Framework won't be just a laptop company anymore
theverge.com
theverge.com
> After five years building laptops, what might Framework add to the portfolio? Patel won’t say — I only get the barest hints, no matter how many different ways I ask.
> He won’t even say if they’ll make less or more of a splash than laptops. Framework might choose an “equally difficult” category or might instead try something “a bit smaller and simpler to execute, streamlined now that we have all this infrastructure.”
A tablet form factor with a documented electrical interface for magnetic attachments (like an MS Surface style keyboard) that can run Android or Linux, or be repurposed for embedded or IoT touch interfaces.
A NUC or Raspberry Pi type device with a beefy AMD SoC inside, with optional battery support. Maybe it's thin and light enough that it could have snap-on touchscreen and gaming attachments that Lego together into a custom Steam Deck.
A solid TV without any built-in advertising junk, maybe running Android. The chassis, display panel, controller board, CPU board, and remote control can be purchased separately, of course.
A sleek and repairable smartphone where you can even replace the stock Android with Linux, where all the peripherals are documented and have open drivers, so with the right software you can have a Linux phone that doesn't suck.
If I had to pick any one of those things specifically, it would be the NUC. MiniPCs seem fairly popular these days. But many of them come from Chinese companies with varying degrees of quality and support. Seems like there's an opening. Especially since Framework already sells a MiniPC of sorts: the CoolerMaster case + mainboard.
Something with a premium case, customizable ports, and upgradeable RAM + SSD, would be a perfect fit for what they're already doing.
When they launched three years ago I was super excited and told everyone about them, I really believed in what they were doing. Granted it wasn't available in my country but surely they'd work on that right?
Three years later, not only have they failed to expand their geography meaningfully, but they've been utterly silent on the topic, there's no roadmap or sign of interest from them, and they go as far as to delete posts on their forums about forwarding laptops to unsupported countries.
They just don't care about the rest of the world it seems.
It's hard to not become bitter as the years march on. We will never have Framework where I live, it seems. Guess I'm being petty but I'm slipping into the "fuck this company" camp.
The process of saying goodbye to Framework has begun, before they ever even allowed me to say hello...
The funny thing is that virtually all of these small laptop makers I've seen will sell a laptop to someone pretty much anywhere in the world, simply with caveats that you need to make sure you get the right power adapter (not that this is really an issue anymore now that USB C charging exists), you won't have local warranty service etc. Framework is the only one that seems to hate 75% of the human race and actively prevent them from buying its product.
The other one, the PrimeBook Circular, doesn't appear to be on sale anymore? Their website is gone and an empty parking page loads.
You can only have one of them, I guess, or is there an Android TV without ad junk?
One of the biggest killers of companies is the lost of focus and doing other things good or bad is taking focus from one thing to another.
I've seen too many carrot on a stick situations fueled by continuous VC money, until the whole thing implodes to be 100% behind this without questions.
I hope this is one of the good examples where things work out.
They are not really 'taking the foot of the gas', there simply isn't a great way for them to sell more of those product lines. Their industrial designers aren't gone make those lines profitable.
But yes, if their current laptop line isn't profitable, just adding new product lines likely isn't gone safe their business.
Especially if you're going to do that without burdening their existing laptop team.
Am I wrong?
EDIT: I'm guilty of commenting without reading the article first. See comments below for the answers to my question. Apologies.
In the end it's twice as much as when they break in the laptop category.
This amounts to $1M+ per new employee, which can get you pretty far. If the prototype of their new product looks promising, they may receive additional funding for production or form a joint venture.
Yes, there's already that Fairphone Murena partnership which brings the Fairphone 4 to the USA but it's loaded with a 3rd party ROM which is very non-ideal for a general Android phone audience who do expect the Google stuff to all be there and it only works on a subset of T-Mobile's network.
For the last few years I've hated getting e-mail updates from Framework that announce their progress.
The emails implore to Order Now but alas I can not as my EU country is still not supported.
