That implies you believe they are doing something shady or nefarious by not making a sd card module - which they aren’t. This is just an old fashioned business decision where it’s not the financial priority right now.
What I think you mean to say is that it’s a feature required for you that they don’t have. In fact it looks like they’re making one soon: https://frame.work/products/sd-expansion-card
And you can say “well that wasn’t the official framework org” but they’re kinda holding themselves out as a serious contender (marketing on LTT etc) yet apparently don’t have things as basic as working Linux drivers (in their officially supported choice of distro)! I think there is indeed a general belief among the public that you need to at least get that far before holding yourself out for public consumption, as a non-beta product, yeah. When you do those sorts of things it’s clearly not being held out as an enthusiast device for tinkering etc, and then people will have some (reasonable) expectations that it’s gonna actually work. If not, arguably it’s FTC time at that point.
It’s kinda the same as AMD graphics drivers on windows… having the fans repeatedly insist they’ve never had a driver issue for 10 years now (when Vega, rdna1, and rdna3 all had major issues that lasted a significant amount of time) does destroy trust among the public when they try it and see it’s not true. Nothing feels worse than recommending them to a friend based on seeming internet consensus and having them have problems over the advice I gave them. Spent a lot of time trying to debug remotely and get their 5700xt working etc, never did, they ended up selling and buying a 2060S that worked perfectly, and I’ve never trusted the fans again.
The boy who cried wolf is a cultural touchstone for a reason, we don’t like being called to action for something that turns out to be untrue. And spending a lot of money to learn that lesson generally does create a trust issue that turns people off with these brands.
So let me get this straight: a bunch of your friends evangelized Framework to you, but you decided not to go with it, and later realized you made the right decision. And because of that, you don't "trust" Framework (the company). That's not only a weird overreaction, but also a weird place to assign blame. Maybe tell your friends to stop pressuring you to buy things that aren't your cup of tea? Or, hell, maybe tell your friends to stop pressuring you to buy things, period... cuz that's kinda an inappropriate thing for a supposed friend to do?
> apparently don’t have things as basic as working Linux drivers
Not sure what you mean; Linux runs fine on my Framework, with all hardware fully supported.
> I think there is indeed a general belief among the public that you need to at least get that far before holding yourself out for public consumption
I think the general belief among the public is, "Linux? what's that?" Most consumer laptops do not have official support for Linux, and many of them have various bits of hardware (looking at you, Dell, and the fingerprint sensor on my old laptop) that don't work on Linux at all. Yes, Framework has advertised some Linux support, but I think it's been pretty clear that Windows is their priority. And regardless... Linux works fine on Framework laptops. Also consider that "Linux" isn't just one thing: realistically Framework can only test one or two distros; if you want to run something else, you're quite reasonably on your own, and should try to repro issues while running the supported distros before blaming Framework.
Apple however makes a lot of sense to mistrust at pretty much every turn.
Meanwhile, my 12th-gen Intel Framework 13 has severe thermal throttling issues that support hasn't been able to resolve after more than a year of back and forth. While my confidence in the company is at an all-time low, I don't think this is a trust issue.
Anyway, they've already pre-announced a SD card module[0], and people can sign up to get updates about its development. They're even completely candid that it's not 100% certain they won't cancel the project. That sounds refreshingly trustworthy, over other companies that might promise it without disclosing the uncertainty, or even take pre-order money and hold onto it for who knows how long.
Then again they have a miniscule engineering team but they have made two laptops with some pretty non-conventional design aspects and a bunch of modules including a swappable GPU and (one of?) the first 180W USB-C power supplies they're doing a pretty good job so far.
Considering the relative rarity of SD cards compared to microSD, other than photo- and videographers who aren't really a core demographic, welded as they often are into the Mac ecosystem, I can see why it's not the biggest priority and it certainly doesn't smell of dishonesty. I mean, why would they even be up to shenanigans over SD cards of all things?
Since they're on the case (ha, geddit?) anyway, you can get a $5 USB3 SD adapter today and buy the module when it comes out. Which is more than I can hope for with a recent ThinkPad!
I do wonder how true it is that the "put microSD cards in your computer" market is smaller than the "put SD cards in your computer" market.
If I think of the devices that I have microSD cards in (Nintendo Switch, Steam Deck, Windows tablet, phones), they're all devices where the microSD card just lives in the device and only gets removed when I'm upgrading the device. Or I guess there was the time I installed CFW on my 2DS XL.
On the other hand, I take the SD card in and out of my camera much more often, despite it getting less use than the aforementioned microSD using devices.
Not to mention most microSD cards are sold with a microSD -> SD adapter, so to me it feels like if you're going to do only one adapter, you'd do SD.
So perhaps they decided to first go for the one that lets users have the card flush for use like an expansion bay as well as for data transfer to/from devices.
https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards/tree/mai...
Just one single anecdotal data point, but: I'm not sure the last time I've even seen a full-size SD card, let alone used one. I don't use microSD a ton, but enough that I'm glad I have the expansion card for it.
I do think my DSLR takes a full-size SD card, but I (somewhat sadly) haven't touched it in years.
I wouldn't be surprised if the internals of the module would need to be completely redesigned, with the circuit board layout redone, for a full-size SD card. The SD card itself likely would physically reside in a location where other components reside in the microSD reader expansion card.
They have Intel 13th, 16GB onboard RAM, 3x USB-A, 2x TB4, VGA, HDMI, Ethernet, SD slot, 19V barrel jack input, removable battery, etc etc at $1999 starting. That should tick every major boxes that Framework 13 does except price. If by modularity people means SD and VGA and Framework modularity cannot accommodate that, that doesn't count.
Has this all been just a massively roundabout way of finding that out?