I hope they succeed in this business model. In this day and age that companies and government want more and more control over our machines, we should prefer these transparent products even if it performs slightly worse than state-of-the-art.
There is a need for this, but is there a large enough market? I will look seriously at this product for my next laptop. It seems to follow a similar philosophy in the notebook market as Purism's does in the mini-PC, rack server, and mobile phone markets.
Pruism, Framework, System76 - I think it's less about whether the market is big enough, but more about other effects that allow you to survive in smaller niches.
I think today it is just became cheaper for sample companies to offer laptops that can compete with the big names. The Clevo machines of old looked really bad next to a MacBook, today, while still less nice, they are flat and light and minimal as well.
If there's anything that the past 20 years of American Capitalism has taught us: these companies should all merge, integrate their hardware and software, and then get a bunch of VC money until they are the single, truly-free personal hardware vendor in the market.
The key to the market size is that we've designed the Framework Laptop to be a real substitute for a Dell XPS, Microsoft Surface Laptop, HP Spectre, or ThinkPad for more mainstream audiences who want to run Windows 10. The size, weight, performance, display, and general look and feel are on par with those products, and then within those constraints, we've enabled customization, upgradeability, and repairability.
Today it's likely we're bootstrapping off of more niche, enthusiast audiences to reach the mainstream, but over the longer term, the mainstream helps us fuel the ecosystem to keep delivering awesome products for smaller audiences.
I can't see this succeeding when the laptop I have to assemble myself costs more than a prebuilt laptop with much better specs. I love the idea too, but the price seems a little outrageous.
I have a Purism laptop, over 2 years old now so out of warranty. The USB system had a problem last month. Purism shipped me a new motherboard at cost within a few days. I happily swapped out the old motherboard (a bit fiddly in places, but perfectly straightforward). Laptop is fine, I'm typing this on it now.
I've had problems with Dells before - if it's out of warranty then tough, nothing we can do. I had a screen fail on my 2014 Macbook - luckily in warranty so I got a new screen, but it took a week for them to do it.
And, of course, I can upgrade the memory and/or drive any time I like - they're easily accessible and stock parts that I can buy from anywhere.
I think the trade-off on price for this repairability is well worth it. If I'd bought a Dell instead of a Purism I'd be SOL and looking at the cost of a whole new laptop now.
That's the downside of such integrated components. The upside is cheaper manufacturing, cheaper less assembly, less power draw, and less physical space.
Yes. And also wouldn't pricing get better over time? I think the GP is funding it knowing full well it's expensive for now - that's the point of taking the risk.
> I can't see this succeeding when the laptop I have to assemble myself costs more than a prebuilt laptop with much better specs.
I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP. Or laptops made out of cheap bendy plastic with the latest CPUs.
Ergonomics matter, build quality matters, and for some the ability to adapt and upgrade is also part of the spec.
> I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP.
As someone doing just that (I do 99% of my work on my desktop machine), to this day I don't understand folks doing heavy development work on a laptop. If you need portability, remote into a desktop class machine. Sure there are times when you just can't (airplane, or camping in the middle of nowhere, etc) but those times are exceedingly rare.
A lot of people don't work completely from a terminal, and remote-desktop can be a pretty mixed experience. Also, this way companies don't have to issue each person two different devices (and have IT manage twice as many devices, with two different form-factors).
"Remote into a desktop"? That sounds like a horrible experience to me. I've never understood why anybody would remote control a pc for anything. If you need to code on the road, just code directly on whatever device you were going to use to remote control from. How does remote controlling some other computer make this computer's experience better? You still are stuck with this keyboard, this trackpad, this display, etc.
Based on your comments, you've never had the opportunity/need to do so. I have and I can attest that I would much rather remote into a powerful desktop PC to write code than use a mobile processor.
Maybe the software you build and its dev tooling allows you t to be effective with a mobile processor, but for my needs it's not good enough.
Those times are less rare than you'd think. I've been in plenty of situations where I've needed to develop something in an environment with sketchy/nonexistent network access. Not to mention that even in ideal conditions you're now maintaining two separate machines instead of one, and not to mention that if you're doing all your development over VNC or RDP or something you're now introducing some rather annoying latency between your fingers and your eyes.
Having done development work by remoting into another machine (specifically, RDPing into a "dev" server to use vendor-specific IDEs/tooling), I can't say it was an even remotely pleasant experience. I would've sooner preferred doing that work directly on my own machine, or at the very least in a VM if a specific OS and configuration is necessary.
If we look at a maxed out dell xps 13 with ubuntu, the cost is $1,909.00 and I can probably squeak out some additional cost with my business account.
If we look at a maxed out M1 Macbook Air it's $2,049.00 with 2TB of drive space.
The maxed out frame.work costs $1,917.00 with a 100 dollar deposit and that doesn't have a drive in because I don't trust WD with my data. If we add a 2 TB drive the cost is $2,316.00 or $2,416.00 with deposit.
Granted there are some trade offs. Take for instance the frame.work has more memory, but the dell xps has a 4k screen. I don't see any costs savings here and I still have to open this thing up, source a drive and put it all together which means I'm spending additional money on this.
It might still end up cheaper if you can say, buy less RAM today then upgrade in future when it's cheaper rather than needing to max it out today to future proof because it's soldered on.
Well, the price of parts of the DIY edition are really comparable to market price.
Price is not that much higher if the promise to be able to keep upgraded is fulfilled, I totally can see this laptop being used (and upgraded) for at least a decade.
There is literally nothing on the market that is equivalent to the PC tower you upgrade through years.
And I truly love that they made the choice to use USB-C instead of proprietary connectors for the modules. It means that if the market really exists, we can hope for third party components.
