What about shipping and deliveries to regions other than US, like EU for example?How will your volumes look during this silicon shortage?

So in other words it’s going to be 2k for i7, 16 Gb RAM, and 512 Gb SSD?

Framework founder here.  We&#x27;ll be announcing pricing shortly before we open pre-orders this spring.  We won&#x27;t be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, and will be setting pricing to be comparable to other popular notebooks using the same silicon.

I agree. If I ever get a new machine it will be a Lenovo. The build quality is amazing.

I feel you. IMHO Lenovo still makes the best laptop keybaord layouts for coding, typing and gaming. Check out their Legion series.

Haha. I have adapted to that too, but why even bother with 1&#x2F;2 keys then. The look like an afterthought.

The hjkl keys look full size to me.ducks

Yea, fun fact: I like my Acer Nitro 5. I&#x27;m an Apple fan through and through, but I also like to run Linux and Windows and haven&#x27;t done that in a while, so I bought an Acer.I&#x27;m using my Acer now more as a dev laptop and my Mac more as a free time laptop. What I&#x27;m noticing is that I&#x27;m enjoying the typing experience on the Nitro 5 more, in particular because it has decent arrows (and a numpad :) ).

I would strongly urge, if going with half-height arrow keys, to make the side arrows half height as well, rather than full height. This helps with both finding the key cluster and using it. Consider leaving a small gap to the left of the cluster as well, which in this case could conveniently be done by making the keys a bit narrower—they look unreasonably wide as it is. Ideally I’d also say shift them lower, breaking out of the rectangle and allowing taller arrows (even ⅔ or ¾ height would be a good improvement), but I can imagine that may fall afoul of manufacturing practicalities.Another nice feature for keyboard design is small gaps between Esc and F1, F4 and F5, F8 and F9, and F12 and what’s to its right, as desktop keyboards have always done; this helps fingers to blindly find the right place. Not very many laptops do this; the main ones I’ve noticed doing it in my recent research is ASUS ROG laptops, which do seem to put more thought than most into these sorts of details. In the pictures shown here, the Escape and especially Delete keys look to be unnecessarily wide so that you could reduce their widths a bit to provide this space perhaps without shrinking anything else.

I have noticed that most laptops under 14&quot; have those 1&#x2F;2 keys, but once you go to 15&quot; the overall weight increases a lot. The only 14&quot; laptop I&#x27;ve used with full arrow keys was the System76 Galago Pro Gen 3 (galp3).

Great. Another laptop with 1&#x2F;2 arrow keys. Such a shame.

The fact that they answered a fairly ridiculous question (by HN-standards) wether swapping Intel for AMD on the same Motherboard is possible, but did npt address reasonable questions about their choosing of Intel over AMD, makes me suspicious of them being in bed with Intel somehow. It&#x27;s just like with the AMD versions of Lenovo&#x2F;HP&#x2F;Dell premium laptops, which are always somehow inexplicably crippled (low-res display? why?!) compared to the Intel configurations.When people ask why there&#x27;s so many rooting against Intel, I don&#x27;t say it&#x27;s because they stagnated the market. It&#x27;s specifically because long-known practices like these.But hopefully it&#x27;s not the case here.

Seconded!
The value that AMD has been bringing to the table lately is shockingly good.

Looks promising, but having AMD chips would be killer.

Yep. With swappable keyboards, I really hope that they consider an alternative option with trackpoint, trackpoint mouse buttons and full-size arrow keys, perhaps even adjacent PgUp&#x2F;PgDown keys à la ThinkPad.

I wish new laptops would follow the form factor of the old Thinkpads instead of Macbooks. I realize that most people like trackpads and can&#x27;t stand the trackpoint, but as someone who has used one for so long it would be fantastic if something like this existed.That being said, this is a great project and it looks like it should be successful - having a laptop that is built to last with interchangable parts is a great idea and should&#x27;ve been done long ago.

I have few tricks in my sleeve, but my laptop project stalled with quarantine, and appearance of other things to spend money on.

I dig the concept, just hope the utilization pans out.I’m holding out for an arm based Linux laptop which can handle Blender without too much fan noise... I would love to get a system76 laptop but I have doubts about the build quality. But they say that they are on tract to manufacture their own laptops this year. How does a framework laptop compare to System76? (Let alone a Lenovo or Asus.)Any chance you guys could make your own distro in the future and brand it Lapdance?

Sorry, why does it matter where they’re founded?

I can understand the strong benefits for startups starting in the Bay Area; I would like to see more of them migrate OUT at an appropriate time (which would be slightly before FAANG valuation in my mind).Remote work may solve some of this, but eventually the extended runways available at &quot;lower altitudes&quot; (to bend the metaphor) will become worthwhile.

As someone who swaps laptops out a lot, I&#x27;m down to get one. I&#x27;m also the same kind of person that buys an X1 Extreme for it&#x27;s ability to be repaired. I&#x27;m also curious about price, but I&#x27;m assuming that hasn&#x27;t been decided.That said:&gt; Founded in San Francisco in 2019I&#x27;d love to see these kind of companies founded outside of this area in the future.

Awesome!Best of luck and please let me know if you want someone to dogfood things as an outsider. My email is my HN username

How is the trackpad? Does it support Windows Precision? What material is it made out of? How does it compare to an Apple trackpad?

Any plans to support movable keycaps?  I&#x27;d love to actually have the physical keys match my Colemak layout

Keyboard feel was high on our list of priorities. We engaged one of the bigger keyboard suppliers and worked with them on a custom one with 1.5mm key travel.We&#x27;ve built a fingerprint reader into the power button using a just-released sensor that has been performing really well in our testing so far. We&#x27;re seeing False Reject Rates lower than the typical fingerprint readers built into laptops while keeping the right False Accept Rate.

I’ve added my name to preorder list, happy to pay premium for a laptop with high build quality and hardware.   Please don’t screw up the keyboard.  Please.  And a fingerprint reader would be welcome addition if possible.

This looks so interesting.
A modular laptop that looks great?
I’m a Mac guy and this still has me hyped!

They may be wondering if the BIOS is FOSS.E.g. LibreBoot <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libreboot.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;libreboot.org&#x2F;</a>&gt; Non-free BIOS&#x2F;UEFI firmware often contains backdoors, can be slow and have severe bugs. Development and support can be abandoned at any time.

Idk bro the cpu microcode from intel is closed source. How can you live with that&lt;&#x2F;s&gt;

Ubuntu runs also on proprietary drivers.
If the hardware vendor stops to maintain the proprietary driver or binary blob the hardware could become obsolete very quickly, although it runs fine hardware wise.
My 11yr old Nokia N900 runs absolutely fine hardware wise. It also could run a new linux kernel, but some drivers are proprietary and can not be updated. What a waste.

