it will be expensive because it liiks like the first teuly
modular laptop. it will get cheaper if it has a big enough market. so in a long enough time frame it does not matter
I couldn't see it from the introduction, but is it differently modular than old Lenovo's? Like the X220 which I use as daily driver? I guess the flexible ports layout is different but the X220 has enough anyway.
Founder in sister thread explicitly says they aren’t planning on charging a premium for longevity. Besides, even at Apple level prices, a perpetually upgradable system essentially pays for itself eventually.
We have also seen multiple failed attempts at modular phones.
Ultimately, the problem with repair is not about making it easy enough for grandma to swap out a part. Its about making sure repair stores have the ability to source replacement parts.
Its pretty easy to do almost any repair if you have the tools and parts but there is no way you are finding a new IC that fried on your 5 year old laptop.
Framework founder here. We'll be announcing pricing shortly before we open pre-orders this spring. We won't be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, and will be setting pricing to be comparable to other popular notebooks using the same silicon.
We're shipping in the US and Canada this summer and opening up additional countries in Europe and Asia before the end of the year. In the future, we will launch modules and products worldwide closer to the same date, but we're pacing ourselves on inventory on the first launch.
We placed our forecasts and risk buys on most chips early in anticipation of the silicon crunch that is coming this year. So far, we don't see anything that puts us at risk, short of there being massive unexpected upside on consumer demand (a good problem to have!).
Finally! This is amazing what you do! I like the philosophy and share values! This is the machine I wish to have and this is the machine I was dreaming to help making. Is there any way one can help/contribute/join? I have knowledge in sw-dev/ hw / design and speak 4 languages. May be there is a way to help distribute them at least?
Yea, fun fact: I like my Acer Nitro 5. I'm an Apple fan through and through, but I also like to run Linux and Windows and haven't done that in a while, so I bought an Acer.
I'm using my Acer now more as a dev laptop and my Mac more as a free time laptop. What I'm noticing is that I'm enjoying the typing experience on the Nitro 5 more, in particular because it has decent arrows (and a numpad :) ).
I would strongly urge, if going with half-height arrow keys, to make the side arrows half height as well, rather than full height. This helps with both finding the key cluster and using it. Consider leaving a small gap to the left of the cluster as well, which in this case could conveniently be done by making the keys a bit narrower—they look unreasonably wide as it is. Ideally I’d also say shift them lower, breaking out of the rectangle and allowing taller arrows (even ⅔ or ¾ height would be a good improvement), but I can imagine that may fall afoul of manufacturing practicalities.
Another nice feature for keyboard design is small gaps between Esc and F1, F4 and F5, F8 and F9, and F12 and what’s to its right, as desktop keyboards have always done; this helps fingers to blindly find the right place. Not very many laptops do this; the main ones I’ve noticed doing it in my recent research is ASUS ROG laptops, which do seem to put more thought than most into these sorts of details. In the pictures shown here, the Escape and especially Delete keys look to be unnecessarily wide so that you could reduce their widths a bit to provide this space perhaps without shrinking anything else.
I have noticed that most laptops under 14" have those 1/2 keys, but once you go to 15" the overall weight increases a lot. The only 14" laptop I've used with full arrow keys was the System76 Galago Pro Gen 3 (galp3).
The fact that they answered a fairly ridiculous question (by HN-standards) wether swapping Intel for AMD on the same Motherboard is possible, but did npt address reasonable questions about their choosing of Intel over AMD, makes me suspicious of them being in bed with Intel somehow. It's just like with the AMD versions of Lenovo/HP/Dell premium laptops, which are always somehow inexplicably crippled (low-res display? why?!) compared to the Intel configurations.
When people ask why there's so many rooting against Intel, I don't say it's because they stagnated the market. It's specifically because long-known practices like these.
I wish new laptops would follow the form factor of the old Thinkpads instead of Macbooks. I realize that most people like trackpads and can't stand the trackpoint, but as someone who has used one for so long it would be fantastic if something like this existed.
That being said, this is a great project and it looks like it should be successful - having a laptop that is built to last with interchangable parts is a great idea and should've been done long ago.
Yep. With swappable keyboards, I really hope that they consider an alternative option with trackpoint, trackpoint mouse buttons and full-size arrow keys, perhaps even adjacent PgUp/PgDown keys à la ThinkPad.
I dig the concept, just hope the utilization pans out.
I’m holding out for an arm based Linux laptop which can handle Blender without too much fan noise... I would love to get a system76 laptop but I have doubts about the build quality. But they say that they are on tract to manufacture their own laptops this year. How does a framework laptop compare to System76? (Let alone a Lenovo or Asus.)
Any chance you guys could make your own distro in the future and brand it Lapdance?
As someone who swaps laptops out a lot, I'm down to get one. I'm also the same kind of person that buys an X1 Extreme for it's ability to be repaired. I'm also curious about price, but I'm assuming that hasn't been decided.
That said:
> Founded in San Francisco in 2019
I'd love to see these kind of companies founded outside of this area in the future.
I can understand the strong benefits for startups starting in the Bay Area; I would like to see more of them migrate OUT at an appropriate time (which would be slightly before FAANG valuation in my mind).
Remote work may solve some of this, but eventually the extended runways available at "lower altitudes" (to bend the metaphor) will become worthwhile.
I’ve added my name to preorder list, happy to pay premium for a laptop with high build quality and hardware. Please don’t screw up the keyboard. Please. And a fingerprint reader would be welcome addition if possible.
Keyboard feel was high on our list of priorities. We engaged one of the bigger keyboard suppliers and worked with them on a custom one with 1.5mm key travel.
We've built a fingerprint reader into the power button using a just-released sensor that has been performing really well in our testing so far. We're seeing False Reject Rates lower than the typical fingerprint readers built into laptops while keeping the right False Accept Rate.
technically possible as all 4 ports support usb-c PD, but the modules are not big enough to support any reasonable capacity. It is a path to connect something like a slice battery that you could attach to the bottom however!
I've never heard of a "slice battery", but I'm guessing you mean a thin, wedge-shaped battery than would sit underneath the laptop? If so, wouldn't rising heat from the battery be a problem?
Are you implying they’re going to stop you from popping Ubuntu on it somehow?
[Edit: Thanks for all the replies citing driver blobs and proprietary BIOS issues, totally slipped my mind that that was a concern, makes a ton more sense now.]
Ubuntu runs also on proprietary drivers.
If the hardware vendor stops to maintain the proprietary driver or binary blob the hardware could become obsolete very quickly, although it runs fine hardware wise.
My 11yr old Nokia N900 runs absolutely fine hardware wise. It also could run a new linux kernel, but some drivers are proprietary and can not be updated. What a waste.
I think he is referring to proprietary firmware/driver blobs that come with many CPUs and GPUs. Purism has focused on this issue and provide fully FOSS hardware [1].
Our Embedded Controller firmware is fully open source. We're using a proprietary BIOS solution at launch, but that is something we'd like to fix in the future.
Please consider a future option for device owners to install their preferred vendor of open-source firmware. If the hardware and enclosure platform gains traction, it will hopefully attract open system firmware developers. This will require an owner-controlled mechanism for signed-firmware key management.
I always think of The Sandbenders from William Gibson’s Idoru when I see projects like this.
It might be worth publishing enough of the internal CAD measurements as specs so that artists could create their own enclosures / cool addons and be sure that they will have parts access.
Anyway, my first thought was ‘will an m1 board fit in there?’ so I am looking forward to seeing your release!
This actually looks promising but I wonder if I'm really the target group. While I do build custom computers every now and then i also cherish the "completeness" of the unibody design that my MBP has. I also wonder about the availability of parts...
13.5″ 2256×1504, that’s 201ppi, not too shabby, just right for 1.5× scaling for an effective resolution of 1504×1002⅔.
(I like my Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 267ppi display which is just the right size for 2× scaling, yielding an effective resolution of 1500×1000.)
For reference, the common 13.3″ 1920×1080 display is 166ppi, 13.3″ 1366×768 is 118ppi, 15.6″ 1920×1080 is 141ppi, and 15.6″ 1366×768 is 100ppi.
(I’m idly curious why it’s 2256×1504 rather than 2250×1500, which would scale to the more convenient effective resolution of 1500×1000 at 150%, and still 200ppi.)
One of the repair challenges is access to old parts. The drain hose on our three year-old washer sprung a leak. When I called a repair man, he at first said that Samsung doesn't make that part anymore. Fortunately, he was mistaken, but if that's something that happens for a simple hose, imagine trying to replace the "high-end headphone amp" expansion card on this laptop five years from now.
Even if I'm not too excited about the proprietary expansion card system, which will last as long as the founders' attention spans, if it gives access to standard memory and storage, that's an improvement over the current trend.
From the article: "In addition to releasing new upgrades regularly, we’re opening up the ecosystem to enable a community of partners to build and sell compatible modules through the Framework Marketplace."
Maybe I am misinterpreting it but it sounds like its not a completely proprietary system?
A marketplace for an extremely narrow market? Who’s going to invest their money to develop hardware for this platform? They better do everything themselves in the beginning.
Definitely! It's on us to make the ecosystem work by building a large enough install base for other hardware developers to see a reason to come in. We're going to continue to develop modules ourselves until that point, and past that point too!
It is definitely on us to prove that we'll provide long term support for the modules that we're developing, but we're also opening up documentation and reference designs for things like our Expansion Card system. If something ever happens to us, other companies and the community can continue to use and extend the ecosystem.
We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it's possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels. We hope that folks in the community come up with interesting card ideas and bring them out themselves in addition to what we develop.
Yes! Actually, one of the first cards we built internally is a little Arduino-compatible one with a SAMD21 microcontroller and an external-facing 0.1" pin header for GPIO.
> We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it's possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels.
The more recent choice would have been ExpressCard, but that standard was never updated beyond PCIe 2.0 x1 and USB 5Gbit/s. But the bigger problem with both ExpressCard and PCMCIA is that the cards are long—those form factors date back to an era where expansion cards needed a lot more PCB space than they do now. ExpressCard 34 is 70/75mm long, compared to a typical client WiFi card that's M.2 22x30mm. It's quite impractical to have ExpressCard slots on both sides of the machine.
I don't think it would have worked well to try to make a hot-swappable externally-facing card form factor derived from M.2. Likewise, cutting EDSFF E1.S down to a third of the length wouldn't leave any provision for USB or DisplayPort signals. USB-C is clearly the best available connector choice among current standards.
On the other hand in the laptop space I've never had problems with part availability. With brands like Dell or Lenovo there are plenty of new and used parts available on ebay or your trusted reseller, and official service handbooks are easy to download.
The real value-add of the framework laptop is imho the upgrade path: you can swap in newer components without replacing nearly everything. Usually that's limited to just SSD and RAM, with everything else being on one huge mainboard assembly.
It actually is a problem for cheaper laptops whose exact SKUs often don't last more than half a year, which is my primary reason for buying "business" laptops.
Is that true for the premium laptops? I worked at my school's help desk and yes, Dell parts and service manuals were plentiful, but usually for bulky Inspiron and Latitude budget laptops. The ones with ugly screens, wacky trackpads and replaceable batteries.
It's been a while since I was in that world, but Dell makes some mighty nice looking machinery these days, but it doesn't look particularly repairable.
XPS are still very repairable. Not as nice as Latitude, but for example replaceing the battery or upgrading RAM only requires unscrewing the bottom (held on by about a dozen torx screws).
But it has happened to many of us for other things. The camera on my pixel 2 broke but no one sells new parts for the pixel 2 and google doesn't support it. All you can get is poor quality second hand and stolen parts. For a less popular product, you get nothing.
Since the modules are just USB-C adapted, those parts would probably be easy to mimic by a third party. Maybe they need to be signed or something, hence the marketplace they allude to.
Honestly this is exactly what I want (quality, repairable, upgradable), but I'm not all in yet. I feel like this space is extremely hard to break into, and I'm worried about their ability to pull it off. Is there massive capital in this corp? Will the price be really high? I'd pay a premium for this kind of thing, but if they start crowd funding it's gonna seem like a red flag.
We have the funding we need to bring the product to market (an odd downstream benefit of Oculus getting bought by Facebook), but we will be taking pre-orders with a deposit prior to shipping to make sure our SKU mix and production rates are matched to actual demand.
We won't be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, but it's nice to hear that you'd be willing to!
How often will you be pushing out new releases? every 18 months? 24? etc.
Personally, I am waiting until av1 hardware decoders are more common, and BT 5 LE Audio (so they can stream to wireless headsets easily) is out as well.
I think you should offer a first-class Linux experience with this laptop. It's a genuinely underserved market, with a lot of overlap for people who care about the repairability and upgradability which are core to your offering. A market with premium mind share, as well.
When I say first class, I mean something specific: you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good driver Linux driver for your touchpad, and open source it. That would be huge. I'm sure your hardware is up to snuff, but your control over how good that feels in Windows is very limited.