Plenty of businesses sell hardware across EU from a single EU entity.
"We haven’t opened ordering in your region yet, but we’re looking forward to getting there!"
This is definitely illegal inside the European Economic Area, but I guess they are not aware of that. It is allowed not to ship to a specific area in some cases, but not refuse to sell entirely based on the country.
If there is someone from Framework Computer Inc. reading this message: you do not need to comply with any local law if you are not targeting a specific country inside the European Economic Area; you just need to follow the EU rules. Therefore, it does not make any sense to prevent people from a specific EEA country to buy your products (and that is illegal as well). Please fix it! :)
(I don’t know if they actually mean EEA when they say EU, or if they actually mean EU. That may be important given you’re in Norway.)
[1] https://knowledgebase.frame.work/eu-unsupported-SJByUb7a
[2] https://knowledgebase.frame.work/does-framework-support-frei...
it's obviously not perfect, though
I'd be interested in buying Oxide compute for my homelab, but they only sell by the rack. It would be great to see them build a scaled down version of their product that runs on consumer grade hardware. This would give people interested in Oxide an easy way to run their Hubris OS on a supported platform. Since Oxide doesn't sell to consumers, Framework would be a great partner to resell something like this as retailers.
Obviously, this isn't a mass market product, but it could be a profitable side hustle for Framework if they aren't the ones putting work into developing the product. For Oxide, this would be a marketing ploy rather than a revenue stream. The idea is to sell these to the kind of person who would run Proxmox for their homelab or small business, with the ultimate objective of building familiarity so these people have the confidence to push for Oxide at their day job or to their big business partners.
> It would be great to see them build a scaled down version of their product that runs on consumer grade hardware.
I don’t quite follow this: I thought “compute and storage by the rack on custom hardware for better integration” is Oxide’s product? If you take that away, what is left?
> This would give people interested in Oxide an easy way to run their Hubris OS on a supported platform.
My understanding is that Hubris runs on the microcontrollers that are part of the Oxide control-plane; ignoring the why, where would this run on consumer hardware? Is the user going to see it, or is it just a case of, for example, some of the fan controller uCs now running Hubris instead of whatever they would run otherwise (probably bare-metal Arm in some manufacturer-proprietary framework)?
As it happens, Hubris is already open source, so you can build/hack on it right now if you want to.
The form factor would be towers or NUCs, or something you could put under your desk without it sounding like a vacuum cleaner. The CPUs in Oxide racks are AMD, so, presumably AMD-based compute rather than ARM. The idea is to have a system that's as analogous to an Oxide rack as reasonably can be, but on a smaller, cheaper scale.
Yes, Hubris is open source, but much of Oxide's value proposition is hardware integration. So the hardware would be at least vetted, if not completely designed from the ground up by Oxide and Framework.
To be clear, I'm not making the argument that this product would be a slam dunk success for Oxide (or Framework). The benefits that I'm purporting might not be worth the cost of development. In the history of computing, a lot of the infrastructure development has tended to be bottom up rather than top down. Server racks are the descendants of PC's, not mainframes. This could be a way for Oxide to have something that aligns in that direction.
A Dell (using them as an example since I’m familiar with PowerEdge) server/tower/NUC is pretty well integrated; the Oxide value add, as I understand it, is that your entire rack is integrated as opposed to being your own assembly of PDUs/servers/switches/etc.
Perhaps their management software (for spinning up VMs, managing storage, etc.) is high value, but I’m not sure how that works when you lose the rack-level integration and go back to a tower/NUC.
What do you see Oxide as adding at the tower/NUC level that takes you beyond the integration of a traditional tower/NUC from a vendor like Dell? I have seen similar excitement for “hobbyist Oxide” on other threads, but I’m still not completely sure what this actually means and how it would distinguish itself from existing sub-rack commodity hardware.