I think he is referring to proprietary firmware&#x2F;driver blobs that come with many CPUs and GPUs. Purism has focused on this issue and provide fully FOSS hardware [1].1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puri.sm&#x2F;learn&#x2F;blobs&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;puri.sm&#x2F;learn&#x2F;blobs&#x2F;</a>

He is just asking if it can reach the same level in terms of freedom as the laptops listed here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ryf.fsf.org&#x2F;categories&#x2F;laptops" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ryf.fsf.org&#x2F;categories&#x2F;laptops</a>

Are you implying they’re going to stop you from popping Ubuntu on it somehow?[Edit: Thanks for all the replies citing driver blobs and proprietary BIOS issues, totally slipped my mind that that was a concern, makes a ton more sense now.]

Please consider a future option for device owners to install their preferred vendor of open-source firmware. If the hardware and enclosure platform gains traction, it will hopefully attract open system firmware developers. This will require an owner-controlled mechanism for signed-firmware key management.

Our Embedded Controller firmware is fully open source.  We&#x27;re using a proprietary BIOS solution at launch, but that is something we&#x27;d like to fix in the future.

Will it run with completely free software?
The limiting factor for lasting is not hardware but required proprietary software.

I always think of The Sandbenders from William Gibson’s Idoru when I see projects like this.It might be worth publishing enough of the internal CAD measurements as specs so that artists could create their own enclosures &#x2F; cool addons and be sure that they will have parts access.Anyway, my first thought was ‘will an m1 board fit in there?’ so I am looking forward to seeing your release!

&gt; Also, big up for the 3:2 screen.Amen. Any chance I can buy one for my desktop?

Resolution is marginal. It would be a step down from my 2013 Google Chrome pixel (240 dpi), which you can get refurbished for about $200.

13.5″ 2256×1504, that’s 201ppi, not too shabby, just right for 1.5× scaling for an effective resolution of 1504×1002⅔.(I like my Surface Book’s 13.5″ 3000×2000 267ppi display which is just the right size for 2× scaling, yielding an effective resolution of 1500×1000.)For reference, the common 13.3″ 1920×1080 display is 166ppi, 13.3″ 1366×768 is 118ppi, 15.6″ 1920×1080 is 141ppi, and 15.6″ 1366×768 is 100ppi.(I’m idly curious why it’s 2256×1504 rather than 2250×1500, which would scale to the more convenient effective resolution of 1500×1000 at 150%, and still 200ppi.)

If the screen is swappable I&#x27;d really like to see a lower DPI version of 1920x1280. The Thinkpad X1C9 by comparison is 14&quot; @ 1920x1200.

This actually looks promising but I wonder if I&#x27;m really the target group. While I do build custom computers every now and then i also cherish the &quot;completeness&quot; of the unibody design that my MBP has. I also wonder about the availability of parts...Also, big up for the 3:2 screen.

A marketplace for an extremely narrow market? Who’s going to invest their money to develop hardware for this platform? They better do everything themselves in the beginning.

From the article: &quot;In addition to releasing new upgrades regularly, we’re opening up the ecosystem to enable a community of partners to build and sell compatible modules through the Framework Marketplace.&quot;Maybe I am misinterpreting it but it sounds like its not a completely proprietary system?

GPIO cards on a modern laptop?  Sign me up!!!

&gt; We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it&#x27;s possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels.That&#x27;s a bold and brave move. Well done.

It is definitely on us to prove that we&#x27;ll provide long term support for the modules that we&#x27;re developing, but we&#x27;re also opening up documentation and reference designs for things like our Expansion Card system. If something ever happens to us, other companies and the community can continue to use and extend the ecosystem.We designed the Expansion Cards in a way that it&#x27;s possible to 3D print the housings for them on a home 3D printer and get PCBs fabbed through the normal hobby channels. We hope that folks in the community come up with interesting card ideas and bring them out themselves in addition to what we develop.

It would be really cool if they had just made a laptop that accepted PCMCIA cards, and then made a bunch of new PCMCIA cards.

There used to be a pretty standard adapter card for laptops.I had an &quot;ethernet modem card&quot; from ibm in that form factor that worked well. And a scsi adapter for a zip drive I think. Its been a while...<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PC_Card" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;PC_Card</a>

It actually is a problem for cheaper laptops whose exact SKUs often don&#x27;t last more than half a year, which is my primary reason for buying &quot;business&quot; laptops.

Is that true for the premium laptops? I worked at my school&#x27;s help desk and yes, Dell parts and service manuals were plentiful, but usually for bulky Inspiron and Latitude budget laptops. The ones with ugly screens, wacky trackpads and replaceable batteries.It&#x27;s been a while since I was in that world, but Dell makes some mighty nice looking machinery these days, but it doesn&#x27;t look particularly repairable.

On the other hand in the laptop space I&#x27;ve never had problems with part availability. With brands like Dell or Lenovo there are plenty of new and used parts available on ebay or your trusted reseller, and official service handbooks are easy to download.The real value-add of the framework laptop is imho the upgrade path: you can swap in newer components without replacing nearly everything. Usually that&#x27;s limited to just SSD and RAM, with everything else being on one huge mainboard assembly.

But it has happened to many of us for other things. The camera on my pixel 2 broke but no one sells new parts for the pixel 2 and google doesn&#x27;t support it. All you can get is poor quality second hand and stolen parts. For a less popular product, you get nothing.

&gt;if that&#x27;s something that happens for a simple hoseBut it didn&#x27;t happen...

Sounds like 3rd party extension is the goal, and according to other comments here without necessitating distribution on their marketplace either.

Since the modules are just USB-C adapted, those parts would probably be easy to mimic by a third party. Maybe they need to be signed or something, hence the marketplace they allude to.

One of the repair challenges is access to old parts. The drain hose on our three year-old washer sprung a leak. When I called a repair man, he at first said that Samsung doesn&#x27;t make that part anymore. Fortunately, he was mistaken, but if that&#x27;s something that happens for a simple hose, imagine trying to replace the &quot;high-end headphone amp&quot; expansion card on this laptop five years from now.Even if I&#x27;m not too excited about the proprietary expansion card system, which will last as long as the founders&#x27; attention spans, if it gives access to standard memory and storage, that&#x27;s an improvement over the current trend.

Do you have plans for a Ryzen (Zen 3) CPU?

Will it be cheaper than a mac? If yes, you have my money as I can see it being used for the next 20 years (with upgrades).

How often will you be pushing out new releases? every 18 months? 24? etc.Personally, I am waiting until av1 hardware decoders are more common, and BT 5 LE Audio (so they can stream to wireless headsets easily) is out as well.