There are a bunch of developers who have stuck with the Mac for essentially one reason, the touchpad.
Windows is dominant in laptops, but with distinct verticals, and I struggle to figure out which one this would fit into. Cheap semi-disposable laptop for a broke college student? Clearly this will cost more than that. Gaming? No way you'll have enough power and battery with that form factor. Excel ninjas who get it from work? Why would they care about expansion and repairability?
But "I'd rather be using Linux if the experience just sucked a little bit less" is underserved. Obviously you can't offer just Linux, and maybe licensing shenanigans with Microsoft mean you can't even consider this (although I really hope that's not a factor anymore).
Totally agree!
I think there's a real market for laptops with Linux preinstalled - if they offered 2 or 3 distros, (Pop, Manjaro, Fedora for example) all with excellent touchpad drivers, I would snap it up.
> you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good driver Linux driver for your touchpad, and open source it
It's funny how completely random this suggestion feels (I figured you were going to suggest a customized distro based on Ubuntu or something), and yet I completely agree. Most everything uses libinput these days, and a whole lot of the "feel" is baked into the driver at compile time. Getting it right yourself (or even just making it more configurable for users) would be an enormous step forward.
Relevant to this conversation is Bill Harding's project to fund a better touchpad driver [1] [2]. It's well worth reading his blog posts and seeing his related GitHub project.
Definitely worth understanding his understand motivations, then considering collaborating and/or funding him.
Purism is a good example, but System76 is not -- they're not actually designing or building hardware specifically for Linux, but tailoring existing hardware for Linux.
The distinction is they're not trying to develop a new computer that only runs or officially supports Linux. Instead they're leveraging the sales volumes of these OEM/ODMs which do offer Windows in order to keep prices in line with similarly specced laptops.
Compare this to Purism, whose offerings are much more expensive compared to similarly specced laptops, and because of this unlikely to gain mass market appeal. An initiative like Framework needs some amount of mass market appeal to make the repairability aspect really make sense, else it'll just be expensive and resource intensive to manufacture small quantities of these systems.
We're putting in the work ourselves to make sure the most common distributions like Ubuntu LTS releases run smoothly. We had that in mind as we selected key components in the system.
Edit: And it's worth noting that a couple of folks on the team are diehard Linux users, including our software/firmware lead, and they run Ubuntu on their Framework Laptops.
Kieran from Framework Here - Using it as my main machine for development running Ubuntu 20.04 right now.
The main tweak is running a mainline kernel with some distributions as Tigerlake support is new.
Nice to see that many of the developers/members of the team are GNU/Linux users. I would like to see if it can run other popular distros, like Elementary.
Don’t get me wrong, it’d be great to have a good Linux laptop on the market. However, I’ve read too many Dell XPS reviews to stay on Mac(which is suboptimal due to the nature of my work). There’s always something that is misbehaving on Linux laptops: WiFi, the sleep mode(i.e. you open the laptop and it’s ready to work), touchpad, fingerprint reader. Maybe it’s too much to ask, but i) is your laptop MacBook-level smooth on Linux ii) how could you achieve it when big players with much more resources failed?
I bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon expecting excatly the situation you describe so stuck with the preinstalled Windows 10 for some months. I was pleasantly surprised when I summoned up the courage to try Debian. I had no trouble at all with all you described except the fingerprint reader (which Windows 10 also had trouble with FWIW). Was not planning on Linux as my daily driver but from Day 1 it worked well enough as an immediate replacement for Windows 10. The trackpad is not quite as good as the Mac but again seemed on par with the experience in Windows 10. Surprised you stayed on Mac despite listing fingerprint reader as a must have—I'm not aware Mac laptops have these?
Fingerprint reader is definitely not the top priority, but saves a lot of typing when retrieving a password from the password manager. And yes, I think all MBPs that have a Touch Bar had one, new airs as well.
How’s battery life and thermals under Debian? I guess all Intel CPUs get hot, but at least my MBP is quiet enough. Battery life life isn’t that great though.
The Dell XPS works fine on Linux if you get a model that is at least 6 months old. Usually what happens is on day one people go and add support for the wifi card and then it takes 6 months for ubuntu to ship a version that includes that support.
After using both a macbook and a dell xps on linux this year, I'm a whole lot happier using the dell xps. The XPS has functional cooling at least.
I feel horrible whenever I end-up damaging an electronics product in such a way that repairs do not make any monetary sense. Mostly this is because the manufacturer doesn't bother in building out a healthy service network for their product because they'd rather force you to buy a new model.
If priced right, I'll buy this as my next laptop. And the next phone as well -- if they ever launch one.
Well, HN will love this. Moddable laptop with a good webcam? Nice.
But:
- I really dislike the arrow keys not having the air gap above left and right. You’d think they’d learn that from the MacBook butterfly keyboard era.
- it’s a little disingenuous to say “no adapters” when in fact their little expansion cards are merely adapters that insert into the chassis of the laptop. Only four I/O ports is a little tight (despite Apple deeming it to be “enough”)
- that laptop looks pretty thick and heavy by today’s standards.
It’ll be interesting to see how people respond, when many (especially in this crowd) have been clamoring for this kind of thing. How many will actually vote with their dollars, and will that be enough for Framework to survive and become a viable competitor in the laptop space?
I hope so, as I welcome the diversity and innovation that would represent. But I admit I’m skeptical as to their chances.
The arrow keys were an interesting challenge. We actually prototyped both versions, and the full height ones ended up feeling better to most folks. It's definitely a matter of personal preference though.
The Framework Laptop comes in at 15.85mm thick and 1.3kg. So a couple of sheets of paper thicker than a 13" MacBook Pro, but a bit lighter.
On the Expansion Cards, that is fair. We can say we're getting rid of the need for adapters that protrude from the machine and need to be removed when you need to transport it.
How modular is the keyboard? I can see a replacement sat next to the case in the photo, but is the layout cut in to the case?
If you can make an alternative case with an (e.g.) 12x5 1u grid layout keyboard that lets me put my thumbs to use and stop contorting my fingers, I will more of less open my wallet and let you take what you fancy!
I came to say the same thing. Ortholinear (grid) or staggered columnar keyboards would appeal to an extremely small but passionate group of ergo keyboard users. Given that the alternative for folks who use this kind of layout is to carry around a separate $150-400[1] keyboard I think at least a few people would be willing to pay a hefty premium for a laptop with a customizable keyboard.
What's the chance of a thicker/deeper version in the future? I'd love to see one with enough thickness to support a low profile mechanical keyboard for custom layouts.
With my RSI, I'm almost unable to use standard laptop keyboards, so I have to travel with a split ergo keyboard. Most laptops have enough room to support a split ortho layout, but aren't thick enough (or modular enough) for enthusiasts to roll their own.
Take a look at the Thinkeys [0] and pineapple60 [1] projects for what's possible.
> - that laptop looks pretty thick and heavy by today’s standards.
I am not a fan of today's standards. As I write (on an external A1243 keyboard) I look at the closed touchbar MBP in front of me and cringe at the gap between the cover and the body go from zero on the left to 1/4" on the right. This laptop is too thin for its own good, for no good reason, and I look forward to how sturdy this design would be with the extra thickness (not to mention all the other goodies they list).
For me, the huge trackpad in the middle front is the problem. Centred trackpads, weren't a problem when they were about 1/2 the size, but they've steadily been getting bigger and bigger. Now almost all laptop trackpads are at a size where the base my thumb and the edge of my wrist brush against them, causing endless false touches. If I'm typing for any length of time on a laptop, I now always disable the touchpad and plug in a mouse. Give me a laptop with an offset smaller trackpad please. I suppose people who only use a laptop, learn to type with floating hands with claw-like fingers, but I use a desktop most of the time, so my resting-wrists-on-the-desk style of typing doesn't work.
I can't be the only person with this problem?
Edit: While I'm ranting, I am 100% sure that the touch-logic in trackpads favour right handed people (same with mobile phone screens) and as a leftie it seems harder for me to perform complex multi-touch actions than it does for right handed people.
I hate Windows laptop trackpads because they seem to interpret everything as a click. Fortunately you can turn that off in Control Panel. Apple's default trackpad settings are good.
EDIT - my new problem with Windows 10 is that it somehow interprets certain accidental motions on the trackpad as me wanting it to move to some sort of strange workspace overview screen that appears to be completely useless and not at all what I wanted.
I think it's really case by case. My previous Dell laptop was a nightmare, but I have a Razer Blade now and the trackpad experience has been flawless, totally on par with my work issued Macbook.
I'm with you. I just got a new Precision and the track pad is 6 inches by 3.5 inches (no exaggeration). I think the idea was to accomodate left and right handers, but it has gone way overkill. It is large enough to be a Wacom-style drawing tablet.
The MacBook trackpad somehow knows when you’re not touching intentionally... so I agree with you in theory but on that laptop specifically the palm rejection is good enough that it doesn’t matter.
I have lots of stuff plugged in at my desk -- but it's plugged into a dock, and there's just a single cable that goes into my laptop. Thinking about my usages in the past few years, I can't think of a time where 4 ports (of my choosing) wouldn't have worked for me -- so long as I could change them over the lifetime of the device.
It's not "disingenuous". Everyone knows they're talking about external dongles because those are the kind of adapter that's actually annoying. Complaining about their modules because they're implemented in terms of USB-C is the worst kind of technically true but semantically nonsensical nitpick, precisely because it takes a long comment like this to unpack it but only a few words to make it.
And, additionally, using USB-C is a common and widely used standard - slamming them for using that instead of something proprietary (to make it less "dongly") is really not a good thing.
Not sure if we're looking at the same photos and specs, but it looks and seems thin and light to me - 16mm thick, and 1.3kg according to the specs. I'm aware you can get slightly thinner, but not much lighter. IMO, anything thinner that this is making horrible sacrifices elsewhere, for little more than diminishing aesthetic returns.
Let's not forget that this is repairable, upgradable and expandable - when I first saw the HN title, I was convinced it was going to be a brick. It actually looks great, like a premium laptop from Dell or Lenovo. But supporting up to 64GB or memory, and repairable etc. Pretty amazing, I think.
Great initiative, but the proprietary expansion cards are entirely counter-productive to maintainability.
The expansion cards will only be available for as long as your company provides them. Using the most-commonly used, mass-manufactured standard interfaces for components would provide more long-term repairability and upgradeability.
The trade-off would be in design resulting in more bulk and in the economics of your company, of course. It seems cynical to me to sell maintainability while starting a walled-garden ecosystem of proprietary hardware.
We will open up the expansion card spec and share reference designs to enable partners and the community to build their own! I want it to be open as much as you do.
This is a great first step. Ideally the expansion story converges on some kind of industry-wide standard, like PCMCIA was. Would be cool to have other peripheral manufacturers out there agreeing on the spec and committed to building expansion hardware!
Is there a catching/locking mechanism for the expansion module that holds it in place? It would be a shame if the whole module came out when trying to remove a particularly firm USB connector.
Sounds like a good solution to me, I hope you succeed, I surely will keep an eye on the project!
I assumed it wouldn't be an open design because the marketing didn't mention it. I would integrate this message in your marketing because it's worth convincing critical audiences.
In the worst case (they change the interface spec and no one else produces old modules, or the company folds entirely) it's not any less maintainable than any other laptop on the market today. I think most laptops still allow storage and battery upgrades/replacement; RAM is questionable (some being soldered on the motherboard); and anything else basically means replacing the whole device.
It looks like the expansion cards are just USB-C adapters that fit inside the case. If so, it should be pretty simple to make a compatible expansion card. Or just plug in any dongle you like, ignoring the form factor.
I don't see any information on the licensing of the adapter card / inter-module interfaces.
Can others build a Framework laptop without approval? Can others build cards without approval? Will it be a platform?
Tell me how this isn't a Nespresso machine for silicon pods. :-)
Edit: To be clear, even a "we have a generic base laptop and you can pick your I/O" concept is potentially a nice value prop, but it'd be good if the picture (and roadmap) was clear.
Nespresso pods for silicon sound great! I’m not a hardware engineer, I’m just tired of $800 “replace the entire main board” repairs when I broke my ‘H’ key.
These laptops exist today, just vote with your wallet. I don't know, Lenovo's T-series is popular, e.g. the T14: Here's how to do it (page 72) [1], new keyboard costs around 50 bucks.
We will be releasing specifications and reference designs for the Expansion Card system under a permissive license. We want to make it easy for both other companies and members of the community to develop their own cards and sell them through the Framework Marketplace. That is something we'll be detailing and sharing between now and the time we start shipping out the product. We'll also provide documentation around internal interfaces, though those will be more technically challenging for an individual to be able to build something with.
Hello, glad you're here but I'd urge you to remember that while a minority at HN is highly knowledgeable and technical, hn is an hive-mind opinionated niche and hope that you'd make decisions that widen your reach among general populace so that your firm survives to make money and eventually more such laptops. (Also, hopefully your laptop will play with linux as well as Lenovo's at some point in future).
