I'm happy to answer any questions around this! We've been working on this since update since we launched the product last year, so we're excited to be able to share it today.
I demo-ed my frame.work laptop yesterday to https://www.matinfo-esr.fr/ which is a single buyer entity for all french universities and public research institutes (once hardware is in their catalog it's click to order for universities without administrative hassle).
They showed interest on the non obsolescence, durability and repairability aspect of frame.work since these features are part of their public service mission.
Feel free to contact me, my email is on the website listed on my HN profile
What are the constraints that are blocking wider EU availability?
Right now, in Europe it's only available in a handful of countries (5 of 27). I'm in Spain, and I see I can spec a perfect machine and get it delivered just over the border in France, but I can't get the same thing delivered here just a couple of hours away, which is very surprising! My understanding was the single market & customs union etc should make going from 1 to N EU countries pretty easy.
Is this due to smoe regulatory issues, or needing to organize shipping differently for every country, or waiting to include an ñ key, or something else?
Right now, I'm very seriously looking at ordering one, renting a PO box in France and shipping the laptop here myself, which seems a bit ridiculous.
They gave a IMO good overview of the difficulties of selling to a new country in a previous post :
> With our supply improving, you may be wondering when you can order a laptop if you’re outside of the US and Canada. We selected and are bringing up our worldwide warehousing and fulfillment partner, which is one very key part of the equation, but it takes quite a lot more than that to enable a complete experience in each country. Picking Germany as one example, we need German language keyboards, a Type F power cable, in-box paperwork and labeling in German, localization for the Framework website, support documentation, and checkout flow, support for local payment methods, calculation of Euro prices and taxes, accounting support for German income, creation of legally sound Terms of Sale, Privacy, and Warranty policies for Germany, CE certifications, a local Authorized Representative to back up the certifications, determination of HS codes and tariffs, an Importer of Record to be able to deliver duty paid, German-language in-time-zone customer support, reverse logistics and RMA support for returns and repairs, region-specific sourcing of off the shelf memory and storage, trial builds of German laptops prior to production, and back-end ERP infrastructure to tie all of this together. That sounds like a lot, but it’s actually a drastically simplified summary.
I'd say they need none of that. Not only is barely anything of that a legal requirement in the EU, it's also a waste of money and resources to set this up in every country when you're mainly addressing pro users and tinkerers.
I bought & imported a Supernote e-ink tablet from China the other day. The manufacturer offers none of the things mentioned above, heck their support team barely speaks English (but god knows they're trying!). Still everyone on Reddit loves them because they 1) produce a killer product, 2) provide great support when needed (e.g. send you a replacement or fix bugs), and 3) respond to community requests and regularly roll out software updates with fantastic new features.
This. The "complete experience" is nonsense to me. I don't need any of this, aside from a functioning power cable and whatever is required to pass basic legal checks. If you give me documentation that isn't in English it will go in the trash immediately. I definitely do not want your localized keyboard, either.
Right now you're just forcing people to jump through hoops by not allowing them to directly order from anywhere.
It's just dumb, really. Just make an "international" version and ship it from one EU country.
I can understand not shipping to a "untrustworthy" country like Romania or Poland (lol), but Sweden, Italy, Belgium? Even they register for mail forwarding services in order to buy from Germany (and before, UK).
It's much easier to buy from AliExpress, the CCP can't believe their luck with us drowning ourselves in redundant regulations while producing there because of lack of them.
On that note, Russia makes 2/3 of the world's nuclear power plants and they built this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Bridge in THREE YEARS. We can't manage a stupid river bridge for the same budget in a decade.
A lot of that sounds like legal and paperwork problems.
I thought the whole point of the E.U. was to break down those cross-border paint points. Or is it still a work in progress? Can an E.U. person say if this is going to change?
The EU means it would be entirely legal and tariff-free for a company in France to ship a product to Spain as-is, with minimal caveats. But that won't be a desirable product for most Spanish customers.
The vast majority of that list has nothing to do with laws, but with physical requirements (keyboard and power plug), payments (not standardized beyond bank transfers), localization, and logistics.
It's very much a work in progress, especially since overall progress is happening at the same time.
27 countries need to coordinate to first agree to grant the EU the power to take over some aspects and then those same 27 countries need to actually do the work, together with the EU, to standardize that aspect. Then the standard needs to be adopted and enforced.
The EU has less power than a confederation, which is a very weak supra-statal organization. So everything is very, very slow.
