A bit off-topic, but kind of relevant. I firmly believe that if installing custom firmware voids the warranty of a device, installing official updates should extend the warranty.
I'm tired of sloppy updates or change of behavior that mess with how I use MY device.
At this point, I'm convinced Google is doing this on purpose. My Google TV has become slow since the Gemini update, which I wasn't asked if I wanted it. My pixel battery life gets worse with every update, etc.
Google bricked all of the old fitbit scales with a firmware that glitches out and drains the battery. There were tons of reports at the time, but the devices were out of warranty so they didn’t fix it.
I lost my google mesh network to a firmware update, ofc I didn't even ask for it to be updated, they just shipped an update that bricked the devices. Just got an "out of warranty" response after they gave me the normal suggestions of trying to reboot, etc.
Google seems to have "directives from high" where they shoehorn the latest fad into all their existing devices, regardless of whether it works or not, on a tight schedule. Gemini is the latest one.
I had Google WiFi points that worked fine, and then there was a directive to merge them into Google Home. They didn't show up correctly in the Home app for a year or so.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure the authors of software are liable for damages to property their software might cause. Regardless of whether that is the case, legislation should be enacted to ensure this and make complaints/remuneration standard and easy to extract without the costs of taking a huge company to court.
I don't know. Out of curiosity I went to framework website, found the software license for their BIOS firmware and it says
"Software distributed under the License is distributed AS IS basis, without WARRANTY OF ANY KIND..."
EU has a minimum warranty period (2 years?) on electrical goods. UK has Consumer Rights Act that amounts to a limited warranty for as long as a reasonable person would expect the item to last(!). These disclaimers are to specify that any language elsewhere that sounds like a warranty -- 'we take pride in our work and ensure every laptop meets exacting standards' -- has a silent addendum of 'not a warranty' so you can't actually win in court claiming "this didn't meet exacting standards" (ymmv).
I don't know. I'm sitting here with a framework laptop consciously NOT updating it because I'm in no mood to have my computer SOL because a company can't seem to get their shit together?
Of note, I really like my framework, and I have installed BIOS updates on the past without issue. However, there have been a lot of firmware problems and fixes that are not fixes (battery related) and then bios updates that apparently cut the sound volume down to far lower levels than before the update, etc.
A user shouldn't have to worry about installing a BIOS update from the manufacturer causing the machine to die without circumstances like power loss, etc.
I feel personally that if such a BIOS update bricks someone's device, it should unquestionably be "we are sorry, let us send you out a new board asap". They can then reflash using pogo pins and send them out to other customers.
Accountability these days doesn't exist anywhere. It's making the world shit.
I bought a Framework 13 in 2021. I was so stoked. I used it for 5 years, and of those 5 years only 1 was heavy use. I had to replace the battery and the input cover. I never had to do that before. I never had a laptop I wasn't able to use for 5 years so the repairability was actually not that much better for me. I gave up on Framework because after 5 years they still didn't give a crap about terrible battery performance on Linux distros.
I was using a Macbook Pro before. Went back to a Macbook Pro again. I don't want a Mac. I just can't find anything else remotely worth my money.
From reading online, linux battery seems to be a-lot better on the new intel board, and also if you configure linux with sleep to hibernate, you get really good behavioral performance. My experience is that the sleep states really drain the battery since the low power mode is not _that_ low power, at least with the ram I have.
For context I have a 13th gen intel with the old battery and only get ~4hrs of battery life, but generally go a week or 2 between full shutdowns, since I hibernate all the time. I can close the lid, throw it in my backpack, not use it for the weekend, and when I open it it is ready to go, not having lost charge.
I generally have a better experience than when I was on windows.
> For three years, the laptop has served me well, until Framework suggested via newsletter to install the latest BIOS update, version 3.20, with a bunch of security fixes. Unfortunately, the system hung and displayed a corrupt image on the screen, signifying a failed BIOS flash.
> Naturally, I reached out to Framework support, who told me to unplug the laptop, let the battery drain, and power it back on again afterwards, hoping the laptop would recover by itself. Unfortunately, it never did, and after giving Framework a bunch of information, they informed me that since my 1-year warranty has expired, I have no option but to purchase a new Framework motherboard, which will cost at least CA$500.
This is very disappointing.
1) Framework failed in not implementing a bootloader which takes a BIOS file on a USB-Stick and flashes it w/o requiring a working BIOS/Firmware or even a CPU/RAM. Every $70 Desktop-Mainboard worth its salt has this feature.
2) Considering 1) and that it was an official BIOS that caused the issue. Framework should repair (replacing/re-flashing the BIOS chip) for shipping fees max.
I am furious. We have recovery-bootloaders in devices with $10 bill of materials. Its not rocket science!
> bootloader which takes a BIOS file on a USB-Stick and flashes it w/o requiring a working BIOS/Firmware or even a CPU/RAM
For those unaware, this is sometimes called "BIOS recovery" or "crashfree BIOS". In short, if a BIOS update fails and bricks your motherboard, you can load the image of a known-working BIOS update onto a USB memory stick. Normally, a single USB slot on the motherboard has a special marking to indicate that it can be used to "unbrick" the motherboard. Insert the USB memory stick, start the PC, and the BIOS recovery should be automatic. I agree with the parent post: This would be an excellent feature for Framework Computer to add. From a simple Google search, it appears that their desktop computer already has this feature.
I sympathise with both parties. As customers, things like these really do test our patience. I wanted to support Jolla / Sailfish and purchased their phone but dealing with the bugs in the OS, for years, even as I was using it as my main phone, was sometimes exasperating, if not down right frustrating. At the same time, it was also disheartening to see Jolla make wrong business decisions, and struggle to stay alive as a business. Sad to see Framework struggling with their products too. It is difficult to not be angry at a company you want to support but are also pissed at because you are not getting your money's worth.
Update[20260828]: Framework made this statement(unfortunately only to the press, not on their website):
We've received reports of a small percentage of Framework Laptop 13 7040 Series BIOS updates resulting in non-bootable boards and are investigating the root cause of the issue. In the meantime, in addition to replacing in-warranty Mainboards, we are making exceptions for out-of-warranty replacements where we can confirm a stable-release BIOS update caused the board to become non-bootable.
In parallel to this, we're introducing "Crisis Recovery Mode" BIOS functionality to enable a path for failed updates to be directly recoverable. Our latest Framework Desktop BIOS release includes this functionality, and we are actively bringing it to Framework Laptop 12, 13, and 16 in our upcoming BIOS
Good story, and surprising that there was so little assistance from the OEM. As an aside, I got to test out Asus crash free BIOS a couple of weeks ago. A strong thunderstorm hit and before I could get to my office a rapid series of deep voltage drops occurred. I shut down my systems and waited out the storm. When I powered my Asus tower back on it failed to POST, automatically restarted, recovered the BIOS (CMOS settings I assume), restarted again and booted Windows. Pretty slick, and instantly removed that cold lump of lead that had formed in my gut.
I like my framework, but I do wonder if the repairability angle is overstated if you're already used to fixing normal laptops. Yes, Framework's parts are easier to find, and the laptops are easier to open, but it's not like doing any of the typical repairs - keyboard, screen, touchpad, battery - are impossibly difficult on those other guys.
Used thinkpads and the glut of EBay parts for them reach about 85% of what Framework does for me, and at half the price. But it's a different experience.
Framework does seem like better build quality than most laptops I've had, but I'm used to cheap crappy ones.
Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.
That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.
After months of waiting on preorder (in which time I could've cancelled it), my Framework 16 finally arrived just yesterday, so this is a very unfortunately timed article for me.
Mine is using the AI 300 chip and is presumably on the latest bios so this specifically wouldn't be a problem for me, but it doesn't fill me with future confidence either, though I suppose if you look hard enough you can find similar stories about any manufacturer
Don't bother with the motherboard, the new BIOS is worse. I have two that just randomly shut off whenever they feel like it. I just bought a thinkpad instead, shrug.
I really don't understand how in 2025 a competent company can't implement a trival A/B flash update. Do they depend on some obscure contractor for the firmware and have no power here?
As with many things, "It's complicated" but effectively, yes
Such system firmware is generally provided by AMI / Insyde / Phoenix and similar.
There are a few vendors who decide to go their own way (notably google using a fork of Coreboot for their chromebooks), but it's generally list of vendors that you can count on a single hand.
If it means anything I'm pretty sure AMI provides A/B updates on most products i've used with their stuff.
But that's always been the case. Phoenix and AMI have been the dominant BIOS providers for over 30 years. Both have always provided modular tookits for OEMs to customize their own ROM images, write their own ACPI tables, etc. UEFI gives even more control to the OEMs. If Framework isn't doing that properly, that's on them.
It appears that Framework contracted out the development of their (Insyde-based) firmware to somebody who, to put it mildly, does not treat them as a priority. Either way, Framework’s firmware is really bad, and that’s entirely on Framework; you can look around on the forums for the horror stories in the (open) EC code around power delivery for instance.
As another example of a vendor low-key screwing Framework in a way that I think it’s entirely appropriate to blame Framework themselves for, the first couple 13-inch models could charge off 5V chargers. The newer ones still have the necessary hardware, but whoever they get their power circuitry from cut that bit from the firmware on a newer chip version, and Framework obediently went “welp, guess we don’t have that feature anymore”.
In addition to no longer charging off 5V chargers (their first laptop could literally charge off a USB type A with no USB-PD), on the AMD 7040 I've got ~10% chance every time I plug it in to my dock that it will simply not start charging. Everything else will connect (display, USB) but power won't flow. Resolving that is as simple as unplugging and replugging in my laptop but if I don't notice until I'm in a video conference then it is a problem because my webcam, microphone, and headset are also going over that cable. Oh how I miss the OG 11th gen framework charging.
I know some higher end gaming motherboards that were targeted towards the overclocking community had two bios chips for exactly this purpose and switching between them was trivial from what I remember. If you overclocked too far, you wouldn't brick your system. It seemed like overkill to me. I'm guessing this is less common than it's worth to fix in software, but then at least continue to give support for the issue.
Original author here, and I agree. When overclocking, the most important feature is probably resetting the CMOS with one easy to reach button.
I was testing ECC previously in https://qt.ax/ecc and was trying to overclock the RAM to induce faults to confirm ECC was fixing them. Since I was using a cheaper board, I had to use keys to short the CLR_CMOS header and that got old really quick... I didn't ultimately succeed in creating a barely stable overclock that generated a ton of ECC errors, but that was a very awful experience.
Having some sort of BIOS recovery is definitely the baseline I'd expect these days, and having two BIOS chips so you can just keep using the device as if nothing had happened is the best solution.
