not a design concerns then perhaps MacbookPro should not have 'Pro' in the title in my opinion.
Its ~2 cubic inches and doesn't dangle on a cable so you don't need a table/lap.
As for your more detailed post you just linked to:
> Only for that purpose more ports are justified because I would prefer to have 4 at least to connect all 3 iOS devices plus hard_drive for backup etc. If there is additional monitor around that I could use I would love to use it which means I need HDMI/display port.
USB4/thunderbolt 4 allows for type c hubs that also support alt-modes like displayport alt-mode so you can have a small cellphone-sized hub to significantly increase your ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RYZJY8M
> I would also need HDMI/DP/DVI or even VGA port to have external screen connected.
Surely you're not suggesting that laptops built in 2021 should have a VGA port? This is exactly what tomtheelder was referring to when he said:
> I'm pretty sure that in 2021 that is an _extreme_ niche use case [...] 99% of people who own Macbooks or whatever don't own an SD card dongle because they don't need it. However, and extra USB-C port can be used for a multitude of things
Just think of all the extra thickness Apple would be adding to their laptops just to fit a VGA port 99.9% of people would never use.
Thank you for the link. Unfortunately it only looks so.
It satisfies only partly because it's still headache to remember where it is, remember to take it and when something like that sticks out of your machine probability to break it when there are people around is very high and not unusual. Also you can tilt accidentally your laptop and it cat potentially break the port completely.
With all that said the reality now for instance that it is simply not available in the country I am right now unfortunately. I cannot move because of the covid situation and I am limited with what I can order. My MacbookPro has died gracefully (you can read how if you wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25809097) I have managed to get M1 machine but now I'll have to deal with adapters that are available around.
Because I do not have sd-card-slot my photography is limited to zero currently until I find adapter that would work. I have additional headache to choose one that works, and they lie about the specs and you never know what you get so this is the reality of all those theories about 'oh you can get a dongle'.
I just wish to add that when you are really mobile and travel in different countries it is Not unusual situation. Even if it's developed country it's not easy to order something in a small town or even in a big town. Usually small towns do not have something you need, you can count on that. Probably you can buy a new Mac probably like I did but it's M1 with 2 ports and some nice adapters will be not available there. Again this is the reality , not the theory where you can access everything you need whenever you need it.
The second item you've mentioned is nice. Thank you again. It can be useful when I'll be able to reach it. Right now all my drives are usb3 to fit MacbookPro I had. This hub is also requires power supply brick as I understand and again it would be simply impossible to get the hub you've mentioned where I am at the moment.
So in my case it will be huge adapter hanging on wire and let us pray it will work as expected.
>Surely you're not suggesting that laptops built in 2021 should have a VGA port?
No, I am not suggesting that. HDMI an micro-sd-card reader do not add any thickness though and are still very useful for flexibility in real world. When I took my previous Mac I thought I will not use HDMI but mobile reality made it so that at some point it was the only way I can use it and extract data from it and the external port allowed me to boot gnu/linux. The M1 Mac on the other hand become not bootable in the first day because of the bug in DiskUtility and I needed 'another Mac' to make it even bootable again so from my perspective I did not upgrade I have downgraded.
>_extreme_ niche use case [...] 99% of people For me it's not about how many people use something it's about what a portable computer allows you to do and how flexible , productive and creative you can be with that tool. I do not want to go further about what else 99% do not do ... following majority was never too exciting for me.
Apple should not be designing their laptops around the needs of 1% of users. That's just dumb. They should be designing for most users, and they are.
Which strategy makes more sense…
1. users who need SD card readers should carry around SD card readers
2. users who don't need SD card readers should carry around SD card readers
I don't need an SD card reader! I'm glad Apple is using that space to make the laptop more portable with the most battery possible.
The whole point of laptop is put as much power as possible into a device that is as portable as possible. The point of a bag is to carry around shit that YOU might need and the rest of us don't. Goodness.
The reason Excel remains the dominant spreadsheet software is because it has dozens of features that other spreadsheet applications don't have. Each one of those features is only used by a small portion of the user base but if you add up the users which use at least one of these features it starts representing a significant chunk of users. Each of those feature independently isn't worth implementing in competing platforms because "Google sheets should not be designing their app around the needs of 1% of users", but the culmination of all of those features add up to a platform Google Sheets just cannot compete with.
The answer about how far we should take it is, as far as is reasonable.
More battery.
I mean, extreme thinness is not really an important criteria for many, but everything seems to gets compromised to serve that goal.
The reason that Excel remains the dominant spreadsheet software is that it's the best spreadsheet out there, and it's almost universally installed on all school and business computers.
And I hope you do realise that I am talking about sd-card reader just for the most obvious example, it doesn't mean I have nothing more to say or wish from laptop.
I think this is not about what majority wishes when you develop a tool that you label as 'Pro', it's about what device can and cannot do and as such what Man can and can't do using it!
>I'm not sure what you need "tons of adaptors and wires" for since you're only talking about SD cards...
First of all it is a real mobile usage. And I mean serious usage 'on the go' (and it could be 3 month + of 'the go') My laptop is the only machine I have and could have in such scenario. And as far as I know this is exactly what laptop was meant to be - device for mobile work.
My use-cases are:
I do Software Development:
- Developing software for iOS: Which means I need to have one of each kind for testing iPhone/iPad/iPadPro and connect each of them periodically. Only for that purpose more ports are justified because I would prefer to have 4 at least to connect all 3 iOS devices plus hard_drive for backup etc. If there is additional monitor around that I could use I would love to use it which means I need HDMI/display port.
- Developing software for MacOS. I am developing FileManager for Mac and few other projects on the go. Which means Xcode and resources it requires. Also external monitor port hdmi/dp - any I can find around depending where I am.
- Developing software for GNU/Linux. which means sometimes a need for Ethernet port to track down issues.
- Using Terminal for remote connections to raspberryPi/s which means wired connections when there is a need of speed or some problem. It also means I use sd-card-reader for this too.
- Developing software for reMarkable tablet. which means VM GNU/Linux machine on Mac which requires more_storage/more_memory/more_processing_power and again free USB-A port to connect rM for speedy connection/charging.
- Making some hardware projects on the go: Arduino/ESP32/8266/raspberyyPi etc. which means periodically connecting those and I must have cable connections when something breaks and wifi would not help. I also do not need additional dongle in the chain when tracking down some problems. It saves a lot of time to have less items to check as the check itself takes time * number of times you do it. Needless to say that those devices barely work with simplest USB 2.0
I do Music:
- I play Guitar. So I need to connect a Guitar for recording/performing, which means I need line-in .
- I sing and if I wish to record it I also need external mic which means one more usb/line-in.
- I play Piano: If it's real piano the same needs for mic if it's electronic piano - perhaps line-in, if it's midi - usb.
You know at least one line-in would be great just in case I wish to connect something in creative situation for creative purposes.
I do massive Photography/Videography:
- Some times work as photographer/videographer. I have Nikon Camera with sd-cards and need periodically but intensively transfer of huge Video Footages.
Wifi for such sizes is simply not an option. I also need ports to connect few drives at the same time.
I need diff types of ports if I work with other people and usually they are not equipped. Again the difference sometimes: it's done or not due to some dumb limitations.
- I do Argentinian Tango Teaching/Dancing/Performing.
Which means I need remote control to stop/play music during the class. Where the IR port that worked fine?
I need wired audio connection to whatever-audio-system-i-can-find and if my bluetooth speaker doesn't_work/not_enough for certain halls . I would also need HDMI/DP/DVI or even VGA port to have external screen connected.
I never know what screen will be available at some place. Again the difference would be: It's doable/Its' not doable.
- I also need to relax and watch movies some times and I also wish to do it with friends sometimes which means HTMI/DP/DVI/VGA whatever we can find.
I do not know your use case but as you can imagine with all that activity the last thing I need is another dumb dongle to deal with.
Since I travel with my guitar I have 'literally' no space in the bag for adapter and wires because most precious things I have to take with me on the plane and I have to pack them really tight if I wish to avoid boarding complications.
I simply have no space in the bag nor space in my mind to deal with another stupid problem like dongle/adapter.
There are projects that require all of theses use-cases simultaneously. And since I wish to do things with top quality possible I need all the equipment to work perfectly too because I relay on it and if it doesn't work it usually means something will not be done. I am sure any pro would confirm that. I simply cannot afford having some stupid dongle. Believe me. I need MacBookPro and it should be really 'Pro'!
Again, I do not know your use-case but for me some people are just barely using laptop as laptop at all for goodness sake.