These comparisons are pretty useless because “maxed-out” means different things for each model. Maxed out M1 has a whopping 16 GB RAM, XPS has 32 GB, and Framework has 64 GB.
Never mind that it doesn’t even seem you actually “maxed-out” either because I just made a XPS 13 Developer that costs US$2,459. So now you’re just comparing arbitrarily different specs.
So FWIW, I got an XPS 13 9310 at the end of June for $1799 (marked down $200 because of a Costco special) that had an 1185G7, 32GB of RAM, 4K screen, 1TB hard drive. I also configured an almost identical DIY Framework (which will hopefully arrive today) with a bunch of extra modules (Dell just has two USB-C ports and a micro-SD). The drive-out price on the Costco (with tax, which is 10.25% in Seattle) was $1940.38.
The drive out cost on my Framework, which has a better network card, faster RAM (though the Dell RAM is soldered so it is better for battery), an SN850 SSD (I trust WD for the high-end gen4 SSDs), and better port options, was $2032.00. I could have shaved off more than $100 if I chose a different port selection (I got 8 total modules) and didn't get the AC adapter and I could have saved further money if I had chosen the SN759 and the non VPro WiFi adapter (which I probably should have in retrospect)
For $90 extra, I get something repairable, something that that will let me upgrade to 64GB of RAM (32GB is the max on the XPS 13), and something more versatile from a port perspective.
Framework didn't charge tax (that will change, I'm sure as soon as they sell the required amount in various states), but even if we account for that, that would leave us at $2240.38. I'm personally willing to pay a 10% penalty for having something more repairable and sustainable. (Also need to factor in the cost of a Costco membership
That said -- I just checked Dell's website and the Developer Edition with an i7 (1165G7 or 1185G7), 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and 4K screen is $2159.00 before tax. So that's $80 more than my identically configured Framework, but with a lower quality SSD and WiFi adapter. The Dell has a better screen -- though I prefer the 3:2 aspect ratio of the Framework/Surface/Matebook X Pro).
I understand you CAN get a cheaper laptop, but as someone who will be returning the XPS as soon as the Framework arrives (assuming it is half as good as the reviews have been), I'm looking at something that costs the exact same and is also more sustainable.
edited to correct the price different between the XPS with tax and the Framework without. It is $90 difference vs $70.
Don't forget that you'll need a backpack or something to carry it. And you'll have to unzip the carrying case and put the laptop in or pull the laptop out yourself. And you have to unfold or fold the laptop, too.
This is exactly like the Dell or Lenovo. There's no difference at all. This laptop has not innovated in any way or have any features whatsoever that might distinguish it.
/s
If you don't see value for yourself in the obvious differences of this laptop, fine. But why snipe?
I don't care for the Intel board, so I will wait to see if they can produce an interesting Ryzen card. But that doesn't mean that others should wait.
It's awesome work. They deserve a congratulations.
Many companies use essentially slave labour and pass some of "savings" onto customers. Workers here couldn't live on 3rd world salaries. I would be outraged that those companies continue to exploit people.
If Framework succeeds, then that upfront cost would eventually pay for itself as you perpetually upgrade the hardware rather than buy an entirely new laptop every time you want e.g. more RAM. Not to mention that as this catches on and Framework finds its footing, I'd fully expect the prices to come down with better economies of scale.
Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors. Turning a 1 L/min sink off for the 20 seconds of washing your hands doesn't matter when the farmer down the road is growing row crops in a desert with center-pivot irrigation system.
But other times, like this? It's absolutely a valid approach. If a high-profile open laptop like this can succeed - which is helped at this scale by individual purchases - maybe some bigger players will take notice.
A water crisis is almost always a case of using slightly more water than is available, so you can usually address one by putting the burden on whichever consumers are least able to fight back, even if they are least responsible for the crisis.
I think your comment is misleading. What was "encouraged" during the Cape Town water crisis was not "small scale efforts". There were details like forbidding hand-washing in some places (replaced by hand sanitizers), but there were also important changes. For example, they introduced a punitive water price for big consumers.
Like the OP, I think one should analyze the problem before opting for the "obvious" solution. I did so with water a few years ago. IIRC, for individuals the biggest share is for showers, then toilet. These two account for two thirds of standard use.
If you encourage people to turn off the sink more often, you may gain 20%... of 5% of their average water needs, so 1% overall. If they take fewer showers, each with less water, they easily can halve their consumption, so a gain of more than 20% overall.
1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't mean you shouldn't.
You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.
While that is true in the theoretical, it ignores human psychology. For example the Debt Snowball method has been so widely successful for ignoring precisely this black&white pragmatism.
Ahmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here.
If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it.
> fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always
This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.
> If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument.
I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?
I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't make that particular 'sacrifice', I suppose the analogy could be better. My point was that individual action may be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent the bad outcome from happening: agriculture could cause aquifer depletion even if suburban houses used no water at all, while without agricultural use, suburban houses could be incredibly wasteful and the aquifer might be fine.
In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term.
A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.
Not an entirely relevant example. The point remains: if you want the market to provide a kind of product you want, you have to cough up the bucks for it.
> Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors.
Sure. But politics of change happens only when an idea spreads. This happens only by changing your own attitudes first, and then trying to advocate it to others in your social circle. The more you believe in an idea, and personify it by adopting it, the easier it is for others to believe you and consider it.
This is what Gandhi once said:
> “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
(This is what is drummed down to the quote - "Be the change you want to see in this world".)
Gandhi was a brilliant politician and this advise is psychologically quite profound - a lot of pessimism, frustration and anxiety that we experience is because we often focus on things that are beyond our sphere of control.