If you need to do that again, maybe try turning the tREFI DRAM timing to the moon? That controls the refresh interval, which is very temperature sensitive. You could configure a marginally stable setting, let it boot, start running `memtester`, and then apply hair dryer directly to DRAM.
It's not a gimmick when the serious overclocking people do custom VBIOSes. Similarly for miners. That's when you need the recovery switch if things go wrong.
I own the "original" gen11 Intel Framework 13. This is a company that wasn't able to ship a working RTC battery, a touchpad that would register a click when a physical click happened, a screen hinge that would reliably hold the screen in an upright position, or a USB-A port that wouldn't consume a watt of power when unused. You expect way too much engineering from them.
I also had one of this 11th Gen Intel FW13s, and the RTC battery on mine worked for a short time because they for some reason used some garbage rechargeable one with a 2 yr lifespan instead of the more common not-rechargeable battery that every other PC vendor uses with seemingly 10x the lifespan
Heh, I remember the “remove the USB A” debacle when I had my OG.
That thing really hacked me off generally. Coming from a MBP 2016 that sipped power, the battery anxiety was real (especially standby drain), and I spent more time than I’d care to admit tweaking tlp to be still a pretty poor drain.
Then the backlight would only work in certain positions.
Love the dream, but it got sold and replaced by a MBP of 2x the price. 4years later the MBP has been used and abused like a tool, dropped from my car boot while trying to carry it and a child, and is still fresh as a daisy. I worry that FW doesn’t fit into “buy once buy well”
I did eventually tweak it to a very particular state where it had decent idle power use. Of course, it had to be re-tweaked occasionally.
Apart from that laptop, I've only ever used good-gen Thinkpads (and I'm back on one; the Framework now lives on my son's desk). The whole "we ship a screwdriver" gimmick gets old fast if you have to use that screwdriver on a regular basis (_of course_ they couldn't just use Phillips screws).
I still don't understand we are comparing a brand new company's engineering to Apple, who have been making laptops for what, 40 years now? Apple's GPUs used to over heat a fry the laptop. They used to make keyboards that would fully break because of a piece of dust, but they were riveted down so they were irreplaceable. Titanium powerbooks had hinges that would break in a year.
Because this isn’t a charity, I’m not paying to work out a new company’s engineering issues. I feel confident, based on the last few laptops, in spending £2k and having it last as my primary for 5 years or so, and then either still having some resale value, or being repurposed for simpler tasks.
Intel / AMD and BIOS vendors simply do not expose their designs to everyone. So you have to go through an ODM to have an Intel chip-based motherboard design. The silicon industry is completely rotten at this point. Framework could simply be too small to get access to secret sauce.
The UEFI spec is open. The way to load Intel ME payload isn't. You need to do it otherwise the Intel CPU is as good as a brick. It will shut down automatically in 30 mins, none of the TPM functions will work, no power management will work.
It is not just payment. Without being "big enough" and guaranteeing some big volumes of CPU sales, Intel won't give you the specs. AFAIK only ODMs and BIOS makers like AMI has the full low-level CPU bootstrap spec.
This is just the CPU. Now add the other peripherals like HDMI controllers. You'd see the problem now.
My framework was sitting in a drawer for two years and now will not turn on no matter how long I charge it. I assume there’s a dead coin cell in there somewhere or something that needs changed but it’s pretty disappointing.
IIRC the only Frameworks that have a coin cell in them are the 13-inch 11th-gen Intel ones (i.e. the OG model), and it should be right there staring you in the face as you lift the keyboard. There’s indeed a known design flaw[1] around that cell in that it the laptop isn’t wired to drain its own actual battery instead; an email to support or a look on the forums should allow you to sort things out.
I looked at the shared link. The laptop manuf is recommending that people solder a wire between two points to eliminate a coin battery from the motherboard. Wild.
Yup, I had to do that to get mine to work. It is a good thing that I am more experienced then the average bear when it comes to soldering. When it was **ed, I could still get it to boot with an AC adapter plugged in, so you can try that.
This happened to my old framework. After a while of troubleshooting, I removed the battery and it will now boot reliably while plugged in. The replacement batteries aren't terribly expensive, so I'll probably buy a new one soon.
> Still, I was very disappointed that Framework chose to entrust sensitive information to a third-party who obviously couldn’t keep the data safe.
Then you're going to be very disappointed a lot. When HIBP first came out, I worried over each incident. These days, breaches of non-payment data are so common that I don't even bother to sign up for notifications.
When it comes to PII, we live in a de facto panopticon.
This was the only point I disagreed with the author on. They used metabase, a tool for their internal employees to manage the business and review their data. It's not some crazy 3rd party marketing tool or something, it's an internal BI tool that had a zero day. More zero days are coming.
I somewhat regret buying my framework laptop at this stage, because the answer to every fault is "buy a new component, from framework".
I'm not sure I blame them for this really, but there is no competitive market of parts (or really any market at all), which means that the reality is that you're just locking your money to them. They also often have stock issues, so woe betide you if your component fails at the wrong time.
It's very hard to predict costs here, but framework laptops do seem to fail more than other brands, and their laptops do tend to be more expensive. In comparison to MacBooks I've used over the years, which other than screen delaminating, have been faultless, at least.
having 2 fw 13s this is my experience as well (and also friends who bought into FW); i was willing to give the 13 pro a try until they downgraded my order. I inevitably cancelled and went with a dell xps14 and its a fantastic laptop. I am unsure bout any future fw purchases. also my m1 macbook pro is made so well I've abused this to the cows come home and i feel like it still has another 3+ years to it..
everytime someone brings up the e-waste aspects of fw, i don't know if its that simple...because i've definitely already generated much more e-waste with my frameworks than any other laptop i've bought in the last decade
that being said, i do like the fw vision, but they might be trying to do TOO much that their quality is suffering for it
A couple years ago, my personal laptop died and that was all the excuse I needed to finally get one of these Framework laptops that everyone was raving about. I was all set to part with roughly $1700. Pulled my credit card out of my wallet and everything. Until I started filling out the order information and they said it was backordered for 6 months! Yeah, I couldn't wait that long.
I started looking at refurbished Dell Precisions and came across one that was $800 with specs not _too_ far off from the Framework 16. Not exactly what a wanted, but it ticked all the boxes and was a very decent deal. I procrastinated a bit by accident and then happened to be checking back on the morning of Black Friday and saw that they had cut the price to $400. I've never clicked "Add to Cart" so fast in my life.
Now, to be fair, when it arrived the battery was pretty much toast and the webcam didn't work, so after sourcing replacements and fixing those myself, it ended up being more like a $500 laptop. Still a bargain for a pretty damn good machine. It has done everything I asked of it. I'm very happy that I wasn't able to order a Framework and walked away from the experience $1000 richer.
My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
A modular gpu using a new standard that is form-factor specific for only a specific model?
Matte panel released a few months after the first 13.5 model was released with glossy panel as only option?
It sounds a bit fishy to me. But maybe I'm just a bit too cynical .
> My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
I think this is absolutely what you sell to investors. For it to be attractive to consumers though (and thus attractive to investors, since people actually need to buy the thing), there has to be a balance. They haven't even managed to conjure up a market for third party expansion cards, which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit.
At the moment they are living on borrowed time and good will from the tech / hippie community who want to be more sustainable and customizable. I think they have likely lost me at this point. I don't know how close they are to losing everybody else.
I think what expansion cards third parties are extremely niche (SDR) or have much better alternatives (to me, and I suspect most others If they thought about it, the 10gbE cards. Get a dock or two for the presumably limited locations you have 10gb infra and the need for it).
What most others have realised is that devices fit the 99% with USB-C, A and HDMI. Or, increasingly, just USB-C as everyone who needs one has a fleet of cheap dongles to provide just the right IO.
I see your point, but what i'm talking about is the company generating a strong incentive to people to buy upgrades or replacements.
This whole submission is about a user going extra length to recover a perfectly functioning main board (with price between 400 and 800 eur depending on model) after an official update went wrong and was suggested to buy a new one.
Mind that I am planning to buy one as well, so I don't have a bias against it. But those suspicious "features" pulled me away from the 16" model for example.
"Bricked" is a bad term for system without a proper software/firmware update path. A LOT could have been done here to improve "repairability" (with quotes, because this is a software issue on a perfectly fine mainboard).
A/B updates automatically recovering the bios is case of failed update, recovery from usb in case that somehow fails as well (InsydeH2O call it "crisis mode" I think).
Lenovo support both. Dell too afaik.
This is very much realistic to have, and I would expect it from a decent product.
A computer without this feature is pretty much designed to fail more easily.
If for some very weird reason framework was unable to offer this, then at very least they could have placed a header on the board with flashing instructions on the website, instead of advising to buy new hardware.
I mean, sure, I agree it would be ideal if BIOS updates literally couldn’t fail - I meant to ask what they could have done to resolve this situation now.
But yes, lack of an USB bios recovery path is a pretty terrible design fault, and I’m surprised that they haven’t improved this by now.
ah, you mean after the accident. Well for starter I would acknowledge the issue (thing that according to the liked thread did not happen, maybe it did not affect enough customers?).
Then they should either provide an official recovery guide instead of letting customers figure it out themself on the forum (I can see various pictures of people hooking clips to the flash chip and wondering want to flash exactly), or repair it pro-bono since it's a job that probably take ~10 mins for affected customer and it's an issue caused by a design flaw.
I mean, sure? Every other laptop company's main business is to sell laptops, so if you want those features or often time even a repair, you have to buy a whole new laptop. If you're Apple, you might need to buy a new laptop for a memory upgrade.
I've had this sort of thing happen with a Dell XPS, and their response was "purchase a new laptop". While it would be great if we had stronger consumer protection, for both economic and environmental reasons I prefer the Framework approach.
When you purchase a new laptop, you can choose a different manufacturer who may have a more durable product. When you have a framework, you're forced to buy the same component from the same company that made it poorly in the first place, if it's even in stock.
When you buy a framework, you are not forced to buy the same component from framework. You are free to buy a new laptop like you would if your laptop from Dell failed.
You didn't mention what the problem was, but Dell laptops are so ubiquitous that buying replacement parts on eBay is both very easy and highly affordable. This is one of the reasons I'm partial to Dell, even in the face of all the objectively better-designed alternatives.
Yes, one of the first lessons as a Framework owner is that "repairable" just means "it's mostly modular and you are able to buy replacement modules when things go wrong".
I can buy 3rd party: RAM, SSD, WI-FI,random Expansion cards from the marketplace. I can open and clean and change thermal paste, etc. I've heard the display can be bought from alibaba, etc.
