The Framework Laptop is entirely our own design and architecture, with no white-label or pre-existing ODM/OEM parts. The cost of developing a from scratch laptop like ours is closer to the mid seven figures.
Our thing was more custom than the framework, but mid seven figures sounds like a steal. Does that include making Linux be reliable on it? (5 engineers total on the EE/mechanical/industrial engineering and SW bringup teams * 4 year product lifespan is mid seven figures, just for salary. That doesn't include facilities, HW budget, stock, etc)
I've never used a framework, but I assume suspend resume is reliable, it can sleep for a week, the GPU works, sound card doesn't pop/crackle, etc, etc... That stuff is hard to get right over time as distros get updated, which is why the above team needs to stick around over time (hopefully while they make version N+1).
Like System76, the firmware is open source, so perhaps after a while it'll work.
Edit: sure enough. Several little gotchas and obscure commands even with the top-line distro, fedora.
From the crowd sourced setup guide (https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+36+Installation+on+th...)
> If you are seeing high suspend power drain, set "nvme.noacpi=1" in your kernel parameters. In Fedora, you can do this by running the following command: sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="nvme.noacpi=1"
> sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --args="module_blacklist=hid_sensor_hub"
Yeah, no. This is not what I would consider supporting Linux. Are there more gotchas? Who knows? Nobody's checking until its released!
My impression was that Quanta does way more for Framework than final integration. Well, good to see that somebody takes on the design themselves today.
> The cost of developing a from scratch laptop like ours is closer to the mid seven figures.
With most of that being the cost of buying the reference design, and access to the documentation I believe?
I last worked on a budget Atom laptop back in 2014. Back then the docs were freely available with enough good Googling, as well as commercial quantities of Atom chipsets sold around Intel's channel. Now I believe it's near impossible without going through an Intel approved IDH.