(Gandhi was not the only politician to have this idea. Muhammad, whom the muslims consider their Prophet, also advocated similar ideas in Islam and this is apparent on Islam's dictates on charity. Muslims in my social circle are literally taught that "charity begins at home". Apart from the poor and the needy, they are told to keep a major portion aside and first enquire within the family if anyone is in need of financial help, and then expand their search to include friends and acquaintances. That's socialism and distribution of wealth within a family / social circle, and the effects of that can be much more profound.)
In Europe, I get 2 years of warranty in stuff that I buy here regularly.
(Not sure how the terms translate, and there are more details, roughly: 1 year is a warranty where the supplier has to prove that the defect is not their fault, second year it is the other way round. In practice, if stuff breaks in the first 2 years that is no obviously the user mishandling the device, you get a free repair.)
Here it's cheaper to import 2 of something than to buy locally, so warranty is usually a non-factor for me. But, in general it's a good reason to avoid forwarding services (especially if your part of the world has strong consumer protections like Europe typically does).
Well, the one I'd be selling doesn't have a warranty either. And if someone is okay with that, they can just import it themselves and cut out my profit share. If I were to order enough to get a bulk price and potentially undercut ordering it oneself, there's likely an expectation of a warranty of some kind being available.
This is generally the same in the US. If a product is not sold "as-is", it falls under the Federal Magnuson–Moss Warranty Act; which enforces any warranty claims made by the manufacturer. In addition, there are multiple state level legislative actions that enforce consumer protections. For this reason a minimum one-year full warranty (manufacturer repairs or replaces the item, in good faith) on new goods is the standard, followed by an additional year or two of limited warranty (if you can prove it broke at no fault of your own, they offer a repair or replacement process).
In the works! We're setting up the infrastructure now to be able to ship and provide support outside the US and Canada. The hardware itself is certified for most markets.
When my dad was teaching university classes he used to say at the beginning of the semester "You all have a B right now. If you impress me before the end of the semester, you will get a different grade, depending on how you impress me"
$750 laptop, $360 RAM, $1000 SSD. The RAM is pretty reasonably priced, but you can get your own 4TB SSD for about $500 less. $150 less if you want the exact same model they're selling.
It's a much more reasonable level of markup than RAM/SSD upgrades from other manufacturers, though of course being able to bring your own is a major selling point.
I doubt they have Newegg's purchasing power, at this juncture, and their prices really aren't unreasonable like they would be if you upgrade a Dell or Apple.
Oh sure but they could charge Newegg's price and just order from Newegg? I just feel like if I'm going to order any sort of "bundle" of items I should be getting a discount. Fundamental axiom of sales:
Well a good thing about this is you can do that. Just order it bare without any of the optional parts, and get those wherever you want.
I've been thinking of doing that (when it finally launches in the UK..!) just to enjoy the promise of being able to. Even though they're offering RAM and WiFi cheaper than I could find it elsewhere in a quick look (Amazon & Scan).
> Oh sure but they could charge Newegg's price and just order from Newegg?
Good way to not stay in business. At the very least, they need to mark it up enough to cover the credit card fees when they re-sell it, never mind the costs of the logistics of the resale operation.
On the DIY Edition, all of the off the shelf modules have a "None" option so that you can bring your own. In general we try to stay close to market pricing on memory and storage, but we can't always get there.
I had one tab with frame.work open, one with amazon, and one with new egg, and while the frame.work were usually a little marked up compared to amazon and new egg, it was extremely close. IMHO that's a great deal for having somebody else vet and test the hardware together and ship it to you in a convenient bundle.
It's a blog post on our company blog. We used to write them weekly to share more detail on different parts of the hardware and systems we're building, but took a pause as we worked through launch. We're now starting back up. We don't post these directly anywhere but our own website, email lists, and social channels, and I assume throwawaysea (who doesn't seem to be a throwaway account) is subscribed to one of those.
That's okay. You're free to write whatever you want on your blog and others are free to submit it here to HN. Even if you submit it yourself I don't see that as a problem.
My comment is that there really isn't much of substance in the article. It's very short and doesn't contain much information in it.
I like the Framework laptop, but I think this post doesn't do a lot.
You have to look at intent. I don't think the intent of this article was to create anything new, provide some intrinsic value, or serve as any kind of in-depth resource. I believe the intent of this article was to serve as a primer / entry point for the question of "linux on a framework laptop" for users who are arriving at their website via a search engine or searching around their website. It seems to already be performing well from an SEO perspective. When you own content on the internet it's not so much about just having it somewhere but it's also to ensure that the user journey is as frictionless as possible and that your information is conveyed in a way that is easy to consume.
I totally disagree. Mine is arriving any day now and one of the most important pieces of info that I needed was there. Fedora 34 will need an update before everything will work.
> My comment is that there really isn't much of substance in the article. It's very short and doesn't contain much information in it.
I agree that it's short, but I found the information very useful.
I've ordered a framework laptop (expected to be delivered today, if FedEx plays nice), and was really excited to read the content of the email. It's super helpful in deciding which linux distro I want to start out with, and has links to the forum threads where people are sorting out support for each distro.
Exactly the kind of content I need as I start down the path of getting the laptop setup.
So +1 for short, but I strongly disagree that the post doesn't contain much information.
I just ordered a DIY kit from them yesterday. One of the really big factor for me would be a decent battery life. Can I suggest the framework team to also post a base power config for Linux?
Thanks for ordering and we hope you like it! That is something we will likely do in the future, but in the meantime, there are a few good threads in our community where people walk through the optimizations they are testing: https://community.frame.work/t/performance-cpu-temp-and-batt...