The EU is gradually able to do more and more, but the time frames are decades long.
That's mostly self imposed legal and paper work. They could ship the German version EU wide, but they don't. Because they want to "provide the best experience". You know what would be the best experience? Buying the damn thing without paying extra for mail forwarding.
It does help (for example the mentioned CE certification is EU-wide). But it definitely could be better. I'd suggest it's not likely to change significantly any time soon.
Amazon might make it look easy but it really isn't (and Amazon is not available in all EU countries either!).
Logistics is more then just shipping, but also returns, repairs, availability, shipping time, shipping costs, where and how to keep stock. And this points affect each other, i.e. they might not have enough supply to sell to the whole EU market etc.
Lastly while there is a free marked in the EU if I remember correctly there are still some differences when importing things from outside into the EU depending on the country of entry. Like how to fill forms and which companies you can work with (for what prices) in given country.
What do you mean by "Amazon is not available in all EU countries". Do you mean like a country specific TLD? Because that is true, but order and delivery is not a problem from any EU country as far as I know.
In my experience a significant part of Amazon's inventory isn't something they'll send outside of the "domain country", e.g. trying to send from .de or .uk (this was before Brexit) to .nl.
It just comes down to suppliers, who aren't serving customers outside of select markets for whatever reason.
I see that as a "market platform" problem. I used extensively amazon.de/co.uk with deliveries in Romania, in early 2010's for a bunch of things. But since then they also opened up their market to any seller, quality dropped, shipment became preferential, or 1 cart could result in 2 separate shipments.
Aside. I've seen the exact same problems with our local Amazon "competitor". As soon as they became a platform marketplace I've started using them less and less because of the same quality/delivery issues.
It's not really a problem of the platform, except insofar as you'd like Amazon to only ship from their own warehouses. It's just Amazon reflecting reality on the ground in the EU.
Which is that even if it's legally a single market it's common that stores that deliver something to your door only sell their products in their own native country, or only within their local region.
Yeah, until you hit the parts of the UI that aren't translated from German or have to return stuff and the vendor only communicates in German and the auto-generated emails are in German and the vendor feedback list is in German and th4 reviews are in German...
They're not ordering from amazon.com (US), they're probably ordering from amazon.de with a thin layer of English translations + autotranslations.
If you're setting your preferred language in English on the website, all further on interaction should be in English. (BTW they have multiple language dropdowns that I didn't even highlight because I'm sure old generations do not know how to use those). Lack of English translated terms isn't something I've personally encountered, and for the reviews it's true I scroll a bit further down the page to see the English reviews from .com
I've used .de very often in the past, and when I stopped using Amazon, as said in reply to someone else https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31445473 , quality dropped (among other downsides) when they allowed third party sellers and those flood the product listing pages.
With those specific suppliers (and anything that isn't fulfilled by Amazon), I expect to be possible to have the issues you're referring to. But I wouldn't clump that together with Amazon not being available in some EU countries.
> My understanding was the single market & customs union etc should make going from 1 to N EU countries pretty easy.
Sadly, every country insist on doing everything else his own special snowflake way. There would have to be a lot more harmonization for it to be that easy.
Why is AMD so important to you? Are there any instruction set extensions these days that are only available on AMD? I can only think of things that are the other way around - only on Intel. And if you need something niche like some SIMD extension I guess you're running a server not a laptop?
For me personally, my preference primarily comes down to extreme differences in low-intensity/idle power usage of Ryzen 6000 vs Intel 12th gen. There aren't true "apples to apples" (same chassis/model, but AMD vs Intel) comparisons yet, although those should be coming in the next month or so, but here's an example of how efficient the Ryzen 6000s are: https://youtu.be/3bSetglEPOY?t=170
For people that need to use their devices on the go, I think it's a no brainer to prefer a Ryzen 6000 vs Intel.
The RDNA2-based Radeon 680M iGPU also significantly outperforms the (admittedly, much improved) Intel Xe iGPUs in 3D rendering. In synthetics, the new Radeon iGPUs are going head to head with Nvidia 1650 Max-Q dGPUs. This probably doesn't much matter if you aren't doing any gaming, but if you are, it means you can play most modern titles reasonably on the road in a thin and light form factor without giving up any battery life when you aren't.
- chips that don't turbo boost themselves into throttling
- not supporting a company with a toxic approach to business
I believe AMD outperforms Intel when you're targeting mobile performance/battery life, rather than "moar CPU" workloads. Though that might change now that Intel is using their own approach to performance cores. Still, given the last decade of Intel development, they don't exactly have my trust that they'll execute performance cores without serious hiccups.