The expansion cards always seemed a gimmick to me: it's just a USB-C port, loaded down with the extra plastic necessary to claim it's an expansion port. I guess some folks find it more convenient than a dongle, but when I'm using a laptop for portability it's rare I want anything other than USB-C. (When the laptop is sitting at home or in the office on a desk, just plug in a Thunderbolt dock and get all the ports I could want.)
My post was not a fiery indictment of framework, more that I am musing that perhaps I have been duped. Not because they aren't repairable (they are), but because I didn't consider that the quality would be so much lower than other options.
I genuinely don't know which is cheaper or better for the environment: buying a macbook that I change out every 8-10 years (this is how long they would last, based on prior experience), or I buy a framework and change out parts as they fail.
ALL thermal paste ages. There is no thermal paste that never needs to be changed.
Thats like BMW saying their transmission fluid never needs to be refilled. It absolutely does, its just financially more lucrative for them if the transmission explodes and you have to buy a new one or a whole new car.
We bulk bought a lot of Framework Intel 12th gen laptops to kit out our engineering team.
Within a year many of these (>20%) started experiencing the "400 MHz bug" where the CPU is either intermittently or constantly stuck at 400 MHz, and the laptop starts to heat up like an oven. As far as I know there has never been any conclusive fix for this issue from Framework, or even an official debugging guide.
It really soured me on the idea of repairable laptops - what's the point of it being "repairable" if you have huge fundamental flaws in the hardware that go unfixed?
I had a similar issue on AMD 7040, where it would lock too I think 800Mhz or something. It didn't get hot, it would just obviously be very sluggish until I restarted. The issue popped up a few times, but I think was ultimately fixed with a Linux change.
My support experience has been quite similar. Lots of required evidence, slow responses, and then just links to buy replacement parts in the store.
The kicker is that the things they were telling me to buy didn't even fix the problem. My fingerprint reader was very flakey, and after replacing it and all cabling connected to it, it still didn't work.
They then told me to buy a whole new input cover which was the wrong solution again. The issue was the touchpad, which routes the signal for the fingerprint sensor through its circuit board.
They also encouraged me heavily to update the BIOS and firmware of everything aggressively before really digging into any of the kernel messages I was seeing.
All that said, it's really hard to complain that for $50 and some waiting I was easily able to fix the problem.
Compared to replacing the battery on a MacBook pro which took me 5hrs and required complete disassembly of the chassis sans fans it was a dream.
Here's to hoping that framework does better, they do seem to take well to community feedback.
I have a framework 13 for. Actually the same model as OP (AMD 7040 series). I have never been as conflicted on a laptop as this one.
I do love many things about it : The whole expansion card system is awesome. It does feel a bit redundant with a simple usb-c hub that do the usual network, hdmi, usb-a, but being able to set it on the side that fit my current setup is much appreciated. I love the form factor and the screen ratio also.
The linux support have been very good for me. And being able to open it up with just one tool and have detailed repair manual is amazing.
But on that last point, it's also the first laptop in a while that I had to get into to fix something. The webcam never worked. That's not a linux issue, it's just that my fw13 is a hand me down from a previous colleague who I believe borked the webcam installation. But I don't use the webcam, so I never cared. On the other hand, when I first got it, the cpu fan was emitting a constant high pitch whine. After some research I wasn't the only one affected, and the support had me do a lot of steps before sending a replacement part (which was very easy to install, but the problem should not have been there in the first place). I also had some random crashes that I was never able to debug. The mic is very meh also. I never use it in anycase with my setup but still.
But at the same time, I don't see myself switching to another laptop. Despite all, this is still the laptop that felt the most "right" to me. I do believe that Framework has to seriously step up their support and QA game. But it does feel like it's a company that is "suffering from success". They got big investment, lots of publicities in some circle and so I feel like they have to produce and sell way more computer than the rest of the business can reasonably handle. I hope it's a “necessary evil” for them to get enough customers and revenue to start being able to attract more investment and being able to invest more in the “quality” side of the biz.
EDIT: I should say, being in the E.U make it so that I have an automatic 2 year guarantee, so I didn't have to experience the whole "just buy new parts lmao"
Honestly, this is why I like Dutch consumer law. Dutch law states that the guarantee duration is dependent on the expected lifespan of a product. Continued official BIOS support is evidence that the device remains within its supported lifetime and also dutch law treats defective or incomplete updates as non-conformity. Therefore, in this situation it would be framework fault and the device would also be within warranty.
The Australia consumer laws are also famously strong. One question: That Dutch law is not zero-cost. Does Framework Laptop charger higher prices compared to the US due to this consumer protection laws? My point: We can presume that Dutch buyers will make more (valid/accepted) warranty claims than those in the United States (with comparatively much weaker consumer laws).
Yeah, the ACL is fantastic. I have an AMD Framework 13 that had a fan bearing fail, which caused the fan to scream and spin up/down erratically. I had a long back-and-forth with Framwework support where they told me what I already knew (the fan bearing failed and the fan needed replacing) and that it was out of warranty (yeah nah, not in Australia). As soon as I mentioned the consumer guarantees under the ACL, I was invited to remove the SSD and ship the unit to their service centre for a fix.
The machine has been fine since and I still really like it.
It helped that Apple had a page for their statutory warranty in AU, so I could point to the sticker price of both machines and say "look, Apple acknowledges the consumer guarantee for at least 24 months after purchase and possibly longer, and I have paid a similar amount of money for a Framework".
> Without limiting consumers rights, Apple will provide its own remedies equivalent to those remedies in the consumer guarantee provisions of the Australian Consumer Law at any time within 24 months of the date of purchase. For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.
Framework seems pretty popular here in general, but nobody really seems to talk about how repairable enterprise laptops are. Some laptops have clips around the edge of the bottom panel to hold it in place, which frequently break. On my brother's T480s, those clips were made out of metal and held in with screws, meaning they were themselves replaceable. More recently I worked on a Dell Precision 7550 laptop, and if you crack it open everything is labeled just like a Framework. Also, before selling it I ran the onboard diagnostic. I was surprised when it told me to check the touchpad cable, because the touchpad was working fine. Took it apart again and yep, the touchpad cable was loose.
Framework really caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle, but Dell/Lenovo/HP have been selling repairable laptops to IT departments for decades. In addition, they're a much more mature product -- been selling laptops for much longer at much higher volumes. Thinkpads are the prototypical example but I actually like Dells better. Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well.
> Framework really caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle, but Dell/Lenovo/HP have been selling repairable laptops to IT departments for decades.
Yeah, but does Dell allow you to change your laptop's mainboard for another mainboard with time? That is such a quantum leap. You do not have to adjust your self to a new keyboard just because you wanted a new processor.
> but does Dell allow you to change your laptop's mainboard for another mainboard with time
Business laptops are swapped out every few years.
Reusable chassis? Literally no one asked for this, it makes no sense outside of a very, very small community of enthusiasts who think it's cool. Restricting yourself to no mechanical changes/improvements in perpetuity is not the flex you think it is.
Keyboards wear out, the chassis gets dented/scratched. Thermal requirements change.
Yeah, I started with their first laptop (11th gen Intel DDR4 ram) and upgraded to the 7040 AMD board with DDR5 ram. Now there's even newer boards available with desirable features like LPCAMM. Framework has absolutely delivered on the "upgradable mainboard" promise.
There's also 3rd party ARM and RISC-V mainboards, but I'd recommend the average user sticks to the x86_64 boards.
A chassis is 10% of the cost of the laptop. Reusable chassis just to put new hardware in isn’t something the average consumer is interested in.
Also, buying a new mainboard every few years and putting the old mainboard on a shelf is a lot less sustainable than buying a complete new laptop and selling your old laptop to someone.
The place where the framework design really pays of is the ability to trivially swap ports. most laptops have the usbc on the motherboard so a warn out connector is a $800 repair. Even those that have separate daughterboards for IO typically will be a ~1hr+ take everything apart to fix. With a Framework, replacing a worn out connector is ~$15 and 15 seconds.
I agree with your point on chassis/mainboard matching but wrt "putting the old mainboard on a shelf," Framework does have some cases for bare mainboards made by coolermaster and I think the 3d printing files are available.
This is true and when we think of it in this way, Framework's value proposition doesn't make a lot of sense.
But there are a lot of other ways to frame it that make it make a lot of sense.
There are a lot of common reasons that put laptops out of commission that the Framework sidesteps.
People often upgrade laptops because their battery is shot, or they need more RAM/storage but all the other specs are fine, or they spilled coffee on their keyboard. Maybe they cracked their screen or the screen stopped working through some kind of physical damage. Maybe they dropped their laptop and the chassis is cracked/bent and various non-critical non-expensive components are damaged, but now the laptop is "totaled." Maybe their I/O ports are worn out and broken from years of rough use.
Now, we might say, hey, a Lenovo ThinkPad is just as repairable! You can get parts straight from Lenovo!
But there's also a huge difference comparing a system that was designed for IT departments to repair versus designed for the end consumer to repair with a single screwdriver and QR codes with step-by-step guides that can be followed by non-technical customers. The question remains "will the customer bother to repair this?"
And there's also a huge gap with "is my laptop totaled?" Is it worth it to buy $400 worth of parts from Lenovo to refurbish your 5 year old laptop when the end result is a 5 year old laptop? With Framework, you have this option of turning a repair into an upgrade.
If we are going to talk sustainability, it's true that the chassis is only 10% of the cost of the laptop, but is it 10% of the environmental impact? Computer chassis are made out of metals that aren't always perfectly recyclable. I don't actually know the full answer to this question, but it's worth pondering the concept. A gallon of gas costing $5 doesn't make it more sustainable to burn that gasoline than to spend the money on something else.
Finally, Framework systems have one last trick up their sleeve: the mainboards are compatible out-of-the-box with a server operation mode, which disables all the laptop-y stuff and tells the board to run like it's an always-on desktop computer. 3D print or buy a $40 Cooler Master case for your old Framework board and now you have a very low-power server.
To add to point #1, the depreciation rate on framework systems seems quite low compared to competition when I check eBay, since any model you buy is compatible with all the parts and upgrades. There’s much lower buyer risk with a 5 year old framework than there is with a 5 year old Dell.
Actually, they do. I'm not sure if it's officially supported, but the 7550 (10th gen) and 7560 (11th gen) have the same motherboard layout, and users have reported swapping successfully in other models. You also see reports of users putting the 7560's Ampere-series graphics cards in a 7550, which only ships with Turing.
I’m assuming many people also haven’t experienced their warranties and service networks. I remember decades ago when I was a teenager and anytime my Dell XPS stopped working (or I dropped it…) a tech would come in a van within two days and repair the laptop on my kitchen table while I watched and peppered him with questions.