I have a framework. Battery life varies between 2 (physics simulation + opengl rendering), 3 (zoom meetings on Wayland), 5 (netflix on firefox), 7 (local streaming with mpv), 8 (casual browsing with an adblocker), and 12 (coding/reading in a TUI) hours.
Note, I use sway but don't notice much of a battery difference on gnome or plasma.
I'm kind of surprised battery cells aren't one of the kinds of usbc case modules you can get out of the gate. Obviously they'd be a bit limited in mAh but tbh a lot of the time I'd probably be willing to sacrifice 2 or even 3 of the 4 modules for battery if I'm actually on the go.
(I kind of suspect you might be limited to one though, assuming the power delivery controller can only really handle one external source of power)
Would it be enough to be worthwhile at all though, even ignoring the cost of the control circuitry? (and what's the laptop going to do when it sees 5 power sources? How does it know not to charge one depleted battery module from another?)
yeah, definitely concerns there. I honestly don't know. I think it'd be interesting if they considered a single "long bay" as an option on future models that could accommodate a few battery cells or something else like an extra m.2 slot.
Some thinkpads already come with two batteries. The program tlp knows how to handle charging and discharging two batteries very well. It just does them one at at time in a given order of priority.
True. But when you have to install Windows on it yourself, a non-zero number of folks will probably end up giving Linux a try, cus why not? It's always been a huge barrier for Linux that it's WAY more work to get going, when your computer shows up with Windows already on it.
When I looked to buy a linux laptop a couple years ago, my options were a few Dell Models, Lenovo (kindof) and system76.
Finding if model XX-YYZZ supported linux and then purchasing and installing myself seemed like something I didn't want to do. So having this page from the manufacturer which says these linux distros work and here are the pitfalls is very helpful.
You start to realize the problem is it seems to take a little while for hardware to get supported so linux laptops are always a little behind.
It depends on your standards -- it's comparable to a Raspberry Pi 3B+/Pi 400.
Note that even the Pi is not OSHW. With (considerable) of effort you could order the PCBs and the components and make one yourself. You'd need to reverse engineer the rasp. It's difficult to convey how amazing that is.
Unfortunately not available for purchase anywhere right now. But yeah, were it available I'd probably nabbed one. So, thanks for the suggestions! I'll keep an eye out in the future.
I see the founder @nrp replying to a few comments here.
@nrp, can you comment on upcoming models? Would love to have a 15" or 17" model with the same swappable ports but with a beefier processor and much larger memory capacities.
The larger frames might allow for more ports, but I'm not sure if you're limited by the number of PCIe lanes on these processors.
I think a Ryzen offering would also be welcomed.
Lastly thanks so much for this product and for first-class Linux support.
I think 16-32 is the sweet spot. For specific use case I could see 64. But beyond that it would be <.1% of users. Like u would want a thread ripper or 2s at that point
What are some practice applications/usecases for that much (64) memory? I'm in the process of building a PC and I'm trying to figure out what ram size should I go for.
I can work comfortably with docker, WSL2 (VS Code remote), 2 IntelliJ, VS Code and 2 versions of Firefox (developer edition and normal, for a total of 6 windows and up to a few hundred tabs ) on 32GB.
If you have complex virtual setups (or use Chrome, according to some, I won't known since I barely touch it these days) then you might need it.
- VMs for testing eat up memory fast.
- A deep disk IO cache dramatically speeds up some workloads, even if processes aren't allocating the memory themselves.
- Running a bunch of microservices locally (we have a webpack-based app that eats 16GiB easy - yes, yes... we're working on it).
I think 64 is a bit extreme these days for a personal computer if you're not running a stack of VMs. Servers are a different story, of course.
I would also ask for a better keyboard. The one currently offered (at least with the model I am interested in), is not fit for purpose when it comes to development.
More generally, I would love if the custom keyboard community jumped on this bandwagon and we saw ergonomic keyboards (and a trackpoint) for the Framework laptop.
I pestered in one of the other HN threads about the Framework laptop that having ortholinear keys would be cool. It's technically feasible, but would be too expensive without sufficient quantity being made.
Looks to me that to allow for even the low-profile Kailh choc switches, the laptop would need to be much thicker. (The DIY laptop is 15mm thick. My PCB+kailh+bumpons keyboard is 14mm thick).
Thanks for the comment! Mechanical switches would definitely be cool but to be honest I'd already be happy with a different (more ergonomical) layout. :)
What changes are you interested in for the keyboard? I find it much better than the keyboard I'm currently typing on, a newer XPS 13: better travel and spacing. But I assume you'd find the XPS keyboard just as lacking, if not more.
I couldn't get UK layout which I find most ergonomic and it's missing dedicated Home / End / PgUp / Down keys and cursors are pretty small.
I am working on XPS 15 keyboard, which isn't great - especially the cursors are a chore to use.
If the Framework Laptop had a keyboard option with a TrackPoint-style pointing stick (and 3 physical mouse buttons between the keys and the touchpad), it would be a very strong contender against ThinkPads. Lenovo has handicapped recent ThinkPad models with soldered memory, and the TrackPoint is their only remaining unique feature.
the exact thinkpad style is probably patented but it's a pointing stick, a feature common across laptops in the past. I know for sure that some Dells (TrackStick) and HPs (PointStick) had them.
If other companies can provide keyboards with a TrackPoint [1], then I think it should be possible - disclaimer, I have such an external keyboard, the Shinobi, and the TrackPoint movement (on Linux) is actually better and more accurate than on my ThinkPad laptop.
