Initial Impressions
Disclaimer: I have owned this laptop for 7 months at the time of writing so much of this is from memory
Disclaimer 2: This user is very experienced with electronics and their experience with this laptop may differ from yours due to this
I ordered the BYO kit from Framework with RAM and storage from Framework. After purchasing the order took a few days to process, and it arrived the day after it shipped. Upon receiving the package I unboxed everything and put together the laptop according to the extremely simple instructions with no issues, it took less than 30 minutes of assembly time.
Initially I had some concerns about the gap between the trackpad module and the spacers being an issue when typing, I thought that this may rub against the underside of my wrist and cause irritation. Nothing else initially stood out to me.
Now - 7 Months Later
I still love this laptop as much as the day I bought it, it is extremely powerful given its size and portability and has done everything that I could ever want it to (it even ran VRChat without any issues, not even my old tower pc could manage that). With that being said I do still have some concerns with this laptop:
- Tolerances - Specifically the ones that I mentioned in my initial impressions, they did not cause any issues with my wrists however I am not thrilled that, on a $3000 machine, I have to deal with ugly gaps. I know why they are there, and I would sacrifice looks for functionality I just with the team could have found a way to make the spacers and trackpad module fit together better, maybe just make a unibody trackpad module that spans the width of the full laptop.
- The Expansion Bay - Since purchasing this laptop I have seen a lot of unofficial support and projects for this, but I have yet to hear about or see anything from Framework themselves. This is a super cool aspect of the laptop and is one of the main reasons I bought it and I hope to see more modules from Framework soon.
- Expandability In General - This goes hand in hand with the last point, another big reason that I purchased this laptop over anything else was this video published by Framework on their Instagram, TikTok, and other socials. It got me really excited for the future of this laptop and this company, I have never before seen something that has the potential to be so versatile and expandable while not sacrificing on performance. Unfortunately I have not seen anything from Framework that comes close to what’s in this video. The repairability and customizability of this laptop alone would have been more that enough for me to buy it, but I was really hoping for more than that. I hope that sometime in the near future I can start seeing some of these things come into the Framework ecosystem.
TLDR: The Framework is a great laptop with a few minor build quality issues that don’t heavily affect the user experience (at least in my case). I think that the Framework 16 platform has a LOT of potential, and I am a bit disappointed that I haven’t seen Framework do anything with that yet, but I do hope that they continue to build and innovate using their current FW16 platform as a baseline.
Edit #1 (Jan 06, 2025): It has just come to my attention that there is now a dual M.2 Adapter for the FW16,