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Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic/hopeful take on it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-designed-a-thin-modular-repairable-13

Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic/hopeful take on it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-designed-a-thin-modular-repairable-13-inch-laptop/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-de... Edit to add quote from Ars article: Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're completely convinced. Although we're skeptical, we are hopeful—the fledgling company does have a pretty solid pedigree. Framework founder Nirav Patel was Oculus VR's head of hardware from 2012 to 2017, and he was a Facebook director of engineering beyond that. The company's team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo.

arcturus17 6y ago
They've got the street cred but producing and marketing hardware is so damn hard. Ouya and the Essential phone are two cases that immediately spring to mind where the founding teams were credible, but the products ended up being massive flops. Good luck to them anyway. The idea is cool and I think if I were on the lookout for a Linux laptop and they delivered on their quality promise, I'd consider them.
- samizdis 6y ago
  Yes, I remember being particularly disappointed when Google's Project Ara [1] to create a modular mobile phone was shelved. It seemed like a fantastic idea, and I truly thought that Alphabet/Google had the cash/clout - and will - to deliver. Still, I haven't lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
  - kilroy123 6y ago
    I too wanted to see this work, but I was skeptical. Maybe it's just too ahead of its time?
  - robotnikman 6y ago
    I feel like building a modular laptop is much easier than a modular phone. You don't have to deal with the hardware enumeration problems on x86 as you do with ARM Already many laptops you can easily swap parts like the HDD/SSD, Battery and RAM, and even the GPU (to an extent) if its using a standard like MXM. Building a laptop with more modular parts using existing standards (looks like from the images the modular parts are using USB C Thunderbolt?) is much more doable than a modular phone.
    - baybal2 6y ago
      Yep, designing custom ssd, gpu, ram pcbs will be of course more expensive, and take time. USB 3, and Thunderbolt are also complete disasters power consumption wise, not to say that Type-C, and Thunderbolt chips cost arm, and a leg.
    - pimeys 6y ago
      It wasn't that long ago when manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo had models where you could basically replace almost everything. I guess still models like the T14 allows you to replace RAM, SSD, Wi-Fi card, keyboard, touchpad and even the screen. For the older models, even screen replacements are quite common in the ThinkPad community... Good luck for this project though, we really need more companies like this!
      - notagoodidea 6y ago
        On some older Thinkpads, even CPU replacement was on the menu.
        pimeys 6y ago
        I think the 2012 generation was the last one. T420 at least.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    They were competing with their partners, that was always going to end poorly. It could only ever be an experiment.
    - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
      Hasn't that always been true? Their Pixel 4a kept me from buying a competitor's product.
  - tpmx 6y ago
    Project Ara seemed quite impractical/naive at the time. Myself (and some people I trusted) dismissed it as yet another Google flight of fancy. This thing though, I can kind of see it working. Basically: The pressure to minimize volume + weight is way too high for a mobile phone to become modular. Then add recent requirements like IP68 ratings. In a laptop there's still some breathing room for modularity. And noone expects a laptop to survive an accidental drop into a pool.
  - estaseuropano 6y ago
    See Fairphone!
  - jkepler 6y ago
    There's Fairphone, already two generations of modular phone design. Unfortunately, they're only officially supported in Europe. But if you're in Europe, and want a modular phone, they're where its at.
    - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
      And IIRC they have LCD screens... Always-on display is a 'killer app' for me, so that immediately rules out the FP2. (Tangentially related: I don't really understand why Apple doesn't include this feature, even though they use OLED screens.)
  - xondono 6y ago
    I was never very optimistic about Ara. In general, modular electronics is a good idea in paper, but a terrible one in practice. - It comes with quite the price tag, adding connectors everywhere gets expensive fast. - Some interfaces are very tricky to modularize, RAM & CPU are very closely linked, and it’s very hard to protect them from ESD. - Which generally points you to the PC solution, don’t protect it, enclose everything and standardize. There’s also the more “business” part of modular electronics. PC parts are only cheap through massive volume, but building a modular phone requires you to (mostly) build all of your parts. The only way to make it feasible requires more than one device using the same modules, which defeats the uniqueness of the device. Laptops are way more feasible just because that modularization is already on the market, and you don’t need to build your own RAM SODIMMs or SSDs.
- offtop5 6y ago
  I think the problem here is you have two complicated things to solve, both hardware and software and you're trying to do it with out too much money. A small hardware project on its own might be doable.
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    Yea I agree the scope is more manageable than the examples I mentioned. But even then, they're tackling a very hard problem. Branding, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution... So many things can go wrong. I'm not making a prediction but I'm with Ars Technica in the "healthy skeptic" camp. I do hope they beat the odds.
- jonplackett 6y ago
