My definition of “high end” in 2023 is a battery that last 14+ hours of general use, doesn’t sound like a 747 when I open two Chrome tabs side by side and won’t fry my nuts when I put it on my lap.
Thixomolding is an incredible process, I'm glad it's becoming more utilized. It really is the best for lightweight, strong, and super thin parts like laptop chassis.
About 10 years ago I worked for a medical device company and we used thixo parts for a portable ultrasound system (think chunky laptop form factor). In my first few weeks, I had a proto part that needed a rework, so I chucked the thixomolded part into the bandsaw to chop it up, before the shop manager chewed me out for almost setting the shop on fire (who let this clueless engineer into my shop...etc etc). Magnesium dust is stupid flammable and burns incredibly fast and hot.
There were only a handful of vendors in the world at that time that had the capability to mold the size of parts we needed, it's a vastly different process to casting other metals, in part due to the hazards of the material itself. Warning to all overly ambitious framework owners: careful if you decide to chop or drill into that case!
The fastest way to learn how to make machinable parts is to machine them yourself :). DFM is often a hard-earned skill.
Unfortunately maker-spaces (the only kinds of places where you could get cheap access to good 3+ axis CNC mills) seem to have gone out of fashion. CNC mills in general cost about 5 digits just for the machine, and usually that again for the tooling.
I think the closest one can get to learning some DFM without working on a machine would be watching machinists on YouTube. Back in the day NYC CNC was great, but I think they post more hype content these days.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I spent a decent amount of time designing for and then fabricating stuff on CNC machines over the last couple years. To my knowledge, operations are cheap while setups are expensive: if you can design a part around a fixed orientation in a machine, it saves a lot of operator time.
> Tangentially, I wish there was some online resources for learning how best design for manufacture for things like laptops and cases.
You are effectively asking for a disclosure of shop secrets. Even in cases of completely no-name factories, there will be so much of clever things nobody would put on a paper.
One factory owner went nuts when we were going with inspection for a client in 2009, just because we clicked seemingly innocuous looking jig which was putting threaded inserts into mould. It later came out that nobody else anywhere had anything like that, and most factories rely on laborious process of manually putting inserts into the mould.
There is so many unobvious things which 99% of people without actual manufacturing experience routinely overlook in ubiquitous items around us.
I once been openning up dozens of laptop samples, and one in 100, from a noname factory had seemingly no ribs in its bottom cover, and seemingly nothing restraining it flexing, and sliding. Then, after days of hair pulling, the secret cracked.. nuts, and screws inside were not meeting
orcompletely, but were suspended with preloaded fasteners, which used those few free millimetres of free travel for it.
This case looks great. Love that we have replaceable graphics on this one.
I’m most excited for the ortholinear keyboard attachment. That makes it a must-buy for me, since after switching to a Kinesis Advantage I just can’t type on a staggered layout anymore.
I really love my Framework. I love that I can hack it (I made a Yubikey adapter so I could always have it inserted: https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-a-security-key-for-the-f...), I love that I can trivially repair any component that breaks, and it feels great as well, it's very light and solid.
The only issues I have with it is battery life (though I have the battery set to charge to 70% max, which leaves a lot on the table), and the fact that Intel processors heat up very easily.
I really hope Intel and AMD get their shit together and release a processor as efficient as Apple silicon, I don't want to end up using my MacBook more than my Framework.
I wonder if it was easier or thinner to do that way, or if it was a deliberate design choice for a more minimal appearance.
Personally I don't mind seeing fasteners. After swapping LCDs on my old Thinkpads a couple times, I stopped replacing the screw covers and embraced one fewer step for future maintenance.
Amazingly enough, we didn't go in with this as a design goal from the start. The Framework Laptop 13 has exposed fasteners on the Bottom Cover, and we went in assuming we'd go the same direction. As we designed the Input Module system, it became clear that the best way to design it was installing everything directly down into the Bottom Cover, meaning you don't need to flip the system over to unscrew anything. The result is a Bottom Cover that is super clean.
