Framework Founder here! I am happy to answer any questions on the product.
2. Coreboot: whats the status on that?
3. When I violently yank my laptop in any random direction, the military-grade type-c cables that I forgot were plugged into all 4 ports on my framework laptop will naturally put significant strain on the type-c ports on the modules. My question is: how possible is it that I manage to also damage the interior usb type-c port on the laptop body?
4. What run-time loaded closed source binary blobs are needed for the full use of the hardware in one of your pre-built configurations?
5. Repair shops can get access to your schematics after signing some forms (presumably involving a NDA). Can I sign the same forms to get the same access?
6. If you cease to exist, everyone essentially just bought a bunch of proprietary dongles that are unlikely to be reused due to their size/shape. This would lead to the exact opposite of your goals by directly causing e-waste. Why won't that happen?
7. Is the fan, in any way, a standard form factor / are there models from competing brands that would work in that spot? I don't know how loud your fan is, but if I was unhappy with the noise from the fan it would be good to know that I could consider other competing models.
2) Also on our (long term) firmware roadmap!
3) It would be extremely difficult to damage the internal USB-C ports from force on the USB-C Expansion Card. You'd destroy the USB-C Expansion Card first, which is inexpensive to replace.
4) This is a great question, and actually on our list of blog posts we want to write. I don't have the answer off-hand, but it shouldn't be different than other recent Intel-based notebooks.
5) Currently we're limited to offering it to repair shops, but we're looking at ways to expand that in the future.
6) For the Expansion Cards, since they are standard USB-C devices, you can plug them into other USB-C hosts (though as you note, they are somewhat oddly shaped for that). We've also released open source CAD and documentation for people to develop their own Expansion Cards.
7) The heatsink and fan is custom to the system by form factor necessity.
1. Have you sent review copies to any independent review channels like LTT, Gamers Nexus, etc etc? I've seen the Tested video but that was in a very controlled environment and I'm mainly waiting on independent reviews before buying one.
2. More of a business question that I'll understand if you don't want to answer, without sharing any actual numbers, has the preorder volume been more or less than you expected?
The pre-order volume has been roughly in line with our expectations. The one big surprise for us was just how much more popular the Framework Laptop DIY Edition is than the pre-built Framework Laptop. We expected some preference from early adopters, but it's actually multiples of volume.
I'd suggest the reason is primarily that it's a lot more configurable -- people can get closer to their ideal feature set for the least spend (if only by not paying for Windows if they just want Linux).
Also provide Mac style keyboard if possible with a command key. I use mac keyboard because it is safer on wrists and thumbs.
All the best.
Full-size arrow keys: by adding another column of keys to the right side of the keyboard. That way you get dedicated Home/End/PageUp/PageDown keys as well. See [1].
Grouping function keys: also put a wider gap between Esc and F1, F12 and Delete.
Mac keyboard: that'd be nice! How compatible are they to hackintosh BTW?
[1] https://img.business.com/o/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuYnVzaW5lc3NuZXdzZ...
Do you anticipate that (if this goes as well as I hope and assume it will/is) a v2 model would have an upgrade path from 'v1' (as it were, that for pre-order/sale now) - i.e. buy new case, new motherboard (or whatever) and it's effectively the same as if you bought the new one? Or have you accepted/do you think that not all parts can be fully modular and independently saleable?
We plan to keep compatible within the current chassis for the foreseeable future. This means that as we support new CPU platforms, existing users can upgrade to them by replacing their mainboard (and in some cases memory).
What's a bit unclear to me is that it seems the Framework Laptop is not be under an Open Source license, unlike the Pinebook Pro, the Librem 14 or the MNT Reform- the MNT being the most "user serviceable" as well as most repairable.
Is your laptop fully open source, or if not, what makes it special or different from these other products?
The "right to repair" tells me that I would be able to get replacement parts from 3rd party suppliers. Once upon a time, Television units also came with the circuit diagrams that helped third-party repair shops troubleshoot and fix TV issues. I am not sure if such circuit diagrams would help with the kind of wave-soldered multi-layered circuit boards that we have, but it'd be nice to have, I suppose.
Back in the day you're talking about, components were often discreet enough that they could be replaced. Today even something as simple as a capacitor is often difficult to replace on a modern circuit board due to a variety of factors.
