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Some of us are just really excited about a laptop which is intentionally built for upgrades, repairs, and re-usability. The current trend of the household name

Some of us are just really excited about a laptop which is intentionally built for upgrades, repairs, and re-usability. The current trend of the household name manufacturers is to solder and glue as many components together as possible, meaning if one thing inside goes ka-plooey outside the warranty then the whole unit is shot, forcing you to buy another. They say their goal is to get their products thinner and thinner (for some reason) but of course we all know the likely real reason is designed obsolescence. Edit: I don't own a Framework laptop yet, but the 16 is near the top of the list of contenders when I upgrade within the next year or so.

rkagerer 3y ago
Yeah I think the 16's will be very popular. Do you know if the Ethernet adapter still sticks out past the edge of the unit?
- lillecarl 3y ago
  That's how it's designed, I'd stick to a dongle if it's an issue. RJ45 size is pretty legacy. See Lenovo T14 vs T14s. Hopefully they'll be able to design one that doesn't stick out eventually, but a bit extra downwards instead.
  - rkagerer 3y ago
    Legacy? I use them all over the place whenever I travel to client sites, and all over my house and office. More reliable than Wifi.
robocat 3y ago
> designed obsolescence I am old enough to remember “reseating” memory to fix faults. Connectors fail, often disgustingly intermittently. Solder is used for reliability, performance and price reduction: I think most people prefer those attributes versus upgradability (although nice to get choice with Framework!). Connectors now limit performance: there’s a reason why the highest performance memory does not use pluggable formats. HBM2. Remember when cache was a seperate stick of SRAM memory? The majority of PCs were never upgraded, even if they could be. I know, because I would do it for non-technical friends back-in-the-day and eek a couple of years of extra life out of a PC: however without my free labour (and usually trickle-down free parts) those friends would just buy a new PC and be happy. Upgrades are mostly for geeks. Meanwhile good hardware (phones, laptops) is often becoming obsolete due to lack of software upgrades, not lack of grunt. I just bought a new iPad because of this. A friend’s MacBook Air: working fine but needed new battery and no more MacOS upgrades. But also they wanted a new device with a better screen since they spend many hours a day on it, so less value in upgradeability? Yeah, batteries. I haven’t seen a good cost-benefit analysis of sealed devices. Modern batteries now seem to outlive the device, which wasn’t the case 10 years ago with iPhone6. Certainly I appreciate sealed mobile phones that don’t die from water damage.

rkagerer 3y ago

Yeah I think the 16's will be very popular. Do you know if the Ethernet adapter still sticks out past the edge of the unit?

lillecarl 3y ago
That's how it's designed, I'd stick to a dongle if it's an issue. RJ45 size is pretty legacy. See Lenovo T14 vs T14s. Hopefully they'll be able to design one that doesn't stick out eventually, but a bit extra downwards instead.
- rkagerer 3y ago
  Legacy? I use them all over the place whenever I travel to client sites, and all over my house and office. More reliable than Wifi.

robocat 3y ago

> designed obsolescence I am old enough to remember “reseating” memory to fix faults. Connectors fail, often disgustingly intermittently. Solder is used for reliability, performance and price reduction: I think most people prefer those attributes versus upgradability (although nice to get choice with Framework!). Connectors now limit performance: there’s a reason why the highest performance memory does not use pluggable formats. HBM2. Remember when cache was a seperate stick of SRAM memory? The majority of PCs were never upgraded, even if they could be. I know, because I would do it for non-technical friends back-in-the-day and eek a couple of years of extra life out of a PC: however without my free labour (and usually trickle-down free parts) those friends would just buy a new PC and be happy. Upgrades are mostly for geeks. Meanwhile good hardware (phones, laptops) is often becoming obsolete due to lack of software upgrades, not lack of grunt. I just bought a new iPad because of this. A friend’s MacBook Air: working fine but needed new battery and no more MacOS upgrades. But also they wanted a new device with a better screen since they spend many hours a day on it, so less value in upgradeability? Yeah, batteries. I haven’t seen a good cost-benefit analysis of sealed devices. Modern batteries now seem to outlive the device, which wasn’t the case 10 years ago with iPhone6. Certainly I appreciate sealed mobile phones that don’t die from water damage.