Me and many of my friends all have zombie Frankenstein desktops that perfectly illustrate why the Framework laptop both does and doesn't make sense.
I can understand why people with money to burn might not understand the limitations of trying to make a modular architecture work over the long term. Back in the day, dropping in an SSD represented a massive, relatively inexpensive upgrade. But, a desktop has cross-compatibility and flexibility primarily afforded by its massive size and weight. I'm not convinced these sorts of cross compatible upgrades will continue to surface into the future. And especially not on a laptop/mobile form factor.
Now, my desktop's IO ports are 2/3 fried. Its memory, motherboard, CPU, GPU, OS and hard drive are hopelessly outdated. It will never make sense to meaningfully upgrade it, upgrade would mean wholesale replacement of everything. I could keep the case and the CPU cooler, big whoop.
> I'm not convinced these sorts of cross compatible upgrades will continue to surface into the future
They've already outdone every other laptop manufacturer: you can swap a new 13th gen system board into an original 11th gen Framework.
My friend's wife has a Framework, and she suffered a liquid spill which reached the system board. He ordered parts, did the swap, and she's back in action for less than half the cost of a new laptop. If it were Dell or Lenovo, you'd be trying your luck with used eBay parts. The housing would have ~20 tiny plastic clips that you break one or two of every time you open it up. (Or adhesive, ugh.) It's just a sketchier proposition.
I remember the days of incremental PC upgrades being quite commonplace (the 286/386/486/Pentium era). It was sort of a golden time where a relatively poor kid (me) could save his pennies up to buy a small upgrade and keep a system going through various "Ship of Theseus" efforts. I think I managed such an upgrade cycle through 4 generations of CPU while keeping various peripherals in various states staggered across all of that. It also meant that if you had the right supplier you could cobble together barely working computers just able to boot the latest all floppy release of SUSE or something.
Today it seems that a decent computer (~$1000k) will simply just run most things perfectly fine for around 5-7 years, after which all the main bus and peripheral tech will have moved on. It's easier to junk that system and buy another one almost from scratch. The main benefit I can think of for still buying your own parts and putting it together (or having somebody put it together) is price/performance /customizability still leads. I was able to retire (give to my wife) an 8 year old desktop which is still perfectly fine for her needs, and buy an all new system, but thread what I wanted through a budget by ultra-specifying specific parts. I couldn't find a pre-built that was close, even after I just paid Microcenter to put it all together for me. This also turned out to be a good idea as they were able to on-the-spot substitute a few pieces based on compatibility and inventory.
Laptops are more vulnerable. They are more likely to need replacement fans, new display, new keyboard.
For a mainboard upgrade, it might make sense if two generations ahead is seriously better. For example, 13th gen i5 is outperforming the 12th gen i7. The i5 mainboard costs 450$ and the i7 1000$, so if you can wait for two new generations it would be worth it.
I disagree, I still upgrade my desktop like the Ship of Theseus, there are even over 10 yo hard disks in there.
My last upgrade was RAM to 64GB, before that the GPU (RX 470 to RX 6600), before that, the mainboard and CPU from some ancient Intel i3 to Ryzen 5 3600. And between all those upgrades, more and more SSDs were added.
Counterpoint - socket AM4 motherboards had an extremely long, upgradable life. Mine has 5 years on it and the 5800x3d I recently swapped in is still one of the fastest gaming CPUs there is. From a gaming standpoint it can handle any top of the line GPU.
For a second there I thought I was reading boomer news instead of hacker news. I kid, but honestly there are plenty of us that still upgrade our systems piecemeal. I'm always buying new parts. Partly because I like having the latest stuff, but also because I love handing down parts to my family members which end up being huge upgrades for them.
I find the battery life on my framework 13 really bad (ubuntu installed).
There's some issue where the battery drains fairly quickly in suspend which requires enabling "deep sleep" mode, but it still drains a lot faster than other laptops I've had.
And then the battery life in general isn't very good; I'd say ~2 hours at full brightness with some video streaming mixed in with normal browsing.
I wonder if that's the same experience other people have? And whether the 16 will have better battery life?