Drive by suggestion here.I think you should offer a first-class Linux experience with this laptop. It&#x27;s a genuinely underserved market, with a lot of overlap for people who care about the repairability and upgradability which are core to your offering. A market with premium mind share, as well.When I say first class, I mean something specific: you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good driver Linux driver for your touchpad, and open source it. That would be huge. I&#x27;m sure your hardware is up to snuff, but your control over how good that feels in Windows is very limited.There are a bunch of developers who have stuck with the Mac for essentially one reason, the touchpad.Windows is dominant in laptops, but with distinct verticals, and I struggle to figure out which one this would fit into. Cheap semi-disposable laptop for a broke college student? Clearly this will cost more than that. Gaming? No way you&#x27;ll have enough power and battery with that form factor. Excel ninjas who get it from work? Why would they care about expansion and repairability?But &quot;I&#x27;d rather be using Linux if the experience just sucked a little bit less&quot; is underserved. Obviously you can&#x27;t offer just Linux, and maybe licensing shenanigans with Microsoft mean you can&#x27;t even consider this (although I really hope that&#x27;s not a factor anymore).Anyway. Good luck, it&#x27;s a cool idea.

We have the funding we need to bring the product to market (an odd downstream benefit of Oculus getting bought by Facebook), but we will be taking pre-orders with a deposit prior to shipping to make sure our SKU mix and production rates are matched to actual demand.We won&#x27;t be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, but it&#x27;s nice to hear that you&#x27;d be willing to!

Honestly this is exactly what I want (quality, repairable, upgradable), but I&#x27;m not all in yet. I feel like this space is extremely hard to break into, and I&#x27;m worried about their ability to pull it off. Is there massive capital in this corp? Will the price be really high? I&#x27;d pay a premium for this kind of thing, but if they start crowd funding it&#x27;s gonna seem like a red flag.

With s3 sleep support for linux you will get my business :-)

We&#x27;re putting in the work ourselves to make sure the most common distributions like Ubuntu LTS releases run smoothly. We had that in mind as we selected key components in the system.Edit: And it&#x27;s worth noting that a couple of folks on the team are diehard Linux users, including our software&#x2F;firmware lead, and they run Ubuntu on their Framework Laptops.

Nice to see that many of the developers&#x2F;members of the team are GNU&#x2F;Linux users. I would like to see if it can run other popular distros, like Elementary.

Don’t get me wrong, it’d be great to have a good Linux laptop on the market. However, I’ve read too many Dell XPS reviews to stay on Mac(which is suboptimal due to the nature of my work). There’s always something that is misbehaving on Linux laptops: WiFi, the sleep mode(i.e. you open the laptop and it’s ready to work), touchpad, fingerprint reader. Maybe it’s too much to ask, but i) is your laptop MacBook-level smooth on Linux ii) how could you achieve it when big players with much more resources failed?

Any luck with fingerprint sensor drivers? I know that&#x27;s a big problem. Still not working on my 4yo thinkpad

Kieran from Framework Here - Using it as my main machine for development running Ubuntu 20.04 right now.
The main tweak is running a mainline kernel with some distributions as Tigerlake support is new.

&gt; with the ability to choose Windows or install your preferred Linux distribution.10$ says it’s going to be quite an effort to run Linux on it. Nice idea though.

I feel horrible whenever I end-up damaging an electronics product in such a way that repairs do not make any monetary sense. Mostly this is because the manufacturer doesn&#x27;t bother in building out a healthy service network for their product because they&#x27;d rather force you to buy a new model.If priced right, I&#x27;ll buy this as my next laptop. And the next phone as well -- if they ever launch one.

reminds me of this <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;CardBus-Laptop-Port-Expansion-Card&#x2F;42323&#x2F;bn_635538" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ebay.com&#x2F;b&#x2F;CardBus-Laptop-Port-Expansion-Card&#x2F;42...</a>

&gt; Will we ever get a laptop component system that&#x27;s as robust and modular as the desktop ecosystem?No.The robust desktop ecosystem is powered by a bunch of categories that don’t really want laptops: gamers, business, research, some developers, etc.Desktops are “work trucks” while laptops are mostly “cars.”

Is the upgrade system proprietary, i.e. will I be able to get in new parts besides RAM and disks when Framework is no more?Will we ever get a laptop component system that&#x27;s as robust and modular as the desktop ecosystem?

How modular is the keyboard? I can see a replacement sat next to the case in the photo, but is the layout cut in to the case?If you can make an alternative case with an (e.g.) 12x5 1u grid layout keyboard that lets me put my thumbs to use and stop contorting my fingers, I will more of less open my wallet and let you take what you fancy!

What&#x27;s the chance of a thicker&#x2F;deeper version in the future? I&#x27;d love to see one with enough thickness to support a low profile mechanical keyboard for custom layouts.With my RSI, I&#x27;m almost unable to use standard laptop keyboards, so I have to travel with a split ergo keyboard. Most laptops have enough room to support a split ortho layout, but aren&#x27;t thick enough (or modular enough) for enthusiasts to roll their own.Take a look at the Thinkeys [0] and pineapple60 [1] projects for what&#x27;s possible.[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dennisleexyz&#x2F;thinkeys" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;dennisleexyz&#x2F;thinkeys</a>
[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saoto28&#x2F;pineapple60" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;saoto28&#x2F;pineapple60</a>

The arrow keys gap as an option would be awesome, I hope you reconsider

The arrow keys were an interesting challenge. We actually prototyped both versions, and the full height ones ended up feeling better to most folks. It&#x27;s definitely a matter of personal preference though.The Framework Laptop comes in at 15.85mm thick and 1.3kg. So a couple of sheets of paper thicker than a 13&quot; MacBook Pro, but a bit lighter.On the Expansion Cards, that is fair. We can say we&#x27;re getting rid of the need for adapters that protrude from the machine and need to be removed when you need to transport it.

If they indeed succeed in creating an open &quot;platform&quot; then if you don&#x27;t like the keyboard, you can replace it with one that you do like.

&gt; - that laptop looks pretty thick and heavy by today’s standards.I am not a fan of today&#x27;s standards. As I write (on an external A1243 keyboard) I look at the closed touchbar MBP in front of me and cringe at the gap between the cover and the body go from zero on the left to 1&#x2F;4&quot; on the right. This laptop is too thin for its own good, for no good reason, and I look forward to how sturdy this design would be with the extra thickness (not to mention all the other goodies they list).

I hate Windows laptop trackpads because they seem to interpret everything as a click. Fortunately you can turn that off in Control Panel. Apple&#x27;s default trackpad settings are good.EDIT - my new problem with Windows 10 is that it somehow interprets certain accidental motions on the trackpad as me wanting it to move to some sort of strange workspace overview screen that appears to be completely useless and not at all what I wanted.

I&#x27;m with you.  I just got a new Precision and the track pad is 6 inches by 3.5 inches (no exaggeration).  I think the idea was to accomodate left and right handers, but it has gone way overkill.  It is large enough to be a Wacom-style drawing tablet.

The MacBook trackpad somehow knows when you’re not touching intentionally... so I agree with you in theory but on that laptop specifically the palm rejection is good enough that it doesn’t matter.