I love my framework because it’s the only laptop where I can design a custom plugin module to talk to my hardware and EE testbench, but DIY repairability pales in comparison to a service network where the tech arrives with a library of spare parts faster than you can get a replacement from Amazon.
The recent thinkpads are shit. They market high tech materials in the T14s machines but the bottom for a huge amount of the line is aluminium with plastic mounts glued to it. Those are fragile and break off. So really the whole magnesium alloy thing is performative.
I preferred the older plastic coated Mg chassis ones. At least they were honest about the materials.
It's a complete overstatement. The USB-C ports are still soldered onto the motherboard and their parts supply chain is shit.
I don't trust iFixit's quite frank "press handjob" because they're giving higher repairability rankings for that junk compared to Apple who have replaceable ports and a good supply chain available to the end user. Also they were all over selling battery kits for Pixel phones which are a complete pain to replace the batteries in compared to an iPhone.
Not that Apple are the bastion of repairability, just their claims are less insane than both Lenovo's and iFixit's.
My last two ThinkPads (a P40 Yoga and a T14 Gen 2) were absolute shit.
The P40 spent more time in the repair depot than in use before I replaced it with something that didn't ship with a fucked M.2 slot, a touchscreen that failed out of the box and then a month after replacement, and a battery that pillowed within a month after that.
The T14 Gen 2 bricked on a BIOS update. The pinhole reset didn't work, so it went to the repair depot, came back two weeks later with the BIOS updated. Next BIOS update bricked it again.
You make a good point. And they do have the industrial knowledge / experience to create higher quality parts than Framework. But note that the value difference between Framework's offering and the others you cited is that repairability is today a lower priority for them (due to prioritising planned obsolescence), where as it is the core value around which the Framework business is built. Why aren't we seeing more modular laptops and smartphones? Sure, people cite technological advances and how electronics are manufactured today. But a major reason, in my opinion, is that it isn't seen as profitable as designing and selling devices that are not easy to repair or upgrade.
Each new Fairphone has pushed the boundaries of what a modular and repairable phone can be, but people must accept that it comes with a very significantly higher price (although in their case that's not only because it's modular, but also fairer wages, more ethical metals, etc). The average person is not willing to pay twice as much for a repairable phone.
And don’t forget about parts availability. I can get a new screen for a 15 year old iPhone on AliExpress. I doubt you will be able to buy Fairphone 6 parts in 15 years.
A Fairphone is repairable right now but might not be in the future.
That's true. On the other hand, it's trivially easy to salvage and transplant a screen from another Fairphone. There's still people selling FP2 parts in the forums.
How is this supposed to work exactly? The company builds a product that fails quickly, so that people will buy another one? I'm highly skeptical that this works on consumers. Almost nobody will buy the same brand after the first one craps out. And I'm certain that it doesn't work on companies who will track failure rates for the product across a large fleet.
Cheap products exist because of a race to the bottom. Some consumers care a lot about quality, but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students. These companies make both high- and low-end devices, cutting corners as necessary to meet that price point while still competing on quality and features. They're not building products worse on purpose, because that doesn't work in a competitive marketplace.
Framework benefits from the same halo effect as Apple: They only make high-end devices, and so they don't get judged for the cheap crap they make. It doesn't mean either company's products are actually better than mainstream offerings at the same price point.
Even if I'm wrong, and planned obsolescence is actually very lucrative: how long do you think Framework's "core values" will hold up against market incentives? Fortunately, we don't need to rely on that. Manufacturers make good products because consumers pay for them; that applies to Apple and Framework, but also high-end laptops from many other manufacturers. If they weren't more reliable and more repairable than the low-end laptops, then IT departments would just buy the consumer devices costing 5x less.
> ... but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students.
Why do you think such a market exists? Compare it with the automobile industry, where really cheap cars (comparable to the $150 laptops) don't really exist. Instead we have a flourishing second-hand market, and people will still buy a good-quality, used car over a cheaper, lower quality one. Why? Repairability. Why would I buy a cheap low quality Automobile, if I can buy a good quality car that I can repair as needed. A market for cheaper laptops exist because you fear buying an older computer as you fear it may no longer be repairable or upgradeable.
Your link doesn't really work right, but note that light bulbs are not at all planned obsolescence. It's been known for a long time that making the filament temperature of an incandescent bulb hotter makes it brighter, more efficient, and whiter, but also burn out faster, due to the tungsten sublimating. Anybody can make a super-long-lasting bulb that is really dim, inefficient, and dull just by making the filament temperature lower. Nobody will ever buy one to actually light their home, because it sucks compared to the competition, but it can run for a crazy long time in a museum or something. And the useless museum bulb will cause a bazillion news and blog articles to be written in support of a mostly-false narrative that we don't make things to last.
You are right... I personally own a T480s and it is a remarkable device, which can be repaired just like the framework (although most parts are no longer available new). I added a glass trackpad (which is way better than the original) and ordered a WQHD Display + Cable to upgrade from FullHD to WQHD (2560x1440?). Batteries can be replaced, RAM can be upgraded (in a way, part of it is soldered) and everything has a unique part number that can be easily researched.
However, newer Lenovo Devices (like the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15 Aura Edition which I would love to buy) are not that repairable any more. Sometimes I think it is for a reason, sometimes I think it may just be no longer reasonable. Even Framework claimed that their Desktop Ryzen 395+ RAM timings were to tight to allow using LPCAMM2 and if you'd like to get the last bit of performance out of a machine, short traces and soldered connections may be the only remaining option, even for SSDs. Additionally, OLEDs didn't make it into Frameworks notebooks yet and that might be a similar reason - harder repairability.
Whatever the reason is, I like Frameworks philosophy of LISTENING to customers and maybe their success has changed the way bigger vendors produce there stuff (if only a little bit). I'm not expecting Apple to do this, but at least HP and Dell seem to have slightly changed their path of vendor locking to be more repairable again.
I would bet that this story of a failed BIOS update reaches the support anytime soon and they provide a repair guide or maybe a replaceable BIOS chip. Stories like this are somehow sad but at least they help to improve.
BTW: Dell has great repairable business notebooks (I recently switched to a cheap Latitude 5420 - the T480s was getting to slow for some tasks), but there are caveats I immediately noticed and most people don't think of:
- Keyboard Backlight is way too bright in the lowest setting
- Keyboard layout is a bit off
- It cannot be opened with one hand
- Display Brightness steps are to low (using the ALT key could increase / decrease the step size, like in MacBooks)
- Display Brightness cannot be set to "off" / black screen (this only works on macbooks)
- The Dell 5520 Trackpad is horrible
- Nobody except Apple supports AudioJack-Headphones remotes for controlling audio playback and volume (with USB-C to audiojack Adapters this works out of the box on Linux)
> I would bet that this story of a failed BIOS update reaches the support anytime soon and they provide a repair guide or maybe a replaceable BIOS chip. Stories like this are somehow sad but at least they help to improve.
Original author here. I like your optimism, but I've linked multiple threads on their forums with people doing the same problem going back over a year. I also pieced together most of the stuff from people doing external flashing on the forums. Still, no official guides, no changes as far as I can tell. This post is the most detail repair guide available right now.
If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
Thank you for making this guide. The knowledge in it can be transferred to other Brands, too.
> I like your optimism, but...
Well, I'm not saying framework is perfect. The Hardware is expensive, inferior to bigger brands and, as you stated, support is worse. The repairability promise is hardly relevant as long as you're keeping your notebook > 5 years taking good care of it like most people. The switchable ports are a nice gimmick but not a total game changer. However, I really hope they succeed while keeping most of their promises and not actively preventing repair like e.g. Apple.
> If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
That's the way it goes. As long as only few people raise their hand, nothing changes. That's why I'm thankful you kept going... Now it is likely you actually changed something for the better
In today's blog post, we are all studying the enshittification of the BIOS.
In general, I agree with you that the bigger laptop makers can repair laptops and do an amazing job.
What we're all here for though is 2026. No big company is coming to fix your machines, even big companies are waiting 30+ days for parts availability from the big company bros they bought from. If you're a consumer, forget about it.
"Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well." I'm calling BS here. Dell and HP hide their limited, paltry Linux offerings in the back of their website. Define your use of "many."
Now we're down to the BIOS. Today's blog post encountered a failed BIOS update, and takes Framework to task for it. Some of the support team at Framework are really cool and would probably have detected this customer is https://xkcd.com/806/
This time he got the strict script follower for customer support. I hope it blows up on Framework.
This is how I define "many." Dell in particular seems to certify lots of laptops for Ubuntu support, even if they don't sell them with Ubuntu. It's not just their enterprise offerings, either; I see lots of consumer models.
There's repairable and there's repairable and it's not quite as obvious as it seems.
The big issue we see on our Dell and Lenovo units is broken USB-C ports and the only repair method possible there is replace the motherboard. No ports on daughterboards like the MacBooks. And you can't just buy the parts from most vendors. Dell is utterly impossible and with Lenovo half the time they don't actually have any of the parts available or somehow manage to fuck up their shipping so they never turn up. Had to charge back Lenovo/Digital River twice. Zero support at all and impossible to contact anyone. And the whole PART NOT USER SERVICEABLE in the HMMs.
If you want Dell/Lenovo repairs just buy two of whatever.
At the same time iFixit are gushing all over Lenovo who are hell and pissing on Apple. The Apple who don't have this problem and I seem to have no problem getting parts for from their official parts store, the parts actually turn up and work.
Arent the USB ports on the framework also soldered on? I’m looking at a picture of the motherboard right now. Unlike my MacBook it doesn’t use a daughter board for the ports. It’s straight on the main board. Seems less repairable than my MacBook.
Most people I know don't own enterprise computers. They are pretty pricy and visually tame - not really made for consumers. To me, buying a framework is more about ideology than them being the best at everything. You can't expect them to be the best when starting out either. I am buying a future.
I don't think any framework owner seriously thinks they are buying the most repairable laptop in the world or the most cost effective laptop in the world.
I don't disagree, but consider that second hand machines are of unknown state, and often have no (or limited) warranty. Just like with a second hand car, there is a higher maintenance burden. How does an average joe know if a machine on ebay is great? If the answer is "they have to learn how to spot a good one", it is already an increased burden.
People like you and I are happy with this, but the average person could not care less about computers and simply need something to send emails, do taxes, and browse the internet. They don't want that extra burden, they want something that is guaranteed to "just work".
Proper second hand refurbishment pipelines that are well known and trusted is something we should aim for and want, but I believe the current state is that people want new and want cheap new. What is wrong with wanting cheap + new, and wanting laptop producers to cater to this?
99.9% to 100% feedback over 10,000 transactions has done the trick for me. EZ.
People would buy refurbs a lot more if they were more noticeable/marketed. People “want” whatever electronics are on the shelf in front of them when it’s time to buy, if we’re talking general public now (I wasn’t trying to).