* I also did a long review covering different ways of optimizing CPU performance, evaluating idle and near idle power consumption, various power-testing (including writing a suspend battery logging tool that people may find useful, etc): https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...
The 13th gen apparently has dramatically better battery life, which is great since the battery life otherwise prevented me from buying one. They spent a lot of time optimizing it both in hardware and software.
I find battery life with linux in general pretty poor. It also struggles achieve any kind of reasonable hibernate/suspend. I can throw my macbook into a bag and pull out a week later with just a small battery draw down. I have never had a linux laptop that would not be completely dead in that scenario.
Spending a ton of time on brittle power configuration in order to get from “bad” to “meh”, and suspend never quite working properly, is part of the experience of owning a linux laptop. That’s the way it’s always been.
Solutions include not caring, buying a mac, or buying windows and using WSL.
Most laptops with high brightness monitors would leave you with about 2-3 hours of battery life... many laptops can hit 300-400 nits, some even more.
sRGB and BT709 declare the brightness of SDR white as 100 nits, and 100-120 is considered acceptable.
The rest of what you say sounds like your Ubuntu is misconfigured, which is common with Ubuntu installs. The fix is usually either changing a few files in /etc, or installing an entirely different distro that isn't user hostile.
I'm running Fedora with the i5-1240p, but I can squeak out maybe 4.5hours max if I'm just in VS Code and don't have my brightness maxed out. With max brightness and Google meet running in Firefox, I barely get 2. And that's with the "Power Saver" profile enabled in GNOME.
I really love the machine otherwise, but I can't say I haven't considered just getting a Macbook Air (especially now that they have the 15").
I don't know if magnesium is a common choice for computer enclosures, but one of the few examples of magnesium that I immediately recall (besides Surface) is a NeXT computer that went up in flames: https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
It's very popular for laptops. The reason Magnesium is popular is a combination of favorable physical properties like light weight, but especially, the specific injection molding process mentioned in the article, Thixomolding. https://www.designnews.com/materials-assembly/thixomolding-w... does a decent job explaining the process and how it's unique from most metal injection molding.
Magnesium alloy is reasonably common in notebooks and other consumer electronics. Sometimes it's an internal structural element with a different cosmetic outer part, and sometimes as in the Framework Laptop 16 along with some of the higher end ThinkPads, it's directly the outer shell. As noted in the linked story, it's actually really difficult to burn the kinds of magnesium alloy that are used for structural purposes, and the author had to jump through hoops to get it to work.
Still waiting for the other shoe to drop with a pricing announcement. I keep getting almost excited about the Framework 16", but then I'm remember it's probably going to be well over $2500USD for a decently specced model (without a GPU even) and my excitement quickly dissipates.
What's the alternative high quality laptop in that price-range though?
A Dell XPS that comes with a lose trackpad, massive coil whine, batteries that drain when plugged in and so on?
Or an LG Gram Pro (more expensive than Framework) that isn't sold outside of the US and maybe some Asian countries where the only thing you can upgrade is the SSD?
Or maybe some Apple laptop?
I personally feel the price of a Framework is fair, even if it is 2500 USD (or more). Not necessarily because Framework is great (I would prefer 17"), but more because the alternatives are worse or don't exist.
Is that really going to cost $2500 though? Sounds like a massive deal-breaker to me.
Apple is giving me a Macbook Pro with solid hardware for an equivalent amount of money that I can always count on for everything I do, and still set it for ~40% of the value 5+ years later.
Given the whole idea here is total user freedom for ports and I/O expandability, it bothers me that I cannot get this with an SD card slot, a feature that comes standard on newer macbook pros.
They do have microSD, at least[0]. I feel like full-size SD cards are a bit more niche than they used to be (mostly DSLRs?). But there's no stopping someone designing and manufacturing a full-size SD card reader if there's enough demand to warrant it.
If you buy all components from Frame.work, yes. Nobody else to my knowledge is making compatible components for their laptops though, so we're still a ways away from having an ecosystem of options like desktop PCs have.
If you're not an EE, the only things you can buy 3rd party are RAM, SSD, and Wi-Fi modules. Which you can do the same for Thinkpads.
