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Comment by SloopJon | Hacker News Reader

One of the repair challenges is access to old parts. The drain hose on our three year-old washer sprung a leak. When I called a repair man, he at first said that Samsung doesn't make that part anymore. Fortunately, he was mistaken, but if that's something that happens for a simple hose, imagine trying to replace the "high-end headphone amp" expansion card on this laptop five years from now.

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.

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It is definitely on us to prove that we'll provide long term support for the modules that we're developing, but we're also opening up documentation and reference designs for things like our Expansion Card system. If something ever happens to us, other companies and the community can continue to use and extend the ecosystem.

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.

> 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.

That's a bold and brave move. Well done.

GPIO cards on a modern laptop? Sign me up!!!

Yes! Actually, one of the first cards we built internally is a little Arduino-compatible one with a SAMD21 microcontroller and an external-facing 0.1" pin header for GPIO.

Will the expansion cards work if plugged into a USB-C port on another laptop or desktop? (Assuming I have driver e.g. Linux installed).

Yep! Most do not require any custom drivers.

Woooow. This has a huge market potential among hobbyists.

Wow that's actually a really cool idea

I love it!

Will your specs include metric or just imperial measurements like you just used here?

Fear not, modern inches are metric inches:

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch

There used to be a pretty standard adapter card for laptops.

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...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card

It would be really cool if they had just made a laptop that accepted PCMCIA cards, and then made a bunch of new PCMCIA cards.

The more recent choice would have been ExpressCard, but that standard was never updated beyond PCIe 2.0 x1 and USB 5Gbit/s. But the bigger problem with both ExpressCard and PCMCIA is that the cards are long—those form factors date back to an era where expansion cards needed a lot more PCB space than they do now. ExpressCard 34 is 70/75mm long, compared to a typical client WiFi card that's M.2 22x30mm. It's quite impractical to have ExpressCard slots on both sides of the machine.

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.

From the article: "In addition to releasing new upgrades regularly, we’re opening up the ecosystem to enable a community of partners to build and sell compatible modules through the Framework Marketplace."

Maybe I am misinterpreting it but it sounds like its not a completely proprietary system?

A marketplace for an extremely narrow market? Who’s going to invest their money to develop hardware for this platform? They better do everything themselves in the beginning.

Definitely! It's on us to make the ecosystem work by building a large enough install base for other hardware developers to see a reason to come in. We're going to continue to develop modules ourselves until that point, and past that point too!

On the other hand in the laptop space I've never had problems with part availability. With brands like Dell or Lenovo there are plenty of new and used parts available on ebay or your trusted reseller, and official service handbooks are easy to download.

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.

Is that true for the premium laptops? I worked at my school's help desk and yes, Dell parts and service manuals were plentiful, but usually for bulky Inspiron and Latitude budget laptops. The ones with ugly screens, wacky trackpads and replaceable batteries.

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.

XPS are still very repairable. Not as nice as Latitude, but for example replaceing the battery or upgrading RAM only requires unscrewing the bottom (held on by about a dozen torx screws).

good to know, thanks!

It actually is a problem for cheaper laptops whose exact SKUs often don't last more than half a year, which is my primary reason for buying "business" laptops.

>if that's something that happens for a simple hose

But it didn't happen...

But it has happened to many of us for other things. The camera on my pixel 2 broke but no one sells new parts for the pixel 2 and google doesn't support it. All you can get is poor quality second hand and stolen parts. For a less popular product, you get nothing.

Since the modules are just USB-C adapted, those parts would probably be easy to mimic by a third party. Maybe they need to be signed or something, hence the marketplace they allude to.

Sounds like 3rd party extension is the goal, and according to other comments here without necessitating distribution on their marketplace either.

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