I’d really like a colour accurate 100% srgb screen, this would make drawing stuff much more feasible.
I also think the second gen should have a stylus holder or something.
Passive cooling would be great and the space used for the cooler could be used by more RAM or a full size SSD. But that would obviously be a bigger change.
I know that probably all of this is overkill but a person can dream.
My number one wish always was a backlit keyboard option.
Today I thought of something else that might elevate FW12 use even more… especially in tablet mode: an expansion card with a volume rocker. That would be really handy on the FW12 when used as tablet.
Or even better an extension card with two programmable rockers - e.g. volume, brightness, toggle on-screen keyboard, etc.
In the meantime I’ll try to find a workaround with gestures maybe. If anybody has pointers for Ubuntu 25.04 that would be amazing.
Edit: Thinking a bit more about the expansion card, it would maybe even be possible to use the USB-C expansion cards and add two buttons - one on each side of the USB-C port. With long / short press it would be 4 different inputs. Or maybe small rockers that are pressable too instead of buttons. That would be at least 6 different inputs.
You are probably going to have to wait for a platform with 4 native tb5 ports first which may take a while. Hooking up 4 tb5 ports externally would probably take pretty much all the pcie lanes a current gen mobile processor has and then some.
Also not sure if intel is going to make 4 tb ports available in the future, in the past pretty much the only manufacturer using more than 2 was apple and they moved away from intel.
Thanks for starting this thread. However, this thread’s topic is duplicated from the following thread.
Ah thanks, and sorry…. I thought there should be one, but I haven’t found it. So I decided to start one….
Oh man… I had the suspicion I might have read “my” idea somewhere else before. So props to @BigT for the volume buttons / USB-C expansion card idea:
My humble contribution then is to maybe find rockers or other alternatives for buttons to implement even more inputs other than short / long press 
Don’t worry. A moderator (@2disbetter, @TheTRUEAsian) may merge this thread into that thread
This will sound heretical 
…
But I would really like to see an APU motherboard with soldered RAM. Just like those that go into handhelds. It would turn FW12 into ultra-portable gaming laptop.
what about CAMM2/similar? It would strike a balance between speed and repairability/upgradeability… if anything it’s a “free” upgrade for speed while maintaining modularity, with the only cost being board space
control key cap in place of caps lock key
I posted earlier in this thread, and my list remains mostly unchanged, but, updated for actually having the laptop, and using it for a month…
1.) BACKLIT KEYBOARD. after actually getting my FW12, this has somehow actually moved up
…from #1.
White text on gray keys is almost impossible to read from the light of the screen.
2.) physical buttons for the trackpad.
If it weren’t for the fact that it’s flatly impossible to find much of anything that has them, not having physical buttons would be an automatic dealbreaker for any laptop.
3.) still want waterproof, still cool with the fact that it’s really unlikely.
4.) means of attaching the stylus, because I will lose it.
The fact that my head is attached doesn’t stop me from losing it, it just makes it easier to find it again.
$60 on something I’m going to lose within the first day is hard to swallow.
5.) yeah, I want volume buttons on the expansion cards too.
6.) eGPU support would be nice too, specifically for the FW16 video cards and the external enclosure they report they’re working on for those…I don’t have a FW16 yet, but when I get my gen2 FW16(at least 6 months), and upgrade the video card(probably 5 years), it’d be nice if I could use the old GPU with my FW12…that being said, that’s far in the future, and I can just use it with my FW13, so even further before it’s helpful. (reusing old hardware when I’m home? sure, spend ~$300-$700ish to buy a video card just for a FW12? hell naw. )
all that being said, FW12 doesn’t need an eGPU, and I’m not sure the CPU and ram could keep up if you gave it one.
7.) still want a numpad somehow, still not sure how you’d fit it in the space available. still cool with that.
8.) yeeees, gimmie blue!
Green is my favorite color, but I like a lot more shades of blue than green, and sage is not high on my list of greens.
9.) not terribly fond of the keyboard layout, mostly when I’m reading, up/down arrows are too small, and pgup/pgdown share those keys…and FNlock doesn’t lock those, I’ll live, but it’s annoying. this one goes for the FW13 as well, don’t have a 16 yet, but it might be ok as is. arrow keys still look awfully small, and still shares the pgup/pgdown, but they’re also on the numpad, so…maybe?
a lot of people in this thread want higher performance, or better battery…I mean, sure, I’ll take it when it’s available, but both of those are fine. it’s not intended for gaming, but it’ll run a decent collection at acceptable levels, battery doesn’t last all day, but it’s long enough that most people aren’t going to have problems with it, and it beats the hell out of my MSI laptop from 2017, which, when set for maximum battery life lasted a whopping 40 minutes from full charge to shutdown, straight out of the box(and, yes, it got worse from there. there’s a reason I never bought another MSI laptop…actually a host of reasons.)
better screen though, while it’s perfectly fine for me as is(my eyes are…kinda…really bad.), better color accuracy particularly would be a big deal for drawing and similar tasks.
and yes, @NoriqNR soldered ram is, indeed heresy, please tie yourself to the stake, the inquisition will be there soon 
I have one laptop that has that, it should have been a dealbreaker. honestly if I’d found out it was using soldered ram earlier in the ordering phase it would have been, but I was in ‘decision made, details’ mode, and didn’t take the time to re-evaluate. if I had to do it over again, I absolutely would not buy that laptop again.(though, I will grant that soldered ram ranks fairly low on the reasons I wouldn’t buy it again.)
soldered ram is expensive, un-upgradable, and unrepairable, it’s just not worth it.
you’re free to be wrong…er…disagree, but I am not making that mistake again. 
I proposed soldered memory mainly because of space reasons. But I also thought I heard somewhere that it offers better performance for the iGPU. Am I wrong?
LPDDR can be faster than ddr which helps the igpu, however with things like lpcamm or socamm it is possible to get that without soldering it down.
Edit: for something as cost opitimized as the 12 there is definitely some merrit in going with very cheap and abundant SODIMMs over still quite niche stuff like lpcamm.
Another option would have been to have the second channel covered by a little bit of soldered ddr5 (8gb would have been enough) so you’d get dual channel and still have expandable ram (also gives the possibility of buying it without an SODIMM and adding one later). This would however need a way to completely disable the soldered memory in case it fails so failed memory will not brick the device.
probably not, as I recall, the reasoning for the framework desktop using soldered ram was that it lost almost half the performance without it…probably not worth using the CPU at all at that point…but I’d still have to think longer and harder before buying one with soldered ram, than without, bad chip? whole system is bricked, want more ram? too damn bad.
also, generally speaking, for any computer, buying it with ram pre-installed adds roughly twice the price you pay buying your own. (48gb chip from framework for the fw12? $240, $120 on newegg(not necessarily the best place, but quick to look up)…the latter has gone up $20 since I ordered mine in july, I don’t think the former has changed since I ordered it(without ram) in april(I reserve the right to be wrong about that though) I’ve seen more or less the same for other computers, I don’t think I’ve ever found one where the up-charge for upgrading the ram from the manufacturer was less than the cost of just getting the cheapest one you could from them, then buying what you actually want and tossing the chip it came with out the window(I only actually did that twice, and I tossed it in a drawer, but that’s beside the point…anyone want a 2gb ram chip? how about 4gb? no? me either. (I think those were 2010, and 2012, next laptop was 2017, and