> For those of you who love to tinker, we’ve also created the Framework Laptop DIY Edition, the only high-end notebook available as a kit of modules that you can customize and assemble yourself, with the ability to choose Windows or install your preferred Linux distribution.
The modularity of a Framework Laptop promises a lot of good. I know there are some workplaces where having wifi working is not permitted. Is this modular enough to have a wired networking plug and not have a wireless wifi ?
Compatibility and upgradability (together with maintainability) is why I stopped using laptops. Your offer sounds interesting, but if it's a platform, instead of a free standard, it's a far cry from the freedom and competition in the stationary PC market. Maybe that's what it takes to move the issue along. I don't know. But that's my knee-jerk reaction.
Actually, yes! We will be offering the chassis by itself. The intent is to make sure that someone can get back into a good state if they drop their laptop down the stairs or something, but there is nothing preventing you from picking one up to use for your own projects (though adapting everything to work with an ARM SBC would be non-trivial).
What makes it non-trivial? I'd love to see a standard laptop frame that all the SBC manufacturers could throw their board in.
I imagine their could be vendor-specific expansion cards for SBC's, like one that is just an HDMI extension which only works with the vendors SBC and doesn't use USB-c. Maybe vendors could implement one "framework" compatible expansion port and provide several of their own expansion cards that only implement SBC features, and plug directly into the SBC instead of generic usb-c.
>We want to make it easy for both other companies and members of the community to develop their own cards and sell them through the Framework Marketplace.
What if they don't want to sell through the Framework Marketplace?
This might be a silly question, but it looks like the adapters are just usb-c/thunderbolt devices with a nice case. Is this the case? I'm not knocking it if it is, I personally think it'd be pretty clever, but it means being able to use them in other places (like pretending the storage expansion thing is just a usb-c flash-drive) and it would have interesting implications for making them.
That's correct. That is one of the intended use cases for our Storage Expansion Cards. You can use it on your Framework Laptop, pop it out, plug it into an other machine that supports USB-C, and transfer files at high speed.
It looks like the laptop supports any kind of expansion card that can be bridged over USB-C. So, it's just a matter of someone developing it for the platform.
They're just USB-C dongles that snap into the chassis.. You can see better shots here: https://frame.work
This is an unpopular opinion, but I think this proves that Apple was right to dump legacy ports. This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space that could have been spent on a bigger battery. USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.
(the Nespresso analogy is ridiculous, a laptop doesn't exist to consume adapters. But I presume you were enjoying a little tongue-in-cheek with your coffee)
Well, sort of :-) Nespresso is a famous implementation of a "your basic machine stays static, you swap out a different element of the system based on temporary/current needs, but you can only buy those elements from one vendor" pattern. Printer ink cartridges are another.
Yeah, add-on cards to a computer aren't consumables per se - but the entire premise is that as time goes on you might want to get new ones (because your current needs change), i.e. upgrade. Whether I can pick upgrades from different vendors, and what the tax imposed on creating and/or selling upgrades is, matters.
I don't understand this criticism. On every other laptop on the market today, if you want different ports you either buy dongles or buy a whole new laptop.
Every laptop I've ever owned has at least one port I never use, and after a couple years it's missing some other port I'd rather have. This one seems to solve that problem, extending the life of the machine and/or avoiding dongle hell.
If the value prop is that it's nice to move the port adapter dongle into the chassis rather than having one dangle from a port, so it's an ergonomic improvement you're sold on, sure. I'm not saying that can't have a market.
But if you can only buy the dongle from one vendor, it's going to be more expensive than if there's a market where multiple vendors compete. It's that "you can only buy the adapter from Apple, and it's really expensive" thing, just moved into the chassis.
Hence the question which one of those we're looking at here, and it was kindly answered by a rep above.
Apple burns almost all of their space savings on making the machine thinner, to the point of absurdity.
Apple is content to push everything into dongles (which you have to carry around anyway) to get it thinner. The point at which I can't have a wired RJ45 ethernet port is already ridiculous - that is not a thick connector. Same with fullsize USB ports.
Battery life there are hard limits as well: nobody is making a laptop with more then 100Wh, because that's the limit that you can carry onto an aircraft.
There are ultra-slim foldable RJ-45 connectors[1], which manufacturers could use if they could be bothered but they don't, because they would rather save the BOM cost of it and advertise the WiFi capabilities instead.
Because it's meant for ultra-slim devices that will be docked on Thunderbolt 99% of the time and that foldable RJ-45 jack is for the "in case of emergency break glass" scenarios, that 1% of the time when you need to patch into a server physically without wasting time looking for a dongle, not for you to constantly plug/unplug ethernet cables in your laptop.
If your uses case requires you to constantly plug/unplug ethernet cables in your laptop then you need a workstation class laptop with a full sized RJ-45 jack, not a sleek thin and light.
The connector's on the top, the bottom is simply a retention clip. If it breaks, you can replace it with tape, or simply resting the laptop on a surface while the cable is plugged in.
I mean all people. When you work on the laptop you probably connect more things than a network => you have a dock => you don't need the rj45. So there might be negligible amount of corporate workers that need it, and some portion of tech workers, maybe. But overall, out of all customers, it's not enough for the hassle. Especially since it has drawbacks for the rest of the customers.
I would say I run into a situation where I dig my RJ45 dongle out of my bag once per year still. Usually if I'm in a different office or trying to fix Wifi or something.
For me the dongle is annoying but probably sufficient.
I've also worked in offices where the Ethernet was better because it didn't require VPN access and was more reliable, but in those situations I plugged it into my monitor rather than directly into the laptop.
> By connecting each device directly to a port on the switch, either each port on a switch becomes its own collision domain (in the case of half-duplex links), or the possibility of collisions is eliminated entirely in the case of full-duplex links. For Gigabit Ethernet and faster, no hubs or repeaters exist and all devices require full-duplex links.
I use mine nowadays, because my room is just far enough from the access point for occasion zoom drops. The 'better' solution would have probably been to put an access point right in my room, but I already have an RJ45 dongle + ethernet cord and I trust a cable connection to have less drops than wifi.
Welcome to dense urban environments, where the list of available wi-fi networks is well above fifty and the throughput well under 100 Mb/s on a good day... When I sit at my desk, I plug the RJ-45 and I get 1 Gb/s - no ifs, no buts !
I mean. Really. That strikes me as willfully ignorant and arrogant. Clearly it's heavily used, especially in professional/corporate environments.
FWIW I use WiFi if I have to on the move.
But at home and office it's hard wire all the way.
In the office it's not even an option, everybody must.
At home, it's a quality of life thing.
The speed drops and disconnections and unpredictability of WiFi are not thing of the past yet. For some there's a security issue as well, real or perceived.
Wire just works.
Edit: other examples - gaming laptops; secure networks; dense environments either urban or corporate; anything that needs predictable connectivity, bandwidth and lag really :-/
Both my own laptop and the laptop from my employer (a large company) are used almost all the time on wired Ethernet, the main exception being during business trips.
"Clearly it's heavily used, especially in professional/corporate environments."
It's so clear that they removed it from their lineup? Clearly you're wrong. I have two Macbooks work/home, and a USB-C dock has been life changing in its awesomeness.
> It's so clear that they removed it from their lineup? Clearly you're wrong.
They also removed scissor switches, sd card readers and hdmi. But they're bringing those back (or have already), so they don't seem like a good authority to appeal to here.
1. Is a particular connector still used/useful on laptops - my statement is that RJ45 is absolutely still used on laptops, and went into some examples / use-cases.
2. Separate discussion, hopefully informed by the first, is how do we do that - built into laptop or via a bunch of dongles.
Apple in particular removing it from their laptops does not speak one way or another to corporate/professional environment requirements. Their approach is "use a dongle/dock" which in their view is compatible with whatever use case is needed (and some people disagree, which is fine - lots of vendors and in particular HP/Dell/Thinkpad all have robust professional/corporate/roadwarrior models with dock, port and even pointing stick capability).
My laptop is sitting at home 1,5 m away from my Unifi access point and the network cable is still measurably more reliable and performant. Wifi might have won the amateurs.
Apart from what everyone else was already saying I have another cool use case: When transferring large files between two devices it's neat to be able to establish a point-to-point Ethernet connection between them, configure static IP addresses and netcat the files over it. It's fast, I don't need to encrypt anything and I'm not hogging anyone's bandwidth.
Agreed, the point when I start to have to choose any two of usb-tethered phone / usb to ethernet / usb to wifi headset / usb to serial really gets infuriating.
If you are bringing your laptop to a coffee shop, you probably won't need an ethernet port anyway, so you can leave the dongle at home. Lots of mobile use-cases don't involve plugging in to a ton of things, so why waste space having ports for it?
We're mostly programmers here, with nice keyboards and big screens as a necessity for work. On the other hand, lots of people are completely content with the base laptop. Making things easier for us at their expense is probably not a great business decision.
But lots of other mobile use case do involve plugging in to a ton of things. I would like to have the option to get the ports builtin. I am not arguing they should stop making those crippled variants without ports.
Luckily, macOS is going downhill as well, therefore my pain will end when the next version has not resemblance to a Unix system any more. The day Apple starts migrating its desktop OS to hamburger menus, I'll wipe and sell all my remaining Apple hardware.
They could make different models and operating systems for every niche I guess, but people who need lots of ports and a UNIX-like experience on a laptop are pretty far out in the tail of the distribution I think.
I dunno. I've never owned a macbook because Linux has been good enough for most of the time I've seriously been using computers for work stuff. Even if you aren't a Linux enthusiast, the time to switch for developers was more than a decade ago, IMO.
Is it a useful form factor on other laptops? The market for RJ45 dongles is a lot larger than the market for framework, so if a vendor can hit both markets with the same product they'd be more likely to do so.
Looking at the design, I'm not sure that expansion card concept is responsible for the thicker case. The reality is, supporting replaceable memory, mainboard, etc, likely necessitated a somewhat thicker design.
Assuming that's correct, I think it's kinda clever... it's basically a dongle system that allows the modules to sit flush instead of jutting out of the side of the laptop.
>I think this proves that Apple was right to dump legacy ports.
How it proves it? Those guys do not drop ports, they just make them modular.
All the "saved space" in Apple laptops become amazingly wasted space in your bag with tons of adapters and wires.
I still dream to meet the one who made such 'wise' decision to tell him what I think about it personally!
>USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.
I am not sure you can know what anyone needs. For instance you do not know what I need.
I wish you'll be around when I need to copy my files from the camera with idiotic dongle in the field when time is precious.
I would love then to hear how sticking card directly into the slot without any headache is less comfortable than looking for some dongle in the bag while holding your camera equipment and then hanging dongle on it's wire because there is no table around to put your laptop on or put it somehow on your lap and try not to move to avoid it breaking during the transfer because then you'll have to start again transferring your important pictures. Then pray it will work
because some times it will not when you need it most.
Removing sd-card reader slot is example of the most idiotic design decision I can imagine. It is taking what works perfectly and destroying it for no reason at all. It is pure damage without any benefits taking size of it into account.
It was done by people who never used laptop for transferring photos from the camera using sd-card.
They never thought that while you transfer with the sd-card your other card is available to continue shooting in critical or unexpected situations. This is what makes the difference between making some shots and not! I would never understand this idiocy of removing sd-card slot to "save space".
The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG! Not in the laptop itself by making it useless. Such a dumb decision to remove useful ports. Goodness.
I'm down to exactly one adapter in my bag. One usb-c male to usb-a female stubby little guy.
If I'm heading to someplace where I think I might need more than 1 usb-a port or a situation where I might need a bit of a usb hub I just pack this little 'dock dongle' that's about three inches long and an inch wide that has three usb-a ports (2x3.0 1x2.0), an hdmi port, a sd and tf card slot, an ethernet port, an audio jack, and a usb-c power input port... cost me all of 60$.
What you describe is exactly the headache I was mentioning and dreaming to avoid. I do not need part of the laptop separated from the laptop to have additional task to think when to take them together and when not to take them together.
I do not want to search for this 'little guy' in the dark and be stuck without it when I forgot to take it because a lot of other things happening in the same time around or I lost it or somebody took it because he thought it belongs to him by mistake.
Having the dongle headache or not in certain situations means missing shots or not. And I speak from experience of shooting intensively in addition to doing other things during 5-7 days in a arrow where you do not always have time to eat/sleep and surely no time to waste for this dongle BS.
> Get the machine that suits _you_. Unless you want to run Apple OS because then you're not given choice.