AMD PSP is NOT the same as Intel ME. AMD PSP is a "trusted execution environment" (the first sentence in your link). Intel's equivalent is Intel SGX. Trusted execution environments are a security feature that does not offer remote management. It's not a privacy concern like Intel ME is.
I havent looked at the presentation yet, but are you saying the PSP, like intels ME could be doing nefarious things since its proprietary and closed? Do you have a link to information on the network capturing thing? I mean is that really a thing?
I have heard of these things before but I am not quite sure what the possibilities are. Do you have a link that can summarize what this actual means in terms of security concerns?
I don't, but they do a lot less with the PSP, especially if you're just using Ryzen Pro and not server SKUs. Intel put a web interface you can't disable with an offbrand networking gear level RCE vulnerability that needs nothing more than ethernet access into their security chip. I don't think AMD can exceed that anytime soon.
> - chips that don't turbo boost themselves into throttling
Your level of understanding about how CPUs control their frequency, voltage, and power is evidently "none". Why spread comments like this which only serve to confuse and mislead readers?
Intel configured the chips such that they turbo boost so high that they overheat and downclock themselves to compensate.
Still "no" level of understanding? If there's something incorrect about my statements, feel free to correct me -- I do want to learn more, and I'm certainly no expert in CPUs. But it's just flat out rude (and against the contributor guidelines, I believe) to comment like this. Build other people up, don't tear them down.
Your airplane analogy is not what Intel CPUs do in practice.
A better analogy:
An airplane takes off at full power, reaches cruising speed, but its engines have overtaxed themselves and can't maintain altitude. The place descends to a suboptimal altitude until the engines can turn back on, and raise the plane back to the altitude it's supposed to cruise at.
Your CPU explanation is technically correct:
> A CPU uses max power until it reaches its max operating temperature, then it maintains that temperature operating at lower power.
Yep, this is a very high-level explanation of what CPUs do. The trouble with Intel processors today is that they use max power for too long, and have to throttle so heavily to "maintain that temperature operating at lower power" that you can notice the latency when the CPU downclocks. An ideal operating curve wouldn't use max power for so long that it causes obvious latency issues to an end user. That's why I have Turbo Boost disabled on my laptops -- the few seconds of "max power" it yields just aren't worth the massive downclock while the CPU cools down. Better to set a more conservative power level that doesn't get in my way. This is especially noticeable if you use emulation or a beefy IDE like Android Studio that turbo boosts your computer to a high temperature in the first few seconds of use, then turns text editing and code suggestions into a sluggish slideshow for the next few minutes because the CPU has downclocked. Or maybe I'm just imagining that?
> This conversation started with you tearing down thousands of expert electrical engineers who make Intel CPUs.
Did I say anything bad about the engineers? I have lots of disparaging things to say about the way Intel works as a business, mostly based around how product and sales operate. I think the engineers at Intel do the best they can under the constraints of a poorly run company. But there's a reason engineering talent has been fleeing for the better part of a decade.
Better power handling per performance ratio, at least when compared to previous Intel generations.
Better integrated graphics, especially with the upcoming line, if what AMD says holds true.
Non-toxic approach to business.
Dr. Lisa Su has done incredible things with that company, and I'll happily support a group that recognizes the need for experience in top tech positions vs. MBAs/Lawyers/Fund Managers/etc...
Integrated graphics is a big deal. I was talking to a friend just this morning who has been waiting to buy a Framework until there is a gaming capable option. Intel integrated graphics isn't viable, but AMD integrated graphics meet a casual gaming bar.
Unfortunately it seems the pendulum swings on this one at least a bit. Unless you want a flagship CPU, you'll wait a good half year to a year to get half as much choice of budget CPUs with rather extreme handicap (cache).
Also half of them are OEM only.
Try to find a good current gen CPU for a small to mid sized NAS in their lineup, it's not easy.
Even if you want a flagship CPU; e.g. see the newest 5xxx series Threadrippers which were only released after a year and half and even then they are only available in overpriced e-waste systems from Lenovo where the CPU is locked down to the motherboard and won't work anywhere else.
AMD is not your friend. Just like every other huge corporation.