The main firms refurbing are also selling new, and so aren’t in a rush to eat their own lunch.
> nobody really seems to talk about how repairable enterprise laptops are
Thinkpads have been a meme since the early 2010s.
It's funny to bring up the T480/s as positive example because I remember people complaining about anything past ~xx20 series.
> caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle
Framework is a reaction to the cult following a lot of the business laptops had. When people are spending $$ to retrofit modern mainboards to vintage Thinkpad chassis you know there's enthusiast money to be made there.
I've been repairing my laptops for a long time. I loved my dell laptops for field work. Swappable batteries especially! Framework, for me, was just the natural extension of that, geared towards multi-use that included reconfigurability, which dell never had, and more compact overall.
On balance, I think the framework has been a cool talking point, but yes, a 2015 dell would have supported all the improvements I made over time to my framework, provided it had all the ports I needed originally. It'd have definitely been bulkier though!
I think the context into which Framework introduced repairable laptops is mainly the Mac dev crowd who've only ever experienced Apple's glued together brick with serial number locked parts that gets replaced whole or not at all.
I mean, I needed to replace my thinkpad x1 carbon gen 3 keyboard and I started looking at videos and... You can do it, but it's absolutely bonkers what you need to do.
I think cases like this should be brought before a small claims court. It seems unfair. The company (Framework Computer) provided the software, but the software is faulty and broke ("bricked") the laptop. Can you imagine if a GPU driver caused the card to get bricked? Even if out of warranty, surely the manuf would be legally liable in many jurisdictions for this faulty driver.
The author's LinkedIn profile[1] tells me that this person lives/works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While the issue is already fixed, for others affected with the same issue, I would suggest the small claims route. Make sure to talk with an LLM to follow the correct steps to gather and prepare evidence for your claim. If you are lucky enough to win, then you should "go nuclear" on social media (and their own forums) to share the win and the exact details about how you did it. Framework Computer will surely (1) cave and provide replacements or (2) be flooded with small claims about this issue.
You're right, for you, since you had the ability to do the repair yourself (although Framework shouldn't have made you invest the time and effort it took to repair this on your own). The legal route would still be a good way to go for others who were forced to buy a new board though. Hopefully your site helps people avoid the time and trouble of going to court or the costs of a replacement.
People doing what you've done, documenting the problem you had and the steps you took to fix it, are what make the internet great. You also get bonus points for having that information well formatted/presented and accessible. Even without JS the page displays nicely, images included. Thank you for that! I may never need the information for myself, but I'm grateful that you took the time to put it out there.
You beat me to it! That is exactly my point: An LLM can guide you to find the forms, fill them, and gather your evidence. Even the cheapest lawyer will far exceed the 500 USD repair fee that is the basis of your small claims lawsuit!
Another thing (this is me guessing here): The standard for evidence and "legal excellence" must be far lower for small claims court, compared to regular district court. The whole point is to provide a very low cost way for average citizens to sue other citizens or companies for recourse. As I understand, most small claims courts don't need or require a lawyer.
Related anecdote: This year, there was a story of a single Japanese mother using an LLM to file a lawsuit against the father to establish paternity[1]. (Note: This was family court, which, again, will have many people attending that cannot afford a lawyer, but the judge will show care that they receive fairness, given their limited knowledge of the law.)
Can you actually point out one thing he said that's wrong? Seems like your whole post history is just blindly raging against AI. I don't even see how AI psychosis applies to what GP wrote, it's not totally detached from reality as those subjects tend to be.
Read the court's forms and instructions then. LLMs are notoriously inaccurate regarding the law and conflating every legal system. Going in blind is better than going in misled by an "AI".
This problem was not the natural result of "exiting". There is no reason FW couldn't supply a recovery method. That's not "hey that's life on the bleeding edge!" For that matter, the whole product isn't bleeding edge since years ago anyway.
Someone else noticed that there is actually a (unpopulated) header for flashing, which avoids the janky pogo pin thing even unpopulated. Why didn't fw point him at it when explicitly asked? And even if they had, where is the firmware image to use with it? They have it, so there is nothing about the "exiting" nature of the product that stops them from saying something more helpful than "throw the motherboard away".
FWIW I bricked a ThinkPad motherboard not that long ago by toggling the wrong BIOS options. Wasn't even a BIOS update (although ironically that would've fixed it), just toggling setting in the F2 Setup Menu. The target configuration was supported, but apparently there was a BIOS bug where if you toggled two different settings without rebooting inbetween, it bricked the motherboard (technically people online found some solutions that involved resoldering chips on the mobo but that's a little outside of my comfort zone). I believe it was Quiet Boot and... some sort of Thunderbolt controller mode? But I don't remember exactly.
The entire USB-C situation with the Frameworks (I have both the original gen 11 and the AMD 7040) is a massive train wreck. They have clearly given up on fixing it. Only some of my ports work, and not reliably. Th EC controller is a bug fest. If you don't believe me, check their forums. I wish I could get back all the hours I spent debugging this, to no avail.
This systemic lack of support for the product for two problems of their own making, both the original design flaw of inadequate recovery from a broken BIOS and producing a bad BIOS for some models and actually encouraging its installation, is more than alarming.
My primary concern about Framework was if they would survive so they were capable of following up on their goal of modular upgrades. That was a risk that I was willing to take.
However, that a company that targets a market segment of fairly sophisticated technologists would fail this badly on _both_ engineering and customer support is a deal killer.
Framework is not even on the shopping radar now for me.
I know that firmware (and in general, software) has bugs. But I wonder why modern firmware for UEFI has to be so complex, that it needs updates on a regular basis. It would be nice to have a dead-simple hardware-initialisation system that doesn't need regular updates and that only has very limited attack surface.
That is the dream isn't it? But there's no such thing since even a simple one that requires no updates would have some sort of vulnerability that needs an update, and the cycle continues.
Not a hardware engineer so feel free to fact-check all of this.
My understanding is Coreboot is a minimum-viable firmware implementation to get your hardware initialized ... and not much else.
Once Coreboot is ready you then use "Payloads".
Payloads can be as varied as booting into Linux directly, GRUB directly, or a whole UEFI/BIOS implementation.
SeaBIOS is a whole FOSS BIOS implementation (commonly used for emulators like QEMU) and is somewhat tractable according to my prior research (~50k lines of C).
My comment about CPU support is due to modern systems using UEFI - the payload for that is TianoCore EDK2. It's quite large (900k+ lines) and while it has much more eyes on it, if minimalism is what you're looking for I doubt it would qualify.
That leaves you with systems from before ~2013 or so - assuming you can even flash Coreboot to them, which only supports a handful of systems.
I suppose you could just jump into Linux though. Perhaps it's silly to do anything else.
If the update is only for supporting new hardware, then there is usually no benefit to the user. They already have a machine that is supported by a previous firmware version. Only in those cases where a user upgrades the hardware there might be a benefit.
Why can't the BIOS/UEFI offer some basic initialisation functionality and then the OS (Linux, Windows, ...) does a more advanced initialisation? Why does it have to be so complicated?
The bootloader part of UEFI FW is quite straightforward. It requires updates due to vulnerabilities found in it and also to update certificates.
However modern FW of PC clones don't only contain a bootloader and a "simple" hardware initializer. Modern laptops have tens of sensors, power measuring parts, power controllers, completely remote management (Intel ME / AMD PSP), embedded controller code for fingerprint, embedded controller code for keyboard etc.
Companies ship a new product line every single year. This churn causes nothing but shitty FW to be developed. Moreover the component manufacturers also slightly change things every single year. That's why sleep sucks with PCs. That's why Fn shortcuts don't always work correctly. That's why batteries drain.
Everything is fixed in the 6 months to a year following the launch in PC industry. Then they start to work on the new model and only supply security updates.
While it's nice to know that I can buy a $100 replacement keyboard (I'm about 6 months out of warranty) it's also frustrating that Framework wouldn't own up to what is obviously a manufacturing failure.
I recommend people who have a soldering iron to start experimenting with enameled wire. It's easily sourced from any random coil/inductor/switching transformer/broken speaker even. Dip the tip of the wire in some flux and keep it on the tip of the iron for a bit so enamel clears away and tins the wire.
This way you can solder the thin wires in crammed places, don't have to stress about them shorting out anything they touch, easily routable and they don't put stress on the solder joint, like a regular thicker wire would.
Working with this type of wire made things easier for me in these sorts of situations. And it's perfectly adequate for signal (withing reason, if not very high speed), and even some power, few mA needed for these kinds of chips is no issue.
I had the same thing happen to me with my Thinkpad Nano, and researching how to fix this made me realize pc manufacturer really don't care.
PC bricked from BIOS update are still ultra common.
I uploaded a dump of the flash [1] in the bad state and they somehow analyzed it and made a fix.
Great for others I guess, but I'm still mindblown that the regular path would have been that this perfectly working laptop to this day become ewaste.
Being an embedded dev, I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins. Or some DFU mode you can boot into.
> I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins
Not enough of these cases happen under warranty for them to bother (and out of warranty cases are either neutral, or even beneficial to them if they drive sales of new hardware).
Lenovo also just had it happen with their Legion Go. They finally pulled the BIOS from distribution, but doesn't sound like they're doing anything to help the victims whose devices got bricked by a bad update.
Yep, you can do a DFU recovery on a Mac from another Mac over USB. Same as if it were an iPhone/iPad. Which makes sense since it's basically the same hardware.
In PCs it's usual for a lot of motherboards have a dual bios, so if something fails (eg no POST) in the update, the mobo fall backs to the other one. It's a cheap chip in bulk, that would help a lot in cases like this.
I really like what Framework is trying to do but this story is very hard to ignore. If a failed BIOS update can brick the machine, and the official solution is a CA$500+ motherboard (that's about $350+ USD I belieive), there's still a pretty big gap between being modular and being truly repairable
Not to mention there are no "alternatives" that you can look into to purchase these replacements. You are essentially just locked to purchasing from Framework only
As far as I am aware a failed bios/firmware update on any device can cause it to brick, thats why they always come with massive warnings everywhere. I personally do not just do bios updates because some OEM marketing said so. The old saying does me well, "If it aint broke dont fix it"
Yeah but this is true for every laptop vendor. Framework is not worse here, and yes, Framework is supposed to be better, but it cannot be better in everything at once. It is already better that you only need to buy a 350USD motherboard instead of a 1200 Euro laptop.
Are there any reports out there of macbook OTA updates causing laptops to become entirely unbootable with no recovery options (and, in case it actually happened, Apple refusing to fix/replace affected laptops at no extra cost)?
I am yet to hear of it being a thing, and I would love to be proven wrong.
