I know FW are telling that they have been growing for every single year, margins going up and such but their rapid expansion of their product line up seems really concerning to me.
If FW’s goal is upgradability then the larger the line up, the more products they have to support long term. And as of now they don’t even fully support their existing line up; not having all parts available for stand alone purchase as well as FW16 not even having any upgrade alternatives as of now.
I get the feeling they will discontinue FW16.
I doubt it, mostly because that would be a really bad look for them. Severely damaging their reputation and credibility, it could be fatal for such a young company as FW.
can you go into more detail why you think this
Well they sure don’t have any plans for it. If a flagship item is totally ignored it is a hint it is either not sustainable or profitable and supporting something like that would be a loss. Therefore discontinue it after the current stock is sold is my guess. Hope i am wong. Seen this game played out before.
What’s your reason why a flagship device was totally ignored at their biggest marketing event ?
Honestly, I still think that the damage of abandoning FW16 would be so great to their brand image that it’d be better for them to just eat the cost and give us something major in relation to FW16
I’m not the one who feels this product is being ignored/discontinued but then I could be wrong as you said yourself “hope I am wrong”. So rather than me jumping into conclusions… I want to build up a clearer understanding of things
I don’t think the FW16 is being abandoned, at least, no more than any of their other products. Look at the Chromebook variant for instance. Look at the software support for previous gens of FW13. Framework likes making money and so far all I’ve seen is NPI after NPI with no money allocated to improving the experience for previous purchases.
Absolutely you are entitled to your opinion as i am to mine. That’s why we have a forum.
The mini-ATX and FW12 reveals to me are really concerning though for two different reasons.
FW12 seems to be their cheapest product, meant as an entry laptop for students and such. This almost demands it being more price competitive but FW isn’t exactly known for being price competitive. Them not even giving an estimation price for it is also a bad sign.
Mini-ATX I don’t understand at all, what’s the point? Ignoring all the AI talk, what’s the incentive of buying a mini-ATX PC from FW? I can’t buy a modular, repairable laptop with promises of upgrades from any other vendor but I can do so for a mini-ATX PC. Or simply build one myself for cheaper and equally as modular, with no soldiered memory at that.
I would argue that the laptop 16 getting the dual SSD expansion module just recently, and the fact that the one key module allows for third party keyboards are proof that they won’t discontinue the platform.
I would also argue that Laptop 13 got the upgrade because it always gets upgrades faster, it’s the oldest product and the easiest for them to create boards for.
I hope to see 16 get upgrades in due time, but I do also think part of it was that AMD offered to let Framework have first dibs at AI Max, they tried to get soceted memory and it just wasn’t possible, so instead of making a laptop with soldered RAM, they pivoted it to a mini PC to capitalize on business and homelab with desktop, and now have to work on 16 updates without AI Max.
When I saw the Desktop, I really loved the aesthetic of it and still think it looks great - but thinking on it more, yeah, you end up with a Mini ITX pc that’s less repairable than the competition due to the soldered on RAM and APU.
It’s cool that you can get crazy performance out of such a small form factor, but it feels like a bit of a weird direction for Framework. When they first pulled it out of the bag, I was expecting it to be some kind of conversion kit for a 13/16 mainboard to turn it into a more full-featured desktop - kind of like the cooler master case but with active cooling, better I/O, etc.
Edit: In hindsight the 13 and 16 have active cooling, I meant to say more powerful cooling.
I don’t think they totally ignored it, it’s just that so far there’s no option available to them to upgrade the mainboards. Heck, they had to go with soldered RAM for the Framework Desktop, and it feels like that would be just impossible to accept on the Framework 16. Maybe we might see an Intel offering later this year?
It just seems to me that it’s a poor idea to release so many different products that have little in common in terms of upgradability. It’s both harder to support long term and it’s not as appealing to customers imo. I’d love to see some upgrade kit that allows upgrading old, discarded FW13/16 mobo into a full fledged PC for example.
Imo it’d be fine if some of their stuff is proprietary as long as they’d be interchangeable between all their different products. But that doesn’t seem to be the case…
This post encapsulates my problem with their line up in short, it’s dongle-land:
Its Mini-ITX, not Micro-ATX. I think the product is primarily targeted at users who need a large amount of VRAM. That’s why they compared it to a Mac Studio and an NVIDIA product on stage. That’s admittedly a much smaller audience than many of their other products, but for that use case it seems pretty competitive.
I’m pretty sure their goal is repairability with upgradability being an intentional byproduct. As far as the FW16 goes, its only been out for a year, I get people want the latest CPUs but I think it’s a bit unreasonable to expect a small manufacturer to be at the bleeding edge of new products.
They’ve always had a year or so lag behind bleeding edge