It's relative. AMD is "your friend" as long as it's on the back foot, so to speak. Their GPU pricing remains much better than Nvidia's, even with the extreme availability issues over the past two years, and some of their actions on the GPU side are more consumer-friendly (such as offering open-source Linux drivers). But when in a more favorable position with respect to their competitor their behavior can and does change.
> where the CPU is locked down to the motherboard
Don't quote me on this, but I think I heard that this wasn't on by default?
> It's relative. AMD is "your friend" as long as it's on the back foot, so to speak.
Which is why you should reward behavior and not branding. Buy because they're doing/selling the right thing now, not because you've got loyalty towards a multinational conglomerate.
One signal for instance I want to send is "I buy from whoever has good Linux support". You stop supporting it well, I look for competition.
First, it shows that they listened to feedback. From way over here in the corner it seems like AMD has been the most requested feature for the Framework.
Second, many people perceive that AMD outperforms Intel.
Third, many people think it is extremely important to reward positive competition in the market place.
Eighth, it would truly, truly prove the upgradeability and versatility of the Framework. Then we could move on to imagining dual^H^H^H^Hquad-Arm boards and RISCV boards and other fantasies.
> First, it shows that they listened to feedback. From way over here in the corner it seems like AMD has been the most requested feature for the Framework.
I would argue one of the most glaring problems with selling Framework laptops was that they where "still"
on Intel 11th Gen hardware which is often perceived as "not so grate" of a choice.
I'm sure they would love to also ship AMD based mobos (and Arm too) but it needs to be profitable, i.e. the additional sales gained through also supporting AMD must outclass the higher logistic cost as well as higher development cost. This might not seem like a big deal but from the little experience I have with logistics and things like maintaining Intel and AMD BIOS support, still having pressure to also ship a faster Intel mother board etc. I highly duped this makes any sense at this point in time.
Also, yes many people perceive AMD outperforms Intel, but many also perceive the opposite! Sure competition is grate, but Framework is not yet a well established company. Lastly I don't think they need to technically prove that upgrading to AMD or ARM is possible, the problem is not technology but logistics, resources (BIOS maintenance, testing, etc), supply-chains and potentially shitty contracts and practices by Intel (and other Companies).
So IMHO they need to first establish themself well, and then branch out.
Because at the moment AMD is the least scummy of the two x86 chip manufacturers. Intel as the only feasible player in town for a good segment of time, asked premium prices for meager performance increases, generation by generation.
Mainly is just out of principle and voting with my wallet.
Exactly. If we're going to be told to vote with our wallets all the time, you better let me vote with my wallet.
I bought an ASUS ZenBook earlier this year because as much as I like Framework's product, I don't want to give Intel another dollar after they bent me over a barrel for a decade.
It's simply a political/better CPU market perspective. Intel had the entire market for so long, and therefore stopped improving. They are getting some fire behind their behind-parts now, but that took a good while. I'm cheering and voting with my wallet for the underdog in the market to make the whole market more competitive. At least that's what I like to believe.
Why is there so little interest in ARM-based Linux laptops? Does AMD (or Intel) have anything even close in performance / watt that one can get from an ARM-based system?
AMD and Intel both have processors that perform much better than anything ARM-based except Apple's M1 processors (which of course nobody else has access to). That might change once Qualcomm release the new design they are supposedly working on, but that's not available yet.
I think Apple's chips aren't that far off being twice as fast as Exynos chips in single-core performance. Whereas the latest AMD and Intel chips are more or less on a par.
ARM-based laptops are definitely more niche and if you don't have a large company like Apple forcing the adaption, you'll have a hard time to support proprietary software, including stuff like drivers. It would absolutely be cool to have an open ARM-based high-end laptop, but it's not drop-in like AMD.
Does anyone know if the Framework laptop use a mainboard form factor that is available with AMD chips?
The modularity of some components can be assumed because they are industry standards, like wifi modules I suppose. Other components perhaps Framework have designed their own range of modules with a common form factor, but it must be very expensive to engineer a compatible mainboard in the same form factor with a different chipset, unless they are using an existing standardised design.
I'm not totally sure, but I think their mainboard is of their own design. They would need to adapt, but they could do it. I also think the differences are not too large, since most mainboard manufacturers offer surprisingly similar mainboards for either brand.
Any chance you'll eventually have a Framework with a 'clickier' keyboard and a trackpoint like the x220? I will happily buy your product the next time my x220 dies (instead of upgrading it) if it has the nice clicky keyboard and a trackpoint. A slightly thicker laptop is very much a fair trade-off.
