Hi all, not sure if this is the proper sub or not but figured since I was discussing an enterprise deployment it would be ok. If not, please either let me know or if the mods could move it to the proper sub I’d be grateful. I am cross-posting on here (org. on LTT Forums) since I know there are a bunch of enterprise team leads here. Basically I am trying to see if Framework Laptops are a good idea for a large org. deployment or if it isn’t worth the bother? Thanks y’all!
I work with an IT dept. (in cyber law/compliance) for the system office of a major university system and was talking with my direct manager about e-waste over lunch today and had a thought. We use standard OEM laptops/desktops and the individual universities have their own contracts with groups like HP/Lenovo/Dell etc. During our talk I mentioned Framework and how the laptop was designed to be modular and repairable. He did not think it was really something that was scalable to a large org. Figured I’d put it to the community and see what y’alls thoughts were and if you could come up with any valid arguments that I could bring to his attention. I love the idea of telling Dell and the other OEM’s to piss off with their soldered RAM and be able to reduce e-waste at the schools. Thanks LTT fam!
I work for the Federal government. We do a lot of in house repairs and also have service contracts with OEM’s. Having Frameworks would be amazing. If the repair requires anything more than swapping out a HDD or RAM then we are basically at the mercy of the vendor as to if it will get fixed or even if the tech they send is competent/will arrive in a timely manner. Being able to completely repair and replace the laptop hardware would be amazing and speed up our turn around time for big repairs.
The other thing is that when we have completely dead laptops we will strip them for parts as much as we can and have a small stockpile. With Framework it is significantly easier to reuse old hardware to fix production machines.
I think the biggest issue would be device cost. Framework laptops are premium devices and getting an organization with more than a couple of users to sign off on $1k+ devices might be a struggle.
Of course if you were buying them in bulk with a service contract you might get a different price than retail.
Honestly I don’t know the exact numbers but 11 institutions, 20k+ staff spread throughout all of them. Each inst. has their own lifecycle process, but we are a public entity so they try to extend devices as much as possible in most cases. When I was shadowing one of the institutions IR/data recovery specialist I know I saw laptops with hard drives still in them going to be destroyed and that was at one of the better budgeted schools.
Oh that’s cool. I can see the upfront cost being a huge problem, I would just think that the amortization over the lifecycle of the device would balance out against a service contract. And you get the added benefit of recycling components rather than just ditching them to the OEM to throw on a landfill or something.
Do you mind if I ask how large your dept. is roughly and how you handle storage/inventory tracking etc.? One of the comments I got over at LTT mentioned the tracking as being one of the biggest hurdles they could see.
At one of my previous jobs we used to repair laptops regularly. We were a company with About 2k employees I believe. And we were spread out over 100+ locations in the US. This was a couple years ago for context. I believe this is large enough scale to say it works at scale for any national organization. However the issue I would see with framework would be supply. They don’t seem to be able to keep things in stock, and we had enough issues getting things from Dell or HP, that I would be concerned about them simply not having stock for a large company.
Just a reminder to OP. Technically Framework laptops are repairable but only with Framework parts. Ask Framework if you could get parts priority should there be a shortage.
Your business would benefit Framework but chip issues might be again in the future if China and US keep fighting.
What is cool is that parts could be cannibalizable (lol try to pronounce that) until the last unit .
I think the possibility is there depending on the organization, and if e-waste is a priority for them, but maybe not quite yet. I think there’s advantages to it (even if it’s just not dealing with HP/Dell/Lenovo) But the scale and support offerings have to be at a spot for business continuity too as well as you being able to spare at least one employees time to do these repairs or find the working bits from laptops with different issues and how much is the single user uptime on a particular device is vs the IT person’s time to repair.