That said -- I do appreciate that partial upgrades are possible with Frame.work. I own one and when I upgrade the motherboard, even though I can only buy a motherboard upgrade from them, I won't be upgrading the case, display, and other things that don't need upgrades.
If anything I would suspect if it's anywhere near the complexity of assembling a PC. This laptop is designed to be no-more than a real-world drag and drop machine
I went searching and was sad to find it'll ship without touch support. The display sure sounds great, but lacking touch is kind of a deal breaker for me.
I don't think the hardware or software are mainstream enough to make it work yet sadly.
There are ARM CPUs available, but they are mostly for servers or very low end devices, there's not a lot in the pro laptop market, and even if a low-end server chip could be repurposed, I don't know if the brand recognition would work, customers know AMD and Intel and what they're getting in terms of performance at different specs. That all works differently with ARM.
And then on the software side, Windows support seems... partial? Linux support is much better, but selling a laptop with only Linux as an option is a big step down in available market, and even Linux struggles with compatibility sometimes.
Apple's ARM chips are the only mainstream laptop/desktop class chips, but that's a completely distinct software and hardware ecosystem that neither Framework nor anyone else have access to.
The picture at the end shows the laptops shadow on its left made it look like the laptop had a cheap shape. You can’t hVe sharp shadows like that on a photo
Magnesium is lighter than Aluminum because it is in the 2nd group of the periodic system to the left of Aluminum residing in the 3rd. The latter has got one additional proton and a couple of neutrons more.
I’m strongly considering buying a Framework 16 when they come out. But with all the hype they’re generating, I feel certain that I and many others have to be disappointed. It can’t live up to it.
Are PCIe cards just dongles in another form factor? Is it a question of how much of the peripheral's surface area is visible from the outside? Or is it the difficulty of insertion/removal that separates expansion cards from dongles?
For me it's the dangling that makes the dongle a dongle.
If you prefer, you can glue them into place and then they're just fixed, unchangeable ports. That would be incredibly silly to do, but if you're so against the idea of something that can be swapped out...
Is your point that dongles are bad and therefore these are bad? If so, can you explain what it is you think is bad about dongles, and how this different form factor doesn't fix those issues?
If that's not your point, then what is your point? My issue with dongle-based connections is generally 2 fold: dongles are an awkward thing to have/carry around and having dongle-based connectors usually means you only have 1-2 connectors total. Neither of those issues applies in this case, so to whatever extent they can be considered dongles, they also aren't a problem in my mind.
Apropos of nothing, I learned (thanks to a recent Linus Tech Tips video) that Framework's DIY Edition laptops are preassembled for QA and then disassembled prior to shipping. I found that amusing. Not sure I could buy a DIY model knowing that.
They probably insert the same and known to work: storage, ram, etc. see if everything works, then remove them and insert them into the next model. The storage and ram you receive are pre-packaged and were QA-ed separately. It makes perfect sense, really.
I found that very funny as well. Built a DIY edition with my dad a few days later. It makes more sense if you're bringing your own SSD or RAM, and even so I've found there's still some value in the DIY assembly process as an introduction to the hardware.
wpwpwpw|2 years ago
scarface_74|2 years ago
CarVac|2 years ago
stavros|2 years ago
buildbot|2 years ago
Injection molding semi-liquid magnesium seems…quite difficult to say the least!
Tangentially, I wish there was some online resources for learning how best design for manufacture for things like laptops and cases.
Contract CNC fabrication is really inexpensive these days until you need 10 iterations to fix your dumb mistakes.
zonkerdonker|2 years ago
About 10 years ago I worked for a medical device company and we used thixo parts for a portable ultrasound system (think chunky laptop form factor). In my first few weeks, I had a proto part that needed a rework, so I chucked the thixomolded part into the bandsaw to chop it up, before the shop manager chewed me out for almost setting the shop on fire (who let this clueless engineer into my shop...etc etc). Magnesium dust is stupid flammable and burns incredibly fast and hot.