Having said that, MacBook is a very homogenous machine with minimal choices (which can be a good thing) so testing upgrades patches on them should be fairly easy as compared to other vendors (a good outcome of that thing).
With framework and effectively with other vendors, this is where a lot of problems come from. And the problem is significantly harder.
the conclusion section is a pretty damning and disappointing read.
i'm realizing that framework's marketing swayed my opinion a lot more than i thought. i was seriously considering a framework laptop when my current one dies, but i'll probably just end up going with a thinkpad again, as the level of serviceability seems a lot closer than i was lead to believe.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 16.7 ms ] threadI'm tired of sloppy updates or change of behavior that mess with how I use MY device.
At this point, I'm convinced Google is doing this on purpose. My Google TV has become slow since the Gemini update, which I wasn't asked if I wanted it. My pixel battery life gets worse with every update, etc.
At this point I’m comfortable saying that on device “Smart TV” software is a crime against humanity, full stop.
I had Google WiFi points that worked fine, and then there was a directive to merge them into Google Home. They didn't show up correctly in the Home app for a year or so.
That sounds like a big incentive to never ship updates.
Of note, I really like my framework, and I have installed BIOS updates on the past without issue. However, there have been a lot of firmware problems and fixes that are not fixes (battery related) and then bios updates that apparently cut the sound volume down to far lower levels than before the update, etc.
A user shouldn't have to worry about installing a BIOS update from the manufacturer causing the machine to die without circumstances like power loss, etc.
I feel personally that if such a BIOS update bricks someone's device, it should unquestionably be "we are sorry, let us send you out a new board asap". They can then reflash using pogo pins and send them out to other customers.
Accountability these days doesn't exist anywhere. It's making the world shit.
I was using a Macbook Pro before. Went back to a Macbook Pro again. I don't want a Mac. I just can't find anything else remotely worth my money.
For context I have a 13th gen intel with the old battery and only get ~4hrs of battery life, but generally go a week or 2 between full shutdowns, since I hibernate all the time. I can close the lid, throw it in my backpack, not use it for the weekend, and when I open it it is ready to go, not having lost charge.
I generally have a better experience than when I was on windows.
> Naturally, I reached out to Framework support, who told me to unplug the laptop, let the battery drain, and power it back on again afterwards, hoping the laptop would recover by itself. Unfortunately, it never did, and after giving Framework a bunch of information, they informed me that since my 1-year warranty has expired, I have no option but to purchase a new Framework motherboard, which will cost at least CA$500.
This is very disappointing.
I am furious. We have recovery-bootloaders in devices with $10 bill of materials. Its not rocket science!We've received reports of a small percentage of Framework Laptop 13 7040 Series BIOS updates resulting in non-bootable boards and are investigating the root cause of the issue. In the meantime, in addition to replacing in-warranty Mainboards, we are making exceptions for out-of-warranty replacements where we can confirm a stable-release BIOS update caused the board to become non-bootable.
In parallel to this, we're introducing "Crisis Recovery Mode" BIOS functionality to enable a path for failed updates to be directly recoverable. Our latest Framework Desktop BIOS release includes this functionality, and we are actively bringing it to Framework Laptop 12, 13, and 16 in our upcoming BIOS
But now I'm reconsidering. Not standing behind their own BIOS update is pretty horrible.
Used thinkpads and the glut of EBay parts for them reach about 85% of what Framework does for me, and at half the price. But it's a different experience.
Framework does seem like better build quality than most laptops I've had, but I'm used to cheap crappy ones.
That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.
Mine is using the AI 300 chip and is presumably on the latest bios so this specifically wouldn't be a problem for me, but it doesn't fill me with future confidence either, though I suppose if you look hard enough you can find similar stories about any manufacturer
Such system firmware is generally provided by AMI / Insyde / Phoenix and similar.
There are a few vendors who decide to go their own way (notably google using a fork of Coreboot for their chromebooks), but it's generally list of vendors that you can count on a single hand.
If it means anything I'm pretty sure AMI provides A/B updates on most products i've used with their stuff.
As another example of a vendor low-key screwing Framework in a way that I think it’s entirely appropriate to blame Framework themselves for, the first couple 13-inch models could charge off 5V chargers. The newer ones still have the necessary hardware, but whoever they get their power circuitry from cut that bit from the firmware on a newer chip version, and Framework obediently went “welp, guess we don’t have that feature anymore”.
They definitely have FW team inhouse, but idk if that team handle the EC too.
Two BIOS chips was supposed to protect you from bad BIOS updates or a bad BIOS mod, just like the scenario from TFA.
I was testing ECC previously in https://qt.ax/ecc and was trying to overclock the RAM to induce faults to confirm ECC was fixing them. Since I was using a cheaper board, I had to use keys to short the CLR_CMOS header and that got old really quick... I didn't ultimately succeed in creating a barely stable overclock that generated a ton of ECC errors, but that was a very awful experience.
Having some sort of BIOS recovery is definitely the baseline I'd expect these days, and having two BIOS chips so you can just keep using the device as if nothing had happened is the best solution.
I was under the impression that GPU overclocking, overvoltage and fan curve settings were not persistent across reboots.
Why don’t the OEMs of GPUs aimed at OCing just ship with a BIOS that exposes more tweaks through software though…
That thing really hacked me off generally. Coming from a MBP 2016 that sipped power, the battery anxiety was real (especially standby drain), and I spent more time than I’d care to admit tweaking tlp to be still a pretty poor drain.
Then the backlight would only work in certain positions.
Love the dream, but it got sold and replaced by a MBP of 2x the price. 4years later the MBP has been used and abused like a tool, dropped from my car boot while trying to carry it and a child, and is still fresh as a daisy. I worry that FW doesn’t fit into “buy once buy well”
I did eventually tweak it to a very particular state where it had decent idle power use. Of course, it had to be re-tweaked occasionally.
Apart from that laptop, I've only ever used good-gen Thinkpads (and I'm back on one; the Framework now lives on my son's desk). The whole "we ship a screwdriver" gimmick gets old fast if you have to use that screwdriver on a regular basis (_of course_ they couldn't just use Phillips screws).
I still don't see how Framework's relative youth compensates my issues.
I don’t have the same confidence in FW
Intel / AMD and BIOS vendors simply do not expose their designs to everyone. So you have to go through an ODM to have an Intel chip-based motherboard design. The silicon industry is completely rotten at this point. Framework could simply be too small to get access to secret sauce.
If you are willing to pay, you can design from scratch everything.
It is not just payment. Without being "big enough" and guaranteeing some big volumes of CPU sales, Intel won't give you the specs. AFAIK only ODMs and BIOS makers like AMI has the full low-level CPU bootstrap spec.
This is just the CPU. Now add the other peripherals like HDMI controllers. You'd see the problem now.
[1] https://guides.frame.work/Guide/RTC+Battery+Substitution+on+...
Then you're going to be very disappointed a lot. When HIBP first came out, I worried over each incident. These days, breaches of non-payment data are so common that I don't even bother to sign up for notifications.
When it comes to PII, we live in a de facto panopticon.
I somewhat regret buying my framework laptop at this stage, because the answer to every fault is "buy a new component, from framework".
I'm not sure I blame them for this really, but there is no competitive market of parts (or really any market at all), which means that the reality is that you're just locking your money to them. They also often have stock issues, so woe betide you if your component fails at the wrong time.
It's very hard to predict costs here, but framework laptops do seem to fail more than other brands, and their laptops do tend to be more expensive. In comparison to MacBooks I've used over the years, which other than screen delaminating, have been faultless, at least.
everytime someone brings up the e-waste aspects of fw, i don't know if its that simple...because i've definitely already generated much more e-waste with my frameworks than any other laptop i've bought in the last decade
that being said, i do like the fw vision, but they might be trying to do TOO much that their quality is suffering for it
How so? Most FW parts seem quite resellable, did you just throw them away after upgrading or something?
I started looking at refurbished Dell Precisions and came across one that was $800 with specs not _too_ far off from the Framework 16. Not exactly what a wanted, but it ticked all the boxes and was a very decent deal. I procrastinated a bit by accident and then happened to be checking back on the morning of Black Friday and saw that they had cut the price to $400. I've never clicked "Add to Cart" so fast in my life.
Now, to be fair, when it arrived the battery was pretty much toast and the webcam didn't work, so after sourcing replacements and fixing those myself, it ended up being more like a $500 laptop. Still a bargain for a pretty damn good machine. It has done everything I asked of it. I'm very happy that I wasn't able to order a Framework and walked away from the experience $1000 richer.
A modular gpu using a new standard that is form-factor specific for only a specific model? Matte panel released a few months after the first 13.5 model was released with glossy panel as only option?
It sounds a bit fishy to me. But maybe I'm just a bit too cynical .
I think this is absolutely what you sell to investors. For it to be attractive to consumers though (and thus attractive to investors, since people actually need to buy the thing), there has to be a balance. They haven't even managed to conjure up a market for third party expansion cards, which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit.
At the moment they are living on borrowed time and good will from the tech / hippie community who want to be more sustainable and customizable. I think they have likely lost me at this point. I don't know how close they are to losing everybody else.
What most others have realised is that devices fit the 99% with USB-C, A and HDMI. Or, increasingly, just USB-C as everyone who needs one has a fleet of cheap dongles to provide just the right IO.
Manufacturer lets you replace each part separately: it's a conspiracy to make money
This whole submission is about a user going extra length to recover a perfectly functioning main board (with price between 400 and 800 eur depending on model) after an official update went wrong and was suggested to buy a new one.
Mind that I am planning to buy one as well, so I don't have a bias against it. But those suspicious "features" pulled me away from the 16" model for example.
If I understand correctly, the problem was that the board was the exact opposite of that. The post title uses the phrase “bricked”.
I agree that FWs handling was pretty bad, but then again, what exactly is the proposed ideal-but-realistic solution they should have offered here?
ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3 utility. That's from a 10-year-old MB. Probably a few other examples.
A/B updates automatically recovering the bios is case of failed update, recovery from usb in case that somehow fails as well (InsydeH2O call it "crisis mode" I think). Lenovo support both. Dell too afaik. This is very much realistic to have, and I would expect it from a decent product. A computer without this feature is pretty much designed to fail more easily.
If for some very weird reason framework was unable to offer this, then at very least they could have placed a header on the board with flashing instructions on the website, instead of advising to buy new hardware.
But yes, lack of an USB bios recovery path is a pretty terrible design fault, and I’m surprised that they haven’t improved this by now.
They could have also had the BIOS chip be socketable and sold it individually pre-programmed.
I agree not everyone does this, but its not like some incredibly out there idea.
