Sounds like you fear that a iGPU only 15" laptop would become obsolete because of 13" laptops. Unlike 9" or even 13" laptops you can use 45W+ cpus in a 15" laptop. The perfromance of a laptop is still mostly determined by how good the cooling solution is. Making small laptops with good cooling gets expensive once you need to use vapor chambers or liquid metal to keep up with a bigger laptop. There is also the point that many people including me prefer working on a 15" laptop compared to a 13" regardless which one is more performant. You can also put a 99Wh batterie in a 15" without too many compromises
Tiger lake processors also offer a additional TB4 port form the processor i think, maybe if you use that you can also have a second m.2 slot.
Microsoft’s new base spec Surface laptops studio is looking to do this. granted the “highest” tier only has a 3050Ti baked in, but it is a 14+ in. laptop looking to do the work of the Surface book that came before it (which had “essentially” a swappable dGPU in the keyboard). size does not equate to performance @_Asic is right on this front.
Clevo’s decisions hinge on what makes their customers happy, since clevo provides laptops to some big names that have been in the desktop market for years and are therefore used to the “volatility” of the PC market, maybe they could see this as an extension of that, and approve Clevo’s shift to R2R. Otherwise, Clevo is in a real pickle because they are the middleman and could get pressure from R2R groups from above, and pressure from their customers to stay the course.
Good luck getting Dell, Asus, and Razer to sign on to the “ATX for laptops/R2R” bandwagon… Lenovo, Acer, MSI, and HP are “maybe’s.”
That’s a fun thought. Framework enters something like the eGPU or VR market and disrupts it into something far more economical, and environmental. Hell, let them take on the the handheld console market against Nintendo… wait that might end in ANOTHER Nintendo lawsuit because Nintendo shoots down all competitors.
Question is how far would framework and Clevo work together. The mainboard formfactor of framework is based on using their expansion cards and probably wouldn’t make sense without them. Maybe on the MXM card front both could work together
I also don’t know if Clevo specializes in aluminum chassis laptops. If I remember correctly Clevo pushes so many designs because they do a lot of plastic cased laptops. “Military-grade” aluminum, while a complete marketing scam, is still going to be more durable than plastic over time, plus rigidity, and aesthetic.
after Iooking at current-gen laptops with MXM graphics in them I still really doubt the engineers at Framework and Clevo could get a fully upgradeable laptop (including MXM) down to the form factor of something like the Macbook Pro 16" or Dell XPS 15 on the thin side or even a lenovo thinkpad from a few years ago on the thick side. They’re all 17" on Clevo’s website and 44mm “deep.” hardly what I would call even an ultrabook-sized machine.
I personally want to see a 15inch but understand the business side of it and that it will probably be 2 years before that happens…in that case what id like to see is where we can take the components from our 13inch and put it into a frame of a 15inch…I think even the motherboard and battery can be swapped while still having room for a bigger board/battery…that way I can upgrade my MB at a later date instead of in a year or two when they come out with something better.
It has a intel dekstop cpu inside it with socket and everything and support for 165W nvidia 3080 mobile GPUs aswell as 4 ram slots. Not to mention 2x280W power supplies. This is the furtherst you can get from the thin and light conzept. A lot of clevo laptop rather prioritise performace over trying to get as thin as possible. Question is if its possible to bring MXM cards into 18-25mm with 45W cpu and ~120W GPU for both framework and Clevo. Both might just work together as far as bringing upgradable GPUs into laptops. With enough laptops there would also be an aftermarket where consumers would sell older MXM cards in order to upgrade to newer ones.
Correct. But I want a chassis that can accommodate multiple drives. Like I said, I don’t care if the drive bay support SATA or m.2. I just want multiple drives.
You can get away with a big fan or the dual fan like the GPD. It’s just that the very majority of people (those that have no idea what a framework laptop is) want thin chassis and the companies see that. Those people have no idea how cooling work and are perfectly happy with a i9 limited to 12W tdp.
Exactly. The problem is that we don’t have a 45W SoC with a graphics capability matching that of the CPU performance it have – we used to, back in 2016 with a 940MX and a i5-6250U. But now we don’t.
We can have desktop class processors running 90W and it is going to have no more graphics performance than a mobile 940MX. If it behave like … say a Radeon RX 560 (which is middle in the ground), I won’t say a thing.
