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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 .
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.
> 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 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.
Ditto. It's not a reference to anything that I can find, and the concept of gravity is sort of mentioned once but never expanded upon enough for me to really understand what they mean.
How can people not trust in anecdotes and vibes while avoiding studies, do you mean?
Isn't that the point here? That everyone thinks massive disruption is happening and everyone is 100xing their productivity, but it's not actually showing up in the numbers anywhere?
In most industries that need software made for them it's hard enough to get people to care about spending enough time on informal methods let alone formal ones. I simply don't think most of the industry has had the breathing room and respect for engineering for this pattern to develop.
I think programmers in general do not give much thought to the level of engineering required for a task.
Mostly, there's too little, but there are many cases when there's too much. I see people writing tons of tests for corporate software that will be used by a couple of people and will have to be updated regularly anyway.
Building a hut is not the same as building a skyscraper, but we don't really have guidelines for different software projects. No methodology I've ever seen distinguishes types of projects by complexity.
I know few 100% unit test coverage, strictest typing to encode invariants fellas who's app is consistently broken and product makes less money than the bakery in my village.
I think its also about tolerance for failure. For software that must not fail or where reliability commands a premium you would be wise to invest in formal methods. Core systems at aws for example. For throwaway CRUD code its just easier to try iterations on the problem and call it a day. Its not about respect just RoI.
The cheapest internet where I live (just outside London) is gigabit, which is why I have it, but really I haven't needed anything faster than ADSL at any point, unless I guess I really want that game downloaded now now now.
That's not really the point of the topic though right, it's that in the UK I have the choice of a billion different ISPs, including (I think stupidly) three different fibre providers (I literally have two fibre connections to my house because I changed ISPs and they ran on different fibre networks), and in the US all I hear about is streamers complaining that they are all stuck with the same shitty ISP as there is no choice, in a country that supposedly champions choice.
Very odd, but perhaps more familiar to graphics programmers? I will say I'd probably call it a stall, which is exactly what the Vulkan docs call it moments later, so :shrug:
I'm a rendering engineer and have used this term frequently.
It's actually a very common technique in rendering to not always be able to easily fill in the gaps, that we frequently deliberately introduce an extra frame of latency, so that the GPU is rendering jobs for the latter half of rendering passes for frame N+1 and the early half of rendering passes of frame N+2 while frame N is visible. This still means that a frame takes the same total GPU time to render, but means that the gaps between jobs on a single frame can be usefully filled with something else from the other.
Valve makes it very very easy to be a PC gamer, and, importantly, slightly harder to be a PC gamer who buys games in places other than Steam.
Yes you can buy games on GoG or Epic and play them on a steam deck or a steam machine. But it's juuuuust enough faff to be annoying enough, that you'd rather just get them on steam. I know people (and am a person) who have rebought games they already own so they are on steam, to make playing between steam deck and desktop more reliable.
It's the same with the steam controller. You _can_ use it with games outside of steam, but it's enough of a faff that you find yourself avoiding it.
It's incredibly effective, and why they are an effective monopoly in PC gaming.
Not OP, but I had to change the mail cache from all mail to recent, I think because it couldn't handle how much mail I had? It would often get stuck not syncing, and offline would be unreliable and showing a blank screen. Recent works fine, but it would be worthwhile folks testing more with all mail enabled, especially if they have larger inboxes.
Meal deals are in every supermarket in the UK. Petrol stations even do them.
Also, as a foreigner who lives over there, I think they are... sad? I'm surprised they got a positive reception from your coworkers. For me they are a backup and a failure to do something more interesting.
What people don't realise is the startups here in the UK run on miserable sandwiches, tasteless crisps and energy drinks. Middle management lives on slightly more expensive platters from Pret.
Unless you live in bumfuck nowhere theres zero reason to be subjecting yourself to a supermarket meal deal, we've got an overabundance of independent food places in towns in the uk.
Everything massively increased in price. Also you won’t get anything for less than a fiver jn pret. A regular baguette is 6.25 and add a coffee it’s now £10
This is one of those things that varies by cultural cachet rather than actual quality. It's not that different from people living off Japanese konbini, but those are perceived as much cooler.
Most cities will have local sandwich options as well near major office districts, but they might not be as cheap.
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.