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Comment by Levitating | Hacker News Reader

Right? People claim that the pricing is "absurd" as if they're forced to buy it. Framework offers repairable laptops at a fixed price. To some the repairability adds enough value to warrant the higher prices, to some it doesn't. (As well as customizability and mainline Linux kernel support).

I've found that if you're in the habit of repairing laptops, Frameworks may come cheap to you as you might have spare storage and ram around. Not being forced to buy ram and storage is one of the "luxuries" of buying framework.

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> Right? People claim that the pricing is "absurd" as if they're forced to buy it.

What is the implication of this? You're not allowed to criticize a product unless you're being forced to buy it? What is the list of companies you're allowed to levy any critiques of, then? Your electricity provider? You could always move, right?

Is this the mentality that leads people to only ever criticize government power and let all others off the hook?

I sometimes feel like people criticize products as if they were offered to them personally. The pricing of a product may be absurd to them but if it were absurd to everyone there wouldn't be a market for it.

You can objectively compare the features between two products and criticize them that way. But to criticize the price you need to attach a monetary value to those features. With a framework one of those features is repairability, which to some is worth nothing, and to others it's worth a whole lot.

So is the frameworks pricing absurd? That depends on the person buying.

So you're not allowed to criticize pricing unless you're forced to buy it?

I am not prohibiting anyone from doing anything. I am just saying I don't think people should criticize pricing as if they're forced to buy it.

Do you have any evidence that anyone, ever, has been forced to buy a (framework) laptop?

> Not being forced to buy ram and storage is one of the "luxuries" of buying framework.

To be fair at least Lenovo and to some extent dell also offer this for individual customers.

It usually is not an option on the latest processors for premium models though as soldered RAM becomes more prevalent there. A minor problem of the author might be that they are looking at the relatively high tier models, which ime have less options for "saving" money, while something like a thinkpad e14 might also have been a good candidate instead.

I think the people criticizing would be potential customers who are voicing the issues that are preventing them from purchacing one. For example, I would criticize the lack of a trackpoint equivalent. And in fact, I'm not purchasing one because it doesn't have a trackpoint. If they listened to my complaint, I'd be much more inclined to buy one. (Not right away — I'm not on the market for a laptop right now — maybe 3 years down the line.)

> Right? People claim that the pricing is "absurd" as if they're forced to buy it.

This happens all the time, especially with Apple. Complaints about the inability to side load or use alternative stores for example. Nobody forced you to buy it. It's stupid when people do it for Apple and it's stupid when they do it for Framework.

I'd say comparing hardware vs software is very different. If there were 5+ competing OS's with decent market share, maybe you'd have a point there. But the reality is that mobile software is controlled by 2 trillionaire tech companies that made use of anti-competitive measures to prevent consumer alternatives.

Heck maybe even 3. The desktop scene doesn't feel that much better, but them all allowing "sideloading" as we call it today alleviates full control of the OS.

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