Certainly the large companies (Apple in particular) creates legal barriers to buying chips and other components. I think the distinction between availability and open source will be an interesting one to see how it plays out when hardware is involved.
I like open source. I CARE that I have to trash a thousand dollar laptop because I can't source a replacement keyboard when the "S" popped off.
All examples I gave are real life examples which I've encountered.
My old (8 years) Thinkpad has had: a new battery, a new keyboard (orange juice!), a new screen (upgrade!), new RAM, new HDD and a new charging plug.
All of the above were very simple with just a couple of screws to get the back cover off. No adhesive or force needed. Even the screen simply clipped off. The manual also comes with instructions on how to dismantle the laptop for repairs.
I sourced the OEM parts from eBay.
The only thing I was not able to change was the Wifi card. Apparently it's hard-locked to a specific model in the bios firmware, which I find a bit odd.
I buy lots of "gadgets"- a Pinephone, LibreM phone, a PiTop, 2 MNT Reform laptops, several OLPC XO-1 laptops- and that's just my current collection (rather than my older collection of even more obscure hardware of the past), but you're not offering much in terms of either being interesting from a social good perspective, nor from a purely practical perspective ala my Dell XPS13 and System 76 Lemur.
I wish you luck, but based just on your HN interactions, you're occupying a market niche that doesn't really interest me- that of people who care a little bit about self-actualization and repair, but not a lot.
Thr problem with oss is its fanatics.
(not associated, fake username)
No. Single channel configuration is slower, unnoticeably on laptops, that’s it.
> One is on the bottom side of the motherboard that requires 16 screws be removed and a pry tool to get the bottom case off.
Wrong choice of laptop brand.
> The second stick is under the keyboard that requires multiple levels of plastic pieces to be pried off and disconnecting the keyboard cable which can barely be reached. Want to swap the battery? That's 16 screws and enough force to break the adhesion that you are bending the case. Plus the system will complain about the battery
Again, wrong choice of laptop brand. Panasonic? Theirs are good as long as you only repair and don’t fiddle with it.
But it's not a powerhouse CPU like this. A rock64 is no competition for a current generation Intel I5/7 AFAIK.
> All examples I gave are real life examples which I've encountered.
Real life for me, too. The S key on my laptop no longer works. I took apart the keyboard to clean it one day, put everything back together, it all worked, except one key - S. Is there something about that specific key or is this just a weird coincidence?
2) Are dGPUs expected in the this or an upcoming version?
3) Color options other than white?
4a) Does the keyboard use low-profile Cherry switches or something else? (Edited)
4b) Are the keys backlit? (Edited)
5) ETA on TB4 ports?
6) Is there a 99Wh battery for the laptop?
2) See question 1.
3) We've designed the bezel to be color customizable, and there are some photos of orange and white ones on our website. We'll be adding more colors as we go. For the chassis itself, it is anodized aluminum. We don't currently have plans for additional aluminum colors though.
4) We have a custom keyboard with 1.5mm key travel scissor switches, which is longer key travel than most other <16mm notebooks.
5) We can't announce anything on Thunderbolt compatibility until we complete certifications, so keep a look out for that.
6) The internal battery is 55Wh.
1) I'd like a 15.6" version
2) Without a keypad...don't throw off the symmetry of keyboard and touchpad
3) bigger battery
Keep up the good work! I'd love to be using these laptops 15 years from now.
We can't say anything about future product plans yet, but our current laptop is not the last product we'll build!
Somewhat obnoxious that you need additional certification to actually call it what it obviously is.
To hear it has a generous 1.5mm is awesome, i'll definitely be keeping an eye on it in the near future for the 15" version.
I now use a lenovo X1 thinkpad and use an external GPU to drive 2 4K monitors. The internal Intel UHD 620 just can't handle.
Is the intel Xe graphics enough to handle this? If so, thunderbolt would be a nice to have, but not a requirement.
That said, there are times when numpads are useful. That’s why on my desktop, I have a discrete numpad sitting to the left of my keyboard, which allows the most used keys to remain centered.
It would be neat if someone made a numpad module for these laptops that can plug into either side of the laptop, and then be tucked away when not in use. The little rails in the module bays should make typing on the numpad almost as solid as typing on the main keyboard.
Everyone loves to hate Intel (and rightfully so) but Tiger Lake has better IPC and implicitly better single threaded performance than Ryzen. In real world tasks (web browsing, opening an IDE) it often comes on top of AMD.
