Framework Laptops Now Offering Refurbished Products | Hacker News Reader

Framework Laptops Now Offering Refurbished Products

frame.work

142 pointschrisdotcode68 comments

This sounds great, but I would expect a discount larger than $80 for purchasing a refurbished product. In particular, I'm looking at the 11th gen DIY units at:

https://frame.work/marketplace/laptops

Understandable (who wouldn't like anything they're shopping for to be cheaper...) I actually tend to prefer refurbs because they've been gone over by the real A Team, unlike units rolling off the line (that may depend a little on who we're talking about, Apple has worked out for me at least). Not in the market for another laptop right now, but the Frameworks are high on my list.

New 11th gen DIY units don't appear to be sold at all, so not only are they refurbished, but also discontinued.

It looks like they just sold out - they were still available a day or two ago.

This is awesome, if Framework's testing is anything like Apple's, their refurbished products will actually be higher quality than "new" ones, primarily due to a thorough testing of components.

A keyboard with full sized arrows, dedicated pgup/pgdown, 3 physical mouse buttons and a trackpoint, I'm begging you, please.

Aren't you just looking for a Thinkpad at that point?

Yes. I'm looking forward to the "framework 2". What's the point of having four interchangeable ports when my daily driver laptop already has 3 type-A, two type-C, an SD and microSD reader, and HDMI-out all at the same time?

Give me the cool shit, Framework. Gimme a module that's actually a bluetooth mouse. Gimme a module that's just a horizontal stack of like six USB2 ports. Gimme an ethernet port and a serial port.

Introducing a whole new structure for modules would be a huge self-defeat for their reason for existing. I didn't get a framework laptop with the expectation they'd obsolete it in a couple years.

Why would you need a whole new structure? They've already shown they're willing to have extended-body modules such as the ethernet one.

I mean if you want a wider thing with multiple ports you can just get a usbc thing that does that and plug it into the usbc module? There's lots of those out there.

The Ethernet one sticks out a little but a multiple usb-a port one would be a lot bigger and put more mechanical stress on the whole thing.

They could make an adapter that allows the current, smaller modules to fit in these supposed future voids. If done right, this adapter could be completely passive (no circuits).

Part of the point is that people can build this stuff themselves. Like, adding 4-6 USB ports onto this thing would be a weekend project if you already own a 3D printer. Bluetooth mouse one can probably be done with an off-the-shelf Alibaba kit, the Ethernet module exists already, and all 4 ports are serial by-default (but you could still add a SCSI port if you insist on being a villain).

Though I agree, for a device that's trying to cater to both Thinkpad and Macbook users alike, they're seemingly allergic to all the stupid things people actually pay big money for on those machines.

The expansion slots are too small to fit 2x USB-A ports in a single expansion card (edit: without an extended body, which will not work for me). They could fit 2x USB-C in one, but the fact that nobody has made one in the year this product has been out makes me wary of the promise of an entire DIY ecosystem.

They could fit 4 USB-C, or 6 MicroSD, or 12 headphone jacks!

But none of that really matters. The elegance of the original model is that you get 4x Thunderbolt 4-capable ports that can run at full-speed and easily interface with any standard USB device. Sure you could add more ports, but you're just diluting the speed of the interface and adding more steps between your device and the laptop's IO controller.

> the fact that nobody has made one in the year this product has been out makes me wary

Did you look?

https://community.frame.work/t/dual-usb-c-expansion-card-moc...

Same problems exist as-usual when you try multiplexing Thunderbolt connections, Alt-mode and PD gets really funky.

> Did you look?

I did look. Did you? That thread is a year of people speculating about if this would even be possible and a few prototype renderings. There is no evidence in that thread that anyone has even created a physical prototype, much less an actual working adapter.

> The elegance of the original model

I don't want elegance. I want sustainability, repairability, linux compatibility, and more than four ports.

Edit: I would have much preferred if they had maybe 1 or 2 TB4 expansion slots, then take those other 40Gbit/sec TB4 pci-e lanes and have a bunch of standard ports that are easily replaceable on the motherboard, which all together wouldn't even come close to saturating a single TB4 lane. Add up 3x USB-A/C 3.2 Gen 2 (10 Gbps each, or 5Gbps for USB 3.2 Gen 1), 2.5Gbps ethernet, 100Mbps SD card, and you're still well under the bandwidth for one of the 4 lanes. Then have the other pci-e lane do HDMI 2.0b.

> you're just diluting the speed of the interface and adding more steps between your device and the laptop's IO controller.

I (and likely most people) don't need 4 TB4 lanes at 40Gbps each. The ethernet expansion card that sticks out of the case is max 2.5Gbps. Where is the rest of that bandwidth going?