And that is exactly the point. I used to be a very happy customer of multiple Macbook Pros over almost a decade. Currently, I am still using my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" with maxed out specs when not in my home office. But all the later models went downhill for my needs. The new Macbook Air M1 is the first model that I am thinking about buying. It is probably powerful enough to work on it, and I think I actually get some value back from the saved spaced due to dropped ports. Even the 2015" Macbook Pros with 15" are at a thickness were I simply see no point to remove even half a milli-meter of thickness. I would gladly use a thicker, heavier variant if it had multiple different ports including Ethernet. One problem that I had over the time with all Thunderbolt dongles was that the physical connection became unreliable over time. That is hassle I don't want to deal with.
For me it's not about what suits who. For me it's about what philosophy you put into design of a portable computer as a tool and what it can allow/encourage you to achieve/create.
If "using it on your lap, without something hanging" matters to you (like the parent) and you wanted something more 'rigid', things like this exist: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/product/B07PCP5J4Z
Yeah I'm in complete agreement. A single "dock" dongle with all the ports you could possibly want are cheap, light, and have smooth designs that won't snag on anything.
I have one buried in my bag that I almost never use. It's surprisingly rare that I need an Ethernet or HDMI port but they're there if I need them. In the meantime, there's more room inside my laptop for battery.
Even an extra 5Wh of capacity is about an extra hour of use.
> All the "saved space" in Apple laptops become amazingly wasted space in your bag with tons of adapters and wires.
Maybe that's the case for you, but that's far from universal. I have zero need for any adapters. At work, I can use usb-c to connect to my monitor, and if I need to present in a meeting room, I do it wirelessly.
At home, I can use airplay to share my screen to my TV.
For my M1, I thought I was in a pinch when I forgot my charger at work. I was fine, though—I just plugged in my 18W USB-C phone charger and used it while WFH.
Saving 0.1% of space for micro-sd-card reader and having headache of dongle for every photo/video transfer? Doesn't appear reasonable at all. They have found space for micro-sd-card reader on raspberryPi Zero ... It's absurd not to have it even on the phone.
> Imagine your laptop with the power supply built in instead of as an external brick.
You know what? Great! One thing less to care separately . It would be bad thermal solution though.
By the way the brick itself was coming with extension cord. Now it comes without it. Imagine during your travel squeezing it in some public place with bad socket to charge it when it doesn't fit well enough and could even fall and break and your life depend on your ability to charge it. Do it few times during few travels, then you will understand how "reasonable" was to even to remove the extended power cord from the brick.
Many things appear 'reasonable' on the paper until you use them in real life.
For those who use a laptop outside office desks, there is a lot of difference between flimsy setups with dongles hanging on wires, and the mechanically solid laptop case. Much easier to carry it around in one piece.
I think the SD card example encapsulates the issue perfectly. I'm pretty sure that in 2021 that is an _extreme_ niche use case. I feel like only extremely serious photographers and perhaps a particular slice of musicians use them. It makes absolutely no sense for them to have that built into the laptop. 99% of people who own Macbooks or whatever don't own an SD card dongle because they don't need it. However, and extra USB-C port can be used for a multitude of things, including being an SD card reader if you have the dongle.
It's completely logical.
> The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG!
It most certainly is not. The point of a laptop is to strike a balance between portability and usability. Requiring the extra like two cubic inches of space in your bag for a dongle is assuredly not a design concern.
And most "extremely serious photographers" today are probably using cameras for which SD cards are not the storage format (or at least the preferred format.)
Exactly. And since we might carry more than one model of camera with dissimilar memory cards, the Mac could need 3 or 4 slots. That’s why the good pro photo USB-C adapters have 3 or 4 slots.
Further, those readers seem to be made /just/ fast enough to read ahead of the current speeds, so when new speeds come out, you need a faster reader. That works fine if you have a USB 3.1 or USB 3.2 adapter, but not so great if the reader is built into a laptop with an otherwise much longer life.
It Depends how you measure "extremely serious photographers".
Starting from Nikon d610 you have descent quality on sd-card plus portability in the same time. I understand that you can't put all the ports in the world in the laptop and while CF Cards reader would also be useful for photography I think sd-card reader or even micro-sd-card reader gives a compromise for mobile solution that covers many needs. Lack of this sd-card reader gives additional headache and nothing more useful as I see it.
> It makes absolutely no sense for them to have that built into the laptop. 99% of people who own Macbooks or whatever don't own an SD card dongle because they don't need it.
That's the issue - you are speaking only from an Apple user perspective. Android (and other non-apple) phones allow us to extend our storage with sd cards, and they are mostly used to store and transfer photos and videos.
Is that an Apple user perspective or just reality for the average user? I recently had an Android phone for a while and never thought to use an SD card because it had plenty of internal storage. I can say the same about my family and friends who use Android devices, I can't think of any who use SD cards at this point. Even in the past when I did use an SD card in my phone, I simply plugged my phone into the computer and wrote to the SD card that way, I don't recall ever removing the card.
> Android (and other non-apple) phones allow us to extend our storage with sd cards
/me looks glumly at my Apple-ized Samsung Galaxy S6Edge, with no SD card or removable battery. (Both of which would make the S6/GearVR combo significantly more useful...)
I'm an Android user whose phone supports microSD. I never take the card out of my phone -- it's a PITA, requires an ejector tool I always manage to misplace, and I think I'm only supposed to do it with the phone powered off -- but I do plug my phone into a computer to move files on and off of it. I do this with a USB-C cable.
I use my notebook's SD card reader all the time. Cameras, ARM SBCs, 3D printers, random SD cards I find laying around... There's plenty of use cases for an SD card reader, I certainly use video out on my notebook much less.
Mostly my and my friends' homes, but I do remember finding an SD card on the ground once... Do you think I'm being targeted by spies? :) It had someone's pictures on it, but no identifying information, so I had no way of returning it.
Thankfully random SD cards should be much safer than random USB devices, but it's probably better to be careful.
> It had someone's pictures on it, but no identifying information, so I had no way of returning it.
You could hav put your laptop on a network with heaps of monitoring going on, and then mailed it back to NSA/GRU/MSS/Mossad as required based on the ip addresses your machine started connecting to...
It's also the main storage on the Wii, DSi, 3DS, (maybe Wii U, but it also had USB storage. I guess the Wii did too.) and Switch. An SD card reader lets you back up your game saves or install homebrew.
More recently there's the PinePhone as well. It's not just expandable storage, you can boot off the SD and have all your OS and files there.
I would say I definitely use SD cards more than flash drives now.
I generally think the whole dongle issue is over exaggerated, you can mostly just buy new cables (once) and be done with it. The SD reader is one of the big exceptions I think. If you always need a cable to do something, you can just replace the cable with a USB-C one and be done with it. Having an integrated reader is handy for a fair number of people and it’s something where you don’t otherwise need an adaptor.
The new cables means your cables aren't backwards compatible though - one day you need to plug in a display port cable to someone's desktop/old laptop and you don't have the cable on you, because you replaced it to avoid dongles.
Dongles are both cheaper and more flexible than replacing the cable, at the cost of having a slightly shittier experience.
>I think the SD card example encapsulates the issue perfectly
It does. Micro-sd-card reader fits even in raspberryPi Zero ... Neglectable "space saving" advantage vs huge usability disadvantage.
> The point of a laptop is to strike a balance between portability and usability.
I think MacbookPro should be about philosophy of amplifying creative person with power tools for creativity in a portable way. Not a dumb machine mimicking more and more some TV . While this it should also do easily it shouldn't do just this, I think.
From my perspective of extensive use of a laptop some people barely use laptops at all and thus perhaps they better be designing something else because for me it appears they have no idea what 'Pro' usage is. When you travel you never know what environment you'll have and therefor ports and connectivity make a difference between: Creative idea done/ not done.
>Requiring the extra like two cubic inches of space in your bag for a dongle is assuredly not a design concern.
It's not 2 cubic inches. It's huge adapter with all missing ports. Why Pro Laptop should consist of two parts is beyond me.
Again look at my use-case. I have no place for dongles nor time for dealing with them.
If those real 'Pro' requirements are not a design concerns then perhaps MacbookPro should not have 'Pro' in the title in my opinion.
Its ~2 cubic inches and doesn't dangle on a cable so you don't need a table/lap.
As for your more detailed post you just linked to:
> Only for that purpose more ports are justified because I would prefer to have 4 at least to connect all 3 iOS devices plus hard_drive for backup etc. If there is additional monitor around that I could use I would love to use it which means I need HDMI/display port.
USB4/thunderbolt 4 allows for type c hubs that also support alt-modes like displayport alt-mode so you can have a small cellphone-sized hub to significantly increase your ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RYZJY8M
> I would also need HDMI/DP/DVI or even VGA port to have external screen connected.
Surely you're not suggesting that laptops built in 2021 should have a VGA port? This is exactly what tomtheelder was referring to when he said:
> I'm pretty sure that in 2021 that is an _extreme_ niche use case [...] 99% of people who own Macbooks or whatever don't own an SD card dongle because they don't need it. However, and extra USB-C port can be used for a multitude of things
Just think of all the extra thickness Apple would be adding to their laptops just to fit a VGA port 99.9% of people would never use.
>This looks to satisfy all your requirements from your original post:
Thank you for the link. Unfortunately it only looks so.
It satisfies only partly because it's still headache to remember where it is, remember to take it and when something like that sticks out of your machine probability to break it when there are people around is very high and not unusual. Also you can tilt accidentally your laptop and it cat potentially break the port completely.
With all that said the reality now for instance that it is simply not available in the country I am right now unfortunately. I cannot move because of the covid situation and I am limited with what I can order. My MacbookPro has died gracefully (you can read how if you wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25809097) I have managed to get M1 machine but now I'll have to deal with adapters that are available around.
Because I do not have sd-card-slot my photography is limited to zero currently until I find adapter that would work. I have additional headache to choose one that works, and they lie about the specs and you never know what you get so this is the reality of all those theories about 'oh you can get a dongle'.
I just wish to add that when you are really mobile and travel in different countries it is Not unusual situation. Even if it's developed country it's not easy to order something in a small town or even in a big town. Usually small towns do not have something you need, you can count on that. Probably you can buy a new Mac probably like I did but it's M1 with 2 ports and some nice adapters will be not available there. Again this is the reality , not the theory where you can access everything you need whenever you need it.
The second item you've mentioned is nice. Thank you again. It can be useful when I'll be able to reach it. Right now all my drives are usb3 to fit MacbookPro I had. This hub is also requires power supply brick as I understand and again it would be simply impossible to get the hub you've mentioned where I am at the moment.
So in my case it will be huge adapter hanging on wire and let us pray it will work as expected.
>Surely you're not suggesting that laptops built in 2021 should have a VGA port?
No, I am not suggesting that. HDMI an micro-sd-card reader do not add any thickness though and are still very useful for flexibility in real world. When I took my previous Mac I thought I will not use HDMI but mobile reality made it so that at some point it was the only way I can use it and extract data from it and the external port allowed me to boot gnu/linux. The M1 Mac on the other hand become not bootable in the first day because of the bug in DiskUtility and I needed 'another Mac' to make it even bootable again so from my perspective I did not upgrade I have downgraded.
>_extreme_ niche use case [...] 99% of people
For me it's not about how many people use something it's about what a portable computer allows you to do and how flexible , productive and creative you can be with that tool. I do not want to go further about what else 99% do not do ... following majority was never too exciting for me.
If we actually got enough USB-C ports to make up for all the removed ports (like, 8 or so?) then I'd agree with you, and be willing to put up with the temporary pain of dongles for the sake of a glorious future where everything's USB-C. But we've ended up with the worst of both worlds: say I bring out my laptop for movie night and I want to plug in power, projector, surround sound, a DVD drive, and a mouse, that was easy 5-10 years ago and it's impossible now.
They make hubs/docks with many ports that only need one of your USB-C ports. There's also daisy-chaining to consider. I think you most likely could connect all those things.
I ended up having to daisy chain a dock to a USB hub, and then I would get errors if I connected the wrong things to the hub because I was breaking the 7 hub limit (turns out a lot of things have extra internal hubs). Obviously I did get it to work eventually, but it felt a lot more complicated and fragile than in the old days.
I'm not sure what you need "tons of adaptors and wires" for since you're only talking about SD cards, but to address that one example: what percentage of laptop users are professional photographers? One percent? A quarter? There are at least six fashion photographers in my apartment building and even I know they're a negligible slice of the population.
Apple should not be designing their laptops around the needs of 1% of users. That's just dumb. They should be designing for most users, and they are.
Which strategy makes more sense…
1. users who need SD card readers should carry around SD card readers
2. users who don't need SD card readers should carry around SD card readers
I don't need an SD card reader! I'm glad Apple is using that space to make the laptop more portable with the most battery possible.
The whole point of laptop is put as much power as possible into a device that is as portable as possible. The point of a bag is to carry around shit that YOU might need and the rest of us don't. Goodness.
That’s my point exactly, I don’t want to buy the laptop you need either. Since Apple can’t make models for all users, they design around the needs of most users. And practically nobody needs SD card readers.