I can buy 3rd party: RAM, SSD, WI-FI,random Expansion cards from the marketplace. I can open and clean and change thermal paste, etc. I've heard the display can be bought from alibaba, etc.
I can't even open my Mac.
Like Airpod after all is just a bluetooth earphone, but it is way more successful than traditional one.
You know what’s even better than easily changed thermal paste?
A laptop that doesn’t need it changed.
Land Rover guys love to say how easy they are to repair, and forget to mention they need ten times as many repairs as other vehicles.
My post was not a fiery indictment of framework, more that I am musing that perhaps I have been duped. Not because they aren't repairable (they are), but because I didn't consider that the quality would be so much lower than other options.
I genuinely don't know which is cheaper or better for the environment: buying a macbook that I change out every 8-10 years (this is how long they would last, based on prior experience), or I buy a framework and change out parts as they fail.
Thats like BMW saying their transmission fluid never needs to be refilled. It absolutely does, its just financially more lucrative for them if the transmission explodes and you have to buy a new one or a whole new car.
Within a year many of these (>20%) started experiencing the "400 MHz bug" where the CPU is either intermittently or constantly stuck at 400 MHz, and the laptop starts to heat up like an oven. As far as I know there has never been any conclusive fix for this issue from Framework, or even an official debugging guide.
It really soured me on the idea of repairable laptops - what's the point of it being "repairable" if you have huge fundamental flaws in the hardware that go unfixed?
At least in my case, a proper cold shutdown was the remedy. (Many normal reboots were attempted in vain)
The kicker is that the things they were telling me to buy didn't even fix the problem. My fingerprint reader was very flakey, and after replacing it and all cabling connected to it, it still didn't work.
They then told me to buy a whole new input cover which was the wrong solution again. The issue was the touchpad, which routes the signal for the fingerprint sensor through its circuit board.
They also encouraged me heavily to update the BIOS and firmware of everything aggressively before really digging into any of the kernel messages I was seeing.
All that said, it's really hard to complain that for $50 and some waiting I was easily able to fix the problem.
Compared to replacing the battery on a MacBook pro which took me 5hrs and required complete disassembly of the chassis sans fans it was a dream.
Here's to hoping that framework does better, they do seem to take well to community feedback.
But on that last point, it's also the first laptop in a while that I had to get into to fix something. The webcam never worked. That's not a linux issue, it's just that my fw13 is a hand me down from a previous colleague who I believe borked the webcam installation. But I don't use the webcam, so I never cared. On the other hand, when I first got it, the cpu fan was emitting a constant high pitch whine. After some research I wasn't the only one affected, and the support had me do a lot of steps before sending a replacement part (which was very easy to install, but the problem should not have been there in the first place). I also had some random crashes that I was never able to debug. The mic is very meh also. I never use it in anycase with my setup but still.
But at the same time, I don't see myself switching to another laptop. Despite all, this is still the laptop that felt the most "right" to me. I do believe that Framework has to seriously step up their support and QA game. But it does feel like it's a company that is "suffering from success". They got big investment, lots of publicities in some circle and so I feel like they have to produce and sell way more computer than the rest of the business can reasonably handle. I hope it's a “necessary evil” for them to get enough customers and revenue to start being able to attract more investment and being able to invest more in the “quality” side of the biz.
EDIT: I should say, being in the E.U make it so that I have an automatic 2 year guarantee, so I didn't have to experience the whole "just buy new parts lmao"
The machine has been fine since and I still really like it.
https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/docs/statutory_warranty... (Page 2):
> Without limiting consumers rights, Apple will provide its own remedies equivalent to those remedies in the consumer guarantee provisions of the Australian Consumer Law at any time within 24 months of the date of purchase. For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.
Framework really caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle, but Dell/Lenovo/HP have been selling repairable laptops to IT departments for decades. In addition, they're a much more mature product -- been selling laptops for much longer at much higher volumes. Thinkpads are the prototypical example but I actually like Dells better. Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well.
Yeah, but does Dell allow you to change your laptop's mainboard for another mainboard with time? That is such a quantum leap. You do not have to adjust your self to a new keyboard just because you wanted a new processor.
Business laptops are swapped out every few years.
Reusable chassis? Literally no one asked for this, it makes no sense outside of a very, very small community of enthusiasts who think it's cool. Restricting yourself to no mechanical changes/improvements in perpetuity is not the flex you think it is.
Keyboards wear out, the chassis gets dented/scratched. Thermal requirements change.
This feature is for no one.
There's also 3rd party ARM and RISC-V mainboards, but I'd recommend the average user sticks to the x86_64 boards.
Also, buying a new mainboard every few years and putting the old mainboard on a shelf is a lot less sustainable than buying a complete new laptop and selling your old laptop to someone.
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Late+2020+U...
But there are a lot of other ways to frame it that make it make a lot of sense.
There are a lot of common reasons that put laptops out of commission that the Framework sidesteps.
People often upgrade laptops because their battery is shot, or they need more RAM/storage but all the other specs are fine, or they spilled coffee on their keyboard. Maybe they cracked their screen or the screen stopped working through some kind of physical damage. Maybe they dropped their laptop and the chassis is cracked/bent and various non-critical non-expensive components are damaged, but now the laptop is "totaled." Maybe their I/O ports are worn out and broken from years of rough use.
Now, we might say, hey, a Lenovo ThinkPad is just as repairable! You can get parts straight from Lenovo!
But there's also a huge difference comparing a system that was designed for IT departments to repair versus designed for the end consumer to repair with a single screwdriver and QR codes with step-by-step guides that can be followed by non-technical customers. The question remains "will the customer bother to repair this?"
And there's also a huge gap with "is my laptop totaled?" Is it worth it to buy $400 worth of parts from Lenovo to refurbish your 5 year old laptop when the end result is a 5 year old laptop? With Framework, you have this option of turning a repair into an upgrade.
If we are going to talk sustainability, it's true that the chassis is only 10% of the cost of the laptop, but is it 10% of the environmental impact? Computer chassis are made out of metals that aren't always perfectly recyclable. I don't actually know the full answer to this question, but it's worth pondering the concept. A gallon of gas costing $5 doesn't make it more sustainable to burn that gasoline than to spend the money on something else.
Finally, Framework systems have one last trick up their sleeve: the mainboards are compatible out-of-the-box with a server operation mode, which disables all the laptop-y stuff and tells the board to run like it's an always-on desktop computer. 3D print or buy a $40 Cooler Master case for your old Framework board and now you have a very low-power server.
I love my framework because it’s the only laptop where I can design a custom plugin module to talk to my hardware and EE testbench, but DIY repairability pales in comparison to a service network where the tech arrives with a library of spare parts faster than you can get a replacement from Amazon.
My headcannon is that the only reason the T14G7 is as repairable as it is, is due to the whole right to repair movement, including framework.
I preferred the older plastic coated Mg chassis ones. At least they were honest about the materials.
I don't trust iFixit's quite frank "press handjob" because they're giving higher repairability rankings for that junk compared to Apple who have replaceable ports and a good supply chain available to the end user. Also they were all over selling battery kits for Pixel phones which are a complete pain to replace the batteries in compared to an iPhone.
Not that Apple are the bastion of repairability, just their claims are less insane than both Lenovo's and iFixit's.
But only 3 in stock and 3x the price of the Apple ones. Good luck!
The P40 spent more time in the repair depot than in use before I replaced it with something that didn't ship with a fucked M.2 slot, a touchscreen that failed out of the box and then a month after replacement, and a battery that pillowed within a month after that.
The T14 Gen 2 bricked on a BIOS update. The pinhole reset didn't work, so it went to the repair depot, came back two weeks later with the BIOS updated. Next BIOS update bricked it again.
A Fairphone is repairable right now but might not be in the future.
It doesn't need to cost twice as much - https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-pulse?sku=286947218 . It however does require legislation to make manufacturers comply. A good example is the minimum 2/3 year warranty mandate in EU (depending on the country) - https://www.eccnet.eu/consumer-rights/what-are-my-consumer-r...
How is this supposed to work exactly? The company builds a product that fails quickly, so that people will buy another one? I'm highly skeptical that this works on consumers. Almost nobody will buy the same brand after the first one craps out. And I'm certain that it doesn't work on companies who will track failure rates for the product across a large fleet.
Cheap products exist because of a race to the bottom. Some consumers care a lot about quality, but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students. These companies make both high- and low-end devices, cutting corners as necessary to meet that price point while still competing on quality and features. They're not building products worse on purpose, because that doesn't work in a competitive marketplace.
Framework benefits from the same halo effect as Apple: They only make high-end devices, and so they don't get judged for the cheap crap they make. It doesn't mean either company's products are actually better than mainstream offerings at the same price point.
Even if I'm wrong, and planned obsolescence is actually very lucrative: how long do you think Framework's "core values" will hold up against market incentives? Fortunately, we don't need to rely on that. Manufacturers make good products because consumers pay for them; that applies to Apple and Framework, but also high-end laptops from many other manufacturers. If they weren't more reliable and more repairable than the low-end laptops, then IT departments would just buy the consumer devices costing 5x less.
> ... but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students.
Why do you think such a market exists? Compare it with the automobile industry, where really cheap cars (comparable to the $150 laptops) don't really exist. Instead we have a flourishing second-hand market, and people will still buy a good-quality, used car over a cheaper, lower quality one. Why? Repairability. Why would I buy a cheap low quality Automobile, if I can buy a good quality car that I can repair as needed. A market for cheaper laptops exist because you fear buying an older computer as you fear it may no longer be repairable or upgradeable.
However, newer Lenovo Devices (like the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15 Aura Edition which I would love to buy) are not that repairable any more. Sometimes I think it is for a reason, sometimes I think it may just be no longer reasonable. Even Framework claimed that their Desktop Ryzen 395+ RAM timings were to tight to allow using LPCAMM2 and if you'd like to get the last bit of performance out of a machine, short traces and soldered connections may be the only remaining option, even for SSDs. Additionally, OLEDs didn't make it into Frameworks notebooks yet and that might be a similar reason - harder repairability.
Whatever the reason is, I like Frameworks philosophy of LISTENING to customers and maybe their success has changed the way bigger vendors produce there stuff (if only a little bit). I'm not expecting Apple to do this, but at least HP and Dell seem to have slightly changed their path of vendor locking to be more repairable again.
I would bet that this story of a failed BIOS update reaches the support anytime soon and they provide a repair guide or maybe a replaceable BIOS chip. Stories like this are somehow sad but at least they help to improve.