> I would have much preferred if they had maybe 1 or 2 TB4 expansion slots, then take those other 40Gbit/sec TB4 pci-e lanes and have a bunch of standard ports that are easily replaceable on the motherboard

So... You wanted every other laptop? I'm glad I can have 4 fully capable thunderbolt ports on my laptop (and probably don't want or need half the things you think are "standard"), and unlike what you're asking for here, which is the norm in the industry, that's basically not available on any other laptop.

If you just want a relatively fixable standard laptop that's what ThinkPads are for.

> If you just want a relatively fixable standard laptop that's what ThinkPads are for.

Stop misrepresenting my position. I want repairability and more than four ports. Every other manufacturer (including Lenovo) just gives me more than four ports but no repairability. Framework gives me repairability but only four ports.

I'm a Thinkpad fanboy and have owned literally dozens of Thinkpads. I've enjoyed the ability to swap out parts for the same model. But Lenovo has steadily been going down the Mac route of sacrificing repairability for design and thinness. They are even exclusively soldering RAM and wifi for a lot of their current gen top of the line laptops. And when they update the CPUs for a new generation, they also change a lot of things in the case and peripherals, so it is almost impossible to put a 12th gen Intel motherboard in a laptop of the same model with a 11th or 10th gen Intel motherboard. Hats off to framework for following through with their motherboard/CPU upgrade.

It was never easy to replace ports on a Thinkpad motherboard. I tried and failed to replace the barrel power socket of my X220 Thinkpad because I was clumsy with the soldering iron and had to just get another motherboard. I get the benefits that if your port on the outside of the expansion slot breaks due to cable stress, etc., you can easily swap it out. But imagine something like a pogo pin solution, where you have a standard set of ports on one side (2x USB-A, 2x USB-C, HDMI, SD card, ethernet), but if the port connector breaks, you can unseat the connector from the motherboard and replace it without soldering. Then on the other side, you have to TB4 expansion slots with all the benefits that I recognize come from that approach. Best of both worlds! Why not?

One USB A Port ist 1.3cm the slot ist 3cm wide. Why shouldn't it fit?

Two USB-A ports would barely fit next to each other width-wise, but wouldn't provide enough space to actually plug in two USB-A cables/devices at the same time. Most cables have plastic covering the connector that adds 0.2-0.5cm of width. Grab two USB-A cables and place them right next to each other and you'll see a gap.

Edit: plus you need to add 0.1cm for the plastic housing of the adapter itself.

Same, I've never understood the love for a laptop with only four ports -- and if you want one of those to be ethernet, it is not flush with the case. The modules could have been slightly bigger to fit 2x USB-A or USB-C, ethernet flush with the case. I hate carrying around and losing adapters.

And the case could have been slightly bigger to allow for novel keyboard designs, including mechanical keys with better travel or a trackpoint. The framework has been out for a year and nobody has released a third party keyboard that is materially different.

I think the laptop is too thin for an ethernet port but not an expert. I'd like a "Framework Pro" that thickens the laptop in exchange for providing workstation class performance and access to 6+ ports & builtin ethernet...

Know what I love about Framework? You, humble user, can go make an adaptor. It's just USB-C on the inside, and a very simple slot to slide it into. Go put your USB->Serial FTDI chip in a 3d printed case and start making money.

The customization ability of Framework, for my use cases, appears to be overblown. "You don't have to use hubs/dongles", they say. The laptop on my desk has six things plugged into it, two more than the number of customizable ports that Framework offers. And I would much rather plug/unplug one or two USB-C hubs than unplug four separate items on both sides of the laptop.

For someone with a smaller set of peripherals and working mostly mobile, it might be worth it - if they were fine with the non-customizable aspects such as the trackpad and keyboard. But I'm not one of those people.

I have no interest in a trackpoint at all but I do really want the other things. The keyboard being replaceable is great in theory but until they put some effort into making alternatives, it's not very useful.

Add a AMD Ryzen option also please.

Or a RISC-V board (some help required from interested industry partners, I know).

dedicated home/end as well

>and a trackpoint

You know, I keep hearing people beg for a trackpoint, but if there really was the demand, why hasn't a third party made one already? That's the whole point of Framework, if you want to extend functionality, you can do it yourself without relying on the company to do it.

You know, this is going to sound outrageous to many hacker news readers, but I bought a little Asus Vivo book with a touch screen.. and I really like the touch screen. The trackpad sucks. My hands stay on the keyboard most of the time, but when I need to click on something, it feels really good to just reach up and touch it on the screen.

Now admittedly, I don't use this thing for real work, just messing around when traveling, but a touch screen really is much better than a track pad.

Like quite a few user upgradeable parts of the Framework, the amount of space you have to do something significantly different to what Framework have done is very limited. I do expect that eventually there'll be some sort of trackpoint solution, but my understanding is that there is not a lot of height available for the keyboard, and currently all the good trackpoint options are too tall.