It only loses to AMD in multi threaded benchmarks because of the lower core count (everyone loves to flex Cinebench scores online, but I buy my laptop to use, not run benchmarks).
Also, the iGPU in Tiger Lake is more modern and more powerful than the outdated Vega iGPU in Ryzen and it also has AV1 codec hardware decoding unlike Ryzen which is stuck at VP9.
Add in Thunderbolt support and using Tiger Lake makes perfect sense for this form factor. Ryzen shines best in gaming laptops with discrete GPUs.
My real-world task is not opening an IDE, it’s using that IDE. Modern C++ compilers are using all available CPU cores just fine.
> It only loses to AMD in multi threaded benchmarks
These are the only workloads I care about. Not just compilation, many other things as well.
You only need single-threaded performance for 2 things, for the stuff that’s inherently serial like gzip, or to run programs made more than 5-10 years ago.
I don’t normally play games on a laptop, but even videogames use multiple cores for decades now, since the Xbox 360 / PS3 generation.
Firefox and Chrome both have gpu hardware acceleration, and different threads/processes for UI and webpages.
Once you start having several tas open, or web pages with different iframes, modern browsers put those in different processes.
I used to want high single core performance for my python code. I've since switched to using VSCode with devcontainers which run remotely on my 5950x. That makes it fast enough ;-).
You must not be grand strategy game players. Any titles from Paradox and some other popular games are all limited by single core IPC. They are a great example of the limits of multi-threading, some processes and problems cannot be adapted to take advantage of it. If I get such a laptop I'd spend 50% of the time I use it playing such games.
These are examples of lazy programmers and PC-only games. Consoles have many cores for decades and these cores are slower than PCs, developers of cross-platform titles have embraced multithreading for quite some time now.
Multithreading does have limits. Some things are borderline impossible to parallelize, examples include gzip, streaming encryption algorithms, or parsing long streams of HTML and JavaScript. However, vast majority of the CPU-bound stuff found in videogames scales just fine with CPU cores.
Oh neat, I wasn't aware there were any AV1 decoders in hardware yet, that was always something somebody was complaining about on HN threads (probably MPEG employees HA). Tiger lake was released late last year and AV1 was finalized in 2018; that's got to be a record turnaround time from new codec to hardware decoders in top-selling chips.
A single browser tab is single threaded, but you REGUARLY are forced to run several electron apps, and have many tabs open. Each requiring processes and threads and ryzen blows it out of the water in responsiveness. It was not uncommon for some language-server running to lag out because some chrome shit was blowing up my cpu/memory, which drove me away from vscode again.
The intel is maybe better for gaming or other inherently single program stuff. But at the cost of using WAY more energy and sucking for everything else I do regularly.
Further the m1 macs make them both look fairly power hungry and laggy.
For how many years can consumers expect to receive these updates?
If at all, a script to automatically download/compile deps will be more than adequate (not necessary).
Hopefully on release we can get some confirmations about how well it runs.
https://mobile.twitter.com/bgolus/status/1080213166116597760...
(personally id love to see linux supported well haha, bjt seriously good luck)
I wish you guys to succeed.
Yeah, but I’d rather not pay for that Windows license.
Edit: Oh, I see that you have to DIY the entire laptop in order to NOT select a Windows OS.
We’ve made the setup process for the DIY Edition really straightforward, and we think kind of fun too: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Framework+Laptop+DIY+Edition...
It’s been my experience that when only sRGB is mentioned, only sRGB is supported. Adobe RGB is relatively rare these days, and any amount of P3 or HDR support is common only in higher end laptops with either very bright backlights or OLED. You might be interested in a new standard, DisplayHDR, which commonly focuses on how bright and technically accurate a screen can be. At this point there are often trade offs between screen technologies, but OLED tends to produce the “nicest” picture. https://displayhdr.org/
Also, as a correction, as long as you’re not performing colour grading on footage, you don’t need 10-bit input or output for HDR. It helps, obviously, but technically you can use dithered 8-bit RGB over HDMI 2.0 at 60 fps and still view HDR content with no perceptible difference between the 8-bit and 10-bit or 12-bit formats. For example: https://2020.smpte.org/home/session/325093/perceptually-dith...
