14 ms·

Framework's modular design has been advertised as a solution to upgradability, which is huge, but I see the real strength in being able to have a GPU plugged in

Framework's modular design has been advertised as a solution to upgradability, which is huge, but I see the real strength in being able to have a GPU plugged in when I'm using my laptop at home, and swapping it out for an extra battery when I'm using my laptop away from an outlet. Being able to transform the capabilities of the laptop based on your situation is a huge game changer.

varispeed 3y ago
Interesting that nobody came with a concept of a desktop PC, but as a laptop (commercially) before. Most like due to perceived niche, no standard format of laptop motherboards, not easy to buy laptop motherboard off the shelf. Then also the technology was evolving, so manufacturers maybe didn't want to restrict themselves to the certain layout and way how components can be laid out and connected.
- jjice 3y ago
  There was a short period where external GPUs that could connect to your laptop were kind of big a few years back. The never really took off though, and that was the only big component I saw that with.
  - theWreckluse 3y ago
    Any idea why they didn't take off?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - mschild 3y ago
      Guess on my part, but likely cost. The cheapest egpu case I could find is 300 Euros and that's just the case with an internal PSU. You still need to buy an incredibly expensive GPU to put into it. So now you're spending probably 1k just for the laptop, plus 300 for the case and an additional, let say, 350-400 on the GPU. For that amount of money, most would probably look for good laptops that have an integrated one, buy a handheld, a console, or just don't want to spend that amount of money on it.
    - Jochim 3y ago
      They often just don't justify the cost. The enclosures themselves are expensive, and there's a really rough performance hit, less than half the framerate of the same card connected via PCIe in some cases[0]. A decent gaming laptop probably costs about the same while having better performance[1]. They're not particularly portable either, so you'd be better off getting the gaming laptop, or building a desktop with a cheaper GPU for roughly the same price. The size/power delivery of the enclosure can be a limiting factor as well, new GPUs have tended to be bigger and more power hungry, resulting in many enclosures just not being compatible with newer cards. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYHPj-0DTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYHPj-0DTE [1] https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbolt-3-egpu-internal-display-test/ https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbo...`
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  I would love to see an external monitor with embedded GPU/extra CPU etc that would serve as an extension to a laptop, tablet, phone or stick. If such devices were popular enough in remote-first offices, coworkings and hotels, it would be a game changer making computing more inclusive. Imagine having a $100 laptop with easily replaceable components that is transformed into $1500 workstation on demand.
  - dijit 3y ago
    I had the same idea before, its basically possible now if you pass through the SSD to a host computer. I even thought about maybe having an external SSD module which you could swap out the SSD to a beast machine when you need it.
    - ivan_gammel 3y ago
      This solution will work even with good old HDD, but you need a whole host computer and you swap, not extend your hardware.
  - acomjean 3y ago
    Isn't that what "Display Link" usb monitors kinda are (without the powerful gpu and large screen real estate) I've used a usb-> monitor adapter from time to time (with my own screen). The performance wasn't great, but its not bad and been more than usable for work and such. with usb3 it should be better than the one I used. https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/displaylink-products-list?field_displaylink_category_value=usb_monitors https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/disp...
    - ivan_gammel 3y ago
      Well, the connector does not really matter, the key is the hardware at the extension. CPU+GPU+screen+network+camera+HDD with some software that you need only in workstation mode etc. The software could be sandboxed by the OS on your device, security of extra CPU and GPU is interesting, but probably solvable problem.
- usrusr 3y ago
  Standing on the shoulders of giants is a pointless endeavor if the giants simply aren't there or if their abilities are too narrowly focused on the very hard problems. Very fast (on a contemporary scale) mobile extension interfaces have come and gone before, but only PCIe in its USB-C and m.2 incarnations not only excels at high performance but also scales down nicely to things as pedestrian as plugging in a mouse or a non-exotic storage extension. PCMCIA for example was dead weight unless you happened to be one of the very few who had one of those super exotic cards. An unused lightning 4 slot? There can never be enough of those, the more the merrier. You might find yourself using it for things as simple as topping up your bike light battery when it's not running an external GPU.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    (eh, sorry for typing lightning when I meant thunderbolt)
- sh34r 3y ago
  I strongly believe the tech just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to make a modular laptop, but making some ten billion smartphones (and the constant drive to make them ever thinner and smaller) made it so we can pack far more power into a smaller space. Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements. People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.
- jerf 3y ago