For me, the huge trackpad in the middle front is the problem. Centred trackpads, weren&#x27;t a problem when they were about 1&#x2F;2 the size, but they&#x27;ve steadily been getting bigger and bigger. Now almost all laptop trackpads are at a size where the base my thumb and the edge of my wrist brush against them, causing endless false touches. If I&#x27;m typing for any length of time on a laptop, I now always disable the touchpad and plug in a mouse. Give me a laptop with an offset smaller trackpad please. I suppose people who only use a laptop, learn to type with floating hands with claw-like fingers, but I use a desktop most of the time, so my resting-wrists-on-the-desk style of typing doesn&#x27;t work.I can&#x27;t be the only person with this problem?Edit: While I&#x27;m ranting, I am 100% sure that the touch-logic in trackpads favour right handed people (same with mobile phone screens) and as a leftie it seems harder for me to perform complex multi-touch actions than it does for right handed people.

&gt; Only four I&#x2F;O ports is a little tightMaybe, but how many do you really need?I have lots of stuff plugged in at my desk -- but it&#x27;s plugged into a dock, and there&#x27;s just a single cable that goes into my laptop. Thinking about my usages in the past few years, I can&#x27;t think of a time where 4 ports (of my choosing) wouldn&#x27;t have worked for me -- so long as I could change them over the lifetime of the device.

And, additionally, using USB-C is a common and widely used standard - slamming them for using that instead of something proprietary (to make it less &quot;dongly&quot;) is really not a good thing.

It&#x27;s not &quot;disingenuous&quot;. Everyone knows they&#x27;re talking about external dongles because those are the kind of adapter that&#x27;s actually annoying. Complaining about their modules because they&#x27;re implemented in terms of USB-C is the worst kind of technically true but semantically nonsensical nitpick, precisely because it takes a long comment like this to unpack it but only a few words to make it.

I really do hate full-height left and right keys, they&#x27;re strictly worse in my usage.

Not sure if we&#x27;re looking at the same photos and specs, but it looks and seems thin and light to me - 16mm thick, and 1.3kg according to the specs. I&#x27;m aware you can get slightly thinner, but not much lighter. IMO, anything thinner that this is making horrible sacrifices elsewhere, for little more than diminishing aesthetic returns.Let&#x27;s not forget that this is repairable, upgradable and expandable - when I first saw the HN title, I was convinced it was going to be a brick. It actually looks great, like a premium laptop from Dell or Lenovo. But supporting up to 64GB or memory, and repairable etc. Pretty amazing, I think.

Well, HN will love this. Moddable laptop with a good webcam? Nice.But:- I really dislike the arrow keys not having the air gap above left and right. You’d think they’d learn that from the MacBook butterfly keyboard era.- it’s a little disingenuous to say “no adapters” when in fact their little expansion cards are merely adapters that insert into the chassis of the laptop. Only four I&#x2F;O ports is a little tight (despite Apple deeming it to be “enough”)- that laptop looks pretty thick and heavy by today’s standards.It’ll be interesting to see how people respond, when many (especially in this crowd) have been clamoring for this kind of thing. How many will actually vote with their dollars, and will that be enough for Framework to survive and become a viable competitor in the laptop space?I hope so, as I welcome the diversity and innovation that would represent. But I admit I’m skeptical as to their chances.

This is a great first step. Ideally the expansion story converges on some kind of industry-wide standard, like PCMCIA was. Would be cool to have other peripheral manufacturers out there agreeing on the spec and committed to building expansion hardware!

Is it &quot;just&quot; an internal USB-C connection to the expansion card? Or is there something else going on that could be more difficult to work with?

Is there a catching&#x2F;locking mechanism for the expansion module that holds it in place? It would be a shame if the whole module came out when trying to remove a particularly firm USB connector.

Sounds like a good solution to me, I hope you succeed, I surely will keep an eye on the project!I assumed it wouldn&#x27;t be an open design because the marketing didn&#x27;t mention it. I would integrate this message in your marketing because it&#x27;s worth convincing critical audiences.

We will open up the expansion card spec and share reference designs to enable partners and the community to build their own! I want it to be open as much as you do.

In the worst case (they change the interface spec and no one else produces old modules, or the company folds entirely) it&#x27;s not any less maintainable than any other laptop on the market today. I think most laptops still allow storage and battery upgrades&#x2F;replacement; RAM is questionable (some being soldered on the motherboard); and anything else basically means replacing the whole device.

It looks like the expansion cards are just USB-C adapters that fit inside the case. If so, it should be pretty simple to make a compatible expansion card. Or just plug in any dongle you like, ignoring the form factor.

Great initiative, but the proprietary expansion cards are entirely counter-productive to maintainability.The expansion cards will only be available for as long as your company provides them. Using the most-commonly used, mass-manufactured standard interfaces for components would provide more long-term repairability and upgradeability.The trade-off would be in design resulting in more bulk and in the economics of your company, of course. It seems cynical to me to sell maintainability while starting a walled-garden ecosystem of proprietary hardware.

I agree with you. I cannot avoid saying: you don&#x27;t have to throw your whole coffeemaker out after every pot if you don&#x27;t have Nespresso.

These laptops exist today, just vote with your wallet. I don&#x27;t know, Lenovo&#x27;s T-series is popular, e.g. the T14: Here&#x27;s how to do it (page 72) [1], new keyboard costs around 50 bucks.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.lenovo.com&#x2F;pccbbs&#x2F;mobiles_pdf&#x2F;t14_gen1_p14s_gen1_hmm_en.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;download.lenovo.com&#x2F;pccbbs&#x2F;mobiles_pdf&#x2F;t14_gen1_p14s...</a>

Nespresso pods for silicon sound great! I’m not a hardware engineer, I’m just tired of $800 “replace the entire main board” repairs when I broke my ‘H’ key.

Hello, glad you&#x27;re here but I&#x27;d urge you to remember that while a minority at HN is highly knowledgeable and technical, hn is an hive-mind opinionated niche and hope that you&#x27;d make decisions that widen your reach among general populace so that your firm survives to make money and eventually more such laptops. (Also, hopefully your laptop will play with linux as well as Lenovo&#x27;s at some point in future).

Compatibility and upgradability (together with maintainability) is why I stopped using laptops. Your offer sounds interesting, but if it&#x27;s a platform, instead of a free standard, it&#x27;s a far cry from the freedom and competition in the stationary PC market. Maybe that&#x27;s what it takes to move the issue along. I don&#x27;t know. But that&#x27;s my knee-jerk reaction.

Any chance of the company ever releasing only the chassis so I can buy it and put my favorite arm sbc inside it?

&gt;We want to make it easy for both other companies and members of the community to develop their own cards and sell them through the Framework Marketplace.What if they don&#x27;t want to sell through the Framework Marketplace?

This might be a silly question, but it looks like the adapters are just usb-c&#x2F;thunderbolt devices with a nice case. Is this the case? I&#x27;m not knocking it if it is, I personally think it&#x27;d be pretty clever, but it means being able to use them in other places (like pretending the storage expansion thing is just a usb-c flash-drive) and it would have interesting implications for making them.