BTW: Dell has great repairable business notebooks (I recently switched to a cheap Latitude 5420 - the T480s was getting to slow for some tasks), but there are caveats I immediately noticed and most people don't think of:
- Keyboard Backlight is way too bright in the lowest setting
- Keyboard layout is a bit off
- It cannot be opened with one hand
- Display Brightness steps are to low (using the ALT key could increase / decrease the step size, like in MacBooks)
- Display Brightness cannot be set to "off" / black screen (this only works on macbooks)
- The Dell 5520 Trackpad is horrible
- Nobody except Apple supports AudioJack-Headphones remotes for controlling audio playback and volume (with USB-C to audiojack Adapters this works out of the box on Linux)
Original author here. I like your optimism, but I've linked multiple threads on their forums with people doing the same problem going back over a year. I also pieced together most of the stuff from people doing external flashing on the forums. Still, no official guides, no changes as far as I can tell. This post is the most detail repair guide available right now.
If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
Thank you for making this guide. The knowledge in it can be transferred to other Brands, too.
> I like your optimism, but...
Well, I'm not saying framework is perfect. The Hardware is expensive, inferior to bigger brands and, as you stated, support is worse. The repairability promise is hardly relevant as long as you're keeping your notebook > 5 years taking good care of it like most people. The switchable ports are a nice gimmick but not a total game changer. However, I really hope they succeed while keeping most of their promises and not actively preventing repair like e.g. Apple.
> If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
That's the way it goes. As long as only few people raise their hand, nothing changes. That's why I'm thankful you kept going... Now it is likely you actually changed something for the better
In general, I agree with you that the bigger laptop makers can repair laptops and do an amazing job.
What we're all here for though is 2026. No big company is coming to fix your machines, even big companies are waiting 30+ days for parts availability from the big company bros they bought from. If you're a consumer, forget about it.
"Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well." I'm calling BS here. Dell and HP hide their limited, paltry Linux offerings in the back of their website. Define your use of "many."
Now we're down to the BIOS. Today's blog post encountered a failed BIOS update, and takes Framework to task for it. Some of the support team at Framework are really cool and would probably have detected this customer is https://xkcd.com/806/
This time he got the strict script follower for customer support. I hope it blows up on Framework.
This is how I define "many." Dell in particular seems to certify lots of laptops for Ubuntu support, even if they don't sell them with Ubuntu. It's not just their enterprise offerings, either; I see lots of consumer models.
The big issue we see on our Dell and Lenovo units is broken USB-C ports and the only repair method possible there is replace the motherboard. No ports on daughterboards like the MacBooks. And you can't just buy the parts from most vendors. Dell is utterly impossible and with Lenovo half the time they don't actually have any of the parts available or somehow manage to fuck up their shipping so they never turn up. Had to charge back Lenovo/Digital River twice. Zero support at all and impossible to contact anyone. And the whole PART NOT USER SERVICEABLE in the HMMs.
If you want Dell/Lenovo repairs just buy two of whatever.
At the same time iFixit are gushing all over Lenovo who are hell and pissing on Apple. The Apple who don't have this problem and I seem to have no problem getting parts for from their official parts store, the parts actually turn up and work.
usb-c port is now dead, it is soldered.
Not going to happen to my https://frame.work laptop, 10 eur part, no soldering, not even a screwdriver, and good as new
The actual USB-C port on a Framework is soldered to the motherboard. If you destroy the port electrically it is the same thing.
If you are inserting/removing cables like a gorilla, then buy a 3" dongle (aka magic Framework module) for your other laptop.
I don't think any framework owner seriously thinks they are buying the most repairable laptop in the world or the most cost effective laptop in the world.
Stop buying new. Great retired business machines on eBay daily.
People like you and I are happy with this, but the average person could not care less about computers and simply need something to send emails, do taxes, and browse the internet. They don't want that extra burden, they want something that is guaranteed to "just work".
Proper second hand refurbishment pipelines that are well known and trusted is something we should aim for and want, but I believe the current state is that people want new and want cheap new. What is wrong with wanting cheap + new, and wanting laptop producers to cater to this?
People would buy refurbs a lot more if they were more noticeable/marketed. People “want” whatever electronics are on the shelf in front of them when it’s time to buy, if we’re talking general public now (I wasn’t trying to).
The main firms refurbing are also selling new, and so aren’t in a rush to eat their own lunch.
Thinkpads have been a meme since the early 2010s.
It's funny to bring up the T480/s as positive example because I remember people complaining about anything past ~xx20 series.
> caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle
Framework is a reaction to the cult following a lot of the business laptops had. When people are spending $$ to retrofit modern mainboards to vintage Thinkpad chassis you know there's enthusiast money to be made there.
On balance, I think the framework has been a cool talking point, but yes, a 2015 dell would have supported all the improvements I made over time to my framework, provided it had all the ports I needed originally. It'd have definitely been bulkier though!
The author's LinkedIn profile[1] tells me that this person lives/works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While the issue is already fixed, for others affected with the same issue, I would suggest the small claims route. Make sure to talk with an LLM to follow the correct steps to gather and prepare evidence for your claim. If you are lucky enough to win, then you should "go nuclear" on social media (and their own forums) to share the win and the exact details about how you did it. Framework Computer will surely (1) cave and provide replacements or (2) be flooded with small claims about this issue.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/guanzhong-chen/
Or, if you need legal advice, go to a lawyer, not an LLM.
The last one that tried that was fined 5,000$ for wasting the court’s time.
People doing what you've done, documenting the problem you had and the steps you took to fix it, are what make the internet great. You also get bonus points for having that information well formatted/presented and accessible. Even without JS the page displays nicely, images included. Thank you for that! I may never need the information for myself, but I'm grateful that you took the time to put it out there.
Another thing (this is me guessing here): The standard for evidence and "legal excellence" must be far lower for small claims court, compared to regular district court. The whole point is to provide a very low cost way for average citizens to sue other citizens or companies for recourse. As I understand, most small claims courts don't need or require a lawyer.
Related anecdote: This year, there was a story of a single Japanese mother using an LLM to file a lawsuit against the father to establish paternity[1]. (Note: This was family court, which, again, will have many people attending that cannot afford a lawyer, but the judge will show care that they receive fairness, given their limited knowledge of the law.)
[1] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260325/p2a/00m/0na/02...
Is thinkpad really it? I wasn't wildly excited about that one either.
Someone else noticed that there is actually a (unpopulated) header for flashing, which avoids the janky pogo pin thing even unpopulated. Why didn't fw point him at it when explicitly asked? And even if they had, where is the firmware image to use with it? They have it, so there is nothing about the "exiting" nature of the product that stops them from saying something more helpful than "throw the motherboard away".
This systemic lack of support for the product for two problems of their own making, both the original design flaw of inadequate recovery from a broken BIOS and producing a bad BIOS for some models and actually encouraging its installation, is more than alarming.
My primary concern about Framework was if they would survive so they were capable of following up on their goal of modular upgrades. That was a risk that I was willing to take.
However, that a company that targets a market segment of fairly sophisticated technologists would fail this badly on _both_ engineering and customer support is a deal killer.
Framework is not even on the shopping radar now for me.
My understanding is Coreboot is a minimum-viable firmware implementation to get your hardware initialized ... and not much else.
Once Coreboot is ready you then use "Payloads".
Payloads can be as varied as booting into Linux directly, GRUB directly, or a whole UEFI/BIOS implementation.
SeaBIOS is a whole FOSS BIOS implementation (commonly used for emulators like QEMU) and is somewhat tractable according to my prior research (~50k lines of C).
My comment about CPU support is due to modern systems using UEFI - the payload for that is TianoCore EDK2. It's quite large (900k+ lines) and while it has much more eyes on it, if minimalism is what you're looking for I doubt it would qualify.
That leaves you with systems from before ~2013 or so - assuming you can even flash Coreboot to them, which only supports a handful of systems.
I suppose you could just jump into Linux though. Perhaps it's silly to do anything else.
Why can't the BIOS/UEFI offer some basic initialisation functionality and then the OS (Linux, Windows, ...) does a more advanced initialisation? Why does it have to be so complicated?
However modern FW of PC clones don't only contain a bootloader and a "simple" hardware initializer. Modern laptops have tens of sensors, power measuring parts, power controllers, completely remote management (Intel ME / AMD PSP), embedded controller code for fingerprint, embedded controller code for keyboard etc.
Companies ship a new product line every single year. This churn causes nothing but shitty FW to be developed. Moreover the component manufacturers also slightly change things every single year. That's why sleep sucks with PCs. That's why Fn shortcuts don't always work correctly. That's why batteries drain.
Everything is fixed in the 6 months to a year following the launch in PC industry. Then they start to work on the new model and only supply security updates.
While it's nice to know that I can buy a $100 replacement keyboard (I'm about 6 months out of warranty) it's also frustrating that Framework wouldn't own up to what is obviously a manufacturing failure.
This way you can solder the thin wires in crammed places, don't have to stress about them shorting out anything they touch, easily routable and they don't put stress on the solder joint, like a regular thicker wire would.
Working with this type of wire made things easier for me in these sorts of situations. And it's perfectly adequate for signal (withing reason, if not very high speed), and even some power, few mA needed for these kinds of chips is no issue.
I uploaded a dump of the flash [1] in the bad state and they somehow analyzed it and made a fix. Great for others I guess, but I'm still mindblown that the regular path would have been that this perfectly working laptop to this day become ewaste.
Being an embedded dev, I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins. Or some DFU mode you can boot into.
[1] https://github.com/fwupd/firmware-lenovo/issues/484
Not enough of these cases happen under warranty for them to bother (and out of warranty cases are either neutral, or even beneficial to them if they drive sales of new hardware).
Ironically, Macs do have that, no?
Not to mention there are no "alternatives" that you can look into to purchase these replacements. You are essentially just locked to purchasing from Framework only
As far as I am aware a failed bios/firmware update on any device can cause it to brick, thats why they always come with massive warnings everywhere. I personally do not just do bios updates because some OEM marketing said so. The old saying does me well, "If it aint broke dont fix it"
Various enterprise boards with BMCs can flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked.
You might even be able to do that with Intel AMT, but I've never had occasion to try.
Are there any reports out there of macbook OTA updates causing laptops to become entirely unbootable with no recovery options (and, in case it actually happened, Apple refusing to fix/replace affected laptops at no extra cost)?
I am yet to hear of it being a thing, and I would love to be proven wrong.
Having said that, MacBook is a very homogenous machine with minimal choices (which can be a good thing) so testing upgrades patches on them should be fairly easy as compared to other vendors (a good outcome of that thing).
With framework and effectively with other vendors, this is where a lot of problems come from. And the problem is significantly harder.
i'm realizing that framework's marketing swayed my opinion a lot more than i thought. i was seriously considering a framework laptop when my current one dies, but i'll probably just end up going with a thinkpad again, as the level of serviceability seems a lot closer than i was lead to believe.