There were only a handful of vendors in the world at that time that had the capability to mold the size of parts we needed, it's a vastly different process to casting other metals, in part due to the hazards of the material itself. Warning to all overly ambitious framework owners: careful if you decide to chop or drill into that case!
claytonwramsey|2 years ago
Unfortunately maker-spaces (the only kinds of places where you could get cheap access to good 3+ axis CNC mills) seem to have gone out of fashion. CNC mills in general cost about 5 digits just for the machine, and usually that again for the tooling.
I think the closest one can get to learning some DFM without working on a machine would be watching machinists on YouTube. Back in the day NYC CNC was great, but I think they post more hype content these days.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I spent a decent amount of time designing for and then fabricating stuff on CNC machines over the last couple years. To my knowledge, operations are cheap while setups are expensive: if you can design a part around a fixed orientation in a machine, it saves a lot of operator time.
Solvency|2 years ago
baybal2|2 years ago
You are effectively asking for a disclosure of shop secrets. Even in cases of completely no-name factories, there will be so much of clever things nobody would put on a paper.
One factory owner went nuts when we were going with inspection for a client in 2009, just because we clicked seemingly innocuous looking jig which was putting threaded inserts into mould. It later came out that nobody else anywhere had anything like that, and most factories rely on laborious process of manually putting inserts into the mould.
There is so many unobvious things which 99% of people without actual manufacturing experience routinely overlook in ubiquitous items around us.
I once been openning up dozens of laptop samples, and one in 100, from a noname factory had seemingly no ribs in its bottom cover, and seemingly nothing restraining it flexing, and sliding. Then, after days of hair pulling, the secret cracked.. nuts, and screws inside were not meeting orcompletely, but were suspended with preloaded fasteners, which used those few free millimetres of free travel for it.
hellcow|2 years ago
I’m most excited for the ortholinear keyboard attachment. That makes it a must-buy for me, since after switching to a Kinesis Advantage I just can’t type on a staggered layout anymore.
bboygravity|2 years ago
seanhunter|2 years ago
Really looking forward to using linux as my main laptop os again.
111111IIIIIII|2 years ago
stavros|2 years ago
The only issues I have with it is battery life (though I have the battery set to charge to 70% max, which leaves a lot on the table), and the fact that Intel processors heat up very easily.
I really hope Intel and AMD get their shit together and release a processor as efficient as Apple silicon, I don't want to end up using my MacBook more than my Framework.
accrual|2 years ago
> with no externally visible fasteners
I wonder if it was easier or thinner to do that way, or if it was a deliberate design choice for a more minimal appearance.
Personally I don't mind seeing fasteners. After swapping LCDs on my old Thinkpads a couple times, I stopped replacing the screw covers and embraced one fewer step for future maintenance.
nrp|2 years ago
marssaxman|2 years ago
acyou|2 years ago
I can understand why people with money to burn might not understand the limitations of trying to make a modular architecture work over the long term. Back in the day, dropping in an SSD represented a massive, relatively inexpensive upgrade. But, a desktop has cross-compatibility and flexibility primarily afforded by its massive size and weight. I'm not convinced these sorts of cross compatible upgrades will continue to surface into the future. And especially not on a laptop/mobile form factor.
Now, my desktop's IO ports are 2/3 fried. Its memory, motherboard, CPU, GPU, OS and hard drive are hopelessly outdated. It will never make sense to meaningfully upgrade it, upgrade would mean wholesale replacement of everything. I could keep the case and the CPU cooler, big whoop.
chrismartin|2 years ago
They've already outdone every other laptop manufacturer: you can swap a new 13th gen system board into an original 11th gen Framework.
