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Comment by ekianjo | Hacker News Reader

good luck finding cheap parts for your framework laptop. Lenovo however can be repaired for years with off the shelf components and at very low cost.

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Some business laptops from Lenovo, Dell, and HP rank among the most repairable laptops. But Framework goes even further by making their parts store and repair guides accessible to everyone:

- https://frame.work/marketplace

- https://guides.frame.work/c/Framework_Laptop

The prices of the parts are very reasonable, and each part is labeled with a QR code that can be scanned to access repair instructions.

> Some business laptops from Lenovo, Dell, and HP rank among the most repairable laptops

I can confirm HP isn't too shabby. Very easy to take apart, and they even put out maintenance and service manuals, at least for their Pro/Elite Desk/Book lines. They show how to disassemble them, the possible part-numbers (for example the different available keyboards with or without backlight).

I've never had to actually source any parts so don't know how easy it is, especially once they get old.

But, in general, I would personally not recommend the laptops. They're cheap junk with ridiculously bad screens.

The desktops are quite OK, though.

I would not trust a company with no history with providing parts forever. If anything, I'd like them to license the manufacturing of replacement parts so that other companies can make their own if they ever go bankrupt.

Dell Vostro laptops are not as sleek as their consumer models, but they are tanks, and they are a breeze to repair.

I do like what Framework is doing, and my next laptop will likely be from them.

FWIW I just look up 6 parts for the Thinkpad (battery, keyboard, webcam, speakers, audio board), and all the prices were within $5 of the framework equivalent. Granted, that doesn't necessarily mean the prices will still be comparable a decade from now.

One of my Lenovo laptops has firmware to prevent me from upgrading its WiFi card using off the shelf components.

If it's successful one would expect availability to increase.

It was reported recently that they are also doing the same thing with the CPU in some of their machines. As someone who has bought older Xeon CPUs to upgrade older PCs (often giving them years more useful life) that is frustrating.

Is it a Lenovo ThinkPad, or one of their other models?

That one was a yoga 2 pro. An unfortunate choice to stray from the T and X series on my part. Or, they could have chosen not to add software limitations and Superfish or at least made it clear before I bought it.

Some thinkpads have a whitelist for wireless chips in the firmware, that's known - but I am not sure how widespread it is.

> Lenovo however can be repaired for years with off the shelf components and at very low cost.

The Framework uses standard parts for wifi, storage, and display. The "proprietary" bits are the mainboard, the battery, and the keyboard/mouse assembly (in the case of the Framework, mainly because of the custom connector).

This is precisely the same situation as with Lenovo, save that the Framework is far more modular and thus easy to repair.

I'm not sure why you think there's any difference.

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