And if we are talking about 'Pro' shouldn't we listen to people like me who is literally using all the features to the full extent.
These are my use-cases and what are yours?
I don’t take any dongles with me. Or any adaptors. My laptop case is just a protective sleeve and sometimes I bring the power brick.
It would be nice to have one USB-A port, and HDMI, but it’s not that big of a deal either.
You do. From my perspective you are barely use laptop as laptop for any serious work on the go.
Look at my use-case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271855
this is true, yet... I'd be okay with that, to be honest.
My current work laptop (a dell latitude 7390) is a jewel also because it's got a lot of ports. I have used them all at least once, but quite frankly, never all at the same time.
So yeah, being able to unplug a port and plug a different one it's almost the perfect middle ground.
we're pretty much all carrying dongles anyway (not me, the dell latitude 7390 has all the ports i might need)
I wondered about that as well. Looking at the picture at the top of the main page, I see one small battery, and electronics that take up 2-3x the size of normal laptop electronics. Most current laptops have 60-80% of their chassis space occupied by batteries.
However, the description mentions a 55Wh battery, which is quite reasonable for a thin-and-light laptop. It says 1.3kg, which is a little heavier than desirable for the form factor (1-1.2kg), but not by much. On balance, this looks like a much more reasonable set of tradeoffs than past "repairable laptop" efforts I've seen; Framework is putting serious hardware engineering effort into this.
I think the flush USB-C dongles are actually clever in another way, you could make storage expansion bricks that have pass through USB (or no passthrough) and get more storage on your laptop beyond the one M.2 slot. It would be especially nice for video editor types, who I've seen literally velcro expansion SSDs to their macbooks with USB angle adapters [0] because dealing with dangling drives is annoying.
In practice it leads to a significantly worse product for the vast majority of users, for the benefit of the minority that falls in the pro crowd and is able to get all their work done solely through USB-C ports.
But the Apple Pro crowd users tend to include a lot of audio/video professionals who have a lot of expensive devices they tend to connect through USB-A, HDMI, etc, Photographers who were big fans of the SD card readers, and business people who didn’t really need pro devices but could afford them, and were fan of the video outputs for connecting to projectors and monitors, and maybe even LAN inputs because many offices tend to discourage WiFi networks.
I think Apples big mistake was a category mistake. If they had made the MacBook or MacBook Air all USB-C, for example, there wouldn’t have been too much of an outcry. But the MacBook Pro line is the same one that carried a FW 400 port years after FW800 had been released and even after FW itself was kinda dead besides certain niche applications (which tended to be popular with Apple pro users).
The vast majority of users don’t carry a bunch of dongles around.
It’s just true. What are most people doing?
Zoom, Excel, PowerPoint, Browser, Slack, etc.
But that means when I carry the laptop around I have to carry a dongle for the mouse or not use the mouse. It depends. The mouse is ergonomic and easier on my hands than the trackpad, so I prefer to carry it. It's just one dongle, and I'm already carrying the mouse, so not too bad.
I also need USB 2 for my Yubikey, which is USB 2.0.
Before I had USB headsets but that would be 3 USB 2.0 devices and my portable hub only accepts two, so I ditched them and switched to the old wired iphone earbuds since they are light and stateless.
That also means I have to give up my ergonomic keyboard and use the flat keyboard, but usually that's OK unless I am on a long trip. If I'm on a long trip, I'll want that ergonomic keyboard after a lot of typing at which point it's 3 USB 2.0 devices and then I need to bring the powered hub with its own adaptor. I can leave that where I'm staying and just take the mouse to the coffee shop. But this adds complexity.
All in all, it's doable, I'm not complaining that it is an insurmountable obstacle, but I would prefer a computer that was a bit thicker and heavier but had more ports built just to reduce the overall complexity of the setup and not worry if I brought everything with me. When you compare the weight of the usb hub and its adaptor to the extra weight added by adding a few more ports, I'd prefer the laptop to be a bit less demanding in input requirements. To me that would make for a more mobile solution overall.
But honestly these are minor issues.
I’m just saying that that simply isn’t true for most people.
I don't need the ports that much, but it is nice when the needed ports are just there, because it is usually a selection of ports I need. Maybe other people don't need what I need, but I prefer having some occasionally port present, knowing its there when I need it.
I think this project takes a novel approach to the problem, sort of like what expresscards offered. Here, you can just add the ports you need if you need as your defaults.
what i wonder is:
- can those cards be locked in place?
- can i hotplug/hot-unplug them ?
Even if I'm not too excited about the proprietary expansion card system, which will last as long as the founders' attention spans, if it gives access to standard memory and storage, that's an improvement over the current trend.
Maybe I am misinterpreting it but it sounds like its not a completely proprietary system?
We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it's possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels. We hope that folks in the community come up with interesting card ideas and bring them out themselves in addition to what we develop.
since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s, it has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
That's a bold and brave move. Well done.
I had an "ethernet modem card" from ibm in that form factor that worked well. And a scsi adapter for a zip drive I think. Its been a while...
I don't think it would have worked well to try to make a hot-swappable externally-facing card form factor derived from M.2. Likewise, cutting EDSFF E1.S down to a third of the length wouldn't leave any provision for USB or DisplayPort signals. USB-C is clearly the best available connector choice among current standards.
The real value-add of the framework laptop is imho the upgrade path: you can swap in newer components without replacing nearly everything. Usually that's limited to just SSD and RAM, with everything else being on one huge mainboard assembly.
It's been a while since I was in that world, but Dell makes some mighty nice looking machinery these days, but it doesn't look particularly repairable.
But it didn't happen...
Too bad eoma68[3] is still sci-fi.
[1] https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/
[2] https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...
I agree. I understand why that wasn't a thing 10 years ago while laptops continued to get thinner and bezels continued to get smaller and I/O was rapidly changing and evolving. Modern laptops are much more consistent, and standards like M.2 and USB-C have provide excellent support for low-profile expansion. Now seems like a great time to start rolling out standards for laptop motherboard connectivity, display housing, keyboard/trackpad housing, and I/O bays.
Heat and noise are definitely bigger concerns since a compact laptop cannot rely on large radiators, fans, and liquid cooling loops for cooling. But if you standardize the screw holes and socket positions on motherboards and graphics cards, I see no reason why a chassis couldn't ship with their own case-specific cooling solutions which leverage heat pipes and low-profile fans to provide cooling. Processor locations are already pretty consistent on desktop motherboards and graphics cards, so this wouldn't be something particularly new.
Last time I checked the only missing piece was a way to upgrade the display, which didn't age very well (IIRC original resolution was 1280x800 and no HiDPI)
Building a desktop is relatively easy. Desktop is designed to be stationary and it's a lot more forgiving when connecting parts. There's a lot more room to manoeuvre and for heat dissipation.
I think to achieve the purpose, where end-user will be able easily customise a laptop will require a larger footprint and won't be appealing to many users.
Laptops used to allow easy replacement of battery, memory and hardrives at the very least.
All that sacrificed in the name of making the devices "thinner" and the design more attractive.
What bits me most is that a lot of younger friends I have, have no such expectations.
Talk to them about a cellphone the answer is usually "well if you have had it for 2 years it is probably time to buy a new one anyway"
Apples wireless earplugs are use and throw away. With a life expectancy of a little over 2 years from what I have read. No way to swap the batteries. I do not know if that figure is accurate.
I live in Norway now and the government is doing all sorts of things "for the environment" but have no interest in laws to force hardware makers to sell equipment that can be easily repaired.
Not that it would matter much for Norway, hardware makers would just pull out and the citizens would be very angry at the government.
If the EU and the US could join forces on it there would be repaid change.
I wonder if a latest generation Apple Air would be "easily" updated by Apple to allow end user replacement.
I doubt it.
Let say such a law could be passed, and it mattered, how much thicker and "less" attractive would things get. I wonder what engineering could come up with.
Buying less, keeping things longer, and making things repairable should be at the very top of the green agenda. That would all results in less sales so no major government seemsm to go that way.
Sure, Apple recycles some of the parts of the device, but environmentally, it's much better to support and repair a device than it is to simply crush it and recycle it.
[1] https://www.ifixit.com/laptop-repairability [2] https://youtu.be/FY7DtKMBxBw
I think the other major factor you're overlooking here is battery life. High-end laptops these days are mostly battery (right up to the 100 Wh carry-on limit set by the FAA), with everything else designed to fit into the space left over.
