Yes, I remember being particularly disappointed when Google's Project Ara [1] to create a modular mobile phone was shelved. It seemed like a fantastic idea, and I truly thought that Alphabet/Google had the cash/clout - and will - to deliver.

Still, I haven't lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara

I feel like building a modular laptop is much easier than a modular phone. You don't have to deal with the hardware enumeration problems on x86 as you do with ARM

Already many laptops you can easily swap parts like the HDD/SSD, Battery and RAM, and even the GPU (to an extent) if its using a standard like MXM. Building a laptop with more modular parts using existing standards (looks like from the images the modular parts are using USB C Thunderbolt?) is much more doable than a modular phone.

It wasn't that long ago when manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo had models where you could basically replace almost everything. I guess still models like the T14 allows you to replace RAM, SSD, Wi-Fi card, keyboard, touchpad and even the screen.

For the older models, even screen replacements are quite common in the ThinkPad community...

Good luck for this project though, we really need more companies like this!

On some older Thinkpads, even CPU replacement was on the menu.

I think the 2012 generation was the last one. T420 at least.

Yep, designing custom ssd, gpu, ram pcbs will be of course more expensive, and take time.

USB 3, and Thunderbolt are also complete disasters power consumption wise, not to say that Type-C, and Thunderbolt chips cost arm, and a leg.

I was never very optimistic about Ara. In general, modular electronics is a good idea in paper, but a terrible one in practice.

- It comes with quite the price tag, adding connectors everywhere gets expensive fast.

- Some interfaces are very tricky to modularize, RAM & CPU are very closely linked, and it’s very hard to protect them from ESD.

- Which generally points you to the PC solution, don’t protect it, enclose everything and standardize.

There’s also the more “business” part of modular electronics. PC parts are only cheap through massive volume, but building a modular phone requires you to (mostly) build all of your parts. The only way to make it feasible requires more than one device using the same modules, which defeats the uniqueness of the device.

Laptops are way more feasible just because that modularization is already on the market, and you don’t need to build your own RAM SODIMMs or SSDs.

Project Ara seemed quite impractical/naive at the time. Myself (and some people I trusted) dismissed it as yet another Google flight of fancy.

This thing though, I can kind of see it working.

Basically: The pressure to minimize volume + weight is way too high for a mobile phone to become modular. Then add recent requirements like IP68 ratings.

In a laptop there's still some breathing room for modularity. And noone expects a laptop to survive an accidental drop into a pool.

There's Fairphone, already two generations of modular phone design. Unfortunately, they're only officially supported in Europe. But if you're in Europe, and want a modular phone, they're where its at.

And IIRC they have LCD screens... Always-on display is a 'killer app' for me, so that immediately rules out the FP2.

(Tangentially related: I don't really understand why Apple doesn't include this feature, even though they use OLED screens.)

They were competing with their partners, that was always going to end poorly. It could only ever be an experiment.

Hasn't that always been true? Their Pixel 4a kept me from buying a competitor's product.

I too wanted to see this work, but I was skeptical. Maybe it's just too ahead of its time?

See Fairphone!

Laptops seems a very different situation to this though.

There isn’t a huge amount of ready to use phone hardware from multiple competitive consumer suppliers I feel like integrating into a phone myself.

But there are those things for a laptop.

If they can make this work at a reasonable price it would be appealing even to me as an ardent Mac user.

The OUYA did not have this problem. They packed stock standard android hardware in to a box. The problem was that it didn't have enough games to make it worth buying or enough developers to make it work targeting.

I haven't read the details of this specific laptop in the OP but I have seen similar projects go nowhere. What usually happens is the product ends up a lot more expensive and lower quality than a mass produced laptop and the project doesn't live long enough to release a second gen of hardware.

It would make more sense for me to buy 2 Dell XPS laptops over the next 10 years that to buy this hobby project and if I even can, buy the upgrade kit.

Yeah it depends if you really can use cheap hardware with it or if they're just locking you into their own proprietary stuff, which as you say, could just get discontinued.

I think the problem here is you have two complicated things to solve, both hardware and software and you're trying to do it with out too much money.

A small hardware project on its own might be doable.

Yea I agree the scope is more manageable than the examples I mentioned.

But even then, they're tackling a very hard problem. Branding, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution... So many things can go wrong.

I'm not making a prediction but I'm with Ars Technica in the "healthy skeptic" camp. I do hope they beat the odds.