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Comment by nrp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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