I would argue that after many years of customisable/repairable desktop PCs and servers, it is clear that a more modular and standardised design is a good thing in most ways. It tends to be gamers who are the big upgrade-in-place fans and will look at things like new CPUs or graphics cards or even motherboards, but the modularity and standardisation are also good for simple things like adding more storage or RAM, or replacing a failed PSU or drive in an otherwise working system.
Even if you never use the flexibility yourself, an old PC can potentially have the storage devices wiped or replaced for security and then be passed on to another user. That might be a recycled home PC going to a less developed country where someone otherwise wouldn't be able to afford one. It might be a business clearing out some old pro-level equipment that finds its way to a homelab enthusiast. Either way, it's saving someone money and making more use of the equipment for longer.
Modern laptops and phones have fought against this modularity and flexibility, and that's not a good thing. There have been all kinds of arguments made about achieving smaller and lighter devices that people carry with them, or needing carefully engineered airflows to keep high performance components cool in limited space, or achieving better fluid resistance in case of accidents. Sometimes those arguments do have some merit. But let's not kid ourselves that all the sealed cases and ever-changing connectors (or lack of connectors) and active steps to prevent systems working with "unofficial" replacement parts aren't heavily in the interests of the manufacturers and doing real harm to both customers and the environment.
IFixIt: Smartphone Doesn’t Have to Be Glued Shut
We won't be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, but it's nice to hear that you'd be willing to!
Personally, I am waiting until av1 hardware decoders are more common, and BT 5 LE Audio (so they can stream to wireless headsets easily) is out as well.
I think you should offer a first-class Linux experience with this laptop. It's a genuinely underserved market, with a lot of overlap for people who care about the repairability and upgradability which are core to your offering. A market with premium mind share, as well.
When I say first class, I mean something specific: you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good driver Linux driver for your touchpad, and open source it. That would be huge. I'm sure your hardware is up to snuff, but your control over how good that feels in Windows is very limited.
There are a bunch of developers who have stuck with the Mac for essentially one reason, the touchpad.
Windows is dominant in laptops, but with distinct verticals, and I struggle to figure out which one this would fit into. Cheap semi-disposable laptop for a broke college student? Clearly this will cost more than that. Gaming? No way you'll have enough power and battery with that form factor. Excel ninjas who get it from work? Why would they care about expansion and repairability?
But "I'd rather be using Linux if the experience just sucked a little bit less" is underserved. Obviously you can't offer just Linux, and maybe licensing shenanigans with Microsoft mean you can't even consider this (although I really hope that's not a factor anymore).
Anyway. Good luck, it's a cool idea.
It's funny how completely random this suggestion feels (I figured you were going to suggest a customized distro based on Ubuntu or something), and yet I completely agree. Most everything uses libinput these days, and a whole lot of the "feel" is baked into the driver at compile time. Getting it right yourself (or even just making it more configurable for users) would be an enormous step forward.
Definitely worth understanding his understand motivations, then considering collaborating and/or funding him.
[1] https://bill.harding.blog/2018/04/12/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
[2] https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700537
> Obviously you can't offer just Linux
Yes, you can: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14
The distinction is they're not trying to develop a new computer that only runs or officially supports Linux. Instead they're leveraging the sales volumes of these OEM/ODMs which do offer Windows in order to keep prices in line with similarly specced laptops.
Compare this to Purism, whose offerings are much more expensive compared to similarly specced laptops, and because of this unlikely to gain mass market appeal. An initiative like Framework needs some amount of mass market appeal to make the repairability aspect really make sense, else it'll just be expensive and resource intensive to manufacture small quantities of these systems.
When I saw this announcement I was hoping that I could finally buy a laptop with a good trackpad, with buttons, and a good keyboard again. But looking at the announcement, it seems like trackpad and keyboard quality are far from anyone's mind, and it just looks like the laptop is copying Apple stylistically like everyone else, which means it is going to be kind-of unusable and I won't want to use it. (Especially when running Windows, those kinds of giant Apple-esque trackpads are death, because you'll keep accidentally moving files into places you didn't mean to, and then of course there's the general unresponsiveness once you add all the PalmCheck and turn-off-trackpad-for-n-secons after typing junk).
I like the idea of a laptop built for quality, but for me the #1 determinant of quality is my area of constant physical contact with the laptop, the keyboard and trackpad. And sadly, those look like afterthoughts here.
(For context -- I have bought and heavily used an average of more than one laptop per year, every year, since 1998, and have been dismayed to watch the quality trend constantly downward over that time).
This is the best layout humanity ever invented: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/c/0/csm_...
Classic arrow keys, separate volume buttons, separate back/forward/pageup/pagedown, F1-F12 as the primary functions, …
I'm far more comfortable moving my fingers and thumbs as little as possible rather than having to stretch far and wide for those extra function keys.
IMO, the row-stagger is an unergonomic, archaic skeuomorphism. This is also a niche opinion.
Unfortunately, I'm sure there are practical reasons why "modular keyboard" can't happen (not enough market interest, strength of the laptop hull suffers if the keyboard is a separate module, laptop couldn't be as thin, etc.).
(And then, let's not forget that keyboard layouts are somewhat configurable in software. It's easy to bind pageup to mod-uparrow and pagedown to mod-downarrow. But it can't be done if the physical keys are missing, so physical keyboard layouts with more keys are preferable to those with less keys. Unfortunately fn-combos are usually hardwired in the Embedded Controller and can't be changed easily in software.)
https://puri.sm/posts/librem-14-adding-librem-ec-freed-embed...
But yeah, being able to override the key mapping in EC is an important feature as well, and I'm glad someone's doing it! I really hope for the future where all these pieces come together: a laptop with a good physical keyboard (configurable/swappable, so that everyone can get their meaning of "good"), with configurable EC, replaceable components, etc. That would be a dream.
Key size and placement is generally pretty perfect for the size imo (backspace, shift, enter, etc aren't cramped), and key travel and feel is up there with the best.
The up/down arrow keys and lack of brightness control in the fn row are the only real problems.
[0] https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/IMG_3...
Basically, full-size arrow keys are what really makes the difference, and at that point you could get the best of both worlds anyway.
(Let's not talk about other recent/misguided ThinkPad keyboard developments though.)
But it doesn't really matter, as long as the physical keys are there. They can be remapped.
But am I the only person considering a split ergonomic layout with thumb clusters, to give your pinkies some rest? The touchpad could live between the keyboard halves, and never be touched by mistake.
I wonder if that could be an option.
What I don't understand are the arrows. I've been using MB Pro daily for over 3 years now and I still regularly miss up/down arrows. I would never buy a device that merges them into size of one key as the MB Pro does, as well as this one.
Thin and flat has nice visual appeal, but I think you should approach it from a tactile direction.
My ideal keyboard would have a little extra throw, and they keys would be sculpted to match the curve of your fingertips for comfort and to help you center on the keys.
I think the thinkpad keyboards were favorites for a reason.
Personally, I'm in the latter camp. I have a 13" MBP, and find the buttons need way too much pressure, even with the sensitivity ramped up. There's also something I can't quantify... there's a feeling of it being laggy, and somehow "unpleasant" to drag my finger across. I prefer just about every other trackpad I've ever used, even those in dirt cheap netbooks.
Personally, the newest Macbooks became a problem for me despite the history of amazing palm rejection on Macbooks, I have sort of sweaty hands and when they increased the trackpad size, that combined with how I type (palm resting on the chassis, not raised), it causes a lot of jitter (I say a lot, it's super rare, but just enough to train me away from it) and I've ended up using an external mouse exclusively, but in the past year, uh, I haven't been mobile so that's just a nonissue :)
Not sure if we’re talking about the same thing with that plural, but the first thing I change on a new Mac is enabling tap to click. It works great and you can avoid the annoyance of the audible click.
The second thing is to enable three finger drag, which the moves into Accessibility settings about 5 years ago.
* Apple MacBook - Nothing configurable. Expensive and not build to be repaired.
* Microsoft Surface - Much the same, but with Windows
* Lenovo Thinkpad - A little more configurable than a MacBook, and much better value, but still difficult to repair. Missing premium features like an Aluminium case.
* Dell XPS 13 - Much like the Lenovo, but the Linux option is nice.
If they pull this off, developers are going to love it. I really wish them the best.
My advice? Make sure it works _flawlessly_ with the top 3 Linux distributions.
May sure it works flawlessly with one of the BSD distributions and you know the Linux experience will be flawless.
Magnesium is a different type of premium for some.
difficult to repair? They're super easy to repair! My T430 even came with a bay to access the RAM and hard drive without opening the case up.
Also replacing things like keyboard usually is only 2 screws even on the newer models.