I would have loved to buy this laptop. I did just buy a xps 13. One thing I'm always really worried about when buying a laptop is thermals. With the XPS 13 I could add some thermals pads, new TIM and heat pipes to greatly improve thermals.
Is there any info on the thermals of the Framework laptop?
Given the XPS 13 is essentially a "closed" system, if you managed to add those items then I assume your options with the intentionally "open" Framework laptop would be greater still.
This article seems to go into some details and has pictures:
"We’ve designed the thermal system in the Framework Laptop to handle 28W continuous processor load. By making space for an unusually large 65mmx5.5mm cooling fan and carefully designing our airflow paths, we’ve done this without sacrificing quietness. Our dual 5mm heatpipes and copper fin pack allows the CPU to run up to 60W turbo."
One big difference is that the XPS has the cooling on the bottom which means you can connect the heat pipes to the bottom aluminium chassis. That makes an insane difference.
The trackpad is solid but not quite to the level of an Apple product, at least when I'm running Ubuntu. I imagine as drivers improve over time it will only get better.
I personally dig the display but I am not doing anything graphics intensive so YMMV. The aspect ratio is great for editing text files, though!
I just switched to a Framework from a 2018 MacBook Pro. My take: the display is comparable, the keyboard is much better, and the trackpad is fine, but not as good as Apple's.
My experience with Mac keyboards is either with its magic keyboard for the iMac, or the mid-2012 Mac Book Pro which has a fantastic keyboard. I've touched newer MBPs, and I despise the low-profile keys.
I am currently using the DIY version running Ubuntu.
I absolutely love this laptop. It had been awhile since I built a computer (let alone a laptop). The DIY kit instructions and the construction of the machine itself are very well thought out.
I am very excited for a future where we can measure the lifespan of our personal electronics in decades rather than months.
I personally dig the resolution. I run at 200% and have the fractional scaling toggled off. It works for me but I am primarily editing text files. If you're doing anything graphically intensive, I don't really have any anecdata.
Personally I'm currently running at 1x and debating whether or not I need to scale things at something like 1.25 instead. 2x is a total nonstarter for me personally.
It's easy enough to manually configure scaling for the various things that are just browsers and I may do that, or use something like GDK_DPI_SCALE. Frankly, "browser-ish" things and the Terminal cover a very large fraction of what I use the thing for.
Fractional scaling is easy to just turn on in the Display settings but I don't love the results and don't want to really deal with what if anything turning it on will do to Steam/ScummVM/whatever. I haven't really played with it much, though.
I'm running gnome 40 on arch/Wayland and ended up settling on 2x window scaling with .75 text scaling along with the compact materia theme. This is effectively 1.5x window scaling, but 1.5x fractional scaling alone is blurry on gnome in non gnome apps. The other alternative I tried was 1x window scaling with 1.5x text scaling, but the UI feels more cluttered/cramped.
Same here. I never... NEVER do first run of anything, but I firmly believed in the business model, rolled the dice, and received my $1200 i7 DIY kit. Sold my 3 month old XPS-13 and haven't looked back. Deep sleep and fingerprint reader were the only things that didn't work out of the box, and the implementation (if you take a look at the forum) is trivial. I would definitely recommend it to folks.
Likewise. I'm running Pop!_OS on mine. When I pre-ordered, I figured there was a 50/50 chance the thing would even ship. But it shipped exactly when they said it would, and it's fantastic. I'm very impressed with Framework so far.
I also was skeptical though I had a feeling after chatting with some of the team that they would deliver. I didn't expect the level of polish in terms of customer experience--e.g., packaging, instructions, etc. Like you, I am also very impressed with Framework. It's actually amazing given how early in the company life they are.
Just okay. With tuning I'm at 8-ish hours casual browsing with low screen brightness. IIRC this puts it in the same league as the XPS 13 but miles behind an X1 or MacBook.
Exceptional. My work machine is a Lenovo X1 and IMO the Framework approaches that machine in build quality and fit/finish while being infinitely more user serviceable. It's really impressive.
I've had little to no fan noise unless I'm deliberately driving the machine hard (i.e. building a kernel). But if they do spin all the way up it's a jet engine.
This is one of those things that makes me feel like the battle is not lost yet. In a world where companies go out of their way to make you unable to actually own the hardware you buy, we are desperately in need for this.
@nrp, is there any estimate about when will we be able to buy this in South America?
I got a linux laptop from Tuxedo (https://www.tuxedocomputers.com/en) and I think the keyboard is the most comfortable and satisfying I've used. (And I have RSI so I'm fairly sensitive to keyboards.)
This looks amazing! I will definitely purchase my next laptop from them later this year. Question - to save us time, can they come pre-booted with NixOS?
This is a laptop supposed to be for power users, but why does it have such a horrible keyboard layout?
I mean cursors are probably the most used keys and they are tiny and you don't have dedicated keys for PgUp / PgDown, Home, End.
I have money ready for a laptop, but still can't find anything on the market :/
Second deal breaker is Intel. I don't want to reward this company for doing basically nothing for 5 or so years and essentially releasing the same products under different names.
I'm just a weirdo where I actually want uniformly smaller arrows: I like the half-scale "inverted T" more than having big left/right only, and I like fn-combos for all 4 arrows for PgUp/PgDn/Home/End, it's intuitive to me for them to work that way, vs. learning wherever they happen to be when they're actual separate keys.
Apple flip-flopped on this in MacBooks going from inverted-T to full-height left/right and apparently now back, and as usual other manufacturers have seemed to follow. Just waiting for the "back again" to trickle down.
This is the first time I'm hearing about the Framework laptop and… damn, it looks enticing.
Unfortunately, 13" is definitely too small for me (in terms of ergonomics). Are you planning on releasing models with a larger (and matte) screen in the future?
