A more ethical Framework competitor?

[Ryuka]

@Caleb_Maclennan

At this point if any of Framework’s competitors in this space have solid business ethics the best thing they could do would be to jump in this thread and disavow being interested in taking customers purely based on this nonsense.

Best this would happen is someone write a mail directly to their mailbox. Chance they will appear in here is low.

[JBH]

If Framework sinks I’m not sure where I will be even able to go. I didn’t buy my FW13 to make a political statement, I bought it because it fits my needs perfectly. This is so far the only product on the market that fits my needs of a traditional form factor laptop that runs Linux well that doesn’t have to go into landfill the second a single part breaks.

Before I came across Framework I was buying new laptops every year. Before we decide to burn down this company for something as frankly as minimal a transgression as this, can we at least have a viable competitor? If Framework dies, most of its customers aren’t going to go buy from the tiny list of even more obscure brands. They’ll go back to big names like Lenovo, HP, or Apple who regularly make political decisions that make what we’re accusing Framework of look like the actions of a saint.

[Charlie_6]

@Ryuka

I make that comment when I watching MacBook repair video

MacBook repairs are much harder than it looks. Even if you can solder the RAM, SSD, angle sensor, etc, etc precisely. You still can’t fully repair them. Apple products are notoriously known to have anti-repair “part pairing” which will deliberately show an error and lose some function even if you use genuine parts unless you’re an “authorized” repair technician having apple “authorized” maintenance software that most consumers simply can’t obtain legitimately. Those MacBook repair videos on YouTube only show the “mechanical” part at most. They won’t show or explain how they obtain hacked maintenance software to bypass the “part pairing”.

[JackOfManyTrades]

I have looked MNT as well from a year ago. I use train a lot in my daily commutes and I needed something that I can use to program there, and something that has open hardware. It’s an ARM based laptop as well, so aside dreaming on adding HW modifications (they share KiCad files as well), I thought I could also modify it’s firmware.

But MNT laptops are quite expensive for the specs they offer. Alternative option was cheaper PineTab, but I did not jumped on this as well. And for tinkering - I found other projects.

As a bottom line, I actually still use my old laptop, that is now 11-12 years old. I can still get parts for that from eBay and have changed vents, old HDD, broken USB ports, a faulty keyboard etc. over time. As @DSN pointed out, you have to be careful with battery replacement. I have currently a fourth battery on it and have had a hazardous bulging with one of the earlier ones. And it does not last long, just long enough for my daily train commute. Probably the motherboard wont live much longer long though and I am not going to replace that, even if I find one… so I have to find a new laptop alongside to my Framework desktop probably soon

So, for the users, who want to be “ethical” , the best thing to do is IMHO keep your old laptop running. Well, if you can, its easier said than done.

As for ethics in general, as I said (and others as well), you never know, how ethical a consumer electronic device is:

@workintw

Unfortunately, all that shows you is the very last step in the process: final assembly location. Everything more advanced than a hand-picked banana relies on China in some way or another. The final assembly label doesn’t tell you where the raw materials came from or anything about the global supply chain, tooling, or anything to get to that final assembly step.

That is quite good summary of that. Some of the options of the horrendous things you might indirectly support: modern slavery, child labor, corruption, environment pollution, wasting of drinking water, components in ballistic missiles…the list goes on. I used IBM Thinkpad like long time ago, and remember that a book came out about IBM supporting the Nazi-Germany during the 1930-s and WWII. So saying that you want to ditch Framework laptop because they sent their laptop to endorse Omarchy…I am not saying that it is hypocritical, rather than - it (probably) does not make much difference to you in my opinion. But I would rather leave the “political” discussion to that other thread - after all everything does not have to be “extremely political” everywhere.

Also to note, things are also getting better, you can look for TCO ceritified consumer electronics for example. This addresses shady supply chain issues and environmental hazards at least, but still it is a long way to go.

[Ivirono]

@JackOfManyTrades

Also to note, things are also getting better, you can look for TCO ceritified consumer electronics for example. This addresses shady supply chain issues and environmental hazards at least, but still it is a long way to go.

Thanks. I didn’t know about this site and will look into it.

[Richard-Feynman]

Let the cancel mob move on. Please people, move elsewhere and leave us alone.

[Kazriko]

@patrizia

“no point developing software as there’s no hardware” → “no point developing hardware as there’s no software” loop.

They don’t need to develop the entire software stack, most of that exists. They just need to provide open source drivers and device trees, preferably upstreamed though that is optional. It would be even better if they supported the ARM server boot methods so they can use off the shelf distro installers, but they’re at the mercy of their chip providers for that mostly, and none of the Chinese ARM chip providers seem to care about standard booting, all of them just force you to use custom images instead. (Standard boot being Arm Base Boot Requirements.) That they don’t do that means that their hardware becomes poorly supported very quickly, no reason for people to work on random arm product #24123 when everyone’s moved onto random arm product #25789.