All screws are standard philips too.
Lenovo also published comprehensive repair guides for all their thinkpad laptops.
Only things missing are the RAM on a 13" version and wifi cards being soldered in (but you can theoretically use a different wi-fi card on a 17" as it has a spare M.2 slot).
Before that I've performed upgrades from XPS 15 9550 to 9560 and 9570 by swapping the motherboard and couple other parts. So it's not like Apple _at all_. It's more like the opposite of Apple
What about this laptop? https://puri.sm/products/librem-14
The i7 16GB ram / 512GB ssd Thinkpad X1 Carbon is $1900 and you don't even get a nice display. The M1 16GB/512GB ssd Macbook Pro is only $1700 and you get a best-in-class display along with that.
The XPS 13 and Surface are similarly priced. Macbooks are very price competitive and have been for a long time.
But:
- I really dislike the arrow keys not having the air gap above left and right. You’d think they’d learn that from the MacBook butterfly keyboard era.
- it’s a little disingenuous to say “no adapters” when in fact their little expansion cards are merely adapters that insert into the chassis of the laptop. Only four I/O ports is a little tight (despite Apple deeming it to be “enough”)
- that laptop looks pretty thick and heavy by today’s standards.
It’ll be interesting to see how people respond, when many (especially in this crowd) have been clamoring for this kind of thing. How many will actually vote with their dollars, and will that be enough for Framework to survive and become a viable competitor in the laptop space?
I hope so, as I welcome the diversity and innovation that would represent. But I admit I’m skeptical as to their chances.
The Framework Laptop comes in at 15.85mm thick and 1.3kg. So a couple of sheets of paper thicker than a 13" MacBook Pro, but a bit lighter.
On the Expansion Cards, that is fair. We can say we're getting rid of the need for adapters that protrude from the machine and need to be removed when you need to transport it.
If you can make an alternative case with an (e.g.) 12x5 1u grid layout keyboard that lets me put my thumbs to use and stop contorting my fingers, I will more of less open my wallet and let you take what you fancy!
[1] https://shop.keyboard.io/products/keyboardio-atreus https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/
With my RSI, I'm almost unable to use standard laptop keyboards, so I have to travel with a split ergo keyboard. Most laptops have enough room to support a split ortho layout, but aren't thick enough (or modular enough) for enthusiasts to roll their own.
Take a look at the Thinkeys [0] and pineapple60 [1] projects for what's possible.
[0]: https://github.com/dennisleexyz/thinkeys [1]: https://github.com/saoto28/pineapple60
I gotta do that with a Mitosis layout for myself.
I am not a fan of today's standards. As I write (on an external A1243 keyboard) I look at the closed touchbar MBP in front of me and cringe at the gap between the cover and the body go from zero on the left to 1/4" on the right. This laptop is too thin for its own good, for no good reason, and I look forward to how sturdy this design would be with the extra thickness (not to mention all the other goodies they list).
I can't be the only person with this problem?
Edit: While I'm ranting, I am 100% sure that the touch-logic in trackpads favour right handed people (same with mobile phone screens) and as a leftie it seems harder for me to perform complex multi-touch actions than it does for right handed people.
EDIT - my new problem with Windows 10 is that it somehow interprets certain accidental motions on the trackpad as me wanting it to move to some sort of strange workspace overview screen that appears to be completely useless and not at all what I wanted.
Maybe, but how many do you really need?
I have lots of stuff plugged in at my desk -- but it's plugged into a dock, and there's just a single cable that goes into my laptop. Thinking about my usages in the past few years, I can't think of a time where 4 ports (of my choosing) wouldn't have worked for me -- so long as I could change them over the lifetime of the device.
Let's not forget that this is repairable, upgradable and expandable - when I first saw the HN title, I was convinced it was going to be a brick. It actually looks great, like a premium laptop from Dell or Lenovo. But supporting up to 64GB or memory, and repairable etc. Pretty amazing, I think.
We've built a fingerprint reader into the power button using a just-released sensor that has been performing really well in our testing so far. We're seeing False Reject Rates lower than the typical fingerprint readers built into laptops while keeping the right False Accept Rate.
Best of luck and please let me know if you want someone to dogfood things as an outsider. My email is my HN username
Hopefully the AMD board will ship late Summer 2021. Lack of AMD support is a showstopper for some.
That being said, this is a great project and it looks like it should be successful - having a laptop that is built to last with interchangable parts is a great idea and should've been done long ago.
If/when I return to Windows, a Framework laptop is definitely appealing. I'd rather change the ports than deal with a handful of dongles and adaptors.
One thing to consider:
I really want to try a laptop that comes with a good, well-supported Linux installation. (I haven't tried desktop Linux since the early 2000s.) I'm less concerned about "distro of my choice," because I really just want something that works well out of the box and is easy to learn.
Do you mean software? Or are you referring to the iMac? because on the laptop side, the MacBooks seem very similar in terms of simplicity. Build quality is a different story, etc.
To the Framework? Oh heck yes!
I switched to Mac when the rumors were that Windows Vista was going to be a flop. Today, I like MacOS better than Windows 10, but Windows 10 is very nice.
Just two times I saw what seemed to be an xorg glitch which required powering off and on the display output via xrandr over SSH.
And MTP (android file transfer) implementation under KDE is not ideal, it sometimes freezes or behaves weirdly. ADB CLI helps in such cases, though.
Other than that it's a pretty solid and usable system.
If you decide to use Linux, make sure your HW is well supported. For example AMD seems to be better choice over nVidia or even Intel.
Finally, someone that knows about the sweet spot between fuzzy looking FHD and inevitably slow 4K. I'd buy this laptop just for that bit of (nowadays rare) common-sense thinking.
Webcam is just icing on the cake.
Hope the keyboard is more similar to a Thinkpad rather than a Macbook. Even if not, I'm sure that will become an option soon if the project is a success
The expansion cards will only be available for as long as your company provides them. Using the most-commonly used, mass-manufactured standard interfaces for components would provide more long-term repairability and upgradeability.
The trade-off would be in design resulting in more bulk and in the economics of your company, of course. It seems cynical to me to sell maintainability while starting a walled-garden ecosystem of proprietary hardware.
I assumed it wouldn't be an open design because the marketing didn't mention it. I would integrate this message in your marketing because it's worth convincing critical audiences.
Also, do any of such Thinkpads approach the lightness, thinness and aesthetic of this laptop? Last time I looked at new Thinkpads, I seem to recall they were pretty chunky, with only the Ideapads being thin, light and nice to look at (it was a while ago, so I might have that wrong tho)
As a couple of comparisons, the XPS 13 is 1.27kg and 14.8mm thick; the MBP 13 is 1.4kg and 1.56mm thick; the ThinkPad X1 Nano is 1.18kg and 13.87mm thick.
Note you have to compromise with the X1 Nano, as it maxes out at only 16GB of RAM, and doesn't have great battery life.
So this is lighter than an MBP, and basically the same thickness, all while being upgradable - you haven't convinced me that this isn't witchcraft ;)
Fair, it's certainly not going for the eyecatcher look
The 16 gb option refers only to the soldered ram, you can expand it with a 32gb stick to 48gb, I'm currently running it with 24gb (8 GB stick). I'd have liked two ram slots, but for my purposes even 16 GB is enough. (be aware, some online shops might do the update for you and sell one with two 8 gb sticks, but I'm not aware of Lenovo offering something like that)
Comes with 2x USB-C, 2x USB-A, HDMI, Ethernet, 3.5mm headset jack, MicroSD.
That said, the Lenovo online shop is a customer service disaster. Don't buy there. Misadvertised the smart card reader as a SD/MMC/... card reader, defrauds customers by advertising a "best price" policy that they then refuse to honor, 3 months to shipping with repeated delays, they play stupid games with their pricing (e.g. they jack up the price during week days by about 30% to milk business customers), zero flexibility (e.g. if the shipment is delayed because they're missing the removable RAM, they can't change the order to ship you a unit without the RAM, your only option would be to cancel and go to the end of the queue).
Also, poor hardware support for the GPU and possibly Bluetooth under Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The truth is that right now most components are insanely hard to get, not just GPUs and they will have to play the bidding game (which will make their laptop significantly more expansive) or delay. For a small volume like theirs, there is a non zero probability that they will get dropped by their manufacturer completely.
I'd love to get my hands on one of their laptop though!
We have not been subsumed by The Man yet :-)
The MNT Reform also does the "sustainable laptop" thing, via an open source approach. It's a lot simpler to manufacture and easier for end users to modify, and its longevity doesn't necessarily rely on MNT Research continuing to exist. I feel that's the safer approach.