Check out XY Tech who build and distribute modified ThinkPads. Xue Yao, the person behind it, intends to build a motherboard that will fit into an X220 case soon, possibly this year.
I bought an "X2100" (a ThinkPad X200 with a 10th-gen Intel CPU) from him in 2020 and it's been fantastic.
I've been waiting for 12th gen Alder Lake availability and am ready to pay. However as a EU citizen from one of the Baltic states I am unable to do so.
Please, tell us that this year any EU citizen will be able to order a Framework laptop.
I could not even find which friends in which countries to ask to order Framework for me.. It used to be US then UK, and I know there are a few other ones.
Combined with a waitlist the logistics are painful.
At least I hope that signing up for the waitlist from a specific country counts as something.
Looking at the DIY Guide [0] it looks like a lot of the laptop comes pre-assembled still (case, motherboard, screen, keyboard).
Is it more cost effective to do the labor on Framework's side to ship everything more tightly together in 1 box or could we see a 'DIY Pro' option that ships every component in its own box? (Maybe even at greater discount?)
Also, check out this Mechanical Watch [1] tutorial that made it to the front page of HN last week. I could definitely see an exploded assembly view like this being really instructional for Framework DIY-ers.
It would be substantially more expensive for us to ship the laptop in a state that is less assembled. Packaging, labor for pack-out, and increased size and weight for freight all end up being quite a bit more than product assembly labor.
I would really like to buy one BUT I find it a little bit too expensive, especially the price difference for better CPUs I find proportionate. (i would be slightly more tempted if it was for an amd 6000 cpu, they are much better in perf/power, I hope you will reconsider in the next generation when the iGPU will be RDNA based)
Just to pile on, I would love to buy a Framework laptop instead of more ThinkPads, but I really can't do without a pointing stick keyboard. I even have a Tex Shinobi* for my desktop! I hope that Framework or a 3rd-party accessory can fill this gap in the market.
To pile on even more... A lot of Linux users used to buy ThinkPad because of the Linux compatibility, the modularity and the build quality, but got addicted to the trackpoint, and this has become the only reason we keep buying them.
A competitor would be very welcomed!whoever is going to take that market will have followers for a long time.
We've gotten requests from a couple of ortholinear keyboard makers on it. With our current Input Cover design, it is technically possible to do, but would have fixed costs that would be extremely difficult to amortize over the number of units we could realistically sell. Because of that, we don't have any active plans for this.
Would it be reasonable to test the waters with a survey or some form of group buy campaign? For example, if at least ~5k people preorder an ortholinear input cover for ~$200 you will produce one. (Or whatever numbers are required for you to break even.)
And of course if the campaign fails then you can at least say you tried.
The problem is mainly getting switches (and their keycaps) that are thin enough. All the switches that are available to be used by hobbyists (Cherry MX, Kailh Choc...) are way too thick.
I think a frame thick enough for PCB + Chocs would then allow both a premium mechanical keyboard in a standard shape, as well as allowing for swapping this out for whatever more niche arrangements.
Whereas, for a thin, non-mechanical keyboard, the manufacturing cost would be too high to be feasible for anything but standard, presumably.
Not a question for the announcement, but the location page is missing countries, for example Bulgaria. This prevents me from even telling you I want to order form here (Bulgaria).
In use battery life is largely the same, though Intel has added some additional features with 12th Gen Intel Core that can improve in-use power consumption in some scenarios. The main optimizations we were able to land were in standby power consumption. For Windows users, this means longer Modern Standby before going into Hibernate. For Linux, more importantly since hibernate is atypical, it means being able to leave your laptop unplugged for much longer when not in use.
The standby performance was what kept me from buying a previous gen frame.work despite loving the mission and wanting to support y'all. I was holding my time until either the efficiency cores came along (if that has any improvement in standby? I'm not even sure) or if you ended up making AMD where I believe S3 sleep states still exist.
Very exciting to hear there's an improvement in this generation. Is that improvement due to intel changes, or due to frame.work changes? Can you quantify the standby improvement for linux in watts or battery % / 24h?
Does battery life significantly change between processor models?
This is a combination of hardware and firmware improvements by both Intel on 12th Gen Intel Core generally and us on the Framework Laptop specifically. This is with s0ix standby, and we see ~0.4%/hour typically in Fedora 36 on 5.17.6 with the settings in our setup guide: .https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Fedora+36+Installation+on+th...