My friend's wife has a Framework, and she suffered a liquid spill which reached the system board. He ordered parts, did the swap, and she's back in action for less than half the cost of a new laptop. If it were Dell or Lenovo, you'd be trying your luck with used eBay parts. The housing would have ~20 tiny plastic clips that you break one or two of every time you open it up. (Or adhesive, ugh.) It's just a sketchier proposition.
bane|2 years ago
Today it seems that a decent computer (~$1000k) will simply just run most things perfectly fine for around 5-7 years, after which all the main bus and peripheral tech will have moved on. It's easier to junk that system and buy another one almost from scratch. The main benefit I can think of for still buying your own parts and putting it together (or having somebody put it together) is price/performance /customizability still leads. I was able to retire (give to my wife) an 8 year old desktop which is still perfectly fine for her needs, and buy an all new system, but thread what I wanted through a budget by ultra-specifying specific parts. I couldn't find a pre-built that was close, even after I just paid Microcenter to put it all together for me. This also turned out to be a good idea as they were able to on-the-spot substitute a few pieces based on compatibility and inventory.
whazor|2 years ago
For a mainboard upgrade, it might make sense if two generations ahead is seriously better. For example, 13th gen i5 is outperforming the 12th gen i7. The i5 mainboard costs 450$ and the i7 1000$, so if you can wait for two new generations it would be worth it.
Semaphor|2 years ago
My last upgrade was RAM to 64GB, before that the GPU (RX 470 to RX 6600), before that, the mainboard and CPU from some ancient Intel i3 to Ryzen 5 3600. And between all those upgrades, more and more SSDs were added.
eightysixfour|2 years ago
And it is in a 7.5l SFF case.
nightski|2 years ago
cowpig|2 years ago
There's some issue where the battery drains fairly quickly in suspend which requires enabling "deep sleep" mode, but it still drains a lot faster than other laptops I've had.
And then the battery life in general isn't very good; I'd say ~2 hours at full brightness with some video streaming mixed in with normal browsing.
I wonder if that's the same experience other people have? And whether the 16 will have better battery life?
lhl|2 years ago
If that doesn't help, I'd recommend reviewing some of the resources:
* Framework Forum Linux battery life tuning thread (300+ messages) https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...
* anarcat's Framework Battery Life and Power management testing: https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/framework-12th-gen/#battery...
* I also did a long review covering different ways of optimizing CPU performance, evaluating idle and near idle power consumption, various power-testing (including writing a suspend battery logging tool that people may find useful, etc): https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...
Twisted5939|2 years ago
hellcow|2 years ago
strangescript|2 years ago
BaculumMeumEst|2 years ago
Solutions include not caring, buying a mac, or buying windows and using WSL.
DiabloD3|2 years ago
Most laptops with high brightness monitors would leave you with about 2-3 hours of battery life... many laptops can hit 300-400 nits, some even more.
sRGB and BT709 declare the brightness of SDR white as 100 nits, and 100-120 is considered acceptable.
The rest of what you say sounds like your Ubuntu is misconfigured, which is common with Ubuntu installs. The fix is usually either changing a few files in /etc, or installing an entirely different distro that isn't user hostile.
seabrookmx|2 years ago
I really love the machine otherwise, but I can't say I haven't considered just getting a Macbook Air (especially now that they have the 15").
newsclues|2 years ago
kccqzy|2 years ago
bri3d|2 years ago
nrp|2 years ago
accrual|2 years ago
It's an interesting material, it's very stiff and light, usually with a dark gray color and a sort of chalkboard-like texture.
lhl|2 years ago
Related:
* Testing of WE43/Elektron 21 vs AZ91, ZE41: https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/2010Conference/files/Magnesium_U...
* Final FAA evaluation of flammability of various magnesium alloys (for aircraft use): https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/pdf/ar11-13.pdf
* The Wikipedia is a pretty good overview of a bunch of the material properties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_alloy
For context btw, ignition temp (in furnace) for magnesium alloys is around 600C, which a house fire can reach: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...
buildbot|2 years ago
It’s surprisingly hard to ignite! As your link explains it took them a bit haha.
SeanLuke|2 years ago
Magnesium is pretty safe.
GuB-42|2 years ago
It has similar properties to aluminum but it can be cast, making it a material of choice as a more premium alternative to plastic.
kcb|2 years ago
loughnane|2 years ago
generalizations|2 years ago
rfwhyte|2 years ago
bboygravity|2 years ago
A Dell XPS that comes with a lose trackpad, massive coil whine, batteries that drain when plugged in and so on?