How far do we take this? What percentage of Macbook users use the tilde key? How many users open the terminal? What percentage of users use multiple desktops?
The reason Excel remains the dominant spreadsheet software is because it has dozens of features that other spreadsheet applications don't have. Each one of those features is only used by a small portion of the user base but if you add up the users which use at least one of these features it starts representing a significant chunk of users. Each of those feature independently isn't worth implementing in competing platforms because "Google sheets should not be designing their app around the needs of 1% of users", but the culmination of all of those features add up to a platform Google Sheets just cannot compete with.
Is the space actually being used more effectively? What can fit in the laptop without a SD card slot that couldn't fit with one present? Why is a smooth side with no ports somehow more valuable than a side with usable ports? You can't think you'll see any savings passed along to use for Apple taking out a part that costs them a few dollars at most. Removing the feature won't save any consumers any money, only reduce usability overall.
The reason that Excel remains the dominant spreadsheet software is that it's the best spreadsheet out there, and it's almost universally installed on all school and business computers.
Before going any further you do realise that there is enough space for micro-sd-card reader even on raspberryPi Zero?
And I hope you do realise that I am talking about sd-card reader just for the most obvious example, it doesn't mean I have nothing more to say or wish from laptop.
I think this is not about what majority wishes when you develop a tool that you label as 'Pro', it's about what device can and cannot do and as such what Man can and can't do using it!
>I'm not sure what you need "tons of adaptors and wires" for since you're only talking about SD cards...
First of all it is a real mobile usage. And I mean serious usage 'on the go' (and it could be 3 month + of 'the go')
My laptop is the only machine I have and could have in such scenario. And as far as I know this is exactly what laptop was meant to be - device for mobile work.
My use-cases are:
I do Software Development:
- Developing software for iOS: Which means I need to have one of each kind for testing iPhone/iPad/iPadPro and connect each of them periodically. Only for that purpose more ports are justified because I would prefer to have 4 at least to connect all 3 iOS devices plus hard_drive for backup etc. If there is additional monitor around that I could use I would love to use it which means I need HDMI/display port.
- Developing software for MacOS. I am developing FileManager for Mac and few other projects on the go. Which means Xcode and resources it requires. Also external monitor port hdmi/dp - any I can find around depending where I am.
- Developing software for GNU/Linux. which means sometimes a need for Ethernet port to track down issues.
- Using Terminal for remote connections to raspberryPi/s which means wired connections when there is a need of speed or some problem. It also means I use sd-card-reader for this too.
- Developing software for reMarkable tablet. which means VM GNU/Linux machine on Mac which requires more_storage/more_memory/more_processing_power and again free USB-A port to connect rM for speedy connection/charging.
- Making some hardware projects on the go: Arduino/ESP32/8266/raspberyyPi etc. which means periodically connecting those and I must have cable connections when something breaks and wifi would not help. I also do not need additional dongle in the chain when tracking down some problems. It saves a lot of time to have less items to check as the check itself takes time * number of times you do it. Needless to say that those devices barely work with simplest USB 2.0
I do Music:
- I play Guitar. So I need to connect a Guitar for recording/performing, which means I need line-in .
- I sing and if I wish to record it I also need external mic which means one more usb/line-in.
- I play Piano: If it's real piano the same needs for mic if it's electronic piano - perhaps line-in, if it's midi - usb.
You know at least one line-in would be great just in case I wish to connect something in creative situation for creative purposes.
I do massive Photography/Videography:
- Some times work as photographer/videographer. I have Nikon Camera with sd-cards and need periodically but intensively transfer of huge Video Footages.
Wifi for such sizes is simply not an option. I also need ports to connect few drives at the same time.
I need diff types of ports if I work with other people and usually they are not equipped. Again the difference sometimes: it's done or not due to some dumb limitations.
- I do Argentinian Tango Teaching/Dancing/Performing.
Which means I need remote control to stop/play music during the class. Where the IR port that worked fine?
I need wired audio connection to whatever-audio-system-i-can-find and if my bluetooth speaker doesn't_work/not_enough for certain halls . I would also need HDMI/DP/DVI or even VGA port to have external screen connected.
I must be doing something different from you. I have one adaptor on my desktop which lets me get display/ power/ USB A. It’s nice because it means removing the laptop means unplugging one thing.
I don’t take any dongles with me. Or any adaptors. My laptop case is just a protective sleeve and sometimes I bring the power brick.
It would be nice to have one USB-A port, and HDMI, but it’s not that big of a deal either.
> This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space
this is true, yet... I'd be okay with that, to be honest.
My current work laptop (a dell latitude 7390) is a jewel also because it's got a lot of ports. I have used them all at least once, but quite frankly, never all at the same time.
So yeah, being able to unplug a port and plug a different one it's almost the perfect middle ground.
we're pretty much all carrying dongles anyway (not me, the dell latitude 7390 has all the ports i might need)
> This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space that could have been spent on a bigger battery.
I wondered about that as well. Looking at the picture at the top of the main page, I see one small battery, and electronics that take up 2-3x the size of normal laptop electronics. Most current laptops have 60-80% of their chassis space occupied by batteries.
However, the description mentions a 55Wh battery, which is quite reasonable for a thin-and-light laptop. It says 1.3kg, which is a little heavier than desirable for the form factor (1-1.2kg), but not by much. On balance, this looks like a much more reasonable set of tradeoffs than past "repairable laptop" efforts I've seen; Framework is putting serious hardware engineering effort into this.
I think either are fine TBH. Framework will definitely be a niche play to a segment of a pro market that is currently ignored. It will probably cost more than most equivalent laptops. They could in the future make a chassis that is just 4 USB-C ports and give you the space savings for other things.
I think the flush USB-C dongles are actually clever in another way, you could make storage expansion bricks that have pass through USB (or no passthrough) and get more storage on your laptop beyond the one M.2 slot. It would be especially nice for video editor types, who I've seen literally velcro expansion SSDs to their macbooks with USB angle adapters [0] because dealing with dangling drives is annoying.
What Apple did was gave people a solution that looks good on the retail floor, but in practice involved carrying a bunch of dongles, which take up more space, can break more easily, can be easily forgotten and are more finicky while using.
In practice it leads to a significantly worse product for the vast majority of users, for the benefit of the minority that falls in the pro crowd and is able to get all their work done solely through USB-C ports.
But the Apple Pro crowd users tend to include a lot of audio/video professionals who have a lot of expensive devices they tend to connect through USB-A, HDMI, etc, Photographers who were big fans of the SD card readers, and business people who didn’t really need pro devices but could afford them, and were fan of the video outputs for connecting to projectors and monitors, and maybe even LAN inputs because many offices tend to discourage WiFi networks.
I think Apples big mistake was a category mistake. If they had made the MacBook or MacBook Air all USB-C, for example, there wouldn’t have been too much of an outcry. But the MacBook Pro line is the same one that carried a FW 400 port years after FW800 had been released and even after FW itself was kinda dead besides certain niche applications (which tended to be popular with Apple pro users).
There are dongles at home and dongles to carry. For home, I need a DVI adaptor that goes into a separately powered USB 3 hub so I can use a monitor, and I can plug my keyboard and mouse into that. I am not a fan of the extra wiring though, needing to power the hub takes up one more electrical outlet, but it's not mobile and I can hide it, so no biggie.
But that means when I carry the laptop around I have to carry a dongle for the mouse or not use the mouse. It depends. The mouse is ergonomic and easier on my hands than the trackpad, so I prefer to carry it. It's just one dongle, and I'm already carrying the mouse, so not too bad.
I also need USB 2 for my Yubikey, which is USB 2.0.
Before I had USB headsets but that would be 3 USB 2.0 devices and my portable hub only accepts two, so I ditched them and switched to the old wired iphone earbuds since they are light and stateless.
That also means I have to give up my ergonomic keyboard and use the flat keyboard, but usually that's OK unless I am on a long trip. If I'm on a long trip, I'll want that ergonomic keyboard after a lot of typing at which point it's 3 USB 2.0 devices and then I need to bring the powered hub with its own adaptor. I can leave that where I'm staying and just take the mouse to the coffee shop. But this adds complexity.
All in all, it's doable, I'm not complaining that it is an insurmountable obstacle, but I would prefer a computer that was a bit thicker and heavier but had more ports built just to reduce the overall complexity of the setup and not worry if I brought everything with me. When you compare the weight of the usb hub and its adaptor to the extra weight added by adding a few more ports, I'd prefer the laptop to be a bit less demanding in input requirements. To me that would make for a more mobile solution overall.
I am an Apple hater who owns a MacBook and an iPad.
I am extremely happy with their USB-C decision.
I want USB-C everywhere.
Just buy one of the all-encompassing USB-C hubs or just buy individual adapters/dongles for your needs.
It makes every laptop customizable. That's why I like it.
Yeah. Who needs a swiss army knife anyway. Just carry two knives, a can opener, a corkscrew, a nail filer, a pair of scissors, a saw, a screw driver, fish scaler, magnifying lens and toothpick.
There was at one point a couple of years ago when I had to attend more meetings at work that I would the be the one presenting something on my thinkpad only because everyone else had a macbook and forgot their dongle. It could be solved by buying dongles for each room possibly, but this was a persistent problem anyway. (Thankfully, there is fewer meetings and they are just online now :) )
I don't need the ports that much, but it is nice when the needed ports are just there, because it is usually a selection of ports I need. Maybe other people don't need what I need, but I prefer having some occasionally port present, knowing its there when I need it.
I think this project takes a novel approach to the problem, sort of like what expresscards offered. Here, you can just add the ports you need if you need as your defaults.
tbh the adapter card really looks like a simple adaptor with an usb-c/thunderbolt plug on one side. it'll take a week or two for chinese knock-off to appear on aliexpress etc.
Can they be locked in place? I'm wondering if it will withstand the pull of eg. the USB-A connection while it is being unplugged, and disconnect on the USB-C side instead.
Nice project. However I see no Gigabit ethernet port. USB dongle for the one of us that prefer the performance and the predictability of a cable over Wi-Fi's whims?
A Gigabit Ethernet Expansion Card is on our roadmap, though it is going to look a little goofy compared to the other cards, since it won't fit entirely in the current envelope.
I'll second the parent's request for an RJ45 Ethernet port. It can't possibly look any goofier than an Expresscard Ethernet adapter!
One easy way to get it to fit would be to make the module thicker. To avoid the whole thing sitting at an angle in the existing envelope, you'd want to replace the little adhesive-secured feet with taller, screw-secured feet to give it clearance.
I'm a controls engineer and am constantly connecting to PLCs and robots in environments that don't do wireless networking. I have to deal with all kinds of legacy hardware manufacturer's IDEs and real-time protocols that work poorly with USB dongles. Of course, your expansion cards are really USB dongles, and appear to allow tool-less hot-plugging (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/expan...). I'd love to see an optional screw to retain the card, and wouldn't mind shutting the laptop down and rebooting it, especially if it meant it showed up in /etc/network/interfaces all the time and never needed to be kicked out of sleep with `ip link set dev eth0 up`.
Other desirable expansion cards would be a VGA port or DB9 serial port; would those fit?
I fear that your efforts to reach beige-box compatibility are really hamstrung by the obsession with thin and light laptops; there's no way (for example) that you'll fit my preferred keyboard (Lenovo 45N2211, out of a T420) and still have the hinges close because the enclosure is so thin. I hope you succeed, but I especially hope you produce a 15" workstation version that's 10mm thicker.
If they do a 15" laptop, please make the keyboard configurable. I mean, no number pad for people like me and number pad for people that need it and tolerates an off center touchpad and space bar.
I wouldn't want it to be too thick, but I have to agree that a quality keyboard is SUPER important. At the very least, 2mm travel is much nicer than 1.5mm.
And because it's modular, they might as well add a programmable ortholinear option! It would be a first in the laptop world, and may actually be successful due to the rising popularity of ergonomics.
Maybe the 2mm ortho could have standard qwerty labels printed on the side of the keycaps, so it's not as obnoxious when people bind different layouts or macros.
If I were to buy one, I would also buy the 15" version. Old thinkpads are awesome.
Love the logo on the back of the screen. No stupid slogans, just the cog, looks great! It makes no rational sense, but I'd want to own one just for that.
Hope there's gonna be a touchscreen version! After all, a UI that you can't touch is like coffee that you can't smell.
I didn't get the idea of a touchscreen laptop until I got an iPad recently, now I'm constantly trying to touch my laptop screen and then getting confused when I doesn't do anything.
Apologies for that. We packed in a 55Wh battery and are using popular silicon and a display that is used in several other popular notebooks, so you can use those as a reference point. We didn't want to state a figure in hours until we wrap up our firmware work and can release reproducible benchmarks for it (since battery life marketing statements tend to be pretty questionable).
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 539 ms ] threadWe have also seen multiple failed attempts at modular phones.