Also, could the keyboard "module" in theory be fully customized by the community (so as to support ergonomic layouts similar to ErgoDox, include a trackpoint etc.)?
Finally, why only 4 expansion slots? AFAIU there's no Thunderbolt card(?) yet, so I need every USB slot I can get my hands on and 2 (4 - 1 HDMI or DP slot - 1 PowerDelivery slot) would definitely not be enough!
I'm not affiliated with frame.work, but I read before on an HN thread that they are working on a 15". IIRC it was a "we can't release product details yet but we're not not working on one ;-)"
This is correct; The customization flow advertises the modules as USB4, which is a superset of Thunderbolt 3's capabilities (which itself was a superset of USB 3).
You can usually expect them to work as supersets. But I believe it's possible to implement USB4 without all the Thunderbolt compatibility, and Thunderbolt 3 has some situations where it's not backwards compatible with USB 3.
AFAIK USB4 now mandates Thunderbolt's Type C altmode.
That was Intel's concession on blocking PCI-E 4.0: they wanted to mandate Thunderbolt over Type C as the official external PCI-E interface in enterprise, when the entire industry went with OCuLink instead, due to actually being enterprise-grade (it uses the replacement of the SFF-8644 (multiuse, commonly called MiniSAS HD), the SFF-8611; some mobos use SFF-8644, and SF-8644<->SFF-8611 cables exist) whereas Type C is not.
When they got their way with USB4 mandating Thunderbolt, PCI-E 4.0 finally was ratified several years late.... PCI-E 4.0 is now so late because of Intel's ridiculous tantrum that only two generations of PC will use it, and the world is proceeding directly to 5.0. Some products have already only exist in 3.0 and (soon to be) 5.0, skipping 4.0 entirely.
i would have bought it in an instant if it had a trackpoint! i get its a pretty big ask to add something so niche that only a few people use but still, i just don't even consider non-trackpoint laptops these days. i even switched fully to using a trackpad/surface book for a year to see if i could could rid myself of the addiction but it wasn't for me. #trackpoint4life
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 254 ms ] threadIf you're wondering about NixOS experience on Framework laptop, there is this blog post I've recently read: https://grahamc.com/blog/nixos-on-framework
I think today it is just became cheaper for sample companies to offer laptops that can compete with the big names. The Clevo machines of old looked really bad next to a MacBook, today, while still less nice, they are flat and light and minimal as well.
If there's anything that the past 20 years of American Capitalism has taught us: these companies should all merge, integrate their hardware and software, and then get a bunch of VC money until they are the single, truly-free personal hardware vendor in the market.
Today it's likely we're bootstrapping off of more niche, enthusiast audiences to reach the mainstream, but over the longer term, the mainstream helps us fuel the ecosystem to keep delivering awesome products for smaller audiences.
I'm willing to take the gamble. Sometimes you have to help fund the change you want to see in the world.
I've had problems with Dells before - if it's out of warranty then tough, nothing we can do. I had a screen fail on my 2014 Macbook - luckily in warranty so I got a new screen, but it took a week for them to do it.
And, of course, I can upgrade the memory and/or drive any time I like - they're easily accessible and stock parts that I can buy from anywhere.
I think the trade-off on price for this repairability is well worth it. If I'd bought a Dell instead of a Purism I'd be SOL and looking at the cost of a whole new laptop now.
I wonder why they don't at least mark up the replacement? Or at cost means normal consumer cost and not BOM cost?
In the other end of spectrum Apple do these part swap with exact same margin as they do on a new devices + their labour.
I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP. Or laptops made out of cheap bendy plastic with the latest CPUs.
Ergonomics matter, build quality matters, and for some the ability to adapt and upgrade is also part of the spec.
As someone doing just that (I do 99% of my work on my desktop machine), to this day I don't understand folks doing heavy development work on a laptop. If you need portability, remote into a desktop class machine. Sure there are times when you just can't (airplane, or camping in the middle of nowhere, etc) but those times are exceedingly rare.
Maybe the software you build and its dev tooling allows you t to be effective with a mobile processor, but for my needs it's not good enough.
Having done development work by remoting into another machine (specifically, RDPing into a "dev" server to use vendor-specific IDEs/tooling), I can't say it was an even remotely pleasant experience. I would've sooner preferred doing that work directly on my own machine, or at the very least in a VM if a specific OS and configuration is necessary.
If we look at a maxed out M1 Macbook Air it's $2,049.00 with 2TB of drive space.
The maxed out frame.work costs $1,917.00 with a 100 dollar deposit and that doesn't have a drive in because I don't trust WD with my data. If we add a 2 TB drive the cost is $2,316.00 or $2,416.00 with deposit.
Granted there are some trade offs. Take for instance the frame.work has more memory, but the dell xps has a 4k screen. I don't see any costs savings here and I still have to open this thing up, source a drive and put it all together which means I'm spending additional money on this.
Price is not that much higher if the promise to be able to keep upgraded is fulfilled, I totally can see this laptop being used (and upgraded) for at least a decade.
There is literally nothing on the market that is equivalent to the PC tower you upgrade through years.
And I truly love that they made the choice to use USB-C instead of proprietary connectors for the modules. It means that if the market really exists, we can hope for third party components.
Never mind that it doesn’t even seem you actually “maxed-out” either because I just made a XPS 13 Developer that costs US$2,459. So now you’re just comparing arbitrarily different specs.