That said, especially when using a computer, I really like the way scrolling feels at 120 fps, so I encourage looking for HDMI 2.1 outputs and inputs for that reason alone. Don’t forget you’ll likely also need a new HDMI cable. As an aside, I’ve tried adapters from DisplayPort 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 and they are so far rather unreliable and prone to overheat.
I suspect this as well, especially at the price point the Framework laptop is being offered, but that's why I'm asking. I feel that manufacturers providing a approximate gamut coverage plot would be an enormous improvement to the status quo.
> any amount of P3 or HDR support is common only in higher end laptops
I disagree with this point. The MacBook Air (at $1000) is advertised to have P3 coverage. That's the exact same price (for a shipped laptop) as Framework. It also has HDR support.
> Also, as a correction, as long as you’re not performing colour grading on footage, you don’t need 10-bit input or output for HDR.
I'm aware - that's why I asked about HDR and 10 bit support separately. Worth mentioning that a bunch of cheap panels only really support 6 bits which then gets dithered, though. You're right that 8 bits in probably sufficient at the 400 nits brightness of the Framework screen.
True. But then it only outputs to one extra display, runs a chip Apple made from last year and hasn’t yet updated, and the rest of the industry isn’t Apple and can’t find a way to sell the same product in an iPad, mid-range desktop, entry-level all-in-one, entry-level laptop and entry-level pro laptop while manufacturing in quantity during the middle of a chip shortage. I mean, some things only Apple can do.
The closest comparison I can make to the Air in terms of price might be the Samsung Galaxy Book Pro for $999 which has an AMOLED screen, but that’s presumably because Samsung makes their own displays and wants a laptop to show them off. Everything else about the laptop is low- to mid-range and you need to pay extra for 16GB of RAM. Frankly most laptops with fancy displays end up being like the Dell XPS 9710, they ship with dedicated graphics cores and cost upwards of 2-3 grand. The exceptions with nice displays stand out as exceptions. To date, Microsoft’s entire Surface line has yet to go P3 HDR (iirc) with the exception of the Surface Studio, their giant (and outdated) all-in-one PC.
Frankly, if a third-party repairable MacBook Air with Apple silicon existed, I’d be over the moon, and more so if Apple came out with an OLED display, but in a way even OLED panels aren’t very repairable as if you get the tiniest of scratches the entire panel might need to be tossed, etc. And you might consider repairability from the perspective of “how inexpensive is it to replace?” If so, you wouldn’t want a part that’s only affordable if you buy in bulk, you’d want a screen that’s common and easy to get instead. Probably 16:9 aspect ratio too. So… a repairable laptop might not be the laptop to get if you also want the best of everything… for now, at least…
I did find a review of one laptop that used this panel, and it looks like it's a designed-to-standard 8 bit panel with pretty much no coverage beyond sRGB, similar to the panels Apple was putting in MBPs around 2014 or 2015. Support for HDR (e.g. PQ) shouldn't be expected.
For what it's worth I'd be very interested in future upgrades for the screen quality. I'm fine with the current density (~200 DPI or so), although I know some have requested 4K screens. The real selling point would be a 10 bit panel with ST.2084 HDR support and full coverage for the P3 gamut. Something in line with base model laptops from Apple. (Obviously, such an upgrade would carry an understandable price premium.)
A touchpad with buttons is something we believe could fit in the existing cover though, and something we want to explore more when we have time.
i.e. on the US/ANSI layout photographed on the site - L Shift is using both L Shift and Backslash holes; Enter is also occupying Octothorpe, but not covering the hole above it where Backslash is in that layout? So you have a fixed, what I think the mechanical keyboard enthusiasts call 'switch plate', and then different sized key caps for the relevant keys making them occupy multiple spaces with dummy switches or whatever?
The current keyboard is not really fit to be used as a primary keyboard. A proper 7-row keyboard with full-sized arrows is really a must for people who use laptop keyboards as their main daily driver. Here's a picture of what one looks like: https://imgur.com/Epo5kBw
Please make something like that possible!
A lot of us, addicted to the trackpoint, are not liking some directions Lenovo have taken in the recent years.
1) 3 buttons at the top of the mousepad, ideally contoured to be comfortable and easily differentiated.
2) A 3+ year warranty, rather than just 1 year.
The screen and the high-end internals are really grabbing me.