Ultimately, the problem with repair is not about making it easy enough for grandma to swap out a part. Its about making sure repair stores have the ability to source replacement parts.
Its pretty easy to do almost any repair if you have the tools and parts but there is no way you are finding a new IC that fried on your 5 year old laptop.
How will your volumes look during this silicon shortage?
We placed our forecasts and risk buys on most chips early in anticipation of the silicon crunch that is coming this year. So far, we don't see anything that puts us at risk, short of there being massive unexpected upside on consumer demand (a good problem to have!).
ducks
I'm using my Acer now more as a dev laptop and my Mac more as a free time laptop. What I'm noticing is that I'm enjoying the typing experience on the Nitro 5 more, in particular because it has decent arrows (and a numpad :) ).
Another nice feature for keyboard design is small gaps between Esc and F1, F4 and F5, F8 and F9, and F12 and what’s to its right, as desktop keyboards have always done; this helps fingers to blindly find the right place. Not very many laptops do this; the main ones I’ve noticed doing it in my recent research is ASUS ROG laptops, which do seem to put more thought than most into these sorts of details. In the pictures shown here, the Escape and especially Delete keys look to be unnecessarily wide so that you could reduce their widths a bit to provide this space perhaps without shrinking anything else.
When people ask why there's so many rooting against Intel, I don't say it's because they stagnated the market. It's specifically because long-known practices like these.
But hopefully it's not the case here.
That being said, this is a great project and it looks like it should be successful - having a laptop that is built to last with interchangable parts is a great idea and should've been done long ago.
I’m holding out for an arm based Linux laptop which can handle Blender without too much fan noise... I would love to get a system76 laptop but I have doubts about the build quality. But they say that they are on tract to manufacture their own laptops this year. How does a framework laptop compare to System76? (Let alone a Lenovo or Asus.)
Any chance you guys could make your own distro in the future and brand it Lapdance?
That said:
> Founded in San Francisco in 2019
I'd love to see these kind of companies founded outside of this area in the future.
Remote work may solve some of this, but eventually the extended runways available at "lower altitudes" (to bend the metaphor) will become worthwhile.
We've built a fingerprint reader into the power button using a just-released sensor that has been performing really well in our testing so far. We're seeing False Reject Rates lower than the typical fingerprint readers built into laptops while keeping the right False Accept Rate.
Best of luck and please let me know if you want someone to dogfood things as an outsider. My email is my HN username
[Edit: Thanks for all the replies citing driver blobs and proprietary BIOS issues, totally slipped my mind that that was a concern, makes a ton more sense now.]
E.g. LibreBoot https://libreboot.org/
> Non-free BIOS/UEFI firmware often contains backdoors, can be slow and have severe bugs. Development and support can be abandoned at any time.
</s>
1. https://puri.sm/learn/blobs/
It might be worth publishing enough of the internal CAD measurements as specs so that artists could create their own enclosures / cool addons and be sure that they will have parts access.
Anyway, my first thought was ‘will an m1 board fit in there?’ so I am looking forward to seeing your release!
Also, big up for the 3:2 screen.
Amen. Any chance I can buy one for my desktop?
(I like my Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 267ppi display which is just the right size for 2× scaling, yielding an effective resolution of 1500×1000.)
For reference, the common 13.3″ 1920×1080 display is 166ppi, 13.3″ 1366×768 is 118ppi, 15.6″ 1920×1080 is 141ppi, and 15.6″ 1366×768 is 100ppi.
(I’m idly curious why it’s 2256×1504 rather than 2250×1500, which would scale to the more convenient effective resolution of 1500×1000 at 150%, and still 200ppi.)
Even if I'm not too excited about the proprietary expansion card system, which will last as long as the founders' attention spans, if it gives access to standard memory and storage, that's an improvement over the current trend.
Maybe I am misinterpreting it but it sounds like its not a completely proprietary system?
We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it's possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels. We hope that folks in the community come up with interesting card ideas and bring them out themselves in addition to what we develop.
since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s, it has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch
That's a bold and brave move. Well done.
I had an "ethernet modem card" from ibm in that form factor that worked well. And a scsi adapter for a zip drive I think. Its been a while...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card
I don't think it would have worked well to try to make a hot-swappable externally-facing card form factor derived from M.2. Likewise, cutting EDSFF E1.S down to a third of the length wouldn't leave any provision for USB or DisplayPort signals. USB-C is clearly the best available connector choice among current standards.
The real value-add of the framework laptop is imho the upgrade path: you can swap in newer components without replacing nearly everything. Usually that's limited to just SSD and RAM, with everything else being on one huge mainboard assembly.
It's been a while since I was in that world, but Dell makes some mighty nice looking machinery these days, but it doesn't look particularly repairable.
But it didn't happen...
We won't be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, but it's nice to hear that you'd be willing to!
Personally, I am waiting until av1 hardware decoders are more common, and BT 5 LE Audio (so they can stream to wireless headsets easily) is out as well.
I think you should offer a first-class Linux experience with this laptop. It's a genuinely underserved market, with a lot of overlap for people who care about the repairability and upgradability which are core to your offering. A market with premium mind share, as well.
When I say first class, I mean something specific: you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good driver Linux driver for your touchpad, and open source it. That would be huge. I'm sure your hardware is up to snuff, but your control over how good that feels in Windows is very limited.
There are a bunch of developers who have stuck with the Mac for essentially one reason, the touchpad.
Windows is dominant in laptops, but with distinct verticals, and I struggle to figure out which one this would fit into. Cheap semi-disposable laptop for a broke college student? Clearly this will cost more than that. Gaming? No way you'll have enough power and battery with that form factor. Excel ninjas who get it from work? Why would they care about expansion and repairability?
But "I'd rather be using Linux if the experience just sucked a little bit less" is underserved. Obviously you can't offer just Linux, and maybe licensing shenanigans with Microsoft mean you can't even consider this (although I really hope that's not a factor anymore).
Anyway. Good luck, it's a cool idea.
It's funny how completely random this suggestion feels (I figured you were going to suggest a customized distro based on Ubuntu or something), and yet I completely agree. Most everything uses libinput these days, and a whole lot of the "feel" is baked into the driver at compile time. Getting it right yourself (or even just making it more configurable for users) would be an enormous step forward.
Definitely worth understanding his understand motivations, then considering collaborating and/or funding him.
[1] https://bill.harding.blog/2018/04/12/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
[2] https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700537
> Obviously you can't offer just Linux
Yes, you can: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14
https://system76.com/laptops
The distinction is they're not trying to develop a new computer that only runs or officially supports Linux. Instead they're leveraging the sales volumes of these OEM/ODMs which do offer Windows in order to keep prices in line with similarly specced laptops.
Compare this to Purism, whose offerings are much more expensive compared to similarly specced laptops, and because of this unlikely to gain mass market appeal. An initiative like Framework needs some amount of mass market appeal to make the repairability aspect really make sense, else it'll just be expensive and resource intensive to manufacture small quantities of these systems.
10$ says it’s going to be quite an effort to run Linux on it. Nice idea though.
Edit: And it's worth noting that a couple of folks on the team are diehard Linux users, including our software/firmware lead, and they run Ubuntu on their Framework Laptops.
How’s battery life and thermals under Debian? I guess all Intel CPUs get hot, but at least my MBP is quiet enough. Battery life life isn’t that great though.
After using both a macbook and a dell xps on linux this year, I'm a whole lot happier using the dell xps. The XPS has functional cooling at least.
If priced right, I'll buy this as my next laptop. And the next phone as well -- if they ever launch one.
Will we ever get a laptop component system that's as robust and modular as the desktop ecosystem?
No.
The robust desktop ecosystem is powered by a bunch of categories that don’t really want laptops: gamers, business, research, some developers, etc.
Desktops are “work trucks” while laptops are mostly “cars.”
But:
- I really dislike the arrow keys not having the air gap above left and right. You’d think they’d learn that from the MacBook butterfly keyboard era.
- it’s a little disingenuous to say “no adapters” when in fact their little expansion cards are merely adapters that insert into the chassis of the laptop. Only four I/O ports is a little tight (despite Apple deeming it to be “enough”)
- that laptop looks pretty thick and heavy by today’s standards.
It’ll be interesting to see how people respond, when many (especially in this crowd) have been clamoring for this kind of thing. How many will actually vote with their dollars, and will that be enough for Framework to survive and become a viable competitor in the laptop space?
I hope so, as I welcome the diversity and innovation that would represent. But I admit I’m skeptical as to their chances.
The Framework Laptop comes in at 15.85mm thick and 1.3kg. So a couple of sheets of paper thicker than a 13" MacBook Pro, but a bit lighter.
On the Expansion Cards, that is fair. We can say we're getting rid of the need for adapters that protrude from the machine and need to be removed when you need to transport it.
If you can make an alternative case with an (e.g.) 12x5 1u grid layout keyboard that lets me put my thumbs to use and stop contorting my fingers, I will more of less open my wallet and let you take what you fancy!
[1] https://shop.keyboard.io/products/keyboardio-atreus https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/
With my RSI, I'm almost unable to use standard laptop keyboards, so I have to travel with a split ergo keyboard. Most laptops have enough room to support a split ortho layout, but aren't thick enough (or modular enough) for enthusiasts to roll their own.
Take a look at the Thinkeys [0] and pineapple60 [1] projects for what's possible.
[0]: https://github.com/dennisleexyz/thinkeys [1]: https://github.com/saoto28/pineapple60
I gotta do that with a Mitosis layout for myself.
I am not a fan of today's standards. As I write (on an external A1243 keyboard) I look at the closed touchbar MBP in front of me and cringe at the gap between the cover and the body go from zero on the left to 1/4" on the right. This laptop is too thin for its own good, for no good reason, and I look forward to how sturdy this design would be with the extra thickness (not to mention all the other goodies they list).
I can't be the only person with this problem?
Edit: While I'm ranting, I am 100% sure that the touch-logic in trackpads favour right handed people (same with mobile phone screens) and as a leftie it seems harder for me to perform complex multi-touch actions than it does for right handed people.
EDIT - my new problem with Windows 10 is that it somehow interprets certain accidental motions on the trackpad as me wanting it to move to some sort of strange workspace overview screen that appears to be completely useless and not at all what I wanted.
Maybe, but how many do you really need?
I have lots of stuff plugged in at my desk -- but it's plugged into a dock, and there's just a single cable that goes into my laptop. Thinking about my usages in the past few years, I can't think of a time where 4 ports (of my choosing) wouldn't have worked for me -- so long as I could change them over the lifetime of the device.
Let's not forget that this is repairable, upgradable and expandable - when I first saw the HN title, I was convinced it was going to be a brick. It actually looks great, like a premium laptop from Dell or Lenovo. But supporting up to 64GB or memory, and repairable etc. Pretty amazing, I think.
The expansion cards will only be available for as long as your company provides them. Using the most-commonly used, mass-manufactured standard interfaces for components would provide more long-term repairability and upgradeability.
The trade-off would be in design resulting in more bulk and in the economics of your company, of course. It seems cynical to me to sell maintainability while starting a walled-garden ecosystem of proprietary hardware.
I assumed it wouldn't be an open design because the marketing didn't mention it. I would integrate this message in your marketing because it's worth convincing critical audiences.
Can others build a Framework laptop without approval? Can others build cards without approval? Will it be a platform?
Tell me how this isn't a Nespresso machine for silicon pods. :-)
Edit: To be clear, even a "we have a generic base laptop and you can pick your I/O" concept is potentially a nice value prop, but it'd be good if the picture (and roadmap) was clear.
[1] https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles_pdf/t14_gen1_p14s...
> For those of you who love to tinker, we’ve also created the Framework Laptop DIY Edition, the only high-end notebook available as a kit of modules that you can customize and assemble yourself, with the ability to choose Windows or install your preferred Linux distribution.
Thanks for your info
Perhaps there are more urgent tasks for "targeting the general populace to reach profitability".
Ps. That's why I hate potential sarcasm.
If this laptop doesn’t support Linux, it’s a big missed opportunity.
I imagine their could be vendor-specific expansion cards for SBC's, like one that is just an HDMI extension which only works with the vendors SBC and doesn't use USB-c. Maybe vendors could implement one "framework" compatible expansion port and provide several of their own expansion cards that only implement SBC features, and plug directly into the SBC instead of generic usb-c.
What if they don't want to sell through the Framework Marketplace?
Favorite hardware form factor ever ...
This is an unpopular opinion, but I think this proves that Apple was right to dump legacy ports. This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space that could have been spent on a bigger battery. USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.
(the Nespresso analogy is ridiculous, a laptop doesn't exist to consume adapters. But I presume you were enjoying a little tongue-in-cheek with your coffee)
Well, sort of :-) Nespresso is a famous implementation of a "your basic machine stays static, you swap out a different element of the system based on temporary/current needs, but you can only buy those elements from one vendor" pattern. Printer ink cartridges are another.