  Laptops seems a very different situation to this though. There isn’t a huge amount of ready to use phone hardware from multiple competitive consumer suppliers I feel like integrating into a phone myself. But there are those things for a laptop. If they can make this work at a reasonable price it would be appealing even to me as an ardent Mac user.
  - SilverRed 6y ago
    The OUYA did not have this problem. They packed stock standard android hardware in to a box. The problem was that it didn't have enough games to make it worth buying or enough developers to make it work targeting. I haven't read the details of this specific laptop in the OP but I have seen similar projects go nowhere. What usually happens is the product ends up a lot more expensive and lower quality than a mass produced laptop and the project doesn't live long enough to release a second gen of hardware. It would make more sense for me to buy 2 Dell XPS laptops over the next 10 years that to buy this hobby project and if I even can, buy the upgrade kit.
    - jonplackett 6y ago
      Yeah it depends if you really can use cheap hardware with it or if they're just locking you into their own proprietary stuff, which as you say, could just get discontinued.
nrp 6y ago
"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" was not actually a direct quote from us, but it's nice that the folks at Ars think of our design that way!
- Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
  All the best, Nirav. Long lasting repairable computing hardware is what we need now and goes a long way than just not including the charger within the box.
- bo1024 6y ago
  Good luck, very excited for this! Any chance of a Linux or no-OS option?
  - 1stcity3rdcoast 6y ago
    The article says there's a linux/no-os option
    - aidenn0 6y ago
      But only if you order the kit, not if you get it preassembled I believe.
      - jdormit 6y ago
        Nothing stopping just installing linux on the preassembled one when you get I though, I assume. Although I guess you may have to pay for a Windows license in that case...
        zorrolovsky 6y ago
        Yes, and that's the issue with most computers today: there's no way to opt out to Windows. Whether you like it or not, licensing cost is blended into the computer and even if you don't use Windows you're somehow supporting a company that you might not want to support. I undertand in 99.9% of cases people just want to buy a laptop, turn it on and have it working. But I also think there should be an easy way to opt out of Windows enforced by law so that MS don't bang up numbers due to shady commercial practices.
GordonS 6y ago
The XPS 13 was the first thing I thought of when I saw this - a repairable, upgradable, expandable XPS 13. What they are promising sounds awesome. And AS a Brit, that is not a word I use often :) I really, really hope this pans out, and this summer - this is something I'd very much like to get my hands on!
agumonkey 6y ago
who else here had napkin design of just this ? now let's have a pocket variant that revives the old google modular project
SnowProblem 6y ago
I went with a Thinkpad over a Macbook a couple years ago exactly for these goals - repairability and modularity - so this looks pretty amazing to me. Especially the modular ports. That said, the lack of a discrete GPU makes this a no-go for what I do. Does anyone know if a dGPU is planned, and also any pricing?
0xbadcafebee 6y ago
> The company's team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo. They should avoid the appeal to authority fallacy. Those companies hire tens of thousands of people each. Statistically speaking, half of them could be idiots. Just because I worked at Cisco doesn't mean I'm some product genius. (Hell, I came from an acquisition!)
waheoo 6y ago
I'm very hopefully for this company. I just hope they drop the passive aggressive "block" remarks. Maybe its me but I suspect they're referring to decade old ThinkPad that have since evolved a lot to thin performance beasts. Passive aggressive remarks towards things your target market holds nostalgia for is likely not going to end well. It's also setting themselves up for failure if their cooling solution doesn't beat a modern ThinkPads dual fan solution. The aluminium case is also extremely questionable. Is your target demo thinkpad users or Dell users that want to take things apart. Hate to break it to you but Dell users don't give a fuck. It's why they have a Dell. Most think pad users value plastic chassis. They're lighter (13" at 1.3kg, are you nuts?) more durable, and more palatable on your lap when they warm up they're also more cost effective.
- sanitycheck 6y ago
  Hi, Dell Latitude user for 20+ years here. I buy them because they're easily upgradable and I can get parts after the (excellent) warranty expires. It's true I don't give a fuck about aluminium! Dell started soldering RAM in the past couple of years though, so if this thing exists when I next need to buy a laptop and it remotely justifies its high price I'd be interested.
40four 6y ago
With all do respect, but who gives a sh*t what Ars Technica thinks in regards to this? This project looks unbelievable! I am super excited for this, as many many others are too obviously. I’ll be honest I’m not even going to click on the Ars Technical article, their opinion couldn’t be less interesting to me. No doubt this company still has a lot to prove. Can they put their money where their mouth is? Remains to be seen. But the fact that there is a real company out there, making an attempt to build a product like this makes me so happy.
Igelau 6y ago
> it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're completely convinced. Read: please send us a free one

arcturus17 6y ago

They've got the street cred but producing and marketing hardware is so damn hard. Ouya and the Essential phone are two cases that immediately spring to mind where the founding teams were credible, but the products ended up being massive flops. Good luck to them anyway. The idea is cool and I think if I were on the lookout for a Linux laptop and they delivered on their quality promise, I'd consider them.

