Ah, sweet.
None of the videos I saw mentioned that it’s USB 4. That’s a bit of a major miss-step in coverage, I’d say.
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The coverage of this has been horrendous. The worst was PC Mag’s teardown. The guy got literally every spec wrong.
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Imagine being a journalist.
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I buy soon
If anyone is interested, the ordering page is back up. I’m torn on this one. I love the idea of a modular, repairable laptop, but I don’t have $750 burning a hole in my pocket. I could come up with it if I had to, but hey, I’ve got other bills to pay and I’ve already got a pretty modern laptop.
I can do better than that with an STM32 and some USB coding of my own 
Cypress also has USB 3.0 capable microcontrollers if more speed is required. Last I checked they support 5 Gb/s I/O transfers. But having that at the end of a USB cable isn’t the same as having it directly integrated inside a laptop. It used to be a pretty standard feature, back in the days where all computers had a printer port.
Adding to my earlier wary comments, I’m slightly concerned about the magnetic screen bezel picking up a load of magnetic dust over time.
I’ve just watched LTT’s review and it’s confirmed that this is the laptop for me as well as for everyone I know because, let’s face it, everyone I know always comes to me for laptop repairs… so I might as well make my life easier.
I’m hoping they do larger models in the future, like a 17’’ (sometimes I need a portable workstation).
I’m all laptopped-up at the moment but as soon as I need to buy a new one, it’s gonna be a Framework.
That’s not a big concern. I’ve used a Surface Pro 4 from 2016 to 2020 almost non-stop, including in my metal-working shop. On occasion, the magnetic charger plug got ripped out and fell to the floor, and picked up some iron or steel shavings. Somehow they never got into the tablet’s power connector, they concentrated where the magnets are. A few times I didn’t notice, and it did eventually result in some small scratches on the side of the tablet.
Cleaning the shavings from the plug was easy, I just used a tissue and five seconds of rubbing.
Most importantly, you need to understand how magnets work : they will attract metal, but only if their magnetic field extends in the air. If a magnet holds a piece of metal (or another magnet) it closes the magnetic circuit. Try it yourself : if you stick two magnets together you’ll find out that their magnetism is almost entirely cancelled.
So in this case, the bezel magnets won’t attract anything as long as the bezel is in place. When it’s not, well the magnetic “strength” of permanent magnets only extends outside the magnet to a distance roughly equal to the magnet’s size. So, not very far at all.
If you do not work in a place where people work on metal all the time, you will never come across any sort of dust that could stick to your laptop’s bezel.
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Has anyone here bought and received one yet? Supposedly they are shipping but I haven’t found any good reviews from end users except YT personalities and the usual media outlets.
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I have one ordered but it’ll probably be a bit until I get it.
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I love the idea of this thing but can’t justify another laptop.
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@wendell just dropped his video on patreon.
@wendell what are your thoughts on it for a daily driver? And did you order it before they started shipping or after. If after how long did it take to ship?
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I’d be more interested if it had a touchscreen as an option, I’ve been spoiled with using a 2-in-1 esp with OneNote and CAD. I’d estimate the average person uses a laptop either until a hardware failure, too old to run day to day software or the battery nears its end at about 3-4yrs.
In terms of cost its not that expensive when compared with business notebooks which can be serviced by IT/owner with minimal effort vs consumer models–I’d note Acer is the rare consumer notebook maker with an access panel to upgrade or replace memory/SSD/HDD.
As much as this modular laptop has plenty of upsides esp with the ability to swap out ports, durability such as case flex could be a decision factor for some–I’ve had a few notebooks, they didn’t have case flex and later suffered weird issues after the 2nd year yet notebooks with some case flex never had issues. (case flex tends to be OEMs factoring in expansion/contraction from a laptop being run for hours at a time).
On the topic of trackpads, my first Chromebook had copied Apple’s boarderless trackpad but Dell/HP tend to vary how recessed they are. I think most people who do work are still going to prefer a mouse, I know from personal experience Elan trackpads are awful in comparison to Synaptics.
Got mine in.
My initial thoughts:
- It’s very nice
- The construction quality is a clear step below other ultrabooks. Down to flex, touchpad quality (it does not click well unless the laptop is flat on a surface), keyboard isn’t a great fit, lots of flex around the screen, etc.
- It’s extremely light.
- It’s extremely easy to disassemble.
- It runs quite hot (not any worse than other similarly sized laptops)
- Speakers are decent
- Add-in cards are what I expected (very nice)
- Screen quality is superb. The aspect ratio is very nice, its very bright, colors are nice. I haven’t tested it gaming yet.
I don’t have a ton of other thoughts. I’m glad I got the i5 and not the i7. On openSUSE with KDE, the fingerprint reader isn’t working. I think there might be support on openSUSE, but not in KDE. openSUSE has libprintf and fprintd, but KDE/SDDM don’t have any way to use it that I can find yet. Progress can be found here: [kcms/users] Add fingerprint manager (!149) · Merge requests · Plasma / Plasma Desktop · GitLab (maybe with the PinePhone fingerprint reader back coming out, we will see some progress).
I haven’t really tested the battery life yet because I’m downloading and indexing my entire email inbox lol.
One other note - I am having some Wayland issues with openSUSE and KDE. Most scaling works OK, but LibreOffice scaling is messed up. Scrolling isn’t too smooth, and there are some graphical artifacts with Xe + Wayland.
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If you find the time I would be interested in your experience with Fedora or Ubuntu. I know those aren’t special or sexy distros but I would imagine that they would have better compatibility? I am considering buying this as my work laptop for the next few years so I don’t want to have to fiddle around with it for a week to get it working correctly on mainstream distros.
I’ll give it a shot when I get a chance. I think Framework is primarily supporting Fedora, NixOS, and Arch
We provided pre-release hardware to developers and maintainers at Fedora, elementary OS, NixOS, and Arch to make the Linux experience as smooth as possible, and we’ve been impressed by the incredible variety of Linux distros (and OpenBSD too!) being used by all of you.
I’m actually having an issue with the screen not powering on with my unit the last couple days, so I’ve opened a support ticket and we will see how that goes.
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On the business side, Linus is an investor of Framework
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This small repairability movement is really what the world needs. I don’t need one of their laptops right now, but I might get one nonetheless when they release an ISO keyboard version. It is not just a repairable device it also a pretty sexy device. It is also that for once somebody used their head and is offering things like higher DPI screens an dGPU free laptop at the same time, without going overboard and slapping a insane price tag on these devices. I hope the can sustain as a company because there is a place in my heart for everyone not expecting me to pay $300 for a $130 value RAM upgrade.
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