I'm not expecting Next Business On Site warranty from a new company (though that would be nice...), but an option for at least 3 years is the very minimum for me.
For longer warranties in general, that is something we would like to do. We're giving ourselves some time in market in order to price it appropriately, but since our product is easy to repair, we believe our costs for supporting warranties will be lower than it would be for less repairable products.
Absolutely. In particular, I wouldn't expect an "at-home service" warranty this early in the life of your company, for such an easily repaired laptop. Rather, I'd expect a warranty in which you cross-ship a replacement part, provide instructions to replace it, and say "just put the old part back in the box we shipped you the replacement in and drop it in your outgoing mail".
This community is not represented on youtube etc. so I guess that's why we don't hear about the interest in trackspoints that much.
As a predominantly windows based user every time I use a mac touchpad I'm blown away the fluidity and features like the psuedo-click. I've been eagerly awaiting windows compatible hardware of the same quality and functionality.
Everything else about this laptop looks great, especially the 3:2 screen aspect ratio.
It's totally understandable that the first product from a rather small company would demand some sort of higher price, your initial investment into R&D and product design & manufacturing must've been huge! But is this something we can expect to get a bit better in the future?
We don't want anyone to put an old Framework Laptop that they are not using into a drawer and forget about it. We want to get them to list it on the Framework Marketplace to find another happy user.
2. Is there anything hardware wise that would prevent someone from making an arm based motherboard for this device, or even a RISCV based motherboard?
Nope, it is entirely doable from a technical perspective to build an ARM SoC-based mainboard for the Framework Laptop! I haven't seen a RISC-V SoC that has the necessary interfaces for it to work well in a laptop yet, but I strongly suspect that isn't far away.
Do you plan on offering it in Scandinavia with Scandinavian keyboard layouts?
Any plans to sell in Europe (Italy)?
Apple/Lenovo let you spec an “English International” (ISO) keyboard even if you're shipping to Germany/Austria, for example, so that you're not forced to buy QWERTZ.
We've designed the mainboard to be end-user replaceable for upgrades, and we'll be developing new ones for future CPU platforms as we go.
We don't currently have anyone on the team in Canada, but we are definitely open to it for the right candidate. Please do mention HN so we know where people are coming from!
Do you have information about how the pci-e lanes are routed? I’m wondering because it would be interesting to see how EGPUs perform with this laptop.
Do you have plans to release different types of key caps ( such as U-shaped keys? )
There's some more information about the PCI-e lanes here: https://community.frame.work/t/iommu-groups-for-thunderbolt-...
We don't currently have plans for other keycap geometries, but we do have a range of different languages in progress.
If it's a TI BQ20Z451, will you keep the default unseal code?
I paid exactly $288 SGD to get my battery replaced at the Apple Store here in Singapore.
It's not possible to replace only the battery - an AASP will replace the whole top case. I also think it's more expensive for older models, because the parts are not easy to find for a 2014 computer.
Yeah, this is true for Apple's battery service as well. I got a new keyboard and trackpad for the $288 SGD I paid.
> I also think it's more expensive for older models, because the parts are not easy to find for a 2014 computer.
This would only make sense if parts weren't ordered from Apple directly. I would imagine that they are able to as an AASP. Apple products only enter their vintage list after 5 years, and their obsolete list after 7 years: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624
In this case, it looks like the AASP would still be able to order parts for your 2014 MacBook without extra cost.
Apple Support confirmed the order number is a genuine Apple part. Makes me worry about Apple's own supply chain quality.
The AASP also did a pretty shoddy job at repairing: the case screws were in the wrong positions, and the logic board was seated badly so I couldn't plug in USB. I just spent an hour this morning reseating the logic board myself.
If you put 11hs on your site but the average reviewed time is 4hs, it’s not going to look great.
I know you guys are super busy launching this and there are a million things to look at, just sharing my opinion as a consumer.
The other thing that would be useful to know is a clear return and warranty policy. The items I buy from Amazon without much worry are the ones I know I can return easily, for a product as new and unknown like yours, I’ll probably stand back if I don’t know what the return process works like.
Thanks for responding!
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T490 which struggles to drive two 4k displays at reasonable refresh rates. 4k60 + 4k30 is the best I was able to achieve so far (via Thunderbolt and an additional HDMI cable).
I really wish there was a way to remove the camera as well as microphone (if there's any built in). Is that possible?
