Personally I feel that the amount of heat generated by threads requesting AMD suggest that people are missing the real potential of a modular laptop. At the risk of being provocative, here is an open letter to those who demand AMD processors!
I want more meaningful customisation than getting to choose what processor manufacturer’s sticker it sports on the case. People diss apple because they launch identical looking computers and mobile phones each year with a marginally better processor. Perhaps we can do a little better than that here? I see the “killer app” framework brings to the table being the opportunity to explore different form factors and ergonomics I am agitating for an Atreus ergonomic keyboard. A feature like this is not something that any other manufacturer offers, yet for the minority that use such things the productivity gains vastly exceed any benefit from changing the processor.
The CPU manufacturers are clever in using branding to make it seem important that you get a computer with their label on the outside (remember the Intel Inside adverts?). Perhaps AMD is seen as the plucky underdog challenging the dominance of Intel, and this appeals to many customers of Framework which itself is a challenger to the big manufacturers?
Nobody has the same brand loyalty for the SSD and RAM for example, even though the choice here makes just as much difference to the overall package. Presumably because the manufacturers of these components don’t spend on marketing to the same extent? Nonetheless I think demanding better x86 processors is like swapping deckchairs on the titanic: surely we should be looking forward to RISC chips like Arm or RISC-V?