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Comment by laweijfmvo | Hacker News Reader

I've been bearish on Framework, not because they make a bad product, but because I find it hard to believe there's a market to support them.

- Laptop use is shrinking, or has shrunk, as people diversify to smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, etc.

- Of the remaining laptop users, some percent only wants Apple

- Of the remaining non-Apple laptop users, some (most?) will just buy something cheap from Walmart/Costco/BestBuy

- Some of the remaining few are looking for gaming laptops specifically

- The rest will consider a Framework laptop, among others, and this is likely to be the most picky group

Will they really be able to find enough market to succeed, in any capacity?

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IMHO the market is enterprise and professional, not consumer.

If we could buy enough of them I'd advocate for moving my entire team over to Frameworks. That's not tenable for a few reasons right now, but I can see the day where bulk ordering them and support is better than what you get from Dell, HP, and Lenovo right now.

If you had to buy new machines for new hires in 2020-2021 then you know the pain of finding good and reasonably priced machines. It was a nightmare, and the options are frankly not that great for developers. Especially if you have an aversion to Lenovo products, because they seemed to be the only company with stock available to ship last year.

We've recently started piloting a business program for SMB and teams within enterprises because of the amount of inbound interest we were getting. We're using the learnings from this to scale up business sales. We agree the incentives are aligned for a modular, upgradeable product to be a good solution. As you build up a fleet of systems that all have easily interchangeable parts, you can reduce downtime and manage upgrades at a granular level.

1. While category growth likely won't hold over the next couple of years, there were ~350M PCs sold in 2021, most of which were notebooks. Apple has <10% share, and ASP is >$700, even including ultra-cheap Chromebooks for Edu. [0]

2. The Framework Laptop is our first product, but not our last one. We see the same problems across consumer electronics, and we're excited about our product roadmap to address them!

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/pc-sales-hit-350-million-u...

Small correction the headline reads: "PC Sales Hit Nearly 350 Million Units in 2020"

Not 2021 - will be interesting to see 2022!

I actually think the title is wrong. The URL slug actually states 2021, and later in the article: "The industry shipped 348.8 million PCs in 2021..."

God I genuinely hope they survive!

I bought a gen1 laptop as an early adopter in part because I wanted to "vote with my dollars" and support their mission. A lot of people I know did the same.

As someone who has used Apple products in various capacities since like 2007 (MacBooks, MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, etc...), I'm just so completely done giving that company any of my hard-earned dollars.

Setting aside the M1/M2 processor specifically, they haven't put out a good laptop in the better part of a decade.

I realized a long time ago that I'm not Apple's target audience! They're more fashion/status these days than they are a technology company.

Seems like apple silicon is really throwing a wrench in people's incessant damnation of apple.

Conversely, I think Apple Silicon has drawn the line exactly where it needs to be. It's a fine laptop, but I'm not paying more than $300 for an ARM computer until the software support isn't treated like an afterthought. By the time people actually get multi-arch builds on most of their software, I reckon we'll have moved on to RISC-V anyways.

One advantage this model has is that once someone has bought a framework (and is happy with it) they are even more likely to stay brand loyal for their next laptop purchase than they would be with other brands, since it'll be cheaper to upgrade their existing framework rather than buying an all new laptop.

As software continues to eat the world, and a lot of that software is SaaS, much of that software will be developed to run on either Windows or some variety of Unix. While the Unix market share remains lower than Windows[0], it's enough to support a market.

Apple captured a large share of the hardware market both for developers who wanted to develop for iOS, but also developers who wanted quality hardware that ran a Unix variant that worked out of the box. After shipping quality hardware for years, they made a sequence of missteps that they are still recovering from:

* Faulty keyboards that failed relatively quickly - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/20/technology/apple-macbook-...

* Thermal issues that killed performance - I use 2019 Core i7 and M1 MBPs daily, and still find the thermal performance differences amazing a year after I bought the M1

* Designs that aren't upgradeable/repairable - I upgraded the RAM and drive on my 2008 MBP, and replaced the battery.

I've been reading The Setup blog for a few years now. I noticed a clear trend where developers moved to the MBP for developing on a reliable Unix platform, and a clear trend more recently (pre-M1) where developers moved away from the MBP because of the above issues.

I chose the Dell XPS Developer Edition years ago at a startup where we were developing on Linux because I wanted to develop and test on the same OS we were using for our product. Coming from a MBP, it was a let down, in both the hardware quality (trackpad, coil whine), and OS compatibility (not great power management out of the box, etc.). Maybe it's better these days, I haven't used recent versions of the laptop.

I think there's a market for Framework to succeed and take marketshare from Apple for devs who are looking to work on Unix using an upgradeable/repairable laptop of high quality.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_syste...

[1] - https://www.usesthis.com/

You forgot to add in:

- Those who will only buy laptops with TrackPoints

... But maybe that falls into your last group.

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