:facepalm:
For many of the other modules, we've partnered with other manufacturers specialized in different areas. We have a series of technical deep dive blog posts where we go into each: https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-deep-divethe-touchp...
I see the cable from the keyboard in the upper lid not going directly to the main PCB, but first to the same board as the touchpad. Is there some IC scanning the keyboard right in the keyboard module, and turning it to something like usb or i2c?
Exactly. Good luck to anyone upgrading the RAM or storage on that thing yourself. It is beyond risky to do this [0] (The article title is also misleading and ignores the extreme risk).
I don't think that [0] is remotely an option to the end user.
[0] https://9to5mac.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ssd-and-ram-upgrade/
Edit: To be clear, I'm not just trying to dunk on the idea. That would be the reason for me not to buy one if it looks like the vendor can fold because Apple dragged them to court.
and I mean this sincerely...
Get your eyes checked.
I'm curious because while I've also thought "yeah, these are increasingly overdue for an updated look," it's hard in practice for me to think of changes that I'd really want. I'm typing this on an M1 MacBook Air, and...I'm not saying it's somehow reached the apex of perfection, but other than a wider range of colors there's nothing that immediately comes to mind as an answer to "I wish the Air had [thing]". Smaller bezels? Maybe, but it's not like they're a glaring huge problem. A different shape? Maybe, but again, this is just such a nice one. They could bring in more of the current iPad/iPhone design language, especially on the MacBook Pro rather than the Air, I guess -- which is widely expected for the next refresh, so you'll probably get your wish in that regard.
I have a G14 with anime matrix led display and it's pretty slick looking (so cool how it lights up) [1]. I understand it's not as minimalist as a macbook but I've been blown away by the amount of comments I get on it's looks.
It completely goes against Apple's design DNA but maybe it's just the super minimalist approach itself I am finding tired. I like spice & variety.
[1] https://dlcdnimgs.asus.com/websites/global/Products/xccq31kw...
It has chiclet keys and a black bezel sure, but nothing about this screams carbon copied MacBook anymore than contemporary ultra book.
We’re pretty much in the modern equivalent of beige boxes and CRTs. Consumer computers aren’t very interesting to begin with. This one is a laptop that lets you swap out parts, that’s pretty unique.
And of course there's the suspiciously named Huawei Matebook Pro.
If Apple was inclined to sue people for making MBP lookalikes, it has far more interesting targets to go after.
>Every module has a QR code on it that you can scan for step-by-step instructions, support information, and a link to order a replacement from the Framework Marketplace
So its a dealer "repair" where you, the dealer, sell me a repair without the labour part in a form of black box to replace?
What about the schematics? the Board files? Firmware?
Who is the ODM? Compal? Pegatron? Quanta? Clevo? Wistron? Inventec? Flextronics?
Did you pay for fully tailor made design? Who else sells a laptop with the exact same design (ignoring form factor)? You dont have a single EE listed on staff. What part of the electrical design do you own? Do you own any part of it at all? This sure looks like tweaked Acer Swift 3 SF313-53, same ODM?
Do you own any part of the firmware that goes into the laptop? Will you be able to patch it?
"Great Webcam in a Laptop" Thinkpad X1 tablet 2nd gen uses same OV2740, isnt exactly known for great camera. Optics and ISP tuning are the important bits. Can you post a demonstration video instead of one 1mpix picture of a laptop screen at an angle?
I didn't see anything about this company claiming 100% open source and private consciousness. I thought that was a different company that never really did anything because of issues you've asked about. If I'm wrong in that, please correct me. Certain chips just couldn't use custom open firmware, so no device was ever going to be 100% open.
Just seems your questions might be a bit off target. No wonder you never got a response "the last time around".
End users have the ability to order replacement parts for every part of the laptop, down to the granularity of things like individual flex cables. We've also released reference CAD under open source licenses for the Expansion Card system for people to be able to develop their own (https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/expansioncards). Our embedded controller firmware is also open source, and we'll be posting the repository shortly. Full schematics for the rest of the system are available to independent repair shops that get Framework hardware in for repair.
Our main manufacturing partner is Compal, who makes laptops for many other large US notebook makers.