> This is a combination of hardware and firmware improvements by both Intel on 12th Gen Intel Core generally and us on the Framework Laptop specifically. This is with s0ix standby, and we see ~0.4%/hour typically in Fedora 36 on 5.17.6 with the settings in our setup guide
For reference, on a Intel 11th Gen Lakefield (Lenovo X1 Fold), using a Vanilla Windows 11 Pro with the non-Lenovo Intel GPU driver downloaded from Intel Driver & Support Assistant, given the results of powercfg /sleepstudy I get a 6% of drain for 9h54 min (so about 10h) therefore 0.6%/hour in "disconnected" (no wifi activity) S0ix standby.
Before, with the official Lenovo driver, it was 0.5%/h (4h: 2% drain). I was hoping to get better results, but this isn't so bad with about 0 optimization!
S0ix has gone a long way, in both Linux and Windows.
> Menu button next to Right ALT. And PGUP PGDN adjacent to the arrows
Keys can easily be remapped in software, so all you really is the physical keys layout (full size arrows + two keys on either side of the up arrow) and the trackpoint. Menu or PrintScreen or whatever doesn't really matter much.
I love everything about what you have planned. Is there anything in the works for creating more keyboard options? While mechanical keyboards might be too impractical, even something with bigger arrow keys would be nice.
The day there is a ThinkPad style keyboard (trackpoint, 3 button) and a matte screen, I'll order one immediately, and assuming it lives up to the expectation, I'd order more after that quickly.
I know this is a hard ask, but consider the Apple or Lenovo model of long support contracts. Not only does this help a lot of buyers to get your product, but you can start refurbishing trade-ins to get parts to service support cases.
In the Frame.work style you might be able to do it via a more DIY approach.
IBM used to guarantee availability of the exact chips, and did a lot of stuff behind the scenes to make that happen.
That sort of a guarantee way beyond what's reasonable of Frame.work, they don't control their suppliers to that degree. They've already updated the peripheral chips & hardware even within "v1", both for bugs and supply issues.
Frame.work has pretty much implied the form factor will remain largely untouched, so you're likely to be able to swap a component in even years from now, even if it'll be an "accidental upgrade". That sounds quite reasonable to me...
I know your roadmap is probably packed to the brim, but if you could help facilitate 3rd party sales that would be useful. My wife stepped on my framework 3 days (!!) after I finally got it back in the beginning, and you couldn't buy parts yet so I bought a whole new framework and cannibalized it for the screen. I've since repaired it but if there was a way to either trade or sell with other people in a similar boat, that would be amazing, particularly where not all parts are available for purchase at each given time.
I was waiting for the availability of the US international keyboard for DIY builds, but I got an even better present today. I have just made my preorder, surprised to see that a 1280P CPU with 64GB RAM is very reasonably priced!
I was in the market for a MacBook Pro / max upgrades as well, mind you, so effectively I also saved a lot of money (I believe at least a $1k price difference).
I use Linux as my daily driver, super happy to see the better support here as well.
All in all, thank you for making a refreshing change in this market.
Wow, that's quite a price jump from the i5 to the i7 and then subsequently to the 6 core one. Could you talk a bit about the economics of having hotter / higher end chips in a notebook and whether there are other non-obvious cost increases to them? Are the higher end models "subsidizing" the lower end one, or is there motherboard / chipset upgrades that need to happen as a result?
Really like the laptop though, and it's a close contender when it's my time to upgrade... :)
I'd guess that the 2 extra cores don't really make much of a difference day-to-day. If you crank up all the cores, both chips will throttle in a laptop of that size. If you are only running a couple single-threaded applications, the extra 100MHz turbo hardly makes a difference (around 2-3%).
On the flip side, the places that need/want vPro are going to be very enterprisey and don't mind spending the extra money.
I just ordered a Framework yesterday. I'm not interested in the 12th gen chip, but is there any other reason I might want to cancel & re-order today? i.e. would I be getting an older design?
Not GP but if it were me and you don't care about the 12th gen chip, I definitely wouldn't cancel and re-order. I would guess the battery improvement won't be dramatic, but you'll end up with a little more cost and a longer wait time. The only thing might be the new cover. The old one is pretty flimsy and doesn't tolerate heavy abuse well. Mine is always in my house or a backpack so it's not been a problem for me, but if I carried it around publicly where it can be dropped and such, I might be concerned about it.
