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I think the landscape is right: awareness of reparability is probably at the highest its ever been, along with access to information and tools. The chip shortage and general lack of breakthrough gains in processing aside from Zen has stalled the upgrade cycles a bit, giving Framework time to dig its heel into the ground without being having to deal with new internal components. And the chip shortage also might produce a sense of "whatever I buy needs to last", which is a perfect match for Framework's platform.
Imagine if they grew big enough to buy out Remarkable. Note taking, ebooks, ... I'd love to have all my hardware and productivity tools from an open company and have them all be hackable, extensible, repairable, and interoperable.
Maybe they could even scoop up Mozilla and give everything a singular purpose. Computing as a liberating force yet again.
You want good integration between an open phone, laptop, and e-ink tablet? It's far better for open standards to be established to make this possible, so that any future company founded on similar principles with a similar business model can step right into this ecosystem.
I am no fan of Facebook and encourage all current employees to quit. I do worry about a future where actions committed in ones past are considered so severe to be unforgivable. I would hate to be judged in such a manner.
That said, I do think it's fine for companies to put a 12 month hiring ban in place for current Facebook employees. Such a move would speak to your organization's principles and hopefully make Facebook employees think about what their tenure at the company is doing to the world.
I think you'd want to give Facebook employees an out, such as asking them to speak to a better vision for Facebook. Or ask them to tell you that respecting a user's privacy and not manipulating their emotions is paramount at your company.
But the real intention of such a policy isn't to protect Facebook employees or make them feel safe. It's to make potential future Facebook employees think twice about seeking work there. Get them to question the things they would have to do or overlook if they chose Facebook instead of their other options.
Eventually such a policy might cause the Facebook's workforce to hollow out.
Society tells people that stealing and murder are wrong, and we point to the moral and judicial consequences of these actions. I don't see why similar social and career consequences for working at Facebook wouldn't help. And as you brought up, I think it's appropriate to give Facebook employees incredible latitude to side-step such a hiring ban. The goal isn't to harm the employees so much as it is to protect your own company's culture and to hopefully decrease the attractiveness of working at Facebook.
IIRC he wasn't even a main investor and his investment was around 200k, which isn't that much.
Himself? Seems unlikely, he's more well known than Framework is and has easier ways to advertise.
Of Framework? Yeah that seems like it'd be an intended part of the plan.
One thing of note, it's where a good portion of a generation of nerds learned how to build a computer, so it gets some cred for that.
I agree that this is the time to shout loud about the need for reparability, But an average consumer doesn't even know that manufacturers from automobile industry to consumer electronics are silently switching their internals due to the chip shortage[1].
Yet still the automobile industry is way better in terms of reparability, 1950s Mercedez Benz, Porsche can still get official parts and yes they're luxury products but tech media calls the consumer electronics brand which sells >$1000 phone as luxury brand too; May be it's just for aspiration porn but if I drop a minute old $1000 phone and it goes to garbage because it cannot be repaired its not luxury it's garbage.
[1] https://needgap.com/problems/234-what-has-been-removed-due-t... (Disclaimer: I run this).
Pretty sure if you drop a Porsche from 1m at a random angle it also goes in the garbage.
Better comparisons are maybe things like Commodore 64s or Ataris, for which there are spare parts and active Enthusiast scenes still available. Not sure if that will ever be the case for iPhones, but I could imagine it happening for Mac's or Macbooks.
Actually, what would be kinda cool and a bit more "practical" (in a since, at least) would be an option without any keyboard at all (plain aluminum or like plexiglass or acrylic or something) so I can use my own keyboard. I know from experience my Planck or Atreus fit on top of a normal laptop keyboard footprint, but I always feel so weird putting a mechanical keyboard on top of a laptop keyboard, damaging something or another.
Actually, I'm off to go through that into the community forum
That said, I'm right there with you hoping to see some cool mech keeb work around these laptops!
So they want the laptop to have a blank cover where the keyboard normally is, so they have somewhere to put their mech keyboard while they use the laptop.
https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/how-much-does-out-...
This is the answer that I've been waiting for.
My MBP is 15" and I prefer the bigger size / spec but this laptop is only 13" and would normally be a dealbreaker for me however, I'm going to put that to one side and jump in as soon as I have the capital. I want to be part of something that I see as good and a move in the right direction for repairability, openness and choice.
I see a lot of people holding off because it needs X or they want an AMD cpu, I just want to say support this team now, they're doing great stuff and we as a community need to back them.
Not to hold you back from getting a new framework, I replaced my battery but am still looking at one of these too!
The current issues there have nothing to do with framework, it’s affecting everyone. My friend recently had their mattress shipment stuck there for over a week.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/ppreq9/packages_g...
Of course waiting for my batch of the laptop took quite some time, and I'd be thrilled to see them scale that up.
I do really wish they had macbook-like arrow keys, which are very effective for touch typing since the half-size makes them easy to feel.
Obviously there's a lot of danger to their own business model if things go that way, as there was for IBM back in the day. I want to believe they are aware of and ok with that though.
To your credit, I am typing this from an Intel device that is not my own, and it is performant as you mentioned.
Hard to compare what is coming with what is currently out, so I won't comment on Alder lake/etc. I am really interested how Xe does as a dGPU but that's outside a laptop context.
I don't want to support the market segmentation that intel does with ECC and raid. Especially given the single core pref hit you take moving from the mainline i7-i9 cpus to the equivalent xeon ones thats on top of the 2x to 3x mark up for no reason.
