Framework Laptop 16 Deep Dive: 180W Power Adapter

As much as I dislike Apple's anti-repair and anti-upgrade practices, they're hardly to blame for this. They only gave consumers what they wanted, and consumer collectively voted for their wallets for sexyer, slimmer and lighter notebooks at the expense of repairability and upgradability, regardless of who made them, Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Asus etc.

Consumers are a lot more likely to prioritize "hey look, my laptop fits inside a Manila Envelope" rather than "hey look, I can unscrew and replace/repair all these components in my laptop if something breaks".

Now the entire consumer electronics industry has conditioned consumers that whenever their laptop breaks they just take it to a "genius" bar where some dude who doesn't have any electronics repair knowledge (because that would be too expensive), takes a look at your laptop and says "sorry mate, looks like it's fucked and you're gonna need a new motherboard replacement for 800$", when in fact it can be fixed for 50$ in a 10 minute soldering job by a technician who actually knows electronics but is either retired or out of work because his job was offshored to China and we don't repair things anymore we just throw them in the landfill "because we're that wealthy and stuff made in China is that cheap".

Hopefully right to repair laws, stricter environmental rules and trade tariffs, will put an end to this consumerist throwaway madness that just jack up corporate profits at the expense of everything else, even if that means that MacBook Airs will have to be 1.5mm thinker.

99% of users don't need a powerful discrete GPU or an extended battery, as evidenced by the Macbook Air (the base, sub-$1k model) being Apple's bestselling computer by far.

If Apple came out with something that users did not want, and other manufacturers were still shipping what users wanted, why would anyone have ever bought Apple products?

And even in the Windows PC market, if users really want modular batteries, wouldn't you have been the last manufacturer to move away from them? If you're Acer, and Dell / HP / Lenovo are shipping products users don't want, wouldn't you clean up by continuing to ship what users want?

I think you should be more upset that users want the wrong thing (from your perspective). Product design, especially in competitive markets, is all about differentiating by better meeting user needs. This tinfoil idea that users are sheep who are tricked into buying what they don't want is not realistic.

Through the 90s laptops came with expansion cards and often swappable bays. Even late-90s Mac laptops had two bays that you could swap batteries, DVD/CD/floppy drives into and out of, plus a PC Card slot that could take things like TV video capture cards or Wifi adapters.

I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though.

They all went away in the quest for lightweight size and capacity... especially as more things got built in.

In my case I swapped the optical bay for a SATA bay which enabled quick swapping of SATA drives. For my usage at that point in time that ability was very handy… perfectly possible with an external USB gadget of course, but it was nice to have that without the cables and gadget. Most of the time that bay held a large HDD for "cold" storage, allowing the primary SATA slot to be filled with a fast 256GB SSD.

shouldn't power consumption also be a factor in comparing performance?

I would think an ARM would use less wattage than a Core 2 Duo.

1. Shut down

2. Slide out the input modules covering the Expansion Bay connector, and open the cover door.

3. Unscrew three or four captive fasteners to remove the Fan Cable or GPU Cable.

4. Unscrew two captive fasteners to release the Expansion Bay Module.

5. Slide out the Expansion Bay Module.

6. Reverse the steps with the new module.

It's not something we specifically designed to happen on the fly like swapping Expansion Cards or Input Modules, but it is quick enough that you don't have to plan ahead for it.

Removing the battery is a cable and a few screws, for example. Everything is very accessible.

They do have some initial specs at https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionBay that somebody more knowledgeable than me might be able to glean some practical info from.

Very fast (on a contemporary scale) mobile extension interfaces have come and gone before, but only PCIe in its USB-C and m.2 incarnations not only excels at high performance but also scales down nicely to things as pedestrian as plugging in a mouse or a non-exotic storage extension. PCMCIA for example was dead weight unless you happened to be one of the very few who had one of those super exotic cards. An unused lightning 4 slot? There can never be enough of those, the more the merrier. You might find yourself using it for things as simple as topping up your bike light battery when it's not running an external GPU.

Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements.

People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.

Oh, they did, it was just a niche market you needed to go looking for, because they were and still generally are expensive. I remember my father once brought home a laptop from work to evaluate whether or not they wanted to use it to do data collection in car certification tests. It was a hardened laptop, so the entire thing was made out of sheet metal. I think you could literally run it over with a car and it would be fine. The most noticeable feature was that it featured 4 ISA expansion ports and the volume necessary to contain the cards. I think it was a 486/100 or so. They called these "luggables", but, yes, technically it fit on my lap. I wouldn't guarantee it would fit on everyone's lap, though; I'm quite tall. It was ~$8,000 in ~1995 dollars, and I'm pretty sure I had a Pentium 233MHz by then, and I was never cutting edge on that stuff, was always scrounging around. So, very expensive.

This sort of thing has been available for a while, you just had to go looking for them. A lot of advancements combine to make something like Framework possible, such as the fact that any such testing platform today would have all of its data gathering gear as a combination of USB at worst, bluetooth or wifi quite possible, and software driving the rest, leaving nowadays a GPU as just about the only thing you might want to wire to a laptop at such speeds, so the market has toned down.

A couple of years ago it lived on in the gamer laptop space where, at the very top end, the laptops are basically just desktops jammed into a luggable laptop shell with desktop GPUs in them. You paid through the nose for these things, though you did recover a bit of the price on the grounds that you were using off-the-shelf desktop parts and not paying the mobile premium. I'm qualifying that with "a couple of years ago" because I haven't looked since then, and the external GPU enclosures are getting steadily more practical and well-supported and I expect that will probably eat that market. Hauling around two bits of kit is nominally worse than one, but an external GPU enclosure can have such massively better cooling than trying to jam it in a case with everything else that it will probably be able to perform even better and at this level performance is everything.

What made it even more interesting is mentioning Weltrend in a marketing material, almost 50% of projects I used to work on include a cost down part to switch from TI chips to Weltrend or similar. Whoever wrote this material doesn’t understand what they really implies.

Crude measurements with a ruler indicate that Framework's unit is approximately 23% smaller by volume.

I don't know how far this field moved forward over the past three years, but I see this as a win - mine is especially annoying to handle due to its length - ~150mm.

Would love to know something about the weight, because that thing is a brick, which for this reason I don't normally take along with me on trips and opt for the 60W USB-C charger instead.

I personally went in with the expectation of seeing the PCB inside the adapter, but they don't even show that. :(

The current trend of the household name manufacturers is to solder and glue as many components together as possible, meaning if one thing inside goes ka-plooey outside the warranty then the whole unit is shot, forcing you to buy another. They say their goal is to get their products thinner and thinner (for some reason) but of course we all know the likely real reason is designed obsolescence.

Edit: I don't own a Framework laptop yet, but the 16 is near the top of the list of contenders when I upgrade within the next year or so.

Framework isn't even engaging in any tactics that may help to get more attention organically, like Cloudflare when they group a lot of releases into a very small window to dominate the frontpage.

I posted the announcement because I follow Framework pretty closely, and figured other people might be interested in a company that works in a direction opposed to the mainstream manufacturers. It's Hacker News after all.

[0]: https://frame.work/blog/introducing-the-framework-laptop-16