A sibling comment mentions smaller racks, which is certainly something I could get behind, but that’s not the same as towers/NUCs (or maybe that’s exactly what you mean: something that looks like a tower/NUC but is really a mini-rack with multiple miniaturised computers/switches/etc. inside?).
> The CPUs in Oxide racks are AMD, so, presumably AMD-based compute rather than ARM.
These don’t run Hubris though; the x86 cores are running Helios [0], Oxide’s flavour of Illumos (i.e. Solaris) that includes a bunch of binary blobs that aren’t even available, let alone open-source: they plan to make these “public” at some point, but it’s not clear whether this means source-available.
Based on the chips directory in the repo [1], they’re targeting a mix of NXP and ST parts, which are Arm, and the user isn’t likely to see them or care what firmware they’re running: I don’t think replacing the firmware with something running on top of Hubris is a value add, or even particular interesting for the hacker/hobbyist at all, in the sense that they’re a tiny cog in a much more complex system, and if you’re interested in hacking on something like that then it’s much easier/cheaper to do it in isolation rather than trying to do in-circuit debug on the part that’s keeping your server from catching fire (but that’s just my opinion!).
[0] : https://github.com/oxidecomputer/helios
[1] : https://github.com/oxidecomputer/hubris/tree/020d014880382d8...
What I see is that their full rack is so tall as to complicate delivery, its power and thermal draw so high, that I think they would be better off with a model one third or one half the height, and if the empty rack (all compute and storage modules pulled out) is light enough to lift by hand or with easily transportable equipment, designing them to stack like shipping containers gives you a better situation.
Meanwhile a 12u could probably go via FedEx.
Or is it a sacrifice made for philosophical reasons, compared to say an M-series MacBook.
Si this time I bought a framework, I hope it will be better.
Main issue with Framework is that 13'' is to small and 16'' is to big.
I’d recommend anyone interested to at least try it (it’s really easy like one command to run and doesn’t break anything) because it’s already a nice experience.
Higher build quality than think pads and runs Linux perfectly.
This is coming from someone who had a franken 400/420t hybrid until 2019.
For me getting a new laptop is coupled with getting a new job, and I never want to spend the first month on the job debugging drivers. Self-inflicted FUD has been the only thing keeping me in the mac ecosystem.
I miss the crappy laptop with Xubuntu that I had in university. If framework keeps it up I'll eventually move back.
I wouldn't buy a MacBook for software reasons, the Framework takes many design elements from it though.
wouldn't really be a problem if I were on windows
My work provides a M1 MBP; it's fine, but I usually bring my Framework when I want to get actual work done on the move. The Framework works with my external display but suffers from screen flicker on the M1.[1]
1: https://www.benq.com/en-us/knowledge-center/knowledge/how-to...
what's stopping you from just getting any modern TV and not using the "smart" features?
The other issue here is that if you remove the crap/apps/smart/etc, you have to charge more, because TVs are typically subsidised by the post-purchase revenue flow that you can get from those features. Most people won't pay more for a TV that lacks features, that's a very niche market of HN commenters, and Framework have been explicit in wanting to move to less niche markets.
I would absolutely pay a premium for a decent TV without all the advertising crap that pops up every time I turn on the TV.
On the other hand, TVs can be bringing in quite a significant amount of their revenue post-purchase, like $100/year.
Of course, I also don't have experience with this kind of setup. Am I reading too much into this & this is fine?
[0] https://frameworkcomputer.typeform.com/community-round?typef...
I could see purposes being local storage HA arrays (small scale media firms), perhaps some computational applications (local testing), k8s. Could be a boon for academics who otherwise might be priced out. Like 2k for the tower, less than 1k (old refurb) to 2k per blade. Might be doing something interesting for around 10k.
The only thing investment does is abrogate control to “investors” who care only about profit. Once investors get their claws into an altruistic company, that altruism must take second shrift (if any presence at all) to short-term quarterly profits at any cost, including long-term viability.
I mean, vampire/vulture capitalism has become absolutely endemic for a reason.