The drive out cost on my Framework, which has a better network card, faster RAM (though the Dell RAM is soldered so it is better for battery), an SN850 SSD (I trust WD for the high-end gen4 SSDs), and better port options, was $2032.00. I could have shaved off more than $100 if I chose a different port selection (I got 8 total modules) and didn't get the AC adapter and I could have saved further money if I had chosen the SN759 and the non VPro WiFi adapter (which I probably should have in retrospect)
For $90 extra, I get something repairable, something that that will let me upgrade to 64GB of RAM (32GB is the max on the XPS 13), and something more versatile from a port perspective.
Framework didn't charge tax (that will change, I'm sure as soon as they sell the required amount in various states), but even if we account for that, that would leave us at $2240.38. I'm personally willing to pay a 10% penalty for having something more repairable and sustainable. (Also need to factor in the cost of a Costco membership
That said -- I just checked Dell's website and the Developer Edition with an i7 (1165G7 or 1185G7), 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and 4K screen is $2159.00 before tax. So that's $80 more than my identically configured Framework, but with a lower quality SSD and WiFi adapter. The Dell has a better screen -- though I prefer the 3:2 aspect ratio of the Framework/Surface/Matebook X Pro).
I understand you CAN get a cheaper laptop, but as someone who will be returning the XPS as soon as the Framework arrives (assuming it is half as good as the reviews have been), I'm looking at something that costs the exact same and is also more sustainable.
edited to correct the price different between the XPS with tax and the Framework without. It is $90 difference vs $70.
This is exactly like the Dell or Lenovo. There's no difference at all. This laptop has not innovated in any way or have any features whatsoever that might distinguish it.
/s
If you don't see value for yourself in the obvious differences of this laptop, fine. But why snipe?
I don't care for the Intel board, so I will wait to see if they can produce an interesting Ryzen card. But that doesn't mean that others should wait.
It's awesome work. They deserve a congratulations.
But other times, like this? It's absolutely a valid approach. If a high-profile open laptop like this can succeed - which is helped at this scale by individual purchases - maybe some bigger players will take notice.
Like the OP, I think one should analyze the problem before opting for the "obvious" solution. I did so with water a few years ago. IIRC, for individuals the biggest share is for showers, then toilet. These two account for two thirds of standard use.
If you encourage people to turn off the sink more often, you may gain 20%... of 5% of their average water needs, so 1% overall. If they take fewer showers, each with less water, they easily can halve their consumption, so a gain of more than 20% overall.
If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it.
> fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always
This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.
I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?
In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term.
A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.
Sure. But politics of change happens only when an idea spreads. This happens only by changing your own attitudes first, and then trying to advocate it to others in your social circle. The more you believe in an idea, and personify it by adopting it, the easier it is for others to believe you and consider it.
This is what Gandhi once said:
> “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
(This is what is drummed down to the quote - "Be the change you want to see in this world".)
Gandhi was a brilliant politician and this advise is psychologically quite profound - a lot of pessimism, frustration and anxiety that we experience is because we often focus on things that are beyond our sphere of control.
(Gandhi was not the only politician to have this idea. Muhammad, whom the muslims consider their Prophet, also advocated similar ideas in Islam and this is apparent on Islam's dictates on charity. Muslims in my social circle are literally taught that "charity begins at home". Apart from the poor and the needy, they are told to keep a major portion aside and first enquire within the family if anyone is in need of financial help, and then expand their search to include friends and acquaintances. That's socialism and distribution of wealth within a family / social circle, and the effects of that can be much more profound.)
Indeed, there is no point in having individuals resisting the system, rather changing the system itself would bring forth the systemic change we want.
Probably better to have legislations such as GDPR in place rather than people having to install a bunch of privacy extensions in their browsers.
(Not sure how the terms translate, and there are more details, roughly: 1 year is a warranty where the supplier has to prove that the defect is not their fault, second year it is the other way round. In practice, if stuff breaks in the first 2 years that is no obviously the user mishandling the device, you get a free repair.)
So if you really, really want it right now I guess that's an option... But then it becomes a really overpriced laptop.
It will replace my 5 years old Dell Latitude E7480 (extended with third party 32G RAM and 1 TB nvme).
And my colleagues in the IT department are also interested, like ifixit it reminds them of 2012 era macbook.
Edit: Impressive as in it's low compared to equally specced big-name laptops.
:P (i too wonder which way was intended)
$750 laptop, $360 RAM, $1000 SSD. The RAM is pretty reasonably priced, but you can get your own 4TB SSD for about $500 less. $150 less if you want the exact same model they're selling.
It's a much more reasonable level of markup than RAM/SSD upgrades from other manufacturers, though of course being able to bring your own is a major selling point.
I would expect that they should be be cheaper if they want to get ahead of the game.
I mean, I'll happily sell you $100 Amazon products for $150 if you'd like. I can even charge for shipping, and not pass on the 5% cashback I get.
I've been thinking of doing that (when it finally launches in the UK..!) just to enjoy the promise of being able to. Even though they're offering RAM and WiFi cheaper than I could find it elsewhere in a quick look (Amazon & Scan).
Good way to not stay in business. At the very least, they need to mark it up enough to cover the credit card fees when they re-sell it, never mind the costs of the logistics of the resale operation.
My comment is that there really isn't much of substance in the article. It's very short and doesn't contain much information in it.
I like the Framework laptop, but I think this post doesn't do a lot.
Best of luck!
I agree that it's short, but I found the information very useful.
I've ordered a framework laptop (expected to be delivered today, if FedEx plays nice), and was really excited to read the content of the email. It's super helpful in deciding which linux distro I want to start out with, and has links to the forum threads where people are sorting out support for each distro.
Exactly the kind of content I need as I start down the path of getting the laptop setup.
So +1 for short, but I strongly disagree that the post doesn't contain much information.