And I doubt they are really going to craft together a large chip specifically for that market. But I also have no idea what Intel is going to do with their Xe graphics, so I’m going to sit tight on that.
Yes it doesn’t. But it should, right?
Well, aside from ultra budget laptops like a HP15-dw1083wm which runs a 15W pentium in a 15 inch chassis that I am happening to be running a “backup” with.
That might be the magic behind how Dell’s two-port TB hub work for their mobile workstations. But we will want to avoid those workarounds as much as possible.
It’s funny to think that the GPU and CPU are drawing more power than our charging bricks can handle.
If you are going beyond 100W, you had done something wrong here. Do that on a desktop.
Right now, I’m worrying that by the time I really need a upgrade the company would not exist anymore. But from the initial response (including Linus) it look like it will be quite some time before it start to go down.
So funny story… that “magic dock” is what I’m using right now. at my workplace. yes its 210W over two USB-C connectors. as I’m typing this I only have one plugged in and it’s slow charging but otherwise its a full TB dock. I think the other port is literally just doing 100W PD. If I swap the connectors/ports again one takes on TB duty+charging, and the other takes on just PD
A clever implementation is to have one port doing upstream data and another doing downstream data. This way you have fast transfer rates too.
If only one port is available, then the primary one (on the dock) take on both the upstream/downstream.
Power is like, perhaps split between. 5A at 20V on each port. because there are only this many power pins on the USB-C. You can’t put 20V onto signal rails.
I always dream of a 15" laptop with full sized num pad and a big battery, keyboard backlight, AMD-CPU for nice performance, but low power consumption, ultra wide IR Camara for Windows Hello and a 500 nit Display. And of course with 2 usb-c thunderbolt ports and 1 usb-a.
The Sad thing is that this is possible, but none of the Laptop companies create a super high end Laptop like this.
If there would be a 15 inch Framework Laptop I maybe can fulfill my dream
@Alexandar_Guzsvany for me, the width is the more important factor. Being a bigger guy, I tend to get a bit cramped on smaller systems, and if I’m not needing to move around as much, I’d rather have the extra size than the extra portability.
I personally would prefer a 17" touch screen, particularly if you are working on a spread sheet or Photoshop or similar apps. I have had smaller ones, but I’ve been using a 17" HP Pavilion m7-1015dx for the last 10-11 years, and I wouldn’t want to go to a smaller screen (although mine is not touch screen). I think that being bigger could be an opportunity for more of those modules to fit into the body of the machine. I like the option of having multiple USB ports to connect external devices, like your phone, external drives, external speakers, cooling fans, etc.
I meant touchscreen for spreadsheets. That just sounds really far from the norm. is it as an alternative to using the trackpad when a mouse isn’t available? what happens when you need to type long formulas? I’m actually curious.
I could see a bigger touchscreen being better than a smaller for drawing and maybe selecting things. I’m curious if you would like to have a 360° display for the 17" laptop
Edit: It would remind me of one of those giant graphic tablets:
If pen support was a thing on the framework, I’d 100% be on board at any size. I have a Cintiq which is nice, but, sometimes you just want to do your doodles wherever. Even if its just on the couch instead of at your desk. Cintiq is great, but also got a lot of cables and stuff to deal with.
I dont know if anyone asked already but was the mainboard already thought for bigger variants in its design ? I mean, of course you can just use the same components and leave a lot of empty spaces but about the cooling system and the 4 usb-c, are these enough for other possible extra modules to fill the empty space ?
By touch screen I mean touch screen, like your mobile phone. The technology is not new. It first came out in 1965 by Eric A. Johnson, although we first see this technology commercially on the IBM Simon in 1992. In more recent years, about 14 years ago or so, we see mobile phones like the HTC Tilt (a Windows Phone), and the iPhone. Then the Kindle Touch (2011), etc. It may be overkill for things like Excel, but Word has the capability of turning handwriting into Text, and Windows supports this capability since Windows 7 or 8, if memory serves. I had the first HP Notebook TouchSmart (2nd edition) about 12-14 years ago when HP was improving the technology, and it was incredible. The screen turned around and closed over the keyboard so you could use it to write with a stylus that doubles as a “mouse” for taking notes or drawing, etc.
