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Comment by tedk-42 | Hacker News Reader

Hi Nirav, exciting times ahead!

Key highlights I'd like to point out is that you nailed the screen specs (3:2 and brightness) as well as the 1080p camera which is something that has always annoyed me.

Do you have a timeline of how long you expect to keep the mainboard design replaceable with this frame?

I'd personally love to see an AMD chip in there over Intel but this is right up there for my next laptop purchase (when i need!) - I expect people might wish to swap out the motherboard/cpu combo.

Also, can we expect a bigger version?

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Major thumbs-up for AMD chip. With a replaceable main board, this will be a dream. I ordered a framework laptop at its highest CPU+RAM spec and can't wait to replace my 6 years old ThinkPad x250 with it.

EDIT: would also add that the open source design USB-C based side modules are amazing - looking forward to designing my own modules.

Thanks! We're looking forward to seeing the modules everyone develops, and we're excited to get new mainboards out in the future.

+1 for AMD for me, I'd absolutely buy this today if I could get a 5000 series HS in it too.

Another +1 for AMD from me, only reason I haven't bought one yet was I was hoping to get an AMD chip for my next laptop.

Not sure if this is technically possible. However I would like to see in the future, version with AMD APU but replaceable so you can upgrade as well. Amd seems not selling ryzen mobile that is swappable but maybe possible to design motherboard that will fit ryzen desktop, undervolting it a little when not connected to power to conserve battery - even at the expense of slighty thicker laptop

I'll wait until there is an AMD CPU to buy with this setup.

+1 for seeing AMD chip in it, please go for it!

Why AMD? What about ARM?

I don't want to use an Apple laptop, but I do want a fanless design with M1-type performance and battery life. Can you do that with anything from Intel or AMD?

No and it's probably not possible to get M1 results out of anything remotely modular. The M1's success is largely due to vertical integration. You definitely can't get as good a laptop using a non-Apple ARM chip (see e.g. the Surface X).

The bigger problem is that Qualcomm and Mediatek are so far behind Apple that nobody else makes an ARM chip with M1-type performance and battery life

Any chance for an ortholinear keyboard?

Congratulations! I am really glad to see Framework deliver - I forwared your website to everyone in my contacts list as I was really stoked by what you promised. I certainly hope you can keep up the momentum and consider launching better screens (bigger size, higher PPI, higher resolution) with better processors (AMD). Will definitely be ordering a Framework v2 or v3 (when hopefully you've ironed out all the kinks in v1).

Thanks!

We aren't able to announce anything yet, but we have certainly designed for being able to support different CPU platforms, and for folks to switch between them by upgrading just the mainboard or the mainboard+memory.

What is the likelihood of a 4K (like 3840x2400) screen option appearing anytime in the near future?

We don't have any plans we can share yet, but we did design the display to be easy to replace by putting it behind a magnet-attach bezel and using fasteners to affix it the lid.

Are you considering OLED as well? The Dell XPS has that as an option and it is a serious draw, especially for coders who stare at a mostly-black screen all day.

I wonder if eink would be feasible.

> I wonder if eink would be feasible.

It would depend on your meaning. If you mean taking a device like a Dasung or a Onyx and connecting to the laptop and using it as another screen, then sure, that should work fine. If you mean taking out the LCD and popping in a raw eink panel, then no because they have different interfaces. Speaking of which, I don't see any clear specification on frame.work for the LCD connector or power specs.

I see they wrote on their blog.

" We don’t currently have plans for alternate displays, but we’ve designed the display to be easy to replace and the display connector on the mainboard to be able to support a broader range of possible displays. It’s unlikely we would go lower resolution in this form factor, but I agree there could be an interesting case for a display resolution that works at 2x scaling (at the tradeoff of battery life). "

But I couldn't easily find on their website the info for what type of connector and what type of power is delivered to it.

We use a relatively common 40-pin I-PEX connector. We’ll be publishing more detail on it as we have time to.

@pabs3, there is actually a 4:3 13.3" e-ink panel that may be possible to fit, but it would be challenging to interface.

On OLED, nothing we can share yet, but there are certainly benefits to OLED panels.

I would buy one just to get the eink screen on a laptop!

+1 for eink. Maybe something to do with collaboration with Dasung.

My god, if you can make an e-ink display work it would be an insta-buy for me.

This might be a bit much, but if you offer an e-ink with the same interface as the laptop, it would be very cool to have an external usb-c case for it. So people can choose which display for their "main" monitor, and have the other one as an external portable monitor.

I’m curious about these responses. They kind of read like “Yes, but we don’t want to commit to anything right now.”

Sounds sensible. They're working on it but wouldn't want to have an unexpected obstacle turn into broken promises.

That is right. I’ve answered a few questions in these comments where the answer is basically: It’s technically possible, there is a plausible market need, we think it is worthwhile to do, and we’ve designed for it architecturally, but we can’t commit to a specific date because there are always implementation risks, supplier risks (especially this year), and a large number of programs we have to prioritize between as a small team.

This is the perfect answer. Paste this into every feature request thread.

Haha, yeah, that is exactly the long form of what I expected it meant.

Sounds good. Thanks for the answer.

No matter how much you qualify an answer: “yes, but it’s extremely early in design, we may not be able to find the right manufacturers so it may not happen at all, but the earliest possible date would be late 2022”, there is a segment of people that will have an expectation that you will deliver the product before 2023 and will be upset if you don’t.

It would be really cool if Framework would release an ARM platform based motherboard in the future.

I wouldn't rely on Framework doing this, but if the PCB dimensions were open source, I bet you would have a few companies looking to fabricate custom mainboards with ARM chips that could slot into the Framework shell :D

Hence why i originally asked about how long the motherboard design would stay with the current frame

I would buy this yesterday if you could make a Ryzen 7 version. I'm not buying Intel shit any longer.

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