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Yes! This is absolutely the right move for SBC makers. It has always bothered me that SBCs are sold as entire laptops, which were often subpar because its hard
by craftkiller 2y ago
Yes! This is absolutely the right move for SBC makers. It has always bothered me that SBCs are sold as entire laptops, which were often subpar because its hard to justify an expensive screen/keyboard/shell for a single cheap underpowered SBC. Then, when you move onto the next SBC, you end up with an entire laptop of e-waste instead of just a single motherboard. Framework has already done an excellent job creating the physical/human interface, so lets just replace the brains inside of it so I can keep using the same excellent matte screen, keyboard, and touchpad and have essentially the same user experience (but with different performance).
Hopefully this board can also operate in stand-alone mode outside of the framework shell just like the official framework motherboards because then we'd get the best of both worlds while also being able to benefit from the coolermaster case. Regardless, I'm going to order one when it becomes available.
Also stoked to see the open source CAD files for the shell.
- mikenew 2y agoThey mentioned that it will work in the little Cooler Master standalone enclosure, so we're good on that front. And I totally agree; this is the perfect way to try out something like this.
- bee_rider 2y agoFor a while, it didn’t make sense to replace a CPU. Screens and hard drives were advancing around the same speed as CPUs (if not faster, the biggest advances in laptops until pretty recently were OLED screens and NVME drives). CPU competition picked up a while ago when AMD got their stuff together, but it takes time to turn the boat around, if it is actually turning. On the other hand we didn’t see laptop CPU replacement as a really mainstream thing during the 90’s/early 2000’s era when things were really going crazy. On the other other hand, everybody knew desktop PCs were the way to go for performance back then, so tinkering with laptop performance would have been a somewhat odd thing to do. Hard to speculate about or even measure, because people who tinker with hardware are in a pretty small niche already.
- Neywiny 2y agoI don't understand what you mean that SBCs are sold as entire laptops. SBC is Single Board Computer. Like a raspberry pi. A raspberry pi is not a laptop. If you just look up "RISC-V SBC" none of them are laptops. Is the intent that you want the SoC to be socketed and easily replaceable like AM4 Ryzen?
- DaoVeles 2y agoI'm guessing things like PineBook. https://pine64.org/devices/pinebook_pro/ https://pine64.org/devices/pinebook_pro/
- Neywiny 2y agoYes but that's not an SBC, that's a laptop. I don't understand who would call that an "SBC". I guess technically any laptop that's only 1 PCB is an SBC, but that still doesn't answer the original question of SBC -> Laptop.
- bee_rider 2y agoThey are intentionally misusing the lingo to emphasize the fact that guts of a laptop are basically a single board computer. It is a bit of rhetorical flair.
- Neywiny 2y agoin more discussion with them, that turns out to not be the case. It was a misunderstanding of what an SBC is.
- ssl-3 2y agoI agree. If I order an SBC, I expect to be buying a minimum of exactly one bare PCB. If I'm feeling fancy, I'll add a power supply and a housing to that order -- and maybe a keyboard, a mouse, a display, and/or some storage or other accessories. But it's still rooted as a singular PCB, and that Single Board Computer can be made to do useful work with a minimum of help. This is profoundly distinct from when I order a laptop, wherein: I'm absolutely not buying a bare PCB. My laptop is, at minimum, absolutely going to include a screen, a keyboard, a pointer, a battery, a power supply, and a housing to tie it all together. --- If a laptop is an SBC, then a Playstation 5 is an SBC. A pocket supercomputer and an iPad are both SBCs. ONVIF camera? VoIP desk phone? SBC. Asus router? SBC. Wifi-connected light bulb? SBC! That's madness. If I'm buying a laptop, then I'm buying a laptop. This laptop may or may not contain an SBC, but it's primarily a laptop. We have a term for these things: It is "laptop." If I'm buying a light bulb, then I'm buying a light bulb. This light bulb may or may not contain an SBC, but it's primarily a light bulb. And if I'm buying an SBC, then I'm not implicitly buying anything more than a single-board computer. It is primarily an SBC. (We have a term for these things, too: It is "SBC.") This kind of excessive and deliberate ambiguation is as dumb as the term "loosing" was ten years ago, and it needs to stop.