samizdis 6y ago
Yes, I remember being particularly disappointed when Google's Project Ara [1] to create a modular mobile phone was shelved. It seemed like a fantastic idea, and I truly thought that Alphabet/Google had the cash/clout - and will - to deliver. Still, I haven't lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
- kilroy123 6y ago
  I too wanted to see this work, but I was skeptical. Maybe it's just too ahead of its time?
- robotnikman 6y ago
  I feel like building a modular laptop is much easier than a modular phone. You don't have to deal with the hardware enumeration problems on x86 as you do with ARM Already many laptops you can easily swap parts like the HDD/SSD, Battery and RAM, and even the GPU (to an extent) if its using a standard like MXM. Building a laptop with more modular parts using existing standards (looks like from the images the modular parts are using USB C Thunderbolt?) is much more doable than a modular phone.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Yep, designing custom ssd, gpu, ram pcbs will be of course more expensive, and take time. USB 3, and Thunderbolt are also complete disasters power consumption wise, not to say that Type-C, and Thunderbolt chips cost arm, and a leg.
  - pimeys 6y ago
    It wasn't that long ago when manufacturers like Dell and Lenovo had models where you could basically replace almost everything. I guess still models like the T14 allows you to replace RAM, SSD, Wi-Fi card, keyboard, touchpad and even the screen. For the older models, even screen replacements are quite common in the ThinkPad community... Good luck for this project though, we really need more companies like this!
    - notagoodidea 6y ago
      On some older Thinkpads, even CPU replacement was on the menu.
      - pimeys 6y ago
        I think the 2012 generation was the last one. T420 at least.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  They were competing with their partners, that was always going to end poorly. It could only ever be an experiment.
  - blacksmith_tb 6y ago
    Hasn't that always been true? Their Pixel 4a kept me from buying a competitor's product.
- tpmx 6y ago
  Project Ara seemed quite impractical/naive at the time. Myself (and some people I trusted) dismissed it as yet another Google flight of fancy. This thing though, I can kind of see it working. Basically: The pressure to minimize volume + weight is way too high for a mobile phone to become modular. Then add recent requirements like IP68 ratings. In a laptop there's still some breathing room for modularity. And noone expects a laptop to survive an accidental drop into a pool.
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  See Fairphone!
- jkepler 6y ago
  There's Fairphone, already two generations of modular phone design. Unfortunately, they're only officially supported in Europe. But if you're in Europe, and want a modular phone, they're where its at.
  - Tijdreiziger 6y ago
    And IIRC they have LCD screens... Always-on display is a 'killer app' for me, so that immediately rules out the FP2. (Tangentially related: I don't really understand why Apple doesn't include this feature, even though they use OLED screens.)
- xondono 6y ago
  I was never very optimistic about Ara. In general, modular electronics is a good idea in paper, but a terrible one in practice. - It comes with quite the price tag, adding connectors everywhere gets expensive fast. - Some interfaces are very tricky to modularize, RAM & CPU are very closely linked, and it’s very hard to protect them from ESD. - Which generally points you to the PC solution, don’t protect it, enclose everything and standardize. There’s also the more “business” part of modular electronics. PC parts are only cheap through massive volume, but building a modular phone requires you to (mostly) build all of your parts. The only way to make it feasible requires more than one device using the same modules, which defeats the uniqueness of the device. Laptops are way more feasible just because that modularization is already on the market, and you don’t need to build your own RAM SODIMMs or SSDs.
offtop5 6y ago
I think the problem here is you have two complicated things to solve, both hardware and software and you're trying to do it with out too much money. A small hardware project on its own might be doable.
- arcturus17 6y ago
  Yea I agree the scope is more manageable than the examples I mentioned. But even then, they're tackling a very hard problem. Branding, manufacturing, quality assurance, distribution... So many things can go wrong. I'm not making a prediction but I'm with Ars Technica in the "healthy skeptic" camp. I do hope they beat the odds.
jonplackett 6y ago
Laptops seems a very different situation to this though. There isn’t a huge amount of ready to use phone hardware from multiple competitive consumer suppliers I feel like integrating into a phone myself. But there are those things for a laptop. If they can make this work at a reasonable price it would be appealing even to me as an ardent Mac user.
- SilverRed 6y ago
  The OUYA did not have this problem. They packed stock standard android hardware in to a box. The problem was that it didn't have enough games to make it worth buying or enough developers to make it work targeting. I haven't read the details of this specific laptop in the OP but I have seen similar projects go nowhere. What usually happens is the product ends up a lot more expensive and lower quality than a mass produced laptop and the project doesn't live long enough to release a second gen of hardware. It would make more sense for me to buy 2 Dell XPS laptops over the next 10 years that to buy this hobby project and if I even can, buy the upgrade kit.
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    Yeah it depends if you really can use cheap hardware with it or if they're just locking you into their own proprietary stuff, which as you say, could just get discontinued.