Yeah, add-on cards to a computer aren't consumables per se - but the entire premise is that as time goes on you might want to get new ones (because your current needs change), i.e. upgrade. Whether I can pick upgrades from different vendors, and what the tax imposed on creating and/or selling upgrades is, matters.
Every laptop I've ever owned has at least one port I never use, and after a couple years it's missing some other port I'd rather have. This one seems to solve that problem, extending the life of the machine and/or avoiding dongle hell.
But if you can only buy the dongle from one vendor, it's going to be more expensive than if there's a market where multiple vendors compete. It's that "you can only buy the adapter from Apple, and it's really expensive" thing, just moved into the chassis.
Hence the question which one of those we're looking at here, and it was kindly answered by a rep above.
Apple is content to push everything into dongles (which you have to carry around anyway) to get it thinner. The point at which I can't have a wired RJ45 ethernet port is already ridiculous - that is not a thick connector. Same with fullsize USB ports.
Battery life there are hard limits as well: nobody is making a laptop with more then 100Wh, because that's the limit that you can carry onto an aircraft.
……………
Only Fujitsu use them AFAIK.
[1]https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/12/8/16750574/p...
If your uses case requires you to constantly plug/unplug ethernet cables in your laptop then you need a workstation class laptop with a full sized RJ-45 jack, not a sleek thin and light.
it's perfectly feasible to integrate one.
just look a the dell latitude 7390. really, look at it:
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/eB6gGRDZWSYT4XW6SeSMtf-120...
For me the dongle is annoying but probably sufficient.
I've also worked in offices where the Ethernet was better because it didn't require VPN access and was more reliable, but in those situations I plugged it into my monitor rather than directly into the laptop.
Everyone who understands collision domains.
Everyone who understands bandwidth.
> By connecting each device directly to a port on the switch, either each port on a switch becomes its own collision domain (in the case of half-duplex links), or the possibility of collisions is eliminated entirely in the case of full-duplex links. For Gigabit Ethernet and faster, no hubs or repeaters exist and all devices require full-duplex links.
So is a wifi connection full or half duplex?
I don't think you understand collision domains.
One had WiFi that only gave internet access, the other had no WiFi at all (in 2017).
I mean. Really. That strikes me as willfully ignorant and arrogant. Clearly it's heavily used, especially in professional/corporate environments.
FWIW I use WiFi if I have to on the move.
But at home and office it's hard wire all the way.
In the office it's not even an option, everybody must.
At home, it's a quality of life thing.
The speed drops and disconnections and unpredictability of WiFi are not thing of the past yet. For some there's a security issue as well, real or perceived.
Wire just works.
Edit: other examples - gaming laptops; secure networks; dense environments either urban or corporate; anything that needs predictable connectivity, bandwidth and lag really :-/
Both my own laptop and the laptop from my employer (a large company) are used almost all the time on wired Ethernet, the main exception being during business trips.
It's so clear that they removed it from their lineup? Clearly you're wrong. I have two Macbooks work/home, and a USB-C dock has been life changing in its awesomeness.
And yes my dock has RJ-45 ;)
They also removed scissor switches, sd card readers and hdmi. But they're bringing those back (or have already), so they don't seem like a good authority to appeal to here.
There are discussions on:
1. Is a particular connector still used/useful on laptops - my statement is that RJ45 is absolutely still used on laptops, and went into some examples / use-cases.
2. Separate discussion, hopefully informed by the first, is how do we do that - built into laptop or via a bunch of dongles.
Apple in particular removing it from their laptops does not speak one way or another to corporate/professional environment requirements. Their approach is "use a dongle/dock" which in their view is compatible with whatever use case is needed (and some people disagree, which is fine - lots of vendors and in particular HP/Dell/Thinkpad all have robust professional/corporate/roadwarrior models with dock, port and even pointing stick capability).
My laptop is sitting at home 1,5 m away from my Unifi access point and the network cable is still measurably more reliable and performant. Wifi might have won the amateurs.
Still very much useful in corporate environments.
Edit: Actually, didn't spot the Ethernet port on the first glance, might be worth a deeper look. :)
If you are bringing your laptop to a coffee shop, you probably won't need an ethernet port anyway, so you can leave the dongle at home. Lots of mobile use-cases don't involve plugging in to a ton of things, so why waste space having ports for it?
We're mostly programmers here, with nice keyboards and big screens as a necessity for work. On the other hand, lots of people are completely content with the base laptop. Making things easier for us at their expense is probably not a great business decision.
Luckily, macOS is going downhill as well, therefore my pain will end when the next version has not resemblance to a Unix system any more. The day Apple starts migrating its desktop OS to hamburger menus, I'll wipe and sell all my remaining Apple hardware.
I dunno. I've never owned a macbook because Linux has been good enough for most of the time I've seriously been using computers for work stuff. Even if you aren't a Linux enthusiast, the time to switch for developers was more than a decade ago, IMO.
Assuming that's correct, I think it's kinda clever... it's basically a dongle system that allows the modules to sit flush instead of jutting out of the side of the laptop.
How it proves it? Those guys do not drop ports, they just make them modular.
All the "saved space" in Apple laptops become amazingly wasted space in your bag with tons of adapters and wires.
I still dream to meet the one who made such 'wise' decision to tell him what I think about it personally!
>USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.
I am not sure you can know what anyone needs. For instance you do not know what I need.
I wish you'll be around when I need to copy my files from the camera with idiotic dongle in the field when time is precious.
I would love then to hear how sticking card directly into the slot without any headache is less comfortable than looking for some dongle in the bag while holding your camera equipment and then hanging dongle on it's wire because there is no table around to put your laptop on or put it somehow on your lap and try not to move to avoid it breaking during the transfer because then you'll have to start again transferring your important pictures. Then pray it will work because some times it will not when you need it most.
Removing sd-card reader slot is example of the most idiotic design decision I can imagine. It is taking what works perfectly and destroying it for no reason at all. It is pure damage without any benefits taking size of it into account.
It was done by people who never used laptop for transferring photos from the camera using sd-card.
They never thought that while you transfer with the sd-card your other card is available to continue shooting in critical or unexpected situations. This is what makes the difference between making some shots and not! I would never understand this idiocy of removing sd-card slot to "save space".
The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG! Not in the laptop itself by making it useless. Such a dumb decision to remove useful ports. Goodness.
If I'm heading to someplace where I think I might need more than 1 usb-a port or a situation where I might need a bit of a usb hub I just pack this little 'dock dongle' that's about three inches long and an inch wide that has three usb-a ports (2x3.0 1x2.0), an hdmi port, a sd and tf card slot, an ethernet port, an audio jack, and a usb-c power input port... cost me all of 60$.
I do not want to search for this 'little guy' in the dark and be stuck without it when I forgot to take it because a lot of other things happening in the same time around or I lost it or somebody took it because he thought it belongs to him by mistake.
Having the dongle headache or not in certain situations means missing shots or not. And I speak from experience of shooting intensively in addition to doing other things during 5-7 days in a arrow where you do not always have time to eat/sleep and surely no time to waste for this dongle BS.
Get the machine that suits _you_. Unless you want to run Apple OS because then you're not given choice.
And that is exactly the point. I used to be a very happy customer of multiple Macbook Pros over almost a decade. Currently, I am still using my 2015 Macbook Pro 15" with maxed out specs when not in my home office. But all the later models went downhill for my needs. The new Macbook Air M1 is the first model that I am thinking about buying. It is probably powerful enough to work on it, and I think I actually get some value back from the saved spaced due to dropped ports. Even the 2015" Macbook Pros with 15" are at a thickness were I simply see no point to remove even half a milli-meter of thickness. I would gladly use a thicker, heavier variant if it had multiple different ports including Ethernet. One problem that I had over the time with all Thunderbolt dongles was that the physical connection became unreliable over time. That is hassle I don't want to deal with.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.macrumors.com/guide/14-inch...
If "using it on your lap, without something hanging" matters to you (like the parent) and you wanted something more 'rigid', things like this exist: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/product/B07PCP5J4Z
I have one buried in my bag that I almost never use. It's surprisingly rare that I need an Ethernet or HDMI port but they're there if I need them. In the meantime, there's more room inside my laptop for battery.
Even an extra 5Wh of capacity is about an extra hour of use.
A good dock solves this- it's not mobile, but I find that I'm not really that productive when I'm travelling anyways.
I only wish that docking solutions became standard offerings with the laptops that skimp on ports.
It doesn't solve it. Look at my use-case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271855
>it's not mobile, but I find that I'm not really that productive when I'm travelling anyways.
Laptop is for real mobile usage. In a way you have no need for it according to your description.
Maybe that's the case for you, but that's far from universal. I have zero need for any adapters. At work, I can use usb-c to connect to my monitor, and if I need to present in a meeting room, I do it wirelessly.
At home, I can use airplay to share my screen to my TV.
It's a reasonable tradeoff. Imagine your laptop with the power supply built in instead of as an external brick.
Saving 0.1% of space for micro-sd-card reader and having headache of dongle for every photo/video transfer? Doesn't appear reasonable at all. They have found space for micro-sd-card reader on raspberryPi Zero ... It's absurd not to have it even on the phone.
Look at my use-case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271855
> Imagine your laptop with the power supply built in instead of as an external brick.
You know what? Great! One thing less to care separately . It would be bad thermal solution though.
By the way the brick itself was coming with extension cord. Now it comes without it. Imagine during your travel squeezing it in some public place with bad socket to charge it when it doesn't fit well enough and could even fall and break and your life depend on your ability to charge it. Do it few times during few travels, then you will understand how "reasonable" was to even to remove the extended power cord from the brick.
Many things appear 'reasonable' on the paper until you use them in real life.
In the case of the framework laptop, most of the "modules" just seem to be USBC/Thunderbolt-to-X dongles that fit flush with the case.
For those who use a laptop outside office desks, there is a lot of difference between flimsy setups with dongles hanging on wires, and the mechanically solid laptop case. Much easier to carry it around in one piece.
It's completely logical.
> The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG!
It most certainly is not. The point of a laptop is to strike a balance between portability and usability. Requiring the extra like two cubic inches of space in your bag for a dongle is assuredly not a design concern.
Further, those readers seem to be made /just/ fast enough to read ahead of the current speeds, so when new speeds come out, you need a faster reader. That works fine if you have a USB 3.1 or USB 3.2 adapter, but not so great if the reader is built into a laptop with an otherwise much longer life.
That's the issue - you are speaking only from an Apple user perspective. Android (and other non-apple) phones allow us to extend our storage with sd cards, and they are mostly used to store and transfer photos and videos.
/me looks glumly at my Apple-ized Samsung Galaxy S6Edge, with no SD card or removable battery. (Both of which would make the S6/GearVR combo significantly more useful...)
Can we explore that a bit? Laying around your house? Or like on the ground at work?
I seem to remember some corporate espionage that relied on people looking at random SD cards they found on the ground...
Thankfully random SD cards should be much safer than random USB devices, but it's probably better to be careful.
You could hav put your laptop on a network with heaps of monitoring going on, and then mailed it back to NSA/GRU/MSS/Mossad as required based on the ip addresses your machine started connecting to...
;-)
More recently there's the PinePhone as well. It's not just expandable storage, you can boot off the SD and have all your OS and files there.
I would say I definitely use SD cards more than flash drives now.
Dongles are both cheaper and more flexible than replacing the cable, at the cost of having a slightly shittier experience.
It does. Micro-sd-card reader fits even in raspberryPi Zero ... Neglectable "space saving" advantage vs huge usability disadvantage.
> The point of a laptop is to strike a balance between portability and usability.
I think MacbookPro should be about philosophy of amplifying creative person with power tools for creativity in a portable way. Not a dumb machine mimicking more and more some TV . While this it should also do easily it shouldn't do just this, I think.
Look at my use-case: https://news.ycombinator.com/edit?id=26271855
From my perspective of extensive use of a laptop some people barely use laptops at all and thus perhaps they better be designing something else because for me it appears they have no idea what 'Pro' usage is. When you travel you never know what environment you'll have and therefor ports and connectivity make a difference between: Creative idea done/ not done.
>Requiring the extra like two cubic inches of space in your bag for a dongle is assuredly not a design concern.
It's not 2 cubic inches. It's huge adapter with all missing ports. Why Pro Laptop should consist of two parts is beyond me.
Again look at my use-case. I have no place for dongles nor time for dealing with them.
If those real 'Pro' requirements are not a design concerns then perhaps MacbookPro should not have 'Pro' in the title in my opinion.
Its ~2 cubic inches and doesn't dangle on a cable so you don't need a table/lap.
As for your more detailed post you just linked to:
> Only for that purpose more ports are justified because I would prefer to have 4 at least to connect all 3 iOS devices plus hard_drive for backup etc. If there is additional monitor around that I could use I would love to use it which means I need HDMI/display port.
