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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

Dave2D made the argument that you could buy another laptop for the same price as upgrading the Framework 16. This makes it hard to accept the quality tradeoffs.

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I think what’s lost here is when the framework project was launched, all the companies were moving to SoC designs and reliability was unknown.

Replacing a stick of ram is still much cheaper than buying a whole new MacBook, but these systems seem to be reliable enough that ram failures aren’t front of mind. Same for SSDs.

Gaming laptops tend to have replaceable RAM and SSD so the advantage of Framework 16 is much less.

The current benefit for a Framework is that you can swap out the entire inner/guts without being an expert and everything still works together. Most of the laptops I have provide 2 SO-DIMM slots and a slot for either NVME or SATA for storage.

So for me, there is little value in that in most scenarios. There are a few laptop chassis that I am very fond of and have wished I could "use that chassis with that hardware", but even then I haven't seen Framework chassis designs that give me that impression. I'm not saying they're crappy, but I'm thinking of different types of brushed metal, magnesium alloy stuff, etc.

It makes me wonder who their audience is if they are targeting users that will pay a premium for an upgradable system, but are afraid of modifying the guts of the computer.

Replaceable GPU and CPU is the big draw draw for me. Heck, the config nature of the shop also means I can chop off buying ram and memory instead of haggling with the store, since I have quite a few spare sticks lying around.

> replacing a stick of ram

How often does your RAM fail you?

The use case is to replace an existing working stick with a higher capacity stick, not just for repairs.

On my experience, every time I’ve been in the situation of looking for more capacity because the software requirements have gone up, I’m 1-2 generations of DDR behind and it doesn’t really make sense to do the upgrade anyway.

How often are you actually going to do that though? My desktop from 12 years ago has 16GB of RAM and Apple only just upgraded their base specs to 16GB.

Ok granted my new desktops have 128GB, but that's massive overkill so I can have like 12 VSCode's open. For normal people 16GB has been the sensible amount for at least a decade.

I tend to agree. But some people at least want the option. I would also say only in 2025 has that shifted for me as well. I've been perfectly fine with 16gb of ram for at least a decade, but local LLMs have me wanting for more.

Considerinng how much memory Chrome consumes, I would say that 16GB is the bare minimum these days for any computer.

Currently? Every 1.5 years, luckily still within warranty the last few times. Different systems, different manufacturers, different generations.

But that's an edge case, and I still don't really understand why it's happening.

you get another mainboard to use as a sever or resell

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