Reform makes sacrifices in performance and form factor (much bulkier) but makes up for it in basically all the parts being 3D printable on hardware you could feasibly have at home, and even the PCBs look simple enough I bet you could hand assemble everything except the SoM module.
I don't think the reform could ever become "mainstream" but I don't think it really wants to, either. This could be great if, like you mentioned, it "takes off" and converts more regular laptop users to a more repairable laptop than their old ones. We'll see...
This lets us cover languages and layouts that have historically been missing from notebooks.
By the way, I’d love to have a Trackpoint or an equivalent. Or a trackball.
* I meant ISO, not ANSI in my parent comment :)
One easy way to get it to fit would be to make the module thicker. To avoid the whole thing sitting at an angle in the existing envelope, you'd want to replace the little adhesive-secured feet with taller, screw-secured feet to give it clearance.
I'm a controls engineer and am constantly connecting to PLCs and robots in environments that don't do wireless networking. I have to deal with all kinds of legacy hardware manufacturer's IDEs and real-time protocols that work poorly with USB dongles. Of course, your expansion cards are really USB dongles, and appear to allow tool-less hot-plugging (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/expan...). I'd love to see an optional screw to retain the card, and wouldn't mind shutting the laptop down and rebooting it, especially if it meant it showed up in /etc/network/interfaces all the time and never needed to be kicked out of sleep with `ip link set dev eth0 up`.
Other desirable expansion cards would be a VGA port or DB9 serial port; would those fit?
I fear that your efforts to reach beige-box compatibility are really hamstrung by the obsession with thin and light laptops; there's no way (for example) that you'll fit my preferred keyboard (Lenovo 45N2211, out of a T420) and still have the hinges close because the enclosure is so thin. I hope you succeed, but I especially hope you produce a 15" workstation version that's 10mm thicker.
Maybe the 2mm ortho could have standard qwerty labels printed on the side of the keycaps, so it's not as obnoxious when people bind different layouts or macros.
If I were to buy one, I would also buy the 15" version. Old thinkpads are awesome.
I've upgraded my laptop just in 2020, but when Ryzen-based mainboards and some high-bandwith plugins (10 Gbit SFP+/RJ45 or Thunderbolt) become available, this will definitely go on the list. So best of luck to you to become mainstream, so that these niche-parts can be cross-financed ;)
It might be worth publishing enough of the internal CAD measurements as specs so that artists could create their own enclosures / cool addons and be sure that they will have parts access.
Anyway, my first thought was ‘will an m1 board fit in there?’ so I am looking forward to seeing your release!
Also, big up for the 3:2 screen.
Amen. Any chance I can buy one for my desktop?
(I like my Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 267ppi display which is just the right size for 2× scaling, yielding an effective resolution of 1500×1000.)
For reference, the common 13.3″ 1920×1080 display is 166ppi, 13.3″ 1366×768 is 118ppi, 15.6″ 1920×1080 is 141ppi, and 15.6″ 1366×768 is 100ppi.
(I’m idly curious why it’s 2256×1504 rather than 2250×1500, which would scale to the more convenient effective resolution of 1500×1000 at 150%, and still 200ppi.)
Edit: found the answer: "We're shipping in the US and Canada this summer and opening up additional countries in Europe and Asia before the end of the year"
That said:
> Founded in San Francisco in 2019
I'd love to see these kind of companies founded outside of this area in the future.
Remote work may solve some of this, but eventually the extended runways available at "lower altitudes" (to bend the metaphor) will become worthwhile.
* An option for a good quality trackpoint and 3 buttons
* A possibility to order a fully assembled model without an OS
And you will quickly get a significant share of buyers from the ThinkPad/Linux crowd.
It’s weird how little there is in the laptop space that’s actually good.
Macs, Thinkpads, maybe Dell XPS?
Everything else sucks. It’d be cool to have another high quality option.
The LG gram was fine, if light and portable was what you're looking for. The HP Envy line has been pretty decent recently. Back in school I've had an Asus Zenbook I've quite liked as well. I've heard good things about some System76 systems too, and they're basically Clevo rebrands.
There definitely is good stuff on the laptop market.
System76 comes up a lot, but to be blunt they seem awful.
Bad resolution displays, generally terrible build, bezels, etc.
I think there’s a market for a really good non Mac laptop with Mac quality hardware design.
As for S76 systems, you can't really compare a $2000+ Macbook with a $1000 System76/Clevo ODM with the same criteria. They're just perfectly fine machines for what they cost.
Sure, but I don't care about the 'crap' segment of laptops. I want more options at the Macbook price point. People often talk about System76 as if they are Mac competitors too, so I don't entirely buy your point.
> "High end machines that compete with mac laptops already exist"
And they mostly suck. There isn't a good option that's a clear stand out Macbook competitor. There is no Windows/Linux hardware that's easy to point at and say this is clearly the one to get. All the competitors are a mixture of bad tradeoffs. Why?
I would think Microsoft would want to make a Surface laptop that's competitive in this space (that targets developers), but they haven't really.
Agree to disagree - I pointed you towards 5-6 of them that globally don't suck. Macs also have tradeoffs of their own that you seem to have no trouble dismissing.
Compared to a MacBook, build feels solid if not quite as rigid but that's expected with how light it is. Doesn't feel flimsy. Keyboard roughly on par with that of a 2015 MBP, but with a bit more travel. Doing lightweight tasks it doesn't get hot on my lap or spin up its fan.
So far have only used the included Windows 10 Pro license. Not sure how Linux fares on it but from what I've read you'll need a distro with a newer kernel.
Yes 3:2! Really wish Apple took this direction. But instead it was the PC industry moving towards it. For Desktop or Laptops that no longer has Gaming or Media consumption as their priorities, 3:2 is just much better for productivity.
The reason is that the vast majority of my work is done with two windows open, side by side. A wider aspect ratio gives you a much better picture of what's happening in both, especially if one of them is a web browser (so many sites assume a pretty large screen width these days). The fact that it works much better with media (e.g. watching or editing film footage) is just a bonus.
Hope there's gonna be a touchscreen version! After all, a UI that you can't touch is like coffee that you can't smell.
Also some other options for CPU and GPU would be nice. (AMD CPU. Maybe Nvidia GPU for CUDA. Or maybe even some ARM CPU?)
How long does the battery last in this?
Will this be available in Europe? (Or rather when?)
Will we ever get a laptop component system that's as robust and modular as the desktop ecosystem?
No.
The robust desktop ecosystem is powered by a bunch of categories that don’t really want laptops: gamers, business, research, some developers, etc.
Desktops are “work trucks” while laptops are mostly “cars.”
I switched to using an Ergodox after long hours working on a MacBook Pro made my wrists start to hurt and my pinkie finger to go numb (and this was back in the day when a MBP keyboard was still decent!). I can still type full speed on a regular keyboard but it doesn’t feel as comfortable, and I think there’s a genuine health issue at least for some people.
However, lack of an AMD CPU is a kind of deal breaker for me, even if it means I wouldn't get USB 4.
https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Compact-Keyboard-Trac...
And to scroll I press the middle blue button (below space bar), and then push the trackpoint stick up/down. The mouse cursor doesn't move, and instead the OS just scrolls the window.
(Fwiw I'm on Linux and this behavior just worked out of the box, for both my generic desktop w/this keyboard & Thinkpad laptop.)
Obligatory fanboy note, while performing this scroll action, I only have to move my thumb ~0.5" off the space bar, and my pointer finger ~1" off "j". So there is very little physical movement required to scroll (or click), vs. moving your whole palm up & down ~6" to the trackpad.
I don't know. Maybe people can be trained to workaround all this, but it seems very fragile and unintuitive to me. If there was a way to bind the middle button to one of the modifier keys (e.g. Alt, Ctrl, Shift, Fn, Super/Window), I can see that being a better UX. Then I can hit the modifier key, then change my mind without affecting anything.
Also, this is a very small niche, but it would be rad if down the line they came out with a ruggedized chassis upgrade. A repairable laptop that can be used in the field? That would be a dream.
