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One of the repair challenges is access to old parts. The drain hose on our three year-old washer sprung a leak. When I called a repair man, he at first said t
by SloopJon 6y ago
One of the repair challenges is access to old parts. The drain hose on our three year-old washer sprung a leak. When I called a repair man, he at first said that Samsung doesn't make that part anymore. Fortunately, he was mistaken, but if that's something that happens for a simple hose, imagine trying to replace the "high-end headphone amp" expansion card on this laptop five years from now.
Even if I'm not too excited about the proprietary expansion card system, which will last as long as the founders' attention spans, if it gives access to standard memory and storage, that's an improvement over the current trend.
- 99_00 6y ago>if that's something that happens for a simple hose But it didn't happen...
- SilverRed 6y agoBut it has happened to many of us for other things. The camera on my pixel 2 broke but no one sells new parts for the pixel 2 and google doesn't support it. All you can get is poor quality second hand and stolen parts. For a less popular product, you get nothing.
- psalminen 6y agoFrom the article: "In addition to releasing new upgrades regularly, we’re opening up the ecosystem to enable a community of partners to build and sell compatible modules through the Framework Marketplace." Maybe I am misinterpreting it but it sounds like its not a completely proprietary system?
- f6v 6y agoA marketplace for an extremely narrow market? Who’s going to invest their money to develop hardware for this platform? They better do everything themselves in the beginning.
- nrp 6y agoDefinitely! It's on us to make the ecosystem work by building a large enough install base for other hardware developers to see a reason to come in. We're going to continue to develop modules ourselves until that point, and past that point too!
- nrp 6y agoIt is definitely on us to prove that we'll provide long term support for the modules that we're developing, but we're also opening up documentation and reference designs for things like our Expansion Card system. If something ever happens to us, other companies and the community can continue to use and extend the ecosystem. We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it's possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels. We hope that folks in the community come up with interesting card ideas and bring them out themselves in addition to what we develop.
- foobarian 6y agoGPIO cards on a modern laptop? Sign me up!!!
- nrp 6y agoYes! Actually, one of the first cards we built internally is a little Arduino-compatible one with a SAMD21 microcontroller and an external-facing 0.1" pin header for GPIO.
- ben_ 6y agoI love it!
- mtrovo 6y agoWow that's actually a really cool idea
- thiagocsf 6y agoWill your specs include metric or just imperial measurements like you just used here?
- TheSpiceIsLife 6y agoFear not, modern inches are metric inches: since the adoption of the international yard during the 1950s and 1960s, it has been based on the metric system and defined as exactly 25.4 mm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inch
- acomjean 6y agoThere used to be a pretty standard adapter card for laptops. I had an "ethernet modem card" from ibm in that form factor that worked well. And a scsi adapter for a zip drive I think. Its been a while... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Card
- blhack 6y agoIt would be really cool if they had just made a laptop that accepted PCMCIA cards, and then made a bunch of new PCMCIA cards.
- wtallis 6y agoThe more recent choice would have been ExpressCard, but that standard was never updated beyond PCIe 2.0 x1 and USB 5Gbit/s. But the bigger problem with both ExpressCard and PCMCIA is that the cards are long—those form factors date back to an era where expansion cards needed a lot more PCB space than they do now. ExpressCard 34 is 70/75mm long, compared to a typical client WiFi card that's M.2 22x30mm. It's quite impractical to have ExpressCard slots on both sides of the machine. I don't think it would have worked well to try to make a hot-swappable externally-facing card form factor derived from M.2. Likewise, cutting EDSFF E1.S down to a third of the length wouldn't leave any provision for USB or DisplayPort signals. USB-C is clearly the best available connector choice among current standards.
- wongarsu 6y agoOn the other hand in the laptop space I've never had problems with part availability. With brands like Dell or Lenovo there are plenty of new and used parts available on ebay or your trusted reseller, and official service handbooks are easy to download. The real value-add of the framework laptop is imho the upgrade path: you can swap in newer components without replacing nearly everything. Usually that's limited to just SSD and RAM, with everything else being on one huge mainboard assembly.
- dvdkon 6y agoIt actually is a problem for cheaper laptops whose exact SKUs often don't last more than half a year, which is my primary reason for buying "business" laptops.
- rchaud 6y agoIs that true for the premium laptops? I worked at my school's help desk and yes, Dell parts and service manuals were plentiful, but usually for bulky Inspiron and Latitude budget laptops. The ones with ugly screens, wacky trackpads and replaceable batteries. It's been a while since I was in that world, but Dell makes some mighty nice looking machinery these days, but it doesn't look particularly repairable.
- marzell 6y agoSince the modules are just USB-C adapted, those parts would probably be easy to mimic by a third party. Maybe they need to be signed or something, hence the marketplace they allude to.
- opsy2 6y agoSounds like 3rd party extension is the goal, and according to other comments here without necessitating distribution on their marketplace either.