I wondered this too, but they will need a way to be able to plug the same Mainboard into a new chassis such that the Expansion Cards work correctly, or else design a new Mainboard with increased size (or I guess longer Expansion Cards, but that seems silly).
Of course (?) they need to build a larger motherboard. I'd be really tempted to buy a 15" model especially with a touchpad with 3 hardware buttons (I'm not considering any laptop without them) and a keyboard without numberpad (very important but a little less than the hw buttons.)
I can imagine chassis designs that use the same Mainboard but move the Expansion Card slots out. It would also be much more in keeping with the ethos of the product and company to use exactly the same Mainboard in every device.
We've seen distro preference be too broad to make pre-loading efficient. Instead, we ship DIY Edition with no OS and publish guides for how to install and optimize the most popular distros. Our embedded controller firmware is open (see https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/EmbeddedController), and we're working with some community members on attempting a coreboot port.
> distro preference be too broad to make pre-loading efficient
Others seem to manage by just having one or two pre-install options. Maybe you could do that too?
> Our embedded controller firmware is open
That's good, but do you also ensure that it _works_? There's way too much works-on-windows-and-halfway-on-Linux firmware out there. At least it _can_ be fixed, but being open doesn't mean that it necessarily _will_.
When we started developing this product last year, we looked at price trends and performance data on DDR4 vs DDR5 and made the bet that DDR5 would have both price and availability issues in 2022. That has turned out to be the case, with DDR5 SO-DIMMs typically going for 50-70% over the equivalent DDR4 capacity, without delivering performance improvements to justify that premium. This is something that will improve in the future, and we'll continue to track this for future products.
They sell to different audiences though, so maybe optimize for different outcomes. I'd imagine DDR5 is much easier to sell to a "pro-sumer" who games on Windows vs. to a programmer who runs linux and can make an educated decision re: price/perf tradeoff.
In the configure page to pre-order for the 12th-Gen variant, there's a link to the 12th-Gen variant.
Feels a bit weird and confusing to be pointed towards the shiny new variant, while shopping for the shiny new variant.
What style of touchpad does the device have? Is it a force sensor style (macbook), hinged (most recent thinkpads), or one-big-button (also some thinkpads had this)?
I absolutely despise the hinged touchpad on my thinkpad as you can't click unless you're pushing on the bottom half of the touchpad. A force sensor touchpad alone would make me put in an order for a framework laptop
I can click the framework v1 touchpad with my fingernail touching the chassis above it. Half a finger width lower the resistance is more reasonable. One finger width down from the top the feel is pretty much the same as closer to the bottom.
S3 was technically not supported in 11th Gen Intel Core, but seemed to mostly work anyway. S3 is also not technically supported in 12th Gen Intel Core, and it seems to mostly not work at the moment, and it is unclear if that will change. However, s0ix continues to improve substantially in recent kernels, to the point where there doesn't seem to be a major standby battery life advantage to s3 anymore (on 11th Gen).
> On recent BIOS on Thinkpads this tends to be an option which can be toggled.
Just because the BIOS says so doesn't mean it will work.
On some old Dells, the S0 implementation in the BIOS was just so broken it straight couldn't work, even in Windows. What saved the game was Microsoft carefully considering such scenarios and checking the battery budget: if S0 was draining the battery too fast for the computer to awake in a usable state (like, with enough power to at least boot...) it would give up on S0 and go S4 "hibernate" instead.
In Linux this is now called Hybrid Sleep (S0+S4) but I don't think it existed back when I was in university. Finding a working ACPI S3 was hard.
On thinkpads, as explained above, a working S3 is just sheer luck as Intel 11th gen shouldn't even support S3. On the 12th gen, it sure doesn't. I would be curious to know if S3 works with Linux on a X1 nano Gen2 (12th gen)
Laptops are uniquely challenging in that each additional country has its own keyboard language, increasing the number of SKUs we need to manage and hold inventory for. This is beyond the normal challenges of entering new markets. We enumerated this in a blog post here: https://frame.work/blog/scaling-up-infrastructure
We are continuing to build the infrastructure and keyboards to expand into more countries though!
Please don't let weird localized keyboards block this. We don't care about that stuff. People buying framework laptops are able to change their keyboard layout in software and use it without having to look at the symbols present on the keyboard. Yes the physical layouts are also different, but that really doesn't matter. Just make it available and forget about these tiny issues that your target market of power users don't care about.
I want to throw my money at you, but I can't because the laptop is not available for shipping to the country I live in.
> Yes the physical layouts are also different, but that really doesn't matter.