Note, I use sway but don't notice much of a battery difference on gnome or plasma.
(I kind of suspect you might be limited to one though, assuming the power delivery controller can only really handle one external source of power)
There is a market.
Finding if model XX-YYZZ supported linux and then purchasing and installing myself seemed like something I didn't want to do. So having this page from the manufacturer which says these linux distros work and here are the pitfalls is very helpful.
You start to realize the problem is it seems to take a little while for hardware to get supported so linux laptops are always a little behind.
https://www.olimex.com/Products/DIY-Laptop/
Note that even the Pi is not OSHW. With (considerable) of effort you could order the PCBs and the components and make one yourself. You'd need to reverse engineer the rasp. It's difficult to convey how amazing that is.
@nrp, can you comment on upcoming models? Would love to have a 15" or 17" model with the same swappable ports but with a beefier processor and much larger memory capacities.
The larger frames might allow for more ports, but I'm not sure if you're limited by the number of PCIe lanes on these processors.
I think a Ryzen offering would also be welcomed.
Lastly thanks so much for this product and for first-class Linux support.
If you have complex virtual setups (or use Chrome, according to some, I won't known since I barely touch it these days) then you might need it.
- VMs for testing eat up memory fast. - A deep disk IO cache dramatically speeds up some workloads, even if processes aren't allocating the memory themselves. - Running a bunch of microservices locally (we have a webpack-based app that eats 16GiB easy - yes, yes... we're working on it).
I think 64 is a bit extreme these days for a personal computer if you're not running a stack of VMs. Servers are a different story, of course.
Looks to me that to allow for even the low-profile Kailh choc switches, the laptop would need to be much thicker. (The DIY laptop is 15mm thick. My PCB+kailh+bumpons keyboard is 14mm thick).
https://github.com/saoto28/pineapple60 This (for the ThinkPad T470) barely fits, and that laptop is 24mm thick.
Framework community discussion: https://community.frame.work/t/any-chance-of-trackpoint
Patents?
[1]: https://tex.com.tw/
In other words, you don't really want this laptop at all.
Is there any info on the thermals of the Framework laptop?
This article seems to go into some details and has pictures:
https://frame.work/blog/the-upgradeable-mainboard
Key quote:
"We’ve designed the thermal system in the Framework Laptop to handle 28W continuous processor load. By making space for an unusually large 65mmx5.5mm cooling fan and carefully designing our airflow paths, we’ve done this without sacrificing quietness. Our dual 5mm heatpipes and copper fin pack allows the CPU to run up to 60W turbo."
But 28W continuous is very promising!
The trackpad is solid but not quite to the level of an Apple product, at least when I'm running Ubuntu. I imagine as drivers improve over time it will only get better.
I personally dig the display but I am not doing anything graphics intensive so YMMV. The aspect ratio is great for editing text files, though!
https://www.reddit.com/r/System76/comments/k7xrtz/ill_have_w...
I absolutely love this laptop. It had been awhile since I built a computer (let alone a laptop). The DIY kit instructions and the construction of the machine itself are very well thought out.
I am very excited for a future where we can measure the lifespan of our personal electronics in decades rather than months.
Congrats to the Framework team!
It's easy enough to manually configure scaling for the various things that are just browsers and I may do that, or use something like GDK_DPI_SCALE. Frankly, "browser-ish" things and the Terminal cover a very large fraction of what I use the thing for.
Fractional scaling is easy to just turn on in the Display settings but I don't love the results and don't want to really deal with what if anything turning it on will do to Steam/ScummVM/whatever. I haven't really played with it much, though.
Beware of customs rules and import taxes in your country
It's been some 10 years since everyone seemed to have settled on the "chiclet" style keyboards, to my own sadness
https://www.crowdsupply.com/mnt/reform
I mean cursors are probably the most used keys and they are tiny and you don't have dedicated keys for PgUp / PgDown, Home, End.
I have money ready for a laptop, but still can't find anything on the market :/
Second deal breaker is Intel. I don't want to reward this company for doing basically nothing for 5 or so years and essentially releasing the same products under different names.
Apple flip-flopped on this in MacBooks going from inverted-T to full-height left/right and apparently now back, and as usual other manufacturers have seemed to follow. Just waiting for the "back again" to trickle down.
If they had that and a supported eGPU configuration (or even an option with better graphics) I would probably retire my desktop.
(I’d love to attach an external GPU.)
Unfortunately, 13" is definitely too small for me (in terms of ergonomics). Are you planning on releasing models with a larger (and matte) screen in the future?
Also, could the keyboard "module" in theory be fully customized by the community (so as to support ergonomic layouts similar to ErgoDox, include a trackpoint etc.)?
Finally, why only 4 expansion slots? AFAIU there's no Thunderbolt card(?) yet, so I need every USB slot I can get my hands on and 2 (4 - 1 HDMI or DP slot - 1 PowerDelivery slot) would definitely not be enough!
That was Intel's concession on blocking PCI-E 4.0: they wanted to mandate Thunderbolt over Type C as the official external PCI-E interface in enterprise, when the entire industry went with OCuLink instead, due to actually being enterprise-grade (it uses the replacement of the SFF-8644 (multiuse, commonly called MiniSAS HD), the SFF-8611; some mobos use SFF-8644, and SF-8644<->SFF-8611 cables exist) whereas Type C is not.
When they got their way with USB4 mandating Thunderbolt, PCI-E 4.0 finally was ratified several years late.... PCI-E 4.0 is now so late because of Intel's ridiculous tantrum that only two generations of PC will use it, and the world is proceeding directly to 5.0. Some products have already only exist in 3.0 and (soon to be) 5.0, skipping 4.0 entirely.