[zbrozek]

I got a couple of type-A cards for my AMD FW13 and generally keep one loaded in the laptop for connecting to random junk like flash drives, charging cables for all sorts of widgets (like my bike light or head lamp), etc. I get dramatically more use out of the type-C cards. And in the quite-rare cases where I really need all of the type-C ports, I'll just eject the type-A card and plug directly into the chassis without the interposer at all rather than carry an extra type-C with me.

That said, there have been a few things that have been a bit less than deluxe on my FW13:

- The touchpad mechanical click is just not that good. It is too sensitive to exact pressure and touch location and I find holding it down and dragging to be excessively difficult compared to all other touchpads I've ever used.

- The delete key seems to oxidize and needs a bunch of hard mashing to get it to become responsive. No, it's not sticky or dirty.

- The air intake on the bottom is highly prone to getting blocked, mostly by my legs.

- There's no BIOS option to turn down the brightness or disable altogether the charging status LEDs, and I find that when I travel and can't keep the laptop in a separate room that it's bright enough to interrupt sleep. I've taped over them, but the light leakage from other crevices is still sufficient to be at least mildly annoying. The translucent Ethernet adapter card also acts like a lightbulb.

- The laptop ramps its current consumption from type-C very quickly and seems like it overshoots its target a little bit, and so it is the only device I have that trips out the OCP on some of my bricks.

- There's no BIOS option to artificially limit the charging power, and so I often trip the OCP on aircraft if my battery is not fully charged before plugging in. I don't want to carry a secondary small brick just to use on planes.

- The LCD backlight uniformity and color quality are mediocre, but for my use case I just don't really care that much. For me, this is a portable technical productivity machine and not an art studio, so it doesn't matter.

- The LCD backlight intensity curve is pretty bad. I very-frequently want to have a brightness in-between the lowest and second-lowest settings. I would love to get more control at the bottom and less at the top. It feels like it's linear when it should be logarithmic.

- The speakers suck. So does the volume control. I very rarely go above 10% volume and frequently don't have sufficient control resolution at the bottom. Anything above about 14-16% volume causes something to distort and other stuff to rattle. Luckily I mostly don't consume media, so this is rarely a real problem. But it is truly atrocious.

All that said, I'm generally a pretty happy camper. I look forward to continued improvements from the company over the years.

[nrp]

Could you reach out to support about the delete key? There was a small window of time where a burr on a batch of Input Cover lattices resulted in wearing down the keyboard membrane in that spot: https://support.frame.work

Thanks for the feedback on LED brightness and airplane OCP. That should be something we can improve in firmware.

[zbrozek]

Thanks, I'll do that! I figured I've had the machine for a while and it was unlikely to be covered by warranty, so I didn't consider reaching out to support. Instead I assumed I'd buy a new keyboard if it ever annoyed me too much.

At some point I actually considered poking around the firmware and seeing about fixing up the PD behavior. But it never quite rose in priority above my many other projects.

I absolutely love that the embedded controller firmware and much of the motherboard schematics are available. It makes it possible to do these little projects should I gather the gumption. That, plus easy and reasonably priced replacement parts availability and easy OS compatibility, are why I got the Framework.

[bluescrn]

Seriously, why are touchpads not a solved problem yet?

Why are so many machines (including some fairly high-end models) shipping with worse touchpads than Apple were shipping over a decade ago?

[zbrozek]

The actual touch part of the FW touchpad, including tap to click, works just fine. I might be a weirdo for liking mechanical click for dragging (and I dislike the Macbook tactile fakery; it does not fool my finger).