Real YMMV territory here. I use many devices and when one of them has been a US ANSI layout, that has been a problem. Any ISO layout is fine, could be UK QWERTY, AZERTY or QWERTZ, I'll reconfigure it on software and ignore the labels. But applying a ISO layout to a ANSI keyboard leads to issues like Linux losing the # key or OS X just making random shit up and calling it a keyboard layout it isn't.
Luckily, Framework has done the work of making an ISO layout already for UK/France/Germany
Hmm… I don't see how that prevents you from shipping whatever is available. Many of us don't care about localized keyboards. I want a US layout. I dropped an email to your support almost a year ago with a request to add my country to the list, got "no problem, check back in a week", and the country still isn't there.
Take this with a grain of salt, but the last company I worked for had a sizable office in Tokyo, and I was told by someone in the IT department that they were legally required to buy computers with Japanese keyboards for their Japanese employees. Obviously that kind of rule wouldn't likely be applied to an individual bringing in their personal devices, but I can conceive of it being enforced on commercial imports.
Similarly, I've heard anecdotes about employers in Quebec being forced to provide equipment that has full support for the French language, even if the employees only actually speak English.
Shipping a US keyboard in Europe seems like an odd choice since most European keyboard layouts are ISO, not ANSI. I could see a blank keyboard working, or an ISO US keyboard maybe, but that is an uncommon layout that I don't think I've ever actually seen before?
Does this even matter? The point is that if one is fine with the US/ANSI keyboard, they should be allowed to buy it. To wit, I'm european and despise the ISO keyboards, and have never been forced to use one, so it's not like they're ubiquitous.
In many, many European countries, especially the smaller ones, a large chunk of devs and sysadmins straight out use the US keyboard layout, basically the old IBM PC one. I have no idea what kind of standard they follow... And people don't seem to care.
There are probably many potential users who wouldn't care, I've lived in Norway my whole life but my keyboards have been exclusively with an English layout for more than ten years now. If the thing holding you back from expanding to, among others, Norway is the lack of a nb-NO keyboard, please reconsider :)
Why is the SN750/SN850 the default SSD, given it has relatively high power consumption[1] and separately is there any reason to believe that building a DIY version with a different SSD wouldn't work?
We see folks in the community using a range of different SSDs, but SN750/SN770/SN850 are what we have done the most validation on. We see good perf/watt on the WDC drives. It's unclear why Tom's Hardware was seeing poor idle power with power saving modes on.
Is there a plan to offer other payment methods and/or multiple laptop orders. We want to use frame.work laptops for work and those limitations make it really hard for us to get it through logistics/purchase.
The upgraded version would be an ideal reason for me to rerequest this as my new main machine.
Yep, we currently support orders of up to 5 laptops per order for the original 11th Gen Intel Core-based Framework Laptop. For larger quantities for businesses, we also have additional business-focused payment methods via Balance (including things like NET terms). We're building ingestion flows for that, but in the meantime you can submit a request through our support form: https://frame.work/support?category=business-volume-ordering...
I don't think this works well with x86 chips. The performance of ARM in this low power budget is unmatched, especially looking at Apple's M1. And even they need fans to sustain the clock speeds.
An MS Surface Pro 7 with an Intel Core i5-7300U is fanless. I know I won't be getting the very bleeding edge topmost performance with fanless, but I can still get it plenty awesome. The silence is just a different level of experience, that I'm absolutely addicted to.
Even if you only want 4 usbc ports, get 4 usbc modules and don't be a baby about the 4x$9 for passthrough cards that don't even have electronics.
The usbc port inside the module bay is directly soldered to the motherboard. The module and bay serve as an important prophylactic to protect the usbc port from damage.
I would only use the real port inside as a backup when some module breaks or is lost or something.
It IS useful, and IS an explicit selling point (to me anyway) that you have the option to do something like plug a power supply or hub or dongle directly in there instead of it being a proprietary connector, but that doesn't mean do it regularly, especially not if the machine is being used in a portable manner where you're always plugging and unplugging.
You can, but we don't recommend it. Many/most USB-C cables are too thick to properly plug directly into the internal USB-C receptacles, which would make it hard to plug in and put stress on it.
I love that we jump directly to "deception" rather than "this could be a mistake"
A better approach would've been:
"Your website shows "Starting at 959 for the DIY option, but when I click on it the base option starts at 1,049. Am I missing something or is this a bug, an explanation would be welcome."