Can you somehow bring back the PCMCIA interface ?Favorite hardware form factor ever ...

It mentions the keyboard as being modular - any chance of a trackpoint keyboard?

We will be releasing specifications and reference designs for the Expansion Card system under a permissive license.  We want to make it easy for both other companies and members of the community to develop their own cards and sell them through the Framework Marketplace.  That is something we&#x27;ll be detailing and sharing between now and the time we start shipping out the product.  We&#x27;ll also provide documentation around internal interfaces, though those will be more technically challenging for an individual to be able to build something with.

Luke Leighton tried to make something like this for a really long time.

&gt; the Nespresso analogy is ridiculousWell, sort of :-) Nespresso is a famous implementation of a &quot;your basic machine stays static, you swap out a different element of the system based on temporary&#x2F;current needs, but you can only buy those elements from one vendor&quot; pattern. Printer ink cartridges are another.Yeah, add-on cards to a computer aren&#x27;t consumables per se - but the entire premise is that as time goes on you might want to get new ones (because your current needs change), i.e. upgrade. Whether I can pick upgrades from different vendors, and what the tax imposed on creating and&#x2F;or selling upgrades is, matters.

Apple burns almost all of their space savings on making the machine thinner, to the point of absurdity.Apple is content to push everything into dongles (which you have to carry around anyway) to get it thinner. The point at which I can&#x27;t have a wired RJ45 ethernet port is already ridiculous - that is not a thick connector. Same with fullsize USB ports.Battery life there are hard limits as well: nobody is making a laptop with more then 100Wh, because that&#x27;s the limit that you can carry onto an aircraft.

Is it a useful form factor on other laptops?   The market for RJ45 dongles is a lot larger than the market for framework, so if a vendor can hit both markets with the same product they&#x27;d be more likely to do so.

Looking at the design, I&#x27;m not sure that expansion card concept is responsible for the thicker case. The reality is, supporting replaceable memory, mainboard, etc, likely necessitated a somewhat thicker design.Assuming that&#x27;s correct, I think it&#x27;s kinda clever... it&#x27;s basically a dongle system that allows the modules to sit flush instead of jutting out of the side of the laptop.

&gt;I think this proves that Apple was right to dump legacy ports.How it proves it? Those guys do not drop ports, they just make them modular.All the &quot;saved space&quot; in Apple laptops become amazingly wasted space in your bag with tons of adapters and wires.I still dream to meet the one who made such &#x27;wise&#x27; decision to tell him what I think about it personally!&gt;USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.I am not sure you can know what anyone needs. For instance you do not know what I need.I wish you&#x27;ll be around when I need to copy my files from the camera with idiotic dongle in the field when time is precious.I would love then to hear how sticking card directly into the slot without any headache is less comfortable than looking for some dongle in the bag while holding your camera equipment and then hanging dongle on it&#x27;s wire because there is no table around to put your laptop on or put it somehow on your lap and try not to move to avoid it breaking during the transfer because then you&#x27;ll have to start again transferring your important pictures. Then pray it will work
because some times it will not when you need it most.Removing sd-card reader slot is example of the most idiotic design decision I can imagine. It is taking what works perfectly and destroying it for no reason at all. It is pure damage without any benefits taking size of it into account.It was done by people who never used laptop for transferring photos from the camera using sd-card.They never thought that while you transfer with the sd-card your other card is available to continue shooting in critical or unexpected situations. This is what makes the difference between making some shots and not! I would never understand this idiocy of removing sd-card slot to &quot;save space&quot;.The whole point of laptop is to save YOU space and headache or space in your BAG! Not in the laptop itself by making it useless. Such a dumb decision to remove useful ports. Goodness.

I guess someone misses pcmcia modems and network cards. Does seem a bit odd to not just go for plenty of USB c ports.

&gt; This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal spacethis is true, yet... I&#x27;d be okay with that, to be honest.My current work laptop (a dell latitude 7390) is a jewel also because it&#x27;s got a lot of ports. I have used them all at least once, but quite frankly, never all at the same time.So yeah, being able to unplug a port and plug a different one it&#x27;s almost the perfect middle ground.we&#x27;re pretty much all carrying dongles anyway (not me, the dell latitude 7390 has all the ports i might need)

If it were a phone, I would agree. But laptops are much roomier, and the space lost is probably negligible.

&gt; This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space that could have been spent on a bigger battery.I wondered about that as well. Looking at the picture at the top of the main page, I see one small battery, and electronics that take up 2-3x the size of normal laptop electronics. Most current laptops have 60-80% of their chassis space occupied by batteries.However, the description mentions a 55Wh battery, which is quite reasonable for a thin-and-light laptop. It says 1.3kg, which is a little heavier than desirable for the form factor (1-1.2kg), but not by much. On balance, this looks like a much more reasonable set of tradeoffs than past &quot;repairable laptop&quot; efforts I&#x27;ve seen; Framework is putting serious hardware engineering effort into this.

I think either are fine TBH. Framework will definitely be a niche play to a segment of a pro market that is currently ignored. It will probably cost more than most equivalent laptops. They could in the future make a chassis that is just 4 USB-C ports and give you the space savings for other things.I think the flush USB-C dongles are actually clever in another way, you could make storage expansion bricks that have pass through USB (or no passthrough) and get more storage on your laptop beyond the one M.2 slot. It would be especially nice for video editor types, who I&#x27;ve seen literally velcro expansion SSDs to their macbooks with USB angle adapters [0] because dealing with dangling drives is annoying.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7ljFfuzStEQ" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=7ljFfuzStEQ</a>

What Apple did was gave people a solution that looks good on the retail floor, but in practice involved carrying a bunch of dongles, which take up more space, can break more easily, can be easily forgotten and are more finicky while using.In practice it leads to a significantly worse product for the vast majority of users, for the benefit of the minority that falls in the pro crowd and is able to get all their work done solely through USB-C ports.But the Apple Pro crowd users tend to include a lot of audio&#x2F;video professionals who have a lot of expensive devices they tend to connect through USB-A, HDMI, etc, Photographers who were big fans of the SD card readers, and business people who didn’t really need pro devices but could afford them, and were fan of the video outputs for connecting to projectors and monitors, and maybe even LAN inputs because many offices tend to discourage WiFi networks.I think Apples big mistake was a category mistake. If they had made the MacBook or MacBook Air all USB-C, for example, there wouldn’t have been too much of an outcry. But the MacBook Pro line is the same one that carried a FW 400 port years after FW800 had been released and even after FW itself was kinda dead besides certain niche applications (which tended to be popular with Apple pro users).

Yeah. Who needs a swiss army knife anyway. Just carry two knives, a can opener, a corkscrew, a nail filer, a pair of scissors, a saw, a screw driver, fish scaler, magnifying lens and toothpick.