Or an LG Gram Pro (more expensive than Framework) that isn't sold outside of the US and maybe some Asian countries where the only thing you can upgrade is the SSD?
Or maybe some Apple laptop?
I personally feel the price of a Framework is fair, even if it is 2500 USD (or more). Not necessarily because Framework is great (I would prefer 17"), but more because the alternatives are worse or don't exist.
vorpalhex|2 years ago
I believe Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple, still sleeps 6 workers to an apartment.
princevegeta89|2 years ago
Apple is giving me a Macbook Pro with solid hardware for an equivalent amount of money that I can always count on for everything I do, and still set it for ~40% of the value 5+ years later.
Prickle|2 years ago
elxr|2 years ago
[deleted]
moondev|2 years ago
RGamma|2 years ago
Humbly8967|2 years ago
geoka9|2 years ago
d0100|2 years ago
I'm still looking for a notebook without a chicklet keyboard
Modified3019|2 years ago
mouse_|2 years ago
kelnos|2 years ago
[0] https://frame.work/products/microsd-expansion-card
butz|2 years ago
dheera|2 years ago
If you're not an EE, the only things you can buy 3rd party are RAM, SSD, and Wi-Fi modules. Which you can do the same for Thinkpads.
That said -- I do appreciate that partial upgrades are possible with Frame.work. I own one and when I upgrade the motherboard, even though I can only buy a motherboard upgrade from them, I won't be upgrading the case, display, and other things that don't need upgrades.
princevegeta89|2 years ago
adad95|2 years ago
award_|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
aitchnyu|2 years ago
Paul_S|2 years ago
Love the idea though. If I ever buy a laptop again it will be one of those.
danpalmer|2 years ago
There are ARM CPUs available, but they are mostly for servers or very low end devices, there's not a lot in the pro laptop market, and even if a low-end server chip could be repurposed, I don't know if the brand recognition would work, customers know AMD and Intel and what they're getting in terms of performance at different specs. That all works differently with ARM.
And then on the software side, Windows support seems... partial? Linux support is much better, but selling a laptop with only Linux as an option is a big step down in available market, and even Linux struggles with compatibility sometimes.
Apple's ARM chips are the only mainstream laptop/desktop class chips, but that's a completely distinct software and hardware ecosystem that neither Framework nor anyone else have access to.
m3kw9|2 years ago
oblio|2 years ago
kibwen|2 years ago
G3rn0ti|2 years ago
nick0garvey|2 years ago
coastermug|2 years ago
larperdoodle|2 years ago
midoridensha|2 years ago
_nalply|2 years ago
langsoul-com|2 years ago
qingcharles|2 years ago
windowsrookie|2 years ago
stevehawk|2 years ago
shinyogre|2 years ago
yumraj|2 years ago
lumb63|2 years ago
iceporter|2 years ago
hypeatei|2 years ago
PDTao5Q2TMaTp7U|2 years ago
rcoveson|2 years ago
Are PCIe cards just dongles in another form factor? Is it a question of how much of the peripheral's surface area is visible from the outside? Or is it the difficulty of insertion/removal that separates expansion cards from dongles?
For me it's the dangling that makes the dongle a dongle.
kelnos|2 years ago
MostlyStable|2 years ago
If that's not your point, then what is your point? My issue with dongle-based connections is generally 2 fold: dongles are an awkward thing to have/carry around and having dongle-based connectors usually means you only have 1-2 connectors total. Neither of those issues applies in this case, so to whatever extent they can be considered dongles, they also aren't a problem in my mind.
Gordonjcp|2 years ago
userbinator|2 years ago
mrtranscendence|2 years ago
globalreset|2 years ago
mynameisvlad|2 years ago
Most people buying them will likely use their own RAM, storage and OS anyway.
And either way, you'd ostensibly want to make sure your computer is supposed to work once you assemble it yourself.
nerdponx|2 years ago
chromakode|2 years ago
KRAKRISMOTT|2 years ago
https://starlabs.systems/pages/starfighter
rowanG077|2 years ago