A relatable story - I have an Acer notebook from 2013. I bought it from Microsoft store in Valley Fair mall in San Jose, CA. Over the years I have upgraded its hard disk to ssd, RAM and more recently wifi card to wifi 6 (learnt not to buy before opening the notebook. I bought an m2 card while in 2013 half mini pci cards were all the rage)
The build quality is always the most essential: - monitor - this is what we look at for hours on every day - keyboard - I personally like macbook's perhaps is just being used to them (pre and post butterfly, that one I haven't tried) - trackpad - every other trackpad I tried besides mbs feel always a bit plastiky, also, no outside keys for the trackpad
Good luck
I’m holding out for an arm based Linux laptop which can handle Blender without too much fan noise... I would love to get a system76 laptop but I have doubts about the build quality. But they say that they are on tract to manufacture their own laptops this year. How does a framework laptop compare to System76? (Let alone a Lenovo or Asus.)
Any chance you guys could make your own distro in the future and brand it Lapdance?
Feel like they might've been able to fit slightly more space for port swapping if they had gone for the uniform aluminum slab design of the Chromebook Pixel, which, to me, is still beautiful:
https://regmedia.co.uk/2013/03/02/google_pixel_chromebook_he...
They already ticked the expensive camera box, but for proper hipster bingo success, you would also need: some kind of branded grid paper notebook, a metal mechanical draughting pencil, a teapot with loose leaf tea, audiophile headphones and a 40% mechanical keyboard.
Any plans for a larger version, 14/15", or maybe even 16"?
Very important things for me would be the keyboard (normal layout, include insert&delete&pgup/down&home&end-keys arrowkeys should have a bump or similar to be located easily without watching, ideally as well a number pad - the one of Lenovo is excellent) and the resolution (FullHD not good enough on a 17'' - must be something higher, max 4k, ideally IPS). About the rest: normal CPU (at least 4 threads), normal RAM (8GB probably not enough, better 16GB), normal storage (1 normal SSD/NVME), maybe an ethernet connection, no separate/discrete GPU, no cd/dvd, 2 USB connectors, no superfast/superhot CPU in any case something which does not make the fan spin up often, does not have to be superlight.
Cheers & good luck :)
Not 17" tho, even if it was light (it wouldn't be), it would be massive.
Years back I got lumbered with a 17" CAD laptop from work, an HP I think. It weighed 5-6kg, which was ridiculous - I ended up with grazing all over my shoulder from my backpack! Luckily I managed to swap it after a short time.
I agree about 13'' - a little bit too small. I currently own as well a 14'' Lenovo X1 Carbon (4th gen) and I personally think that that's perfect to carry around and to work with (I do use it as well at home from time to time) (newer models have an even thinner bezel, which makes them even better).
Yes, I absolutely agree that 17'' are quite a challenge to carry around (I remember that many years ago when I was walking around in Manchester with a thick Asus 17'' in my backpack, after a few KMs I started realizing that that was a mistake, hehe) - my usecase would be to use it mostly just at home or at least when not changing too often the workplace.
On a related note, why is it that Linux desktop hardware compatibility is such a hit or miss affair?
I would have thought that given the ethos of the platform and the sheer number of people using Linux worldwide this could be a solvable problem.
I read about VLCs 20 birthday recently and one of the things that made it such an amazing piece of software was that it came bundled with every single codec imaginable. It was revolutionary at the time that it just played literally every single video file you had in your computer. My point is, that it is possible.
If there was a website a bit like caniuse.com, that listed every Linux distro and test results with various hardware. People could register to be ‘drafted’ to test new releases, and there could also be associated discussion forums for workarounds etc.
Even if it was just for laptop hardware, it would be amazing. Not knowing if an expensive purchased laptop will work or not is such a big barrier to entry.
The replaceable battery is great, the weight is great, the design is pretty good, and the keyboard seems fine - 1.5mm of key travel is usable. (The T440P has around 2.2mm, and according to [0] all current Thinkpads are 1.8mm except X1 Carbon/Yoga/L14/L15 at 1.5mm)
My big question, though, is the durability. If you drop this thing a few times, will I have any problems? What about water damage - have you tested anything (intentionally or unintentionally?) Any drain holes? If I was to spill a decent bit of water on the keyboard, would that have a 10%/30%/80% chance of killing it?
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/jhay05/which_curr...
Sure it'd be nice, but I'm not going to hold it against them if their laptop can't survive a fire/spill/drop.
My current model is a T440p, so using that as a comparison.
So far my search has turned up:
- Old Macbooks where the keyboard was still decent (but unfortunately they're not too tough or repairable)
- T470s or T460s: the T460s was the first model with the new magnesium case and the T470s keeps the same case (and is only a small change to the T460s.) Advantage of that is a 250g weight savings (1.35kg total!), 49 Wh battery that lasts 6-8 hours and charges to 80% in 90 minutes, traditional "yellow" Thinkpad charger on the T460s and USB-C charging on the T470s. It doesn't come at a huge cost in terms of durability either - still passes the MIL-STD-810. The T460s was the last of the S line to have drainage holes - the T470 and T460s have them, the T470s and T480s do not, but instead claim to have a "spillproof keyboard". Versus the T450s, it has HDMI out instead of VGA, has both batteries inside the case (no increased battery capacity), and better battery life with the base config. Unfortunately the batteries aren't removable on the outside, so it's a bit more of a pain to buy a used version of these (as you'd want to replace the batteries.)
- T450s: same case as T440 versions, last model with VGA out (which is super useful, I had a popular rant on VGA here a year or two ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20431195) Basically a mildly upgraded T440s, which is a good, if heavy laptop. Default capacity of 48Wh (24+24) and total weight 1.58kg with standard battery - good for 5h new, or 96Wh (24+72) and total weight 1.77kg with extended battery - good for ~10h new. And you can hot swap because of the internal battery!
- T480s: very similar physically (weight + case + materials wise) to T470s. Significantly faster processor than T470s, continuing the trend started by the T470s of spill resistant + no drain holes. Mechanical shutter for the webcam! Same keyboard as T470s, aka very good. Better thermal management than T470s! Speakers still the same old Thinkpad speakers, aka shitty. Slightly larger battery - 57Wh vs 51Wh in T470s - and a fast charge to 80% in 60 minutes - so 9-12 hours of real world battery life.
If anyone has any additional models to suggest, please do!
If priced right, I'll buy this as my next laptop. And the next phone as well -- if they ever launch one.
In terms of design i value optimal decisions without going into extremities such as thinnest possible at all costs. Logo on the CRT-level of thickness bezels - nonsense.
Bookmarking this and waiting for the reviews.
We have also seen multiple failed attempts at modular phones.
Ultimately, the problem with repair is not about making it easy enough for grandma to swap out a part. Its about making sure repair stores have the ability to source replacement parts.
Its pretty easy to do almost any repair if you have the tools and parts but there is no way you are finding a new IC that fried on your 5 year old laptop.
How will your volumes look during this silicon shortage?
We placed our forecasts and risk buys on most chips early in anticipation of the silicon crunch that is coming this year. So far, we don't see anything that puts us at risk, short of there being massive unexpected upside on consumer demand (a good problem to have!).
Also the thermal management doesn't look amazing, but I guess they aren't looking to have big GPUs in them etc.
I really like the idea though, hopefully these guys do well from it!
I approve of this. 16:9 computer screens are an abomination.
https://www.onearmy.earth//project/phonebloks
I really hope this is actually successful.
I'd love a version with a larger screen as well.
Congrats on this project, I hope you folks succeed and bring more companies to make laptops/hardware with the same approach.
- How parts connect at a modular level (e.g. pinout and signalling between LCD and motherboard, how the battery communicates, etc.). I don't need to know e.g. motherboard schematic / layout
- Mechanicals (enough to 3d print things which fit)
- Ideally, as much firmware open as possible (esp. places like battery)
.. and so on. I'd pay a pretty good markup too.
I do agree with many posts. I'm not obsessive about laptop size and weight. I want something sturdy and which works well for work. Battery life, cooling, robustness, etc. all matter a lot more than weight.
1. Do you patch your socks, shirts, pants, jackets? Do you know regular, passive folks (so not the standard HN overachiever) doing this? I don't know anyone doing this.
2. Do you repair your home appliances? Same thing, I don't really know anyone doing this.
Of course, this being the internet, someone will reply "yes, I do this", but my reply to that: "of course someone does it, but it's not a real market, there isn't any money in this".
Poor people tend to repair their stuff, well off or rich people don't do it because it's a negative status symbol. And poor people can't afford expensive stuff, which this will probably be. Poor people can't afford high up-front costs, even though TCO might be awesome.
Socks, generally no - by the time they've got holes, they're usually overall worn down anyway.
I don't generally patch t-shirts or boxers (same reason), but I do sew worn seams, and patch pants, sweaters and jackets. I don't personally replaces zippers, but there's a local shop that does.
For eg gortex outwear, it's possible to fix minor holes (like from sparks from a bonfire) with repair tape.