  "Interesting that nobody came with a concept of a desktop PC, but as a laptop (commercially) before." Oh, they did, it was just a niche market you needed to go looking for, because they were and still generally are expensive. I remember my father once brought home a laptop from work to evaluate whether or not they wanted to use it to do data collection in car certification tests. It was a hardened laptop, so the entire thing was made out of sheet metal. I think you could literally run it over with a car and it would be fine. The most noticeable feature was that it featured 4 ISA expansion ports and the volume necessary to contain the cards. I think it was a 486/100 or so. They called these "luggables", but, yes, technically it fit on my lap. I wouldn't guarantee it would fit on everyone's lap, though; I'm quite tall. It was ~$8,000 in ~1995 dollars, and I'm pretty sure I had a Pentium 233MHz by then, and I was never cutting edge on that stuff, was always scrounging around. So, very expensive. This sort of thing has been available for a while, you just had to go looking for them. A lot of advancements combine to make something like Framework possible, such as the fact that any such testing platform today would have all of its data gathering gear as a combination of USB at worst, bluetooth or wifi quite possible, and software driving the rest, leaving nowadays a GPU as just about the only thing you might want to wire to a laptop at such speeds, so the market has toned down. A couple of years ago it lived on in the gamer laptop space where, at the very top end, the laptops are basically just desktops jammed into a luggable laptop shell with desktop GPUs in them. You paid through the nose for these things, though you did recover a bit of the price on the grounds that you were using off-the-shelf desktop parts and not paying the mobile premium. I'm qualifying that with "a couple of years ago" because I haven't looked since then, and the external GPU enclosures are getting steadily more practical and well-supported and I expect that will probably eat that market. Hauling around two bits of kit is nominally worse than one, but an external GPU enclosure can have such massively better cooling than trying to jam it in a case with everything else that it will probably be able to perform even better and at this level performance is everything.
danShumway 3y ago
How hard is that to do? I know Frameworks are repairable, but you can really do a swap like that completely on the fly? Honestly, this comment is a somewhat decent sales hook for me; I've been thinking about getting a Framework for my next laptop whenever the current one I use really starts to fail (depending on how their AMD stuff works out), and this comment makes me more curious to look into them.
- pitaj 3y ago
  I think we'll have to wait and see whether these are hot-pluggable.
- stavros 3y ago
  I don't know about the GPU, but in general, you unscrew five screws, lift up the magnetic lid/keyboard, and you have access to all the internals. I imagine that swapping the GPU is as easy as undoing one more screw. Removing the battery is a cable and a few screws, for example. Everything is very accessible.
  - stronglikedan 3y ago
    Hopefully they use some crazy hard screws so the heads don't strip with repeated use. (I don't know much about Framework... yet)
    - stavros 3y ago
      No, they're built to unscrew easily, and they're captive, so you can't even lose them.
  - alpaca128 3y ago
    From what I've seen the GPU add-on is not an internal component (within the laptop's case) but similar to swappable batteries on oldschool laptops, slotted into a port on the back. It makes the laptop larger just like extra large batteries on Thinkpads.
- pimterry 3y ago
AceJohnny2 3y ago
My first "real" laptop was a beast of a Dell workstation-class laptop in 2005. One of its key features for me was being able to swap out the CD drive for an extra battery. Of course, by modern standards the thing weighed a ton. These days, my 15" MBP feels like a brick in my bike bag, and it's likely 30-50% lighter! (Oh and fun fact: recently I wanted to test out Moore's Law, and see how the RasPi 4 compared to that Core Duo laptop (that I still have!) Well, the 18y-old laptop still handily beat out the RasPi4 in single-CPU performance! Moore's law can't quite make up for opposite market segments)
- majormajor 3y ago
  Yeah, this used to be pretty common. Through the 90s laptops came with expansion cards and often swappable bays. Even late-90s Mac laptops had two bays that you could swap batteries, DVD/CD/floppy drives into and out of, plus a PC Card slot that could take things like TV video capture cards or Wifi adapters. I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though. They all went away in the quest for lightweight size and capacity... especially as more things got built in.
  - znpy 3y ago
    > I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though. PCMCIA surely not, but express card most likely. I remember some mods installing an external GPU onto the mythical ThinkPad X220 by means of a bridge card that would fit in the express card slot and would allow a full pci-express to be connected. See: https://artemis.sh/2021/08/04/eGPU-on-thinkpad-x220.html https://artemis.sh/2021/08/04/eGPU-on-thinkpad-x220.html
  - acomjean 3y ago
    PCMCIA I remember those slightly larger than a credit card (and thicker). I had 2, and IBM one which had a eithernet and modem on it (and a really fun sparkly label). and a scsi one for a zip drive (they had parallel port zip drives... but)
sschueller 3y ago
I find that hilarious because we did that back in the day on laptops that let you put batteries in instead of a cd or floppy drive. Then Apple happened and ever laptop maker only saw the cash, abondend what users needed and wanted to copy what Apple was peddling including making parts on replacable. Now after waisting all these resources on form over function even Apple has started to go back to function (at least a tiny bit).
- ChuckNorris89 3y ago
  >Then Apple happened As much as I dislike Apple's anti-repair and anti-upgrade practices, they're hardly to blame for this. They only gave consumers what they wanted, and consumer collectively voted for their wallets for sexyer, slimmer and lighter notebooks at the expense of repairability and upgradability, regardless of who made them, Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Asus etc. Consumers are a lot more likely to prioritize "hey look, my laptop fits inside a Manila Envelope" rather than "hey look, I can unscrew and replace/repair all these components in my laptop if something breaks". Now the entire consumer electronics industry has conditioned consumers that whenever their laptop breaks they just take it to a "genius" bar where some dude who doesn't have any electronics repair knowledge (because that would be too expensive), takes a look at your laptop and says "sorry mate, looks like it's fucked and you're gonna need a new motherboard replacement for 800$", when in fact it can be fixed for 50$ in a 10 minute soldering job by a technician who actually knows electronics but is either retired or out of work because his job was offshored to China and we don't repair things anymore we just throw them in the landfill "because we're that wealthy and stuff made in China is that cheap". Hopefully right to repair laws, stricter environmental rules and trade tariffs, will put an end to this consumerist throwaway madness that just jack up corporate profits at the expense of everything else, even if that means that MacBook Airs will have to be 1.5mm thinker.
  - LightHugger 3y ago
    "They only gave consumers what they wanted" This is a complete myth and not how consumer economics works.