Framework making laptops less disposable fills me with joy. I hope someone is able to do the same with cellphones.

Fairphone is trying to, but their market is mainly limited to Europe.

I have one at home, and I must say that it's very decent. Was my daily for a year. BUT the camera is crap, it's big and it's quite slow.

Only thing that was a "deal breaker" was the camera though, it just doesn't cut it for what we expect these days.

Yeah, I have looked into one and the pictures are really bad.

The hardware is decent, so people say the poop camera quality is mainly causes by the software, and they keep improving it. Maybe. But I have two kids now, one 1 year old and one 3 year old, and I want to take as best pictures of them as possible. FairPhone 4 makes worse photos than iPhone 7.

I am really tempted to get a Framework laptop. Has anyone real world stories about using it with Linux (specifically Fedora)? Thanks in advance.

All I have to refer to is NixOS, no fedora (not op). Seems pretty good though. https://blog.tjll.net/one-year-with-nixos-on-framework/

Can't really speak to Fedora but Ubuntu 22.04 works almost perfectly on the 12th Gen (there's a driver you have to blacklist to get the media keys to work).

Ubuntu 22.04 works flawlessly out of the box for me, assuming you've completed the setup guide provided by Framework.

Using it as my daily work computer.

Search around for user experiences w/r/t battery life on Framework. My sense from a little over a year ago was that they built a windows machine that runs Linux pretty well but the battery life is abysmal. May be totally fixed by now.

I've only run linux on my framework laptop. I'm on a rolling release distro and there have been some issues with regressions that seem to get fixed pretty quickly. Early on I had some graphics issues (I don't remember specifics) that got resolved with a kernel update. I also got a bad RAM stick early on which took me a while to figure out. :-) Recently the intel graphics bug in 5.19.12 took me out of commission for part of a day until I downgraded my kernel. It's been fixed since.

Overall, coming from linux on older thinkpads I wasn't used to kernel regressions like that, but this is my first time using linux on brand new hardware, too.

Not too long ago, we shared our feedback on using NixOS with our Framework: https://www.adaltas.com/en/2022/08/22/nixos-framework-laptop...

I'm on the 11th gen board running Fedora 36 and everything worked fine out of the box. The UX for upgrading the BIOS was a little clunky, but that goes for all Linux distros. The only issues I've experienced have involved the mechanical components on the keyboard, and support was quick about sending me replacement.

I've been using a Framework 11th gen for work since I think May with Fedora (currently using Fedora 37 beta). For context, half of the time I use my laptop for meetings and video calls, the other half it sits on a stand plugged via USB-C to a LG 4K monitor where I've plugged my keyboard and mouse (it also charges my laptop).

The two major downsides of this device in my opinion: - the battery life is terrible. If I'm on a video call not plugged in the battery lasts 2h at most and doing basic work (writing on Notion, using Slack, etc) it's at most 5h. Compared to my coworkers with M1 laptops it's just terrible. - the CPU and device gets way too hot without even doing much. I can't recommend a Framework laptop if you intend to type on it, I can't see myself using it to work without an external keyboard. Also, when I'm on a video call the CPU fan is spinning fast which is annoying.

For video calls I'm usually plugging a Logitech thing via USB-C which acts as a webcam, a microphone and an external monitor (which is a TV for me). This works surprisingly well. Sometimes I use a simple USB-A microphone and my laptop webcam, which also works. Right now with Fedora 37 beta I can't use my bluetooth headphones because something crashes with pipewire.

When the laptop is plugged into the LG monitor everything works fine and it's basically a workstation at this point. It's fast enough for what I do which is Go and Java mainly (I have a 1165G7, 32G of RAM and 1TB of SSD).

One annoying thing with an external monitor is that _something_ causes Gnome to move my windows to random workspaces when I unlock Gnome. I have no idea why; it doesn't happen when I'm not plugged in.

If you have more specific questions I'd be happy to answer.

Are you on the latest firmware? People are saying the overheating was patched around 3.06/3.07, but it'd be good to know if that didn't fix it for you.

Yeah I'm using 3.10. I'm not sure it's overheating, I just think the CPU always gets hot even when not doing much.

I have been running Fedora (35 I think) for about a year. I'm happy with the battery life while in use -- not blown away, but happy -- but it does still drain with the lid closed unless shut down. Everything else is perfect.

I use debian myself, I ran into some self caused issues because i migrated from a thinkpad and copied the data over (I had a bunch of thinkpad specific quirks setup). A fresh OS install should do fine, but if you've done any ACPI stuff to your grub config to deal with something weird from a previous laptop you may find that the trackpad doesn't work properly.