Apart from off the shelf modules like the SSD, RAM, WiFi, and LCD, the Framework Laptop is entirely custom to us, and we own all of the design and tooling. We don't have an EE on the team page, but I am actually an electrical engineer by training (or at least that's what it says on my degree from Carnegie Mellon), and our systems lead Kieran is an EE by background as well.
We own the embedded controller firmware, which is based on Chromium EC, and we'll be releasing the source soon. We use a licensed BIOS that we've customized for this go-around, but we would like to move to an open BIOS in the future.
Some of the reviewers have positive comments on their hands-on experience with the webcam. While it won't be at the level of a standalone plug-in webcam, it is substantially better than what is available in other notebooks.
Wow, does look almost identical, except renders/photos are showing keyboard for this laptop removed than bottom case for Acer version. To be fair they don’t seem like a huge ripoff in terms of price though, only ~$300 which is more of a simple reality of low volume products.
- topside (primary servicing end)
...and then there's:
- frontside (replaceable bezel, magnetic retention)
- underside (venting pattern, 6 less securing screws)
- keyboard layout (escape, arrows, tilde, backslash, left ctrl, delete)
- power button (location, fingerprint reader integration)
- peripheral support (modular af, reconfigurable, select your charger side)
- camera, mic (integrated lockout)
- lid opening extruded cut (narrower span)
- internals (design for maintainability of the highest order; so different it's not even worth enumerating)
- documentation (digital first approach, baked onto every sub-assembly)
Wish I could get a closer look at the bezel electronics. What other details did I miss?
The main opening being on topside as opposed to bottom means the enclosure is custom made. So what.
Overall it’s not something that we are smoking, it’s basic understanding in laptops and modern electronics.
The internals of that Acer: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/e/0/csm_...
The internals of the Framework Laptop: https://images.prismic.io/frameworkmarketplace/df9863d8-4512...
Merely speculating that FFC interconnect is "probably just a USB-C" says absolutely nothing of the fact that Acer's system is neither truly modular (because it's fundamentally constrained to specific I/O interface by its own case) nor externally reconfigurable by the user. Nevermind that Framework's design appears to sensibly apply what was intended to be floating interconnect (USB-C male) to a fixed peripheral module interface on both sides, which is a huge value add from a user configuration perspective on the merits of being able to choose what side your charger port is installed on alone.
So what about the enclosure being custom made?? Oh I don't know, nevermind completely disrespecting mechanical design considerations and effort applied towards targeted maintainability which have a direct impact on internal layout, user ease-of-self-service considerations that quite frankly the rest of the consumer laptop market clearly hasn't given an ounce of attention. That Framework completely own their tooling alone tells me substantial work was done.
Without even critiquing layout, Acer didn't even so much as give its prospective customers the courtesy of a fuckin' reach-around by soldering memory directly onto its motherboard and left a substantial amount of internal volume on the table. I suspect comparing display maintainability would be a complete joke of an exercise.
Basic understanding in laptops and modern electronics...yeah, sure.
This practicing hardware EE is far from convinced.
51nb X210 system planar exists, but it also costs $800.
I think Framework has put together something that they believe has the potential to be profitable and I believe has the potential to be sustainable.
Nothing---especially with respect to obsolescence of consumer electronics---is without lifecycle risk to both a business and its customers. I choose to put my money where my mouth is now because I believe the problem is nevertheless worth trying to solve and the offering is good enough for my objective usecase.
Whether Framework can truly make their long term vision happen in a way that doesn't disillusion the community is obviously yet to be demonstrated. If the idea ultimately fails in the market, then such an outcome is hardly any worse than what I perceive to be an already regressive state of productivity laptops being overshadowed by consumption-centric mobile in at least the past decade, none of which ever focused on maintainability as critical design paradigm. Where I think the Framework meta truly differs is it lays a notebook form factor foundation that openly invites the hacker community to fill in at their leisure. Such a brazen "go fuck yourself" message to every other laptop vendor on the market earns my respect any day of the week.
Is it the best of all possible worlds? Probably not and there's surely room for improvement, but unlike most entitled consumers who want the future now for pennies on the dollar, that's not what I'm paying for either. I'm paying to support a sensible start towards something that the marketing and design of big companies intentionally ignore, have interim utility during a period of transitory company growth with hardware features and software (non-)options that I actually want, and hoping the rest of the market follows through with qualifying the movement's worth in the long run.
Please don't be a jerk in HN comments. Note this site guideline: "Assume good faith."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.