varispeed 3y ago

Interesting that nobody came with a concept of a desktop PC, but as a laptop (commercially) before. Most like due to perceived niche, no standard format of laptop motherboards, not easy to buy laptop motherboard off the shelf. Then also the technology was evolving, so manufacturers maybe didn't want to restrict themselves to the certain layout and way how components can be laid out and connected.

jjice 3y ago
There was a short period where external GPUs that could connect to your laptop were kind of big a few years back. The never really took off though, and that was the only big component I saw that with.
- theWreckluse 3y ago
  Any idea why they didn't take off?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - mschild 3y ago
    Guess on my part, but likely cost. The cheapest egpu case I could find is 300 Euros and that's just the case with an internal PSU. You still need to buy an incredibly expensive GPU to put into it. So now you're spending probably 1k just for the laptop, plus 300 for the case and an additional, let say, 350-400 on the GPU. For that amount of money, most would probably look for good laptops that have an integrated one, buy a handheld, a console, or just don't want to spend that amount of money on it.
  - Jochim 3y ago
    They often just don't justify the cost. The enclosures themselves are expensive, and there's a really rough performance hit, less than half the framerate of the same card connected via PCIe in some cases[0]. A decent gaming laptop probably costs about the same while having better performance[1]. They're not particularly portable either, so you'd be better off getting the gaming laptop, or building a desktop with a cheaper GPU for roughly the same price. The size/power delivery of the enclosure can be a limiting factor as well, new GPUs have tended to be bigger and more power hungry, resulting in many enclosures just not being compatible with newer cards. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYHPj-0DTE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlYHPj-0DTE [1] https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbolt-3-egpu-internal-display-test/ https://egpu.io/forums/mac-setup/pcie-slot-dgpu-vs-thunderbo...`
ivan_gammel 3y ago
I would love to see an external monitor with embedded GPU/extra CPU etc that would serve as an extension to a laptop, tablet, phone or stick. If such devices were popular enough in remote-first offices, coworkings and hotels, it would be a game changer making computing more inclusive. Imagine having a $100 laptop with easily replaceable components that is transformed into $1500 workstation on demand.
- dijit 3y ago
  I had the same idea before, its basically possible now if you pass through the SSD to a host computer. I even thought about maybe having an external SSD module which you could swap out the SSD to a beast machine when you need it.
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    This solution will work even with good old HDD, but you need a whole host computer and you swap, not extend your hardware.
- acomjean 3y ago
  Isn't that what "Display Link" usb monitors kinda are (without the powerful gpu and large screen real estate) I've used a usb-> monitor adapter from time to time (with my own screen). The performance wasn't great, but its not bad and been more than usable for work and such. with usb3 it should be better than the one I used. https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/displaylink-products-list?field_displaylink_category_value=usb_monitors https://www.synaptics.com/products/displaylink-graphics/disp...
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    Well, the connector does not really matter, the key is the hardware at the extension. CPU+GPU+screen+network+camera+HDD with some software that you need only in workstation mode etc. The software could be sandboxed by the OS on your device, security of extra CPU and GPU is interesting, but probably solvable problem.
usrusr 3y ago
Standing on the shoulders of giants is a pointless endeavor if the giants simply aren't there or if their abilities are too narrowly focused on the very hard problems. Very fast (on a contemporary scale) mobile extension interfaces have come and gone before, but only PCIe in its USB-C and m.2 incarnations not only excels at high performance but also scales down nicely to things as pedestrian as plugging in a mouse or a non-exotic storage extension. PCMCIA for example was dead weight unless you happened to be one of the very few who had one of those super exotic cards. An unused lightning 4 slot? There can never be enough of those, the more the merrier. You might find yourself using it for things as simple as topping up your bike light battery when it's not running an external GPU.