nrp 6y ago

"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" was not actually a direct quote from us, but it's nice that the folks at Ars think of our design that way!

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
All the best, Nirav. Long lasting repairable computing hardware is what we need now and goes a long way than just not including the charger within the box.
bo1024 6y ago
Good luck, very excited for this! Any chance of a Linux or no-OS option?
- 1stcity3rdcoast 6y ago
  The article says there's a linux/no-os option
  - aidenn0 6y ago
    But only if you order the kit, not if you get it preassembled I believe.
    - jdormit 6y ago
      Nothing stopping just installing linux on the preassembled one when you get I though, I assume. Although I guess you may have to pay for a Windows license in that case...
      - zorrolovsky 6y ago
        Yes, and that's the issue with most computers today: there's no way to opt out to Windows. Whether you like it or not, licensing cost is blended into the computer and even if you don't use Windows you're somehow supporting a company that you might not want to support. I undertand in 99.9% of cases people just want to buy a laptop, turn it on and have it working. But I also think there should be an easy way to opt out of Windows enforced by law so that MS don't bang up numbers due to shady commercial practices.

GordonS 6y ago

The XPS 13 was the first thing I thought of when I saw this - a repairable, upgradable, expandable XPS 13. What they are promising sounds awesome. And AS a Brit, that is not a word I use often :) I really, really hope this pans out, and this summer - this is something I'd very much like to get my hands on!

agumonkey 6y ago

who else here had napkin design of just this ? now let's have a pocket variant that revives the old google modular project

SnowProblem 6y ago

I went with a Thinkpad over a Macbook a couple years ago exactly for these goals - repairability and modularity - so this looks pretty amazing to me. Especially the modular ports. That said, the lack of a discrete GPU makes this a no-go for what I do. Does anyone know if a dGPU is planned, and also any pricing?

0xbadcafebee 6y ago

> The company's team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo. They should avoid the appeal to authority fallacy. Those companies hire tens of thousands of people each. Statistically speaking, half of them could be idiots. Just because I worked at Cisco doesn't mean I'm some product genius. (Hell, I came from an acquisition!)

waheoo 6y ago

I'm very hopefully for this company. I just hope they drop the passive aggressive "block" remarks. Maybe its me but I suspect they're referring to decade old ThinkPad that have since evolved a lot to thin performance beasts. Passive aggressive remarks towards things your target market holds nostalgia for is likely not going to end well. It's also setting themselves up for failure if their cooling solution doesn't beat a modern ThinkPads dual fan solution. The aluminium case is also extremely questionable. Is your target demo thinkpad users or Dell users that want to take things apart. Hate to break it to you but Dell users don't give a fuck. It's why they have a Dell. Most think pad users value plastic chassis. They're lighter (13" at 1.3kg, are you nuts?) more durable, and more palatable on your lap when they warm up they're also more cost effective.

sanitycheck 6y ago
Hi, Dell Latitude user for 20+ years here. I buy them because they're easily upgradable and I can get parts after the (excellent) warranty expires. It's true I don't give a fuck about aluminium! Dell started soldering RAM in the past couple of years though, so if this thing exists when I next need to buy a laptop and it remotely justifies its high price I'd be interested.

40four 6y ago

With all do respect, but who gives a sh*t what Ars Technica thinks in regards to this? This project looks unbelievable! I am super excited for this, as many many others are too obviously. I’ll be honest I’m not even going to click on the Ars Technical article, their opinion couldn’t be less interesting to me. No doubt this company still has a lot to prove. Can they put their money where their mouth is? Remains to be seen. But the fact that there is a real company out there, making an attempt to build a product like this makes me so happy.

Igelau 6y ago

> it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're completely convinced. Read: please send us a free one