Aside from that I'm currently doing TB4 with a Caldigit TS4 dock and putting out over a single cable 2.5GbE, USB3, two displays (1920x1080@60Hz HDMI, and 5120x1440@120Hz DP) and charging the laptop without any issues at all from linux itself.

I did end up going to 5.18 and above kernels for some better linux intel alder-lake tuning/tweaks but it wasn't strictly necessary. You will probably need the binary blob for the intel wifi 6 adapter, not entirely sure I had it from my old laptop already.

The screen resolution is a little weird, but nothing has had any trouble with it.

Edited to add: I've got the 2nd gen laptop with an i7-1280p and 64gb of ram.

I'm an arch user on my Framework, and it's going very well for me, aside from the Intel Graphics fiasco a few days ago (Wasn't exclusive to Arch or Framework).

I have one with Fedora. No driver issues. Hardware-wise, a Framework is as good a laptop for Linux that I know of.

I installed a Crucial P5 SSD in mine, and it caused Linux to crash on waking from sleep. I switched to a different brand and now it's fine. There are several mentions of this problem in the Framework forums, and one of them is from me.

The battery life is not great. I haven't run Windows on the laptop to compare, but I've heard Linux is less good at managing laptop battery life.

What frustrates me the most is that Gnome and KDE have no way to control the trackpad scroll speed under Wayland! Not the pointer speed, the scroll speed. It's a really weird thing to have missing from a desktop environment in 2022 and the default speed is annoyingly high.

KDE also still does not support the fingerprint reader for logging in. Apparently this has been a known issue for years.

My Framework laptop suddenly stopped charging or booting. Hopefully it'll end up being one of these, if their support ever stops telling me to retry charging it for 24 hours.

Maybe worth a try: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fully+Resetting+the+Mainboar...

I tried that before contacting them.

So far their advice is just to try the same thing but longer, though.

Ah, bummer.

I really want to get a Framework laptop, all their values seem very well aligned with what I want from a laptop maker, but until they offer a model with a larger display I'm stuck waiting. As a developer, I really need at least a 15" display, preferably 16" or 17".

Ill take whatever display size, just looking to earn some more or see something on the cheaper side, honestly, upgradability and repairbility, all else be damned

You might be able to do that now, collect a bunch of refurbished parts and assemble a new laptop yourself.

Honestly, I thought the same thing, but I am an extremely happy Framework v2 owner, and I don't miss the extra real estate. I have multiple external monitors for when I am coding at home, and don't mind the small screen when I'm not at my workstation. It's so light and portable too, it's easy to pick up and move with one hand. I adore my Framework laptop. I've got Windows 11 running WSL2 on it, and for me it is the ultimate dev workstation.

I totally understand where you are coming from though, as I really was in the same boat. YMMV, of course.

+1 I really wanted a framework laptop, but had to go with Asus M16 in the end due to size limitations.

A dedicated GPU is another missing feature for me. I'm hoping with how powerful iGPU are becoming (amd 7000 looks promising) this should be a non issue hopefully by next purchase.

They support thunderbolt, when I tried a framework laptop for a bit I was able to use an external GPU box when I needed the extra horsepower. But that may not work for your use case of course.

Unfortunately I require something portable as I'm travelling a lot, and that's not something I can easily chuck in my laptop bag!

Good to know though play nicely with eGPUs though for future reference.

I'm largely in the same boat, but I bought one anyway. If they ever offer a model with a larger display I do plan to look at upgrading. I went and did it because I'm almost always docked to my desk anyway and it's not that big a deal when I'm not.

I'd order one instantly if they did a 16" version with a 16:10 aspect ratio. I stopped using external monitors with my laptop years ago because I found that most of the time, the items I had up on the second, third, and fourth screens were more distractions than anything else. I now use a 32" inch 1080p TV as a single screen with the laptop closed when docked (which is rarely the case lately since I had a triple disc fusion in May. I now migrate between my kitchen bar, dining room table, and couch with a folding table due to hurting if in the same position for too long)

Edit: Mobile - Grammar/Spelling Adjustments.

If they ever release a model with an AMD processor, I'll buy one immediately

I buy generally alot of things used/refurbished - also my beloved X1 carbon. As a swiss I always found it difficult to find the right keyboard, especially with ultrabooks. If framework would make it easy to buy another keyboard format I am all in (ready to pay the other keyboard incl small change fee). On the other hand if like all other manufacturers you are pretty much tied to one keyboard language(hard to change) then the chance the find the right model is so small that I wouldn’t care looking.

Not sure if any of the existing ones matches what you're looking for, but my understanding is that they offer just what you're looking for: https://frame.work/marketplace/keyboards

Yeah, I think I'll pass with decent refurn Thinkpads going for 300-400 EUR, this doesn't have even 7 row keyboard.

just in time for the layoff wave.

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