- usrusr 3y ago
  (eh, sorry for typing lightning when I meant thunderbolt)
sh34r 3y ago
I strongly believe the tech just wasn’t there 10 years ago. It shouldn’t have taken as long as it did to make a modular laptop, but making some ten billion smartphones (and the constant drive to make them ever thinner and smaller) made it so we can pack far more power into a smaller space. Modularity and repairability is always going to lead to less space efficient designs. I will gladly concur that Apple and others have taken severe advantage of this in an excuse to push planned obsolescence, long after anyone cared about shaving another millimeter from a device. But there was absolutely a time where it just wasn’t feasible to make a laptop do what people wanted, at the desired price point, and also make it modular. Computer architecture’s all about tradeoffs and there just wasn’t a viable product on that part of the “efficient frontier.” Similar argument explains why gaming laptops were also a massive disappointment for so many years. There are conflicting requirements. People also didn’t really care as much about right to repair, when hardware improvements made you want to upgrade every few years anyway, and we didn’t have such rapacious anti-consumer monopolies.
jerf 3y ago
"Interesting that nobody came with a concept of a desktop PC, but as a laptop (commercially) before." Oh, they did, it was just a niche market you needed to go looking for, because they were and still generally are expensive. I remember my father once brought home a laptop from work to evaluate whether or not they wanted to use it to do data collection in car certification tests. It was a hardened laptop, so the entire thing was made out of sheet metal. I think you could literally run it over with a car and it would be fine. The most noticeable feature was that it featured 4 ISA expansion ports and the volume necessary to contain the cards. I think it was a 486/100 or so. They called these "luggables", but, yes, technically it fit on my lap. I wouldn't guarantee it would fit on everyone's lap, though; I'm quite tall. It was ~$8,000 in ~1995 dollars, and I'm pretty sure I had a Pentium 233MHz by then, and I was never cutting edge on that stuff, was always scrounging around. So, very expensive. This sort of thing has been available for a while, you just had to go looking for them. A lot of advancements combine to make something like Framework possible, such as the fact that any such testing platform today would have all of its data gathering gear as a combination of USB at worst, bluetooth or wifi quite possible, and software driving the rest, leaving nowadays a GPU as just about the only thing you might want to wire to a laptop at such speeds, so the market has toned down. A couple of years ago it lived on in the gamer laptop space where, at the very top end, the laptops are basically just desktops jammed into a luggable laptop shell with desktop GPUs in them. You paid through the nose for these things, though you did recover a bit of the price on the grounds that you were using off-the-shelf desktop parts and not paying the mobile premium. I'm qualifying that with "a couple of years ago" because I haven't looked since then, and the external GPU enclosures are getting steadily more practical and well-supported and I expect that will probably eat that market. Hauling around two bits of kit is nominally worse than one, but an external GPU enclosure can have such massively better cooling than trying to jam it in a case with everything else that it will probably be able to perform even better and at this level performance is everything.

danShumway 3y ago

How hard is that to do? I know Frameworks are repairable, but you can really do a swap like that completely on the fly? Honestly, this comment is a somewhat decent sales hook for me; I've been thinking about getting a Framework for my next laptop whenever the current one I use really starts to fail (depending on how their AMD stuff works out), and this comment makes me more curious to look into them.