There was at one point a couple of years ago when I had to attend more meetings at work that I would the be the one presenting something on my thinkpad only because everyone else had a macbook and forgot their dongle. It could be solved by buying dongles for each room possibly, but this was a persistent problem anyway. (Thankfully, there is fewer meetings and they are just online now :) )I don&#x27;t need the ports that much, but it is nice when the needed ports are just there, because it is usually a selection of ports I need. Maybe other people don&#x27;t need what I need, but I prefer having some occasionally port present, knowing its there when I need it.I think this project takes a novel approach to the problem, sort of like what expresscards offered. Here, you can just add the ports you need if you need as your defaults.

They&#x27;re just USB-C dongles that snap into the chassis.. You can see better shots here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frame.work" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;frame.work</a>This is an unpopular opinion, but I think this proves that Apple was right to dump legacy ports. This solution is sort of clever but it sacrifices a ton of internal space that could have been spent on a bigger battery. USB-C, and the correct cables, are all anyone needs.(the Nespresso analogy is ridiculous, a laptop doesn&#x27;t exist to consume adapters. But I presume you were enjoying a little tongue-in-cheek with your coffee)

They are hot swappable, and they latch in place.  There is a button on the bottom of the system to release the latch.

tbh the adapter card really looks like a simple adaptor with an usb-c&#x2F;thunderbolt plug on one side. it&#x27;ll take a week or two for chinese knock-off to appear on aliexpress etc.what i wonder is:- can those cards be locked in place?- can i hotplug&#x2F;hot-unplug them ?

I don&#x27;t see any information on the licensing of the adapter card &#x2F; inter-module interfaces.Can others build a Framework laptop without approval? Can others build cards without approval? Will it be a platform?Tell me how this isn&#x27;t a Nespresso machine for silicon pods. :-)Edit: To be clear, even a &quot;we have a generic base laptop and you can pick your I&#x2F;O&quot; concept is potentially a nice value prop, but it&#x27;d be good if the picture (and roadmap) was clear.

I&#x27;ll second the parent&#x27;s request for an RJ45 Ethernet port. It can&#x27;t possibly look any goofier than an Expresscard Ethernet adapter!One easy way to get it to fit would be to make the module thicker. To avoid the whole thing sitting at an angle in the existing envelope, you&#x27;d want to replace the little adhesive-secured feet with taller, screw-secured feet to give it clearance.I&#x27;m a controls engineer and am constantly connecting to PLCs and robots in environments that don&#x27;t do wireless networking. I have to deal with all kinds of legacy hardware manufacturer&#x27;s IDEs and real-time protocols that work poorly with USB dongles. Of course, your expansion cards are really USB dongles, and appear to allow tool-less hot-plugging (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;expansion_card.gif" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.arstechnica.net&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;expan...</a>). I&#x27;d love to see an optional screw to retain the card, and wouldn&#x27;t mind shutting the laptop down and rebooting it, especially if it meant it showed up in &#x2F;etc&#x2F;network&#x2F;interfaces all the time and never needed to be kicked out of sleep with `ip link set dev eth0 up`.Other desirable expansion cards would be a VGA port or DB9 serial port; would those fit?I fear that your efforts to reach beige-box compatibility are really hamstrung by the obsession with thin and light laptops; there&#x27;s no way (for example) that you&#x27;ll fit my preferred keyboard (Lenovo 45N2211, out of a T420) and still have the hinges close because the enclosure is so thin. I hope you succeed, but I especially hope you produce a 15&quot; workstation version that&#x27;s 10mm thicker.

A Gigabit Ethernet Expansion Card is on our roadmap, though it is going to look a little goofy compared to the other cards, since it won&#x27;t fit entirely in the current envelope.

Nice project. However I see no Gigabit ethernet port. USB dongle for the one of us that prefer the performance and the predictability of a cable over Wi-Fi&#x27;s whims?

I didn&#x27;t get the idea of a touchscreen laptop until I got an iPad recently, now I&#x27;m constantly trying to touch my laptop screen and then getting confused when I doesn&#x27;t do anything.

Love the logo on the back of the screen. No stupid slogans, just the cog, looks great! It makes no rational sense, but I&#x27;d want to own one just for that.Hope there&#x27;s gonna be a touchscreen version! After all, a UI that you can&#x27;t touch is like coffee that you can&#x27;t smell.

Apologies for that.  We packed in a 55Wh battery and are using popular silicon and a display that is used in several other popular notebooks, so you can use those as a reference point.  We didn&#x27;t want to state a figure in hours until we wrap up our firmware work and can release reproducible benchmarks for it (since battery life marketing statements tend to be pretty questionable).

Very disconcerting to launch a laptop without any mention of battery life.

This is excellent, would have loved swappable 18650 based battery packs too!

No. You can&#x27;t even do that in a desktop. AMD and Intel CPUs don&#x27;t use the same socket or pinout.

So a ThinkPad in Mac shell? Is the framework flexible enough to switch an Intel processor for AMD Ryzen without having to replace the entire motherboard?

That&#x27;s not where the money is though unfortunately. It&#x27;s why manufacturers like the solder on components. Easier to manufacture and make as small as possible. I hate it, and think it&#x27;s bad for consumers.

&gt; What is really needed is a common chassis.I agree. I understand why that wasn&#x27;t a thing 10 years ago while laptops continued to get thinner and bezels continued to get smaller and I&#x2F;O was rapidly changing and evolving. Modern laptops are much more consistent, and standards like M.2 and USB-C have provide excellent support for low-profile expansion. Now seems like a great time to start rolling out standards for laptop motherboard connectivity, display housing, keyboard&#x2F;trackpad housing, and I&#x2F;O bays.

The form factor of EOMA is simply unsuitable. Compared to any laptop motherboard or SBC, the volume available in the slot is tiny.

In some sense Thinkpad X200 would fit what you&#x27;re saying, its modding community is quite active and there are a lot of people selling old parts or parts designed to upgrade this laptop.Last time I checked the only missing piece was a way to upgrade the display, which didn&#x27;t age very well (IIRC original resolution was 1280x800 and no HiDPI)

I would expect this is similar to the tesla issue of building a common carcass (skateboard) to build different types of cars on top of.

There&#x27;s a lot more to building laptop than putting different components together. Portability, mobility, heat dissipation, design to put as many things as safely (and profitably) possible etc.Building a desktop is relatively easy. Desktop is designed to be stationary and it&#x27;s a lot more forgiving when connecting parts. There&#x27;s a lot more room to manoeuvre and for heat dissipation.I think to achieve the purpose, where end-user will be able easily customise a laptop will require a larger footprint and won&#x27;t be appealing to many users.