You all have made me very, very happy this morning. This is an amazing start!
I get myself a new ThinkPad every 3-6 years. The devices are completely repairable, every part can be exchanged. After the warranty period though, a lot of repairs don't make sense any more.
After my usage period of a few years, nearly every part of the device is worn out. The case is scratched and sometimes broken. The screen too. The battery (probably the 2nd or 3rd) reached the end of its life. The logic board including CPU and GPU is not strong enough any more for the newest software. I don't want to continue using the SSD, because the wear level went up, and I don't want to lose my data.
Normally I give away the device as a present, for some one who has less demands in a laptop than I do. I probably could also sell it to a refurbishment company.
So what would be the benefit with that laptop?
Only one major request: reconsider the arrow keys to match the current generation MacBook Pro. That space above the left and right arrow keys is priceless!
Will there documentation or support for enabling people to create their own expansion cards (for ex. like S/PDIF)?
Will there be any support for high-end processors, perhaps in the absence of a dGPU? Dell Latitudes 14" laptops have an Intel i7-10850H which has 6-cores/12-threads, 2.70 GHz base, 5.10 GHz boost clocks. In addition, will cooling be customizable? The Latitudes run pretty hot.
Finally, is there a ball-park on the price range we can expect on pre-orders and say 1 year from release? $1,000? $2,000? Will it also be a high upfront-cost, but low replacement parts cost? Will they both be relatively high? Both low?
Assuming this isn't vaporware, and is near as good as it sounds, this checks all the boxes I'd like for a laptop, esp. if it gets ARM and/or RISC support.
Show me if you're expecting to put out new CPU upgrade parts every 1, 2, 3 or 5 years.
Show me what type/generation of graphic card is available and your expectation of how far behind graphic card modules will lag behind current gen cards, 1,3,5,10 years?
Show me how long I'll expect to have to wait to double my storage, or ram.
And most of all, what are the target price points of current and future upgrades.
Here's what I can say for sure. The options for future upgrades will be correlated with the sales figures of the base laptop.
That's what I really want. And hell, come out with a mini-ATX for laptops if you're concerned dimensions won't end up competitive.
Eg S3 sleep and fingerprint sensor drivers?
They could make their computers and phones highly upgradeable and repairable, they're brilliant at these kinds of engineering challenges, but they choose not to because they would (presumably) not make as much money as they currently do.
But that leaves an opportunity for others to come along, like this company, and serve the market better than Apple.
I hope this company succeeds at least enough to force Apple's hand, in the way Tesla forced automakers to move to EVs.
I have a P50 -- a 3840x2160 15" screen, 32GB of RAM, Xeon E3-1505M v5 @ 2.8GHz, and a removable battery. It also comes with space (easily accessible!) for extra drives, ram slots, etc. Even with the overkill Xeon CPU, I still get ~5hours of battery life on windows under moderate load.
Most importantly, the service manual is a thing of beauty, and has detailed instructions for almost any replacement. This is a laptop designed to be used, upgraded, and used again.
PC Card, is that you? Long time no see.
Where do I sign? I can't help but wonder if those won't be more expensive than a same specs Laptop. It would totally be understandable but still...
> Threads are paginated for performance reasons (yes we're working on it)
I have a very meta interest in the tech/design/implementation behind HN. I've built a dark mode theme for the site because you asked the community to fill that gap. I'm wondering if whatever work goes into this perf improvement might be something y'all could talk about when it's ready? I'd love to know more about what's behind the incredibly 1999 frontend, and how it keeps up with the huge volume it gets.
I don't like the way Apple is so user- and programmer-hostile, so the Framework laptop does have that going for it. I'm interested in this concept!
Approximately 75% of the aluminium ever produced is still in use today as it can be recycled endlessly without compromising any of its unique properties or qualities.
Aluminium’s life cycle provides significant benefits through recycling, saving 95% of the energy it would take to make new aluminium metal.
https://aluminium.org.au/sustainability/recycling-sustainabi...
Do I need to always have a USB-C adapter in one of those slots, and it charges through that maybe? That sort-of defeats some of the swappability though, if one port is effectively unchangeable. Might as well have a fixed USB-C port, since that's simpler and more space-efficient. Or is there another port or something planned that's just not shown on these prototypes?
- trackpoint - real mouse buttons - exotic keyboard layouts (i.e ortholinear)
Plus they say it will support 3rd party developing accessories, so maybe ?
ducks
I'm using my Acer now more as a dev laptop and my Mac more as a free time laptop. What I'm noticing is that I'm enjoying the typing experience on the Nitro 5 more, in particular because it has decent arrows (and a numpad :) ).
Another nice feature for keyboard design is small gaps between Esc and F1, F4 and F5, F8 and F9, and F12 and what’s to its right, as desktop keyboards have always done; this helps fingers to blindly find the right place. Not very many laptops do this; the main ones I’ve noticed doing it in my recent research is ASUS ROG laptops, which do seem to put more thought than most into these sorts of details. In the pictures shown here, the Escape and especially Delete keys look to be unnecessarily wide so that you could reduce their widths a bit to provide this space perhaps without shrinking anything else.
The use of going portable and then docking in with a top of the line video card, monitor and proper keyboards is so exciting.
Thanks for the response.
Will be wanting to try https://www.sonnettech.com/product/egfx-breakaway-box/overvi... on The Framework Laptop.
Excited!
Especially given that this product appeals to the PC builder types, it really should support AMD.
They definitively should design it to support motherboard swapping.
Or maybe even swap to ARM base motherboard when/if 8,16,32 cores ARM base CPU with 3-15watts is available and ready.
Not seeing anything about the ability to swap out the display, however... You seem to lose a bit of flexibility when embracing the unibody chassis.
[Edit: Thanks for all the replies citing driver blobs and proprietary BIOS issues, totally slipped my mind that that was a concern, makes a ton more sense now.]
E.g. LibreBoot https://libreboot.org/
> Non-free BIOS/UEFI firmware often contains backdoors, can be slow and have severe bugs. Development and support can be abandoned at any time.
</s>
Great design/hardware. Specifically the high res 3:2 display, camera privacy guard, and the weight. And the repairability / upgradability is awesome.
Put together a battery, monitor, keyboard and pointer in a foldable package, with an open space to drop-in and connect one of the many mini PCs out there. The "laptop" part could last for decades, while the customer just swaps-out the mini PC inside it every couple years to upgrade.
"The reason stuff like this doesn't succeed isn't because you can't do it, it's because few people are willing to pay for the increased costs or other tradeoffs to get something repairable/configurable/upgradeable."
Which is a same, but it is what it is...
On the other hand, the interior and exterior of the laptop look gorgeous.
Edit: And we will be sharing full spec sheets before we open pre-orders.
> Most consumer electronics devices are disposable one-offs by design. The single best way to reduce the environmental impact of electronics is to make them last longer.
Yes. And I really don't see why a framework PC can help with that. If you want to make them last longer, then make hard drive that last longer, motherboards that last longer, etc. Also, make sure the user needs stay the same for longer (for example, as a Linux user, my needs have been fullfilled by my PC for about 12 years now, I just added a bit more RAM (4 gigs) and a new low cost gfx card; notice that upgrading my Debian never resulted in more hardware needs)
> In addition to enabling longevity, we’re focused on improving sustainability across the life of our products.
Just don't produce them. It'd be more helpful if those brains would help big companies to do things better. No, instead, they think they're smarter, and that being smarter, somehow, translate into money making.
> The Framework Laptop is made of 50% post consumer recycled (PCR) aluminum and an average of 30% PCR plastic.
Count how many grams that is. Compare that to a car, which you change about as often as a mobile phone or laptop.
> Our packaging is fully recyclable with no single-use plastics,
And who's going to take care of those plastic. Me ? Just don't use plastic (and if you're so smart, then figure out a way to not need plastic in packaging)
> and all of our product shipments are carbon offset.
Yeah, and what about the other part of the iceberg, ie, the carbon produced while producing your laptops ?
I'm all for ecology, reuse, etc. But at some point, if you're smart, you must realize that all of that is pixie powder.
As I said, I'd much prefer :
- if hardware producer would guarantee a 20 years+ longevity - would reduce the number of form factors (so we can have less production lines) - would optimize for energy consumption (hey, my washing machine comes with a nice card explaining how much energy/water it consumes) - would create less market segments. We don't need a new CPU model every year. Look, my kid changes its game console (not exactly ecological either) every 5 years, so it's perfectly doable. - OS producer would make sure OS upgrade doesn't require hardware upgrade
All of that is way more political than technological.
