everytime someone brings up the e-waste aspects of fw, i don't know if its that simple...because i've definitely already generated much more e-waste with my frameworks than any other laptop i've bought in the last decade
that being said, i do like the fw vision, but they might be trying to do TOO much that their quality is suffering for it
How so? Most FW parts seem quite resellable, did you just throw them away after upgrading or something?
I started looking at refurbished Dell Precisions and came across one that was $800 with specs not _too_ far off from the Framework 16. Not exactly what a wanted, but it ticked all the boxes and was a very decent deal. I procrastinated a bit by accident and then happened to be checking back on the morning of Black Friday and saw that they had cut the price to $400. I've never clicked "Add to Cart" so fast in my life.
Now, to be fair, when it arrived the battery was pretty much toast and the webcam didn't work, so after sourcing replacements and fixing those myself, it ended up being more like a $500 laptop. Still a bargain for a pretty damn good machine. It has done everything I asked of it. I'm very happy that I wasn't able to order a Framework and walked away from the experience $1000 richer.
A modular gpu using a new standard that is form-factor specific for only a specific model? Matte panel released a few months after the first 13.5 model was released with glossy panel as only option?
It sounds a bit fishy to me. But maybe I'm just a bit too cynical .
I think this is absolutely what you sell to investors. For it to be attractive to consumers though (and thus attractive to investors, since people actually need to buy the thing), there has to be a balance. They haven't even managed to conjure up a market for third party expansion cards, which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit.
At the moment they are living on borrowed time and good will from the tech / hippie community who want to be more sustainable and customizable. I think they have likely lost me at this point. I don't know how close they are to losing everybody else.
What most others have realised is that devices fit the 99% with USB-C, A and HDMI. Or, increasingly, just USB-C as everyone who needs one has a fleet of cheap dongles to provide just the right IO.
Manufacturer lets you replace each part separately: it's a conspiracy to make money
This whole submission is about a user going extra length to recover a perfectly functioning main board (with price between 400 and 800 eur depending on model) after an official update went wrong and was suggested to buy a new one.
Mind that I am planning to buy one as well, so I don't have a bias against it. But those suspicious "features" pulled me away from the 16" model for example.
If I understand correctly, the problem was that the board was the exact opposite of that. The post title uses the phrase “bricked”.
I agree that FWs handling was pretty bad, but then again, what exactly is the proposed ideal-but-realistic solution they should have offered here?
A/B updates automatically recovering the bios is case of failed update, recovery from usb in case that somehow fails as well (InsydeH2O call it "crisis mode" I think). Lenovo support both. Dell too afaik. This is very much realistic to have, and I would expect it from a decent product. A computer without this feature is pretty much designed to fail more easily.
If for some very weird reason framework was unable to offer this, then at very least they could have placed a header on the board with flashing instructions on the website, instead of advising to buy new hardware.
But yes, lack of an USB bios recovery path is a pretty terrible design fault, and I’m surprised that they haven’t improved this by now.
They could have also had the BIOS chip be socketable and sold it individually pre-programmed.
I agree not everyone does this, but its not like some incredibly out there idea.
ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3 utility. That's from a 10-year-old MB. Probably a few other examples.
I can buy 3rd party: RAM, SSD, WI-FI,random Expansion cards from the marketplace. I can open and clean and change thermal paste, etc. I've heard the display can be bought from alibaba, etc.
I can't even open my Mac.
Like Airpod after all is just a bluetooth earphone, but it is way more successful than traditional one.
You know what’s even better than easily changed thermal paste?
A laptop that doesn’t need it changed.
Land Rover guys love to say how easy they are to repair, and forget to mention they need ten times as many repairs as other vehicles.
My post was not a fiery indictment of framework, more that I am musing that perhaps I have been duped. Not because they aren't repairable (they are), but because I didn't consider that the quality would be so much lower than other options.
I genuinely don't know which is cheaper or better for the environment: buying a macbook that I change out every 8-10 years (this is how long they would last, based on prior experience), or I buy a framework and change out parts as they fail.
Thats like BMW saying their transmission fluid never needs to be refilled. It absolutely does, its just financially more lucrative for them if the transmission explodes and you have to buy a new one or a whole new car.
Within a year many of these (>20%) started experiencing the "400 MHz bug" where the CPU is either intermittently or constantly stuck at 400 MHz, and the laptop starts to heat up like an oven. As far as I know there has never been any conclusive fix for this issue from Framework, or even an official debugging guide.
It really soured me on the idea of repairable laptops - what's the point of it being "repairable" if you have huge fundamental flaws in the hardware that go unfixed?
I somewhat regret buying my framework laptop at this stage, because the answer to every fault is "buy a new component, from framework".
I'm not sure I blame them for this really, but there is no competitive market of parts (or really any market at all), which means that the reality is that you're just locking your money to them. They also often have stock issues, so woe betide you if your component fails at the wrong time.
It's very hard to predict costs here, but framework laptops do seem to fail more than other brands, and their laptops do tend to be more expensive. In comparison to MacBooks I've used over the years, which other than screen delaminating, have been faultless, at least.