pitaj 3y ago
I think we'll have to wait and see whether these are hot-pluggable.
stavros 3y ago
I don't know about the GPU, but in general, you unscrew five screws, lift up the magnetic lid/keyboard, and you have access to all the internals. I imagine that swapping the GPU is as easy as undoing one more screw. Removing the battery is a cable and a few screws, for example. Everything is very accessible.
- stronglikedan 3y ago
  Hopefully they use some crazy hard screws so the heads don't strip with repeated use. (I don't know much about Framework... yet)
  - stavros 3y ago
    No, they're built to unscrew easily, and they're captive, so you can't even lose them.
- alpaca128 3y ago
  From what I've seen the GPU add-on is not an internal component (within the laptop's case) but similar to swappable batteries on oldschool laptops, slotted into a port on the back. It makes the laptop larger just like extra large batteries on Thinkpads.
pimterry 3y ago

AceJohnny2 3y ago

My first "real" laptop was a beast of a Dell workstation-class laptop in 2005. One of its key features for me was being able to swap out the CD drive for an extra battery. Of course, by modern standards the thing weighed a ton. These days, my 15" MBP feels like a brick in my bike bag, and it's likely 30-50% lighter! (Oh and fun fact: recently I wanted to test out Moore's Law, and see how the RasPi 4 compared to that Core Duo laptop (that I still have!) Well, the 18y-old laptop still handily beat out the RasPi4 in single-CPU performance! Moore's law can't quite make up for opposite market segments)

majormajor 3y ago
Yeah, this used to be pretty common. Through the 90s laptops came with expansion cards and often swappable bays. Even late-90s Mac laptops had two bays that you could swap batteries, DVD/CD/floppy drives into and out of, plus a PC Card slot that could take things like TV video capture cards or Wifi adapters. I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though. They all went away in the quest for lightweight size and capacity... especially as more things got built in.
- znpy 3y ago
  > I don't remember if PCMCIA slots had enough bandwidth to make external video cards practical (plus... it would require a separate monitor, I guess), though. PCMCIA surely not, but express card most likely. I remember some mods installing an external GPU onto the mythical ThinkPad X220 by means of a bridge card that would fit in the express card slot and would allow a full pci-express to be connected. See: https://artemis.sh/2021/08/04/eGPU-on-thinkpad-x220.html https://artemis.sh/2021/08/04/eGPU-on-thinkpad-x220.html
- acomjean 3y ago
  PCMCIA I remember those slightly larger than a credit card (and thicker). I had 2, and IBM one which had a eithernet and modem on it (and a really fun sparkly label). and a scsi one for a zip drive (they had parallel port zip drives... but)

sschueller 3y ago

I find that hilarious because we did that back in the day on laptops that let you put batteries in instead of a cd or floppy drive. Then Apple happened and ever laptop maker only saw the cash, abondend what users needed and wanted to copy what Apple was peddling including making parts on replacable. Now after waisting all these resources on form over function even Apple has started to go back to function (at least a tiny bit).

ChuckNorris89 3y ago
>Then Apple happened As much as I dislike Apple's anti-repair and anti-upgrade practices, they're hardly to blame for this. They only gave consumers what they wanted, and consumer collectively voted for their wallets for sexyer, slimmer and lighter notebooks at the expense of repairability and upgradability, regardless of who made them, Apple, Lenovo, Dell, Asus etc. Consumers are a lot more likely to prioritize "hey look, my laptop fits inside a Manila Envelope" rather than "hey look, I can unscrew and replace/repair all these components in my laptop if something breaks". Now the entire consumer electronics industry has conditioned consumers that whenever their laptop breaks they just take it to a "genius" bar where some dude who doesn't have any electronics repair knowledge (because that would be too expensive), takes a look at your laptop and says "sorry mate, looks like it's fucked and you're gonna need a new motherboard replacement for 800$", when in fact it can be fixed for 50$ in a 10 minute soldering job by a technician who actually knows electronics but is either retired or out of work because his job was offshored to China and we don't repair things anymore we just throw them in the landfill "because we're that wealthy and stuff made in China is that cheap". Hopefully right to repair laws, stricter environmental rules and trade tariffs, will put an end to this consumerist throwaway madness that just jack up corporate profits at the expense of everything else, even if that means that MacBook Airs will have to be 1.5mm thinker.
- LightHugger 3y ago
  "They only gave consumers what they wanted" This is a complete myth and not how consumer economics works.