What is really needed is a common chassis. A common carcass that allows me the put whatever I want inside it. If I want a pinebook[1], I want to be able to put pinebook guts inside it, if I want a mnt reform[2], I want to be able to put mnt reform guts inside it.Too bad eoma68[3] is still sci-fi.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;pinebook-pro&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pine64.org&#x2F;pinebook-pro&#x2F;</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mntre.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;reform_md&#x2F;2020-05-08-the-much-more-personal-computer.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mntre.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;reform_md&#x2F;2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...</a>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;eoma68&#x2F;micro-desktop" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crowdsupply.com&#x2F;eoma68&#x2F;micro-desktop</a>

This is awesome, has the same &quot;spirit&quot; of the Fairphone. I think this is the direction the industry should be moving. However it will not be easy to break this vicious and wasteful cycle that feeds many companies nowadays.

This looks great, I _really_ hope this becomes sustainable and a long running model.I&#x27;ve upgraded my laptop just in 2020, but when Ryzen-based mainboards and some high-bandwith plugins (10 Gbit SFP+&#x2F;RJ45 or Thunderbolt) become available, this will definitely go on the list. So best of luck to you to become mainstream, so that these niche-parts can be cross-financed ;)

This is really cool, but I feel like the industry is missing something like ATX for laptops.That&#x27;s what I really want. And hell, come out with a mini-ATX for laptops if you&#x27;re concerned dimensions won&#x27;t end up competitive.

I love the initiative! It&#x27;s in line with the right to repair movement which, considering the HN crowd, is more than welcome these days.I wonder though are there any plans to support coreboot?

The website says that it’s by members of the founding team from Oculus. You know what else is from the founders of Oculus? A company making AI-directed killer drones and other toys being pitched as essentials for World War III.In 2021, the ethics of your products are as important as the products themselves. And yes, there’s a ton of hypocrisy if we compare to $BIG_CO, but that’s one of the tough parts of being young and new in an era where the young new guys have gone from 0 to 100 and gotten old and evil real quick.Sorry to be so harsh, but Oculus connection that wins you VC dollars will get in the way of a lot of other things in unexpected ways if you want to tap consumer &#x2F; prosumer. If you go after the defense market, however, you’re golden! Not kidding. Call me crazy, though, but I’d rather have my dollars end up as far from war lobbying as possible.

I&#x27;ve heard good things about Clevo based designs in the past but even those seem to be questionable now.

Yeah I’m with you that even in the categories I mentioned there are problems.System76 comes up a lot, but to be blunt they seem awful.Bad resolution displays, generally terrible build, bezels, etc.I think there’s a market for a really good non Mac laptop with Mac quality hardware design.

I recently strongly considered a System76 Lemur but ultimately opted for a Thinkpad X1 Nano instead due to reports of QC issues with Clevo (and thus System76) laptops. It&#x27;s too bad because I think they get a lot right with bringing Linux to the general consumer market, and Pop!_OS gets a few things right that plain Ubuntu gets wrong.

Thinkpads are far from being uniformly good, some models flat out suck. Macs aren&#x27;t immune to lemons either - see all the issues with their keyboards after 2016, or the failing GPUs in some MBPs. Some XPSes are good, but many models had horrible coil whine as well.The LG gram was fine, if light and portable was what you&#x27;re looking for. The HP Envy line has been pretty decent recently. Back in school I&#x27;ve had an Asus Zenbook I&#x27;ve quite liked as well. I&#x27;ve heard good things about some System76 systems too, and they&#x27;re basically Clevo rebrands.There definitely is good stuff on the laptop market.

The Razer laptops are IMO the best Windows option available. Not as good as the other options if you&#x27;re running Linux, though.

Neat - I wonder how it’ll turn out.It’s weird how little there is in the laptop space that’s actually good.Macs, Thinkpads, maybe Dell XPS?Everything else sucks. It’d be cool to have another high quality option.

This is the machine I was dreaming to have!

How much overhead will there be from having USB-C connected &quot;Expansion Cards&quot;?Will there documentation or support for enabling people to create their own expansion cards (for ex. like S&#x2F;PDIF)?Will there be any support for high-end processors, perhaps in the absence of a dGPU? Dell Latitudes 14&quot; laptops have an Intel i7-10850H which has 6-cores&#x2F;12-threads, 2.70 GHz base, 5.10 GHz boost clocks. In addition, will cooling be customizable? The Latitudes run pretty hot.Finally, is there a ball-park on the price range we can expect on pre-orders and say 1 year from release? $1,000? $2,000? Will it also be a high upfront-cost, but low replacement parts cost? Will they both be relatively high? Both low?

Yes, I remember being particularly disappointed when Google&#x27;s Project Ara [1] to create a modular mobile phone was shelved. It seemed like a fantastic idea, and I truly thought that Alphabet&#x2F;Google had the cash&#x2F;clout - and will - to deliver.Still, I haven&#x27;t lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Ara" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Project_Ara</a>

I think the problem here is you have two complicated things to solve, both hardware and software and you&#x27;re trying to do it with out too much money.A small hardware project on its own might be doable.

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.

They&#x27;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&#x27;d consider them.

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.

Good luck, very excited for this! Any chance of a Linux or no-OS option?

This is super exciting and I can&#x27;t wait to see the machines in the wild. Congrats on the launch!

I hope this business of yours works out because a laptop that isn&#x27;t a piece of junk with too much stuff I don&#x27;t need inflating the price is something I&#x27;ve been wanting for a long time.

Good luck!  I really hope this works out. So excited.

Just an anecdote on the value of modular and repairable hardware:Compaq vs Sun:I was the IT Director for Decide.com in ~1998-ish and we had a bunch of compaq servers and a bunch of SUN servers...At the time - SUN was *giving* servers to startups to adopt their HW.I had to build out a ton of systems in various DCs and the SUN machines were not rack-mountable, but were like $50,000 a unit... and they had this *security* feature where-by the machine would not boot up if the external case was not properly put on...BUT - I could rebuild a compaq server in the dark with my eyes closed. I had a compaq engineer who was delivering a replacement server and watched me rebuild that machine in no time.The thing was that the engineering of the compaqs was so consistent and well done that it took single digit minutes to rebuild an entire 4U machine vs the behemoth SUNS that bitched when their cover wasn&#x27;t properly sealed.

Any chance of one that doesn&#x27;t look like a Macbook clone?I, personally, am tired of the brushed aluminum with black bezels and keyboard look. The materials can remain the same, but some colored options would be wonderful - like the HP Spectre x360&#x27;s with blue and black options, etc.Everything else looks wonderful, particularly the mobo upgrades for newer CPU&#x2F;GPU combinations... and even better - getting to choose the ports I need! Love that!

I really like the concept, congrats on making it a product!For me I have 3 concerns:
1. I&#x27;d never use a 13&quot; laptop it&#x27;s too small for work for me. Any chance of a 15&quot; version? It&#x27;d be also cool if it could be used to light gaming (e.g. an Nvidia 1650 included)2. Pricing. If this will be priced as Macbook pros you will have a very niche segment as customers (basically silicon valley tech people)3. As I&#x27;m in the EU shipping needs to have a sane price (I can understand if this is not the priority at the start)

Will you consider designing the chassis to be coffee-spill resistant? (if it&#x27;s not already)Also, will you consider establishing an EU warehouse to reduce shipping and customs overhead?

