4 ms·
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 wh
by 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 agoYes, 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 agoI too wanted to see this work, but I was skeptical. Maybe it's just too ahead of its time?
- robotnikman 6y agoI 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 agoYep, 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 agoIt 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 agoOn some older Thinkpads, even CPU replacement was on the menu.
- pimeys 6y agoI think the 2012 generation was the last one. T420 at least.
- lallysingh 6y agoThey were competing with their partners, that was always going to end poorly. It could only ever be an experiment.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoHasn't that always been true? Their Pixel 4a kept me from buying a competitor's product.
- tpmx 6y agoProject 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 agoSee Fairphone!
- jkepler 6y agoThere'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 agoAnd 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 agoI 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 agoI 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 agoYea 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 agoLaptops 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 agoThe 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 agoYeah 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.