In short there is an ethical issue with buying intel some people want to avoid.
Want to own your device? No you don't, Intel does via Management Engine and other universal backdoors. Want to own your system? No you don't, you "need" Intel's microcode to fix all the bugs Intel had on release day [0].
Also, i heard recent AMD processors have tight PCIe integration (> 20 lanes), which if you need a dedicated GPU or network card is a huge bonus, but doesn't matter if you don't.
[0] Yes, i've witnessed with my own eyes CPUs that would fail to boot an OS without Intel's proprietary mirocode.
I would also love a 16 or 18 inch version.
Hope they will be available soon.
In all of my past experience, converting USB to graphics resulted in one problem or another. It's too much complexity for my taste. Am I wrong about how this laptop works though?
Considering other commenters are saying how the port is likely TB4 without certification, those should be natively supported too.
If we purchased one through a forwarder, we'd be able to RMA individual parts still? Or not?
The only thing I haven't gotten sorted is Bluetooth. I got it working once but it didn't survive a reboot. Others have figured it out, so I'm hopeful that I will too.
Love seeing a reasonably priced replacement battery here in the marketplace. I may buy one now just to throw in the backpack. Swapping it out looks like it'd be a ~3 minute job.
Have you enabled fractional scaling on your DIY? How well do applications work? Firefox, for example, goes haywire and its popup menus start flickering as soon as fractional scaling is enabled.
I use fusuma for gestures. Had to change BAT0 to BAT1 in waybar config to get the battery to show up. Had to install Intel's WiFi drivers, probably because the Sway edition is on 5.10 kernel. I've upped to 5.14 without any noticeable issues.
The last time I enabled fractional scaling in Sway, I quit using Sway and Wayland in frustration and moved back to i3. Firefox, and many other applications, just don't behave appropriately when scaling (integer or fractional) is enabled. There are also bugs open on the Sway github issue tracker for this so it's not like this issue is restricted to just me.
So it's best to have a laptop which needs either 100% scaling or 200% scaling, nothing in between.
As for Linux support, it's already there. There are papercuts, like needing a fairly recent kernel and certain packages (for the fingerprint reader), but it works fine, by all accounts.
I'm expecting my DIY edition to ship in the next week or so, and I'll be running Linux on it full-time.
Wait, Framework has a fingerprint reader? Hope it's not built-in. That's a strong security anti-feature to have in an otherwise good-looking laptop.
You pretty much have the option between s2Idle, s2deep, and hibernation. The s2Idle mode is really responsive, but it drains battery at a really high rate. s2deep isn't technically supported IIRC; I was able to turn it on and have seen the battery life under sleep improve, but it takes about 10 seconds to wake up to a point where I can log in.
If I know I'm going to be away from my laptop for a long time, I'll generally put it in hibernation mode.
There might be a better solution out there, but the general consensus seems to be that Linux + Tiger Lake aren't a great marriage at the moment when it comes to sleep.
Arch Wiki tells you how to use s2deep, if you want to enable it: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop/Framework#Suspend
EDIT: I said 10 minutes before, where I meant 10 seconds. Sorry about that.
It's easier to turn it off at that point
Hopefully it will be fixed with time
And while s2deep does help a lot, it's still pretty far from perfect - certainly not the kind of sleep you'd get from a recent MacBook.
My last two machines (work and personal) have been usb-c only, and for the most part I love it (shared chargers, shared docks, shared displays, etc).
BUT! it can suck when I need to use my machine outside of the dock. In that case, I really want a standard usb-3 port or two, and an HDMI port (normally I'm presenting something, and basically every tv/projector under the sun has an hdmi port on it right now). I don't really want to have a giant chunk of plastic dangling off of my laptop that I have to remember, or that will get yanked on, or that I can accidentally leave behind.
This seems like a nice solution to the problem. Given the current reviews, it seems pretty likely that I'll end up picking one of these machines up as my next personal laptop.
I don't know what examples you refer to that are less expensive or more user-friendly.
Edit: actually in the current models, the SD reader is missing.
And I would miss Ethernet currently :)
https://community.frame.work/t/dual-usb-c-expansion-card-moc...
Essentially, they are like 'dongles', but they sit flush and don't take additional space.
I'm not entirely sure why they did 4. 4 is more than other competitor laptops in this size category have. It could have to do with what the processor can handle or the space in a form factor of this size.
You're in for a treat if you buy this. You can swap the ports around using modules. So basically if you want different ports for your laaptop, you can do that without replacing the whole computer. You can even change them throughout day as needed.
The ports are all USB C - thing built in dongles that can be swapped.
It is indeed proprietary, but I think they share the design resources for it.
(But seriously, frame.work guys, add Dvorak!!)
I'd also be happy with no keyboard and to use my own external keyboard
If Framework had split the manufacture of this machine between Intel and AMD then the volume of chips may not have been enough to be in a tier one relationship with either. And so you you need to pick one, and they probably felt that going with Intel first was the safe bet.
I'm sure AMD will come along soon.
https://frame.work/blog/the-evolution-of-the-framework-lapto...
They're actively working on making it work well with linux: https://frame.work/blog/linux-on-the-framework-laptop
There are people in that thread saying they've run egpus off it.
USB-C is a specification and Thunderbolt is a certification. They are in process on the certification.
The processors they use support Thunderbolt and people have been using Thunderbolt accessories with it (you can see that in the forum).