USB4/thunderbolt 4 allows for type c hubs that also support alt-modes like displayport alt-mode so you can have a small cellphone-sized hub to significantly increase your ports: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08RYZJY8M
> I would also need HDMI/DP/DVI or even VGA port to have external screen connected.
Surely you're not suggesting that laptops built in 2021 should have a VGA port? This is exactly what tomtheelder was referring to when he said:
> I'm pretty sure that in 2021 that is an _extreme_ niche use case [...] 99% of people who own Macbooks or whatever don't own an SD card dongle because they don't need it. However, and extra USB-C port can be used for a multitude of things
Just think of all the extra thickness Apple would be adding to their laptops just to fit a VGA port 99.9% of people would never use.
Thank you for the link. Unfortunately it only looks so.
It satisfies only partly because it's still headache to remember where it is, remember to take it and when something like that sticks out of your machine probability to break it when there are people around is very high and not unusual. Also you can tilt accidentally your laptop and it cat potentially break the port completely.
With all that said the reality now for instance that it is simply not available in the country I am right now unfortunately. I cannot move because of the covid situation and I am limited with what I can order. My MacbookPro has died gracefully (you can read how if you wish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25809097) I have managed to get M1 machine but now I'll have to deal with adapters that are available around.
Because I do not have sd-card-slot my photography is limited to zero currently until I find adapter that would work. I have additional headache to choose one that works, and they lie about the specs and you never know what you get so this is the reality of all those theories about 'oh you can get a dongle'.
I just wish to add that when you are really mobile and travel in different countries it is Not unusual situation. Even if it's developed country it's not easy to order something in a small town or even in a big town. Usually small towns do not have something you need, you can count on that. Probably you can buy a new Mac probably like I did but it's M1 with 2 ports and some nice adapters will be not available there. Again this is the reality , not the theory where you can access everything you need whenever you need it.
The second item you've mentioned is nice. Thank you again. It can be useful when I'll be able to reach it. Right now all my drives are usb3 to fit MacbookPro I had. This hub is also requires power supply brick as I understand and again it would be simply impossible to get the hub you've mentioned where I am at the moment.
So in my case it will be huge adapter hanging on wire and let us pray it will work as expected.
>Surely you're not suggesting that laptops built in 2021 should have a VGA port?
No, I am not suggesting that. HDMI an micro-sd-card reader do not add any thickness though and are still very useful for flexibility in real world. When I took my previous Mac I thought I will not use HDMI but mobile reality made it so that at some point it was the only way I can use it and extract data from it and the external port allowed me to boot gnu/linux. The M1 Mac on the other hand become not bootable in the first day because of the bug in DiskUtility and I needed 'another Mac' to make it even bootable again so from my perspective I did not upgrade I have downgraded.
>_extreme_ niche use case [...] 99% of people For me it's not about how many people use something it's about what a portable computer allows you to do and how flexible , productive and creative you can be with that tool. I do not want to go further about what else 99% do not do ... following majority was never too exciting for me.
Apple should not be designing their laptops around the needs of 1% of users. That's just dumb. They should be designing for most users, and they are.
Which strategy makes more sense…
1. users who need SD card readers should carry around SD card readers
2. users who don't need SD card readers should carry around SD card readers
I don't need an SD card reader! I'm glad Apple is using that space to make the laptop more portable with the most battery possible.
The whole point of laptop is put as much power as possible into a device that is as portable as possible. The point of a bag is to carry around shit that YOU might need and the rest of us don't. Goodness.
The reason Excel remains the dominant spreadsheet software is because it has dozens of features that other spreadsheet applications don't have. Each one of those features is only used by a small portion of the user base but if you add up the users which use at least one of these features it starts representing a significant chunk of users. Each of those feature independently isn't worth implementing in competing platforms because "Google sheets should not be designing their app around the needs of 1% of users", but the culmination of all of those features add up to a platform Google Sheets just cannot compete with.
The answer about how far we should take it is, as far as is reasonable.
More battery.
I mean, extreme thinness is not really an important criteria for many, but everything seems to gets compromised to serve that goal.
The reason that Excel remains the dominant spreadsheet software is that it's the best spreadsheet out there, and it's almost universally installed on all school and business computers.
And I hope you do realise that I am talking about sd-card reader just for the most obvious example, it doesn't mean I have nothing more to say or wish from laptop.
I think this is not about what majority wishes when you develop a tool that you label as 'Pro', it's about what device can and cannot do and as such what Man can and can't do using it!
>I'm not sure what you need "tons of adaptors and wires" for since you're only talking about SD cards...
First of all it is a real mobile usage. And I mean serious usage 'on the go' (and it could be 3 month + of 'the go') My laptop is the only machine I have and could have in such scenario. And as far as I know this is exactly what laptop was meant to be - device for mobile work.
My use-cases are:
I do Software Development:
- Developing software for iOS: Which means I need to have one of each kind for testing iPhone/iPad/iPadPro and connect each of them periodically. Only for that purpose more ports are justified because I would prefer to have 4 at least to connect all 3 iOS devices plus hard_drive for backup etc. If there is additional monitor around that I could use I would love to use it which means I need HDMI/display port.
- Developing software for MacOS. I am developing FileManager for Mac and few other projects on the go. Which means Xcode and resources it requires. Also external monitor port hdmi/dp - any I can find around depending where I am.
- Developing software for GNU/Linux. which means sometimes a need for Ethernet port to track down issues.
- Using Terminal for remote connections to raspberryPi/s which means wired connections when there is a need of speed or some problem. It also means I use sd-card-reader for this too.
- Developing software for reMarkable tablet. which means VM GNU/Linux machine on Mac which requires more_storage/more_memory/more_processing_power and again free USB-A port to connect rM for speedy connection/charging.
- Making some hardware projects on the go: Arduino/ESP32/8266/raspberyyPi etc. which means periodically connecting those and I must have cable connections when something breaks and wifi would not help. I also do not need additional dongle in the chain when tracking down some problems. It saves a lot of time to have less items to check as the check itself takes time * number of times you do it. Needless to say that those devices barely work with simplest USB 2.0
I do Music:
- I play Guitar. So I need to connect a Guitar for recording/performing, which means I need line-in .
- I sing and if I wish to record it I also need external mic which means one more usb/line-in.
- I play Piano: If it's real piano the same needs for mic if it's electronic piano - perhaps line-in, if it's midi - usb.
You know at least one line-in would be great just in case I wish to connect something in creative situation for creative purposes.
I do massive Photography/Videography:
- Some times work as photographer/videographer. I have Nikon Camera with sd-cards and need periodically but intensively transfer of huge Video Footages.
Wifi for such sizes is simply not an option. I also need ports to connect few drives at the same time.
I need diff types of ports if I work with other people and usually they are not equipped. Again the difference sometimes: it's done or not due to some dumb limitations.
- I do Argentinian Tango Teaching/Dancing/Performing.
Which means I need remote control to stop/play music during the class. Where the IR port that worked fine?
I need wired audio connection to whatever-audio-system-i-can-find and if my bluetooth speaker doesn't_work/not_enough for certain halls . I would also need HDMI/DP/DVI or even VGA port to have external screen connected.
I never know wha...
I don’t take any dongles with me. Or any adaptors. My laptop case is just a protective sleeve and sometimes I bring the power brick.
It would be nice to have one USB-A port, and HDMI, but it’s not that big of a deal either.
You do. From my perspective you are barely use laptop as laptop for any serious work on the go.
Look at my use-case https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271855
this is true, yet... I'd be okay with that, to be honest.
My current work laptop (a dell latitude 7390) is a jewel also because it's got a lot of ports. I have used them all at least once, but quite frankly, never all at the same time.
So yeah, being able to unplug a port and plug a different one it's almost the perfect middle ground.
we're pretty much all carrying dongles anyway (not me, the dell latitude 7390 has all the ports i might need)
I wondered about that as well. Looking at the picture at the top of the main page, I see one small battery, and electronics that take up 2-3x the size of normal laptop electronics. Most current laptops have 60-80% of their chassis space occupied by batteries.
However, the description mentions a 55Wh battery, which is quite reasonable for a thin-and-light laptop. It says 1.3kg, which is a little heavier than desirable for the form factor (1-1.2kg), but not by much. On balance, this looks like a much more reasonable set of tradeoffs than past "repairable laptop" efforts I've seen; Framework is putting serious hardware engineering effort into this.
I think the flush USB-C dongles are actually clever in another way, you could make storage expansion bricks that have pass through USB (or no passthrough) and get more storage on your laptop beyond the one M.2 slot. It would be especially nice for video editor types, who I've seen literally velcro expansion SSDs to their macbooks with USB angle adapters [0] because dealing with dangling drives is annoying.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ljFfuzStEQ
In practice it leads to a significantly worse product for the vast majority of users, for the benefit of the minority that falls in the pro crowd and is able to get all their work done solely through USB-C ports.
But the Apple Pro crowd users tend to include a lot of audio/video professionals who have a lot of expensive devices they tend to connect through USB-A, HDMI, etc, Photographers who were big fans of the SD card readers, and business people who didn’t really need pro devices but could afford them, and were fan of the video outputs for connecting to projectors and monitors, and maybe even LAN inputs because many offices tend to discourage WiFi networks.
I think Apples big mistake was a category mistake. If they had made the MacBook or MacBook Air all USB-C, for example, there wouldn’t have been too much of an outcry. But the MacBook Pro line is the same one that carried a FW 400 port years after FW800 had been released and even after FW itself was kinda dead besides certain niche applications (which tended to be popular with Apple pro users).
The vast majority of users don’t carry a bunch of dongles around.
It’s just true. What are most people doing?
Zoom, Excel, PowerPoint, Browser, Slack, etc.
But that means when I carry the laptop around I have to carry a dongle for the mouse or not use the mouse. It depends. The mouse is ergonomic and easier on my hands than the trackpad, so I prefer to carry it. It's just one dongle, and I'm already carrying the mouse, so not too bad.
I also need USB 2 for my Yubikey, which is USB 2.0.
Before I had USB headsets but that would be 3 USB 2.0 devices and my portable hub only accepts two, so I ditched them and switched to the old wired iphone earbuds since they are light and stateless.
That also means I have to give up my ergonomic keyboard and use the flat keyboard, but usually that's OK unless I am on a long trip. If I'm on a long trip, I'll want that ergonomic keyboard after a lot of typing at which point it's 3 USB 2.0 devices and then I need to bring the powered hub with its own adaptor. I can leave that where I'm staying and just take the mouse to the coffee shop. But this adds complexity.
All in all, it's doable, I'm not complaining that it is an insurmountable obstacle, but I would prefer a computer that was a bit thicker and heavier but had more ports built just to reduce the overall complexity of the setup and not worry if I brought everything with me. When you compare the weight of the usb hub and its adaptor to the extra weight added by adding a few more ports, I'd prefer the laptop to be a bit less demanding in input requirements. To me that would make for a more mobile solution overall.
But honestly these are minor issues.
I’m just saying that that simply isn’t true for most people.
I don't need the ports that much, but it is nice when the needed ports are just there, because it is usually a selection of ports I need. Maybe other people don't need what I need, but I prefer having some occasionally port present, knowing its there when I need it.
I think this project takes a novel approach to the problem, sort of like what expresscards offered. Here, you can just add the ports you need if you need as your defaults.
what i wonder is:
- can those cards be locked in place?
- can i hotplug/hot-unplug them ?
One easy way to get it to fit would be to make the module thicker. To avoid the whole thing sitting at an angle in the existing envelope, you'd want to replace the little adhesive-secured feet with taller, screw-secured feet to give it clearance.
I'm a controls engineer and am constantly connecting to PLCs and robots in environments that don't do wireless networking. I have to deal with all kinds of legacy hardware manufacturer's IDEs and real-time protocols that work poorly with USB dongles. Of course, your expansion cards are really USB dongles, and appear to allow tool-less hot-plugging (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/expan...). I'd love to see an optional screw to retain the card, and wouldn't mind shutting the laptop down and rebooting it, especially if it meant it showed up in /etc/network/interfaces all the time and never needed to be kicked out of sleep with `ip link set dev eth0 up`.
Other desirable expansion cards would be a VGA port or DB9 serial port; would those fit?
I fear that your efforts to reach beige-box compatibility are really hamstrung by the obsession with thin and light laptops; there's no way (for example) that you'll fit my preferred keyboard (Lenovo 45N2211, out of a T420) and still have the hinges close because the enclosure is so thin. I hope you succeed, but I especially hope you produce a 15" workstation version that's 10mm thicker.
Maybe the 2mm ortho could have standard qwerty labels printed on the side of the keycaps, so it's not as obnoxious when people bind different layouts or macros.
If I were to buy one, I would also buy the 15" version. Old thinkpads are awesome.
Hope there's gonna be a touchscreen version! After all, a UI that you can't touch is like coffee that you can't smell.