Framework worked hard to lose me: a terrible experience with customer support

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Note - I’m the guy from Review of hardware durability and repair (1.5 years)

My personal experience is that Framework support leaves me with a mild sense of meh. I travel a lot, so it doesn’t make sense sometimes to contact them as I wouldn’t be able to get the part most of the time.

My experience:

  1. I replaced the keyboard. You can compare the initial and final pictures as the paint job got worse, but the real reason for replacement is that 2 years in, the alt key quit working.
    1Y keyboard paint job
    2Y keyboard paint job
    For my keyboard wear and tear, I’m really not sure that was due to usage, I would suspect it’s a bad paint job. I finally had to replace it because the alt key went bad (2 years in - definitely out of warranty). 5 months after replacement, this keyboard is not having any paint stripping / bubbles, so my assessment is likely correct.

  2. The initial and replacement power cables both ended up being frayed. I only contacted support out of warranty for the first one. Should it have been replaced if it’s a known issue even out of warranty? Not really sure, but it is sure irritating to order a second one and also have it be frayed in a few months(not sure the exact timeline, but disappointing). I got a braided usb cable from Walmart instead. Note - I did not contact support for the 2nd one as I’m travelling, but perhaps I should.

  3. I wanted to order a matte screen and it was not shippable. They contacted me and said they would ship it even though they screwed up. Which is totally awesome. Unfortunately, due to travel I still couldn’t get that ordered.

Regarding OP, given the likelihood that I’m in the 99th percentile of laptop abusers, I can say there’s really no way that a key should split like that, so I’m having difficulty understanding how this could possibly be customer induced. It’s also highly unlikely that OP would be purposely breaking a key to file an issue. Customer induced damage definitely seems like an unfortunate way to end this issue, but humans are involved and maybe they were having a bad day when they made the assessment.

It happens.

Anyway, the company is growing and evolving, and the reputation will be solidified in the next few years and hopefully, support can evolve to consistently be awesome.

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