Me, an economist: if it's better, why does nobody buy it?

People are buying it... so much so that Framework has been struggling to keep up with the demand. All of their early batches sold out well in advance. I placed my order two months ago and it was backordered for a month. Batch 6 (the current batch) is the first batch they've had all year where they haven't been massively backordered.

I'm glad, but Apple ships millions of Macs every quarter. When Framework catch up, then I'll agree they're better and not niche. Of course as a hacker I might prefer Framework, believe it is better, even evangelize it. That's a different use of the word, though.

The original question was whether a small company can make a better device than a very large company.

Here you've defined "better" to include "can ship very large quantities", which is almost a circular way of defining the answer to be negative, no matter what the company does.

If it can ship very large quantities, it's not a small company.

Indeed, my original point was that there are huge economies of scale in design. That's why it would be a bad idea for everything to be small-scale and local, which the GP was arguing for.