Huh I wasn’t aware of all that since I’ve disregarded them for the performance in the first place. Regardless you’d probably have better luck waiting for something slightly faster than the DeepComputing RISC-V Mainboard than getting something of RK3399 caliber in a new ARM board unless some third party actually does it before Framework themselves, just doesn’t make sense to cut performance of a new ARM board this much when other chips (and even RISC-V) are right there.
If it wasn’t the only ARM board that’d be fine by me, but I’m not sure how well it’d sell when the RISC-V boards would largely be targetting a similar audience at hopefully soon comparable performance if not better so they would also perform faster than around a Raspberry Pi 3/4 in practice.
I bought one too. When purchasing, they made clear that there was no warranty, and that was one of the ways they made the price so cheap. Well, the other way was a brittle plastic case with a way-too-stiff hinge that screwed into little nubs in the brittle plastic. The first thing I noticed when I got it and opened it up was how stiff the hinge was, and it made clicking noises as I opened and closed it. So I was always very careful when opening and closing it. It turns out, the clicking noise was the first couple hinge support posts already broken off.
After using it just 8-10 times, when opening the display it sounded horrible with clicking and crunching, and the display was loose like the screws in the hinges were all about to fall out. I opened up the laptop to see if I could tighten the screws. Screws and plastic bits came raining out. The screws weren’t “loose.” Apparently, the last of the screws supports had finally sheered off. All of the hinges’ screw down points were sheered off. All of them. The only reason it still worked at all is because all the little bits that were in there were sort of jamming the hinges in place. I put it back together as best as I could, but I guess I didn’t get lucky with the way the bits jammed up, because when I tried to lift up the display, the hinges just started prying the entire bottom case off.
Why in the world were the hinges SO stiff? Why were the screw supports for the hinge just little nubs sticking up from the plastic? In the end, it was so jammed up and the case was so destroyed around the hinges that it was unusable. I was too annoyed to look into parts or whatever at the time, so I just stuffed it in a box and haven’t touched it since.
Do you think we’ll get a framework arm laptop any time? I’m interested in what it actually means to make one of these devices with an arm chip, is the procedure any different?
I think the lack of actually worthwhile arm platforms is kind of the bottleneck.
Can’t really go apple m cause for one apple would not sell them and they do have soldered memory (and ssd but I’d asume framework would make that socketed).
The qualcom ones are half baked af but would probably be the most likely ones for framework to actually get access to.
The nvidia+mediatek one was just delayed and given how hard it is to work with nvidia on just gpu I doubt it would be particularly easier on a full system setup. They do have soceted lpddr though so that’s nice.
As for using smartphone/tvbox/sbc chips, they are way slower than what framework currently sells and are extremely lacking in the software support department. While an rk3588 would make for a pretty neat media consumption laptop getting pretty much anything to work well on there is pulling teeth.
FW could maybe move to a Raspberry pi CM5 approach. Where the cpu and ram is on a daughter card, with all the vrm and io on the main board. It would work if the cpu and ram have to be soldered, but they could have the same cpu/ram daughter card for FW12, FW13 and FW16.
They might wish to use infiniband instead of pcie, as fewer pins are needed.
Finally, the 3rd-party company MetaComputing announced the Arm CPU mainboard compatible with Framework Laptop 13!
MetaComputing, a Switzerland-based innovator founded in 2024, today announced its latest breakthrough in intelligent computing — the MetaComputig AI PC with Framework Laptop 13, developed in collaboration with CIX Technology. This product marks a major step toward bringing powerful, energy-efficient AI performance to consumer desktops, designed to blend artificial intelligence with open computing seamlessly.
You guys serious and fun, thank you for the caring too. the ARM mainboard is real indeed me helping the operation under MetàComputing with AI focus but not funded by me or DeepComputing as we mainly focus our investment on #RISCV only but by the web 3 world who want to make the best open source Linux ARM laptop for Blockchain open source world.
More videos and Photos will be updated and now very close to mass production with full certification on its way.
Apologies for the excessive skepticism! Honestly I was mostly afraid because I got weird vibes from the website. It doesn’t help that public documentation of the product is very scarce. I didn’t mean to attack you.
Okay I believe you! I shouldn’t have brought that up, because I have no evidence.
Looking forward to hearing more about the product.
