Framework: a thin and light laptop you can fix and upgrade yourself

Originally published at: Framework: a thin and light laptop you can fix and upgrade yourself | Boing Boing

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Boy, I want this to succeed. The concept is great, and the design and implementation look solid. But, they’ll need to sell a bunch of them for this work. (And, I’d need a more serious GPU).

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Definitely from the video one of the easier laptops I’ve seen to work on. Not sure I would personally call it “modular” if you have to remove the keyboard to get to the memory and other items, but it’s certainly far more so than anything I’ve personally worked on. Hope they succeed with it.

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it comes with Windows 10, and Linux support is still at the haruspicy stage.

“haruspicy stage* is my new favorite band name!

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Ordered mine, it’s coming in October. Hopefully Linux support will be improved in a month or so.

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This is what I’ve wanted for a while. If this company still exists when my present laptop finally gives up the ghost, I’ll look to them for my next one.

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Tested has done a couple of vids on it, here’s their review. They don’t do any benchmarking but its mostly looking at general details around building and tearing it down.

I think the laptop would be pretty perfect if it had the ability to plug in an external GPU for gaming or other intensive processes

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According to Cory on his latest podcast he’s taking a punt on one of these (mp3) because of Lenovo’s lousy customer support if you’re not a business and the difficulty you can get into installing any OS that’s not pre-installed.

Umm…these aren’t made by Lenovo. Not sure how that applies to these machines.

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No, i know but Cory traditionally has always used Lenovo Thinkpads and he’s ditching them for one of these lovely things.

Sadly I’m not seeing Thunderbolt mentioned anywhere in the spec sheet - that would be sweet, as it would also enable broadcast grade video I/O cards to be used.

Ahh, got it. Yes, it sounds like he’s excited to make the move to Framework, even though it lacks his precious trackpoint.

Hey, when someone forms a whole company to produce a product that’s perfectly aligned with his long-stated goals with respect to Right-To-Repair, I would hope he’d be willing to make a small sacrifice in order to help make it happen.

And since my 1.5 year old Lenovo just crapped the bed, I’ll be very interested to follow his experience down this path.

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I genuinely hope this thing is a success and widely sold and more people take it up because we do not need more glued, soldered, sealed black box electronics.

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I thought I saw thunderbolt mentioned for the modules that stick in the sides in one of the reviews I watched. However the official site is a better source than my memory of an unofficial video so if it is not on the list there it probably is not an option.

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Looks nice.

drove me nuts when he was talking about using force to pull out the plug options and didn’t seem to be using the release button that was right there.

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I believe it’s essentially a USB-C port on the motherboard with the ability to plug in adapters for whatever kind of port you want. I don’t know enough to say if this is an issue for the ability to run I/O cards or not, i might be inclined to say it should be ok but might be the kind of questions that need to be asked with the manufacturer of the laptop.

It looks from the video clips like the expansion modules connect via USB-C - so the USB-C module is just a pass through, and the other modules (like HDMI) act in the same way as external USB-C docking adapters would.

Thunderbolt needs to be supported by the core chipset, and unfortunately if they have gone for one without it then expansion isn’t going to be possible, Same reason why you can’t buy a PCIe thunderbolt adapter card for a desktop, if it ain’t in the chipset then it can’t be added.

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I’d like this to succeed, but to me the main selling point is that you can upgrade or replace parts and that’s something that takes some time to establish. I’d like to see at least a second generation of compatible parts before I ditch my habit of modding cheap lenovos off ebay.

Also, I would like to be able to buy an empty shell to dump the working but old parts into. My computer is the ship of Theseus.

Not looking like a mac would also be a plus.

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