I really really really want this to be a real thing.Good luck!!!

I can’t stand small screens, so here’s me hoping you’ll make a 15” or 16” model with 4K screen soon after this one.Also looking forward to AMD or ARM instead of Intel.

Any chance you’d consider an ARM64 architecture in the future (like a Broadcom SOC)?

so compared to a run-of-the-mill Lenovo&#x2F;HP&#x2F;Dell - where I still can get all parts 5 years after buying it - the innovation is that you have decoupled the I&#x2F;O ports with your modules, which might reduce wear and failure there. Given that swapping the mainboard will probably just be as expensive for you as for the aforementioned devices (where some by Fujitsu even had standardized mainboards ;)) + you probably command a significant premium in the beginning: I really don&#x27;t get the value&#x2F;eco proposition except for reusing the frame&#x2F;Display (the latter of which will eventually break as well).
Do you at least plan to release schematics so people can try to understand failure modes of the actual things most of us without extensive resources can&#x27;t repair today?~ typed on a Lenovo T440s (4GB soldered RAM unfortunately): swapped the touchpad for the one from the 450s, replaced the fan, after it made noises, started with a tiny m.2-SATA, then upgraded to a spare SATA from the Desktop, updated the screen after it broke. Now the bottom shell has a dent in it (full backpack) but I think I&#x27;ll let it pass. Still seems pretty repairable to me.

&quot;thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC&quot; was not actually a direct quote from us, but it&#x27;s nice that the folks at Ars think of our design that way!

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&#x27;d very much like to get my hands on!

who else here had napkin design of just this ?now let&#x27;s have a pocket variant that revives the old google modular project

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?

&gt; The company&#x27;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&#x27;t mean I&#x27;m some product genius. (Hell, I came from an acquisition!)

Hi, Dell Latitude user for 20+ years here. I buy them because they&#x27;re easily upgradable and I can get parts after the (excellent) warranty expires. It&#x27;s true I don&#x27;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&#x27;d be interested.

I&#x27;m very hopefully for this company. I just hope they drop the passive aggressive &quot;block&quot; remarks.Maybe its me but I suspect they&#x27;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&#x27;s also setting themselves up for failure if their cooling solution doesn&#x27;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&#x27;t give a fuck. It&#x27;s why they have a Dell. Most think pad users value plastic chassis. They&#x27;re lighter (13&quot; at 1.3kg, are you nuts?) more durable, and more palatable on your lap when they warm up they&#x27;re also more cost effective.

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.

&gt; it&#x27;s going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we&#x27;re completely convinced.Read: please send us a free one

Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic&#x2F;hopeful take on it:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;framework-startup-designed-a-thin-modular-repairable-13-inch-laptop&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2021&#x2F;02&#x2F;framework-startup-de...</a>Edit to add quote from Ars article:Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—&quot;thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC&quot; is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it&#x27;s going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we&#x27;re completely convinced.Although we&#x27;re skeptical, we are hopeful—the fledgling company does have a pretty solid pedigree. Framework founder Nirav Patel was Oculus VR&#x27;s head of hardware from 2012 to 2017, and he was a Facebook director of engineering beyond that. The company&#x27;s team also includes design, engineering, and operations people hailing from Apple, Google, and Lenovo.

This will only be &quot;real&quot; if an when there&#x27;s an ecosystem of clones as happened with the original IBM PC. But it&#x27;s definitely about time that we had such standards for laptops.

Thank you so much for doing this. It&#x27;s really needed.I once had an HP Envy laptop which was so poorly made that I refuse to buy anything from HP again.

This is super cool! Any plans to release a trackpad with the classic 2 physical buttons?

Same for me, but I can understand if it is hard to implement in the current design.

there’s a scroll button iirc. You hold it down, and the trackpoint scrolls instead of moving the cursor.

Sure! I&#x27;m typing on this USB keyboard:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Lenovo-ThinkPad-Compact-Keyboard-TrackPoint&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B00F3U4TQS&#x2F;ref=sr_1_3?dchild=1&amp;keywords=thinkpad+usb+keyboard&amp;qid=1614285897&amp;sr=8-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Lenovo-ThinkPad-Compact-Keyboard-Trac...</a>And to scroll I press the middle blue button (below space bar), and then push the trackpoint stick up&#x2F;down. The mouse cursor doesn&#x27;t move, and instead the OS just scrolls the window.(Fwiw I&#x27;m on Linux and this behavior just worked out of the box, for both my generic desktop w&#x2F;this keyboard &amp; Thinkpad laptop.)Obligatory fanboy note, while performing this scroll action, I only have to move my thumb ~0.5&quot; off the space bar, and my pointer finger ~1&quot; off &quot;j&quot;. So there is very little physical movement required to scroll (or click), vs. moving your whole palm up &amp; down ~6&quot; to the trackpad.

How do I scroll a page up and down with a trackpoint (on Windows and Linux)? I&#x27;ve tried using a trackpoint, but the two-finger swipe up and down on a trackpad is a convenience that I cannot seem to live without.

I don&#x27;t use the trackpoint often on my ThinkPad, but I wouldn&#x27;t buy a laptop without it. It&#x27;s impossible to use the touchpad in a confined space such as an airplane (economy class) or a bus.

I know trackpads won, but would love a trackpoint. I keep buying Thinkpads solely for that feature.

The page about smart TVs makes me wonder if anyone has reverse-engineered the interface between a Samsung Frame TV’s main controller box and the panel that goes on the wall (it’s a remarkably thin cable that carries both the signal and power and can easily be fished through the wall).  I absolutely love the panel itself with its wonderful display characteristics, but the software that drives everything from the main controller box is such trash that I’ll probably never buy one again).  I’d happily buy a 3rd party box that would drive that display panel and be free of the buggy, spying, shitty UX that Samsung provides.

Yeah it&#x27;s too bad, if this laptop had a 16 thread AMD CPU, it would be exactly what I&#x27;m looking for: a 3lbs mobile workstation that I can service&#x2F;upgrade myself.

This. I would bite if it was an AMD chip. Intel is just overpriced.

This would also suggest that once AMD gets their USB4 act together (hopefully starting with Rembrandt?), Mobile Ryzen should become an option.

If I had to make an guess from how they&#x27;re describing the I&#x2F;O, USB4 would be the immediate limitation.

A modular laptop that doesn&#x27;t offer an AMD module? So, so close.Hopefully the AMD board will ship late Summer 2021. Lack of AMD support is a showstopper for some.

Yeah, if I’m getting another laptop with an Intel CPU, I’ll just get a Mac: a Ryzen 4XXX laptop with Mac-like build quality would make me reconsider.

No AMD is an absolute deal breaker for me. Might as well get a mac.

What led framework to choose Intel CPUs over AMD ones?
Did it simplify the design of the system?