Every time I buy a laptop, it's a matter of tradeoffs. Some of these tradeoffs are technical (like battery life vs power), but some are purely based on what level of planned obsolescence the manufacturer thinks they can get away with.
I'm not sure if there was ever a time when manufacturers competed solely on putting features into their hardware, but the situation right now is at least as much about how many antifeatures they can get away with. The "free market" stops working when every manufacturer does this and the barrier for new offerings is impossibly high.
Like others have mentioned, I'm immediately thinking of Fairphone. Definitely going to keep an eye on this and hope it's still on my mind when I'm next in the market. Until then, I'm hoping they'll looking into responsible sourcing of conflict minerals [1] [2], possibly in partnership with Fairphone.
Edit: Hmm, can't find an RSS feed. Anyone know if there's one I can follow somewhere?
[1] https://www.fairphone.com/en/impact/fair-materials-sourcing/
[2] https://www.fairphone.com/en/2017/02/01/fairer-materials-a-l...
The Ars article says the body is aluminium, but if I recall correctly, the Actius was a mag alloy of some kind (which I'd prefer). Either way, I'm curious.
But I am angry too at Apple for their high price and upgrade looked systems.
also, this look like a realistic way to tackle e-waste (not the apple-esque BS)
I understand that most of the e-waste is in the motherboard and the battery, but still, it's something. It's a huge step in the right directions.
I hate those small up/down arrows.
Would also love to see the keyboard layout with additional column on the right (with PgUp, PgDown, Ins, Del etc. keys) like Mech-15 from Eluktronics have.
There are military standards for this, and I think it helps a lot to have a laptop that is durable.
Just because you won't be doing the repair yourself doesn't mean "welp, repairable laptops are dumb and only nerds will use them!" Just means you don't have to buy a new laptop every time one little thing breaks.
Outside of that, anything modular/repairable gets an A+.
Will they use local distributors like other companies?
Are they expect to have international warranty?
But hats off to the initiative. Wee needed this.
I wonder though are there any plans to support coreboot?
I would be more interested in a more innovative approach regarding the keyboard than the ports. This was solved with usb3 for me.
10$ says it’s going to be quite an effort to run Linux on it. Nice idea though.
Edit: And it's worth noting that a couple of folks on the team are diehard Linux users, including our software/firmware lead, and they run Ubuntu on their Framework Laptops.
How’s battery life and thermals under Debian? I guess all Intel CPUs get hot, but at least my MBP is quiet enough. Battery life life isn’t that great though.
After using both a macbook and a dell xps on linux this year, I'm a whole lot happier using the dell xps. The XPS has functional cooling at least.
Hearing "Taipei-based notebook manufacturer" I think already tells how it is, but I myself is totally OK with OEM laptops, especially if you put running Linux a priority.
I had my own plans for making a designed from scratch x86 laptop with AMD Ryzen chipset a year ago. Covid of course made a change to my plans.
I didn't read the entire text, but here's my question: do you have in your plans to ship worldwide.
But if the promises hold true, this will definitely be my next laptop.
I once had an HP Envy laptop which was so poorly made that I refuse to buy anything from HP again.
Is this another way of saying Moore’s law is dead?
Thanks!
For the rest I see a lot of proprietary modules. I somehow can't help but be a bit sceptical. It smells like proprietary lock-in sold as "freedom". I think I'll keep waiting till Pine64 comes out with a RiscV based PineBook Pro.
However, Apple has some patents that cover building up solid aluminum with stir welding instead of CNCing out of a solid block.
You might have to challenge that patent (prior art, Boeing patents that may be older) to make it cheap, but if it's enthusiast targeted, an extra 50 bucks or whatever might be just fine for people.
The only real "weldable aluminium" known today are scandium-aluminium alloys which are both hard to get, and expensive.
You have probably flown in an airplane with stir-welded aluminum. Stir welding is a bit like... making velcro and sticking it together at exactly the same time.
Nobody is building things out of 'aluminum' so it feels like nitpicking to argue about metalurgy for a company that is just going to buy stock in block or plate form. With a bunch of electronics nerds.
I only brought the metal in to talk about stiffening and because some patents may make it difficult for them to build a work-alike that lives up to their hype.
And you still have very painstaking process of finding the optimal welding recipe for the part, post-treatment, and defectoscopy.
but will take the opportunity to be a know it all critic from the peanut gallery to be annoyed by the schmarmy 'made with ♥' that i see on everything these days.. is anyone else as annoyed by this as I am? hmm...
wouldn't stop a potential purchase though. kudos!
I wonder if the "future" this laptop is designed for was canceled by COVID. Now that so many of us are working from home, maybe we should optimize more for a stationary work environment with no compromises on input or output. That is, a desktop machine with unconstrained monitor and keyboard sizes.
In these cases this mix means more mobility, so more value to laptops over desktops.
I only care about repairability when it affects a product’s longevity. And if the drivers are proprietary and will be unsupported after the warranty runs out, who cares if I can repair the hardware? It’s useless anyway if I can’t get security updates to the thing.
Hope the design team have a little more bravery in future
This approach will attract demanding customers - like the hn crowd - who will put demands on support as they customize and tinker. Then, if they extend it a lot, they'll likely buy from other suppliers who free-ride off your development work. So you lose repeat custom.
Tl;dr: there's a reason why modern cars don't have easily accessible engines, and do come with fixed-term support packages. Bundling works. It may even be best for the consumer.
This seems like a dealbreaker for me. No 2160p option?
Mmm conspicuous omission of price. Still, the end of Moore's law does make this sort of product make more sense.
Does it actually exist?
When people ask why there's so many rooting against Intel, I don't say it's because they stagnated the market. It's specifically because long-known practices like these.
But hopefully it's not the case here.
If repairability is super important to someone, what incentive is there to buy this over a used thinkpad? You can get skylake thinkpads for less than $200 on ebay - replacement batteries and displays cost less than $100.
I suspect they'll have to charge premium prices, but that might be justifiable even considering the availability of cheap Thinkpads.
As good as $200 Thinkpads are, they are old devices, with dim, low res screens, old processors, poor battery life, relatively thick and heavy chassis, old ports, old wifi/bluetooth etc. Again, perfectly functional for many people, but I think there are legitimate reasons to want a newer device.
Maybe there's enough of a niche market there, who knows.
I mean this must the dream of every engineer, designer and 13-year old. Designing your own notebook. And what's the results? It's good, I would buy one, maybe. But is it a gadget I think of before I fall asleep?
This logo, then the centered trackpad (are you serious?), huge clumsy bays nobody asked for and a non-centered displays. Worst, a design that doesn't dare, that is afraid to go beyond the Macbook comfort zone, something that wants to be liked, something Chuwi and BMAX, two low-end Chinese brands, would have designed better. Btw, celebrating this reparability feature, maybe you should check out what Schenker/XMG/Clevo or the Thinkpads do for years. Not that all of aforementioned are dealbreakers but IDK, let's says they do not make a good first impression.
Look at following non-iconic notebooks[1]—I don't compare yours with iconic brands, this wouldn't be fair—but look what other non-premium brands are able to create. These are gadgets I dream of and you should think of restarting the project, seriously, I mean are you happy with this yourself or would Jobs be?
[1]
Brand new Chinese Yoga 14S https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDLaptops/comments/kifq5i/lenovo_y...
Brand new Asus Flow X13 https://www.reddit.com/r/eGPU/comments/l5fq7a/asus_rog_flow_...
Razer Book 13 https://www.razer.com/productivity-laptops/razer-book-13
Asus G14 ACRONYM limited editon, https://rog.asus.com/microsite/ROG-ZEPHYRUS-G14-ACRNM/
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PS: If anyone disagrees, pls comment and let me know where I am wrong thanks.
Personally, I don't think they want to change too many variables at the same time. It makes sense to first create something that is familiar to users while offering the benefits they advertise, instead of alienating users right off the bat with a weird/different design that may or may not be successful. It's just unnecessary risk at this point.
In 2021, the ethics of your products are as important as the products themselves. And yes, there’s a ton of hypocrisy if we compare to $BIG_CO, but that’s one of the tough parts of being young and new in an era where the young new guys have gone from 0 to 100 and gotten old and evil real quick.
Sorry to be so harsh, but Oculus connection that wins you VC dollars will get in the way of a lot of other things in unexpected ways if you want to tap consumer / prosumer. If you go after the defense market, however, you’re golden! Not kidding. Call me crazy, though, but I’d rather have my dollars end up as far from war lobbying as possible.