cab404

I've bought 12th gen i7 FW, and after about a year, a fan bearing had failed. Despite originally sending me a laptop through a freight forwarder (FF), they both refused to send me a replacement fan for free, and to sell me one to FF address.

I had to use other means to buy myself a new fan (It is not sold separately from the heatsink), paying around 50 bucks for it.

After another year my motherboard stopped working completely. Framework refused support besides the post light interpretation, did not give any schematics, and outright ignored emails from my company with requests for schematics. Autopsy shown that CPU just freaking cracked in the middle.

I've got a replacement 12th gen i5 from a friend of mine, and not 3-4 months later it met pretty much the same fate, except it looks a tad bit more alive (no visible damage to the crystal, no blown mosfets, no nothing). I cannot diagnose power circuitry without spending time to reverse engineer it, and no local shops would accept it.

At this point, given that you don't have any documentation nor parts available in most of the world, FW is generally less repairable than a macbook. For macbooks you can at least buy docs at Vinafix (and for most other laptops too), and chineese replacement parts pretty much anywhere.

I don't really care what they are telling about «waa waa cant release schematicc nda» or «scammers use ff u will die using it». System76 doesn't care about FF, and provides warranty replacements. They could have tried to renegotiate NDA terms for older boards, or outright let someone leak them; they could have remembered their Coreboot promises; they could have done lot more to actually make something that doesn't just look repairable and hackable.

Instead, they've spent their money to make a nice to use, yet unfixable piece of trash currently lying in my closet and waiting for some cheap board to show up on aftermarket.

So, heed my warning. As good as their promise sounds, you better off supporting someone who actually cares about the mission of repairability, and not just doing whatever poser shitshow they are doing.

  Location: Armenia/Yerevan
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: Yes (?)
  Technologies: Nix, Rust, Haskell, React
  Résumé/CV: https://github.com/cab404/resume.typ/releases/download/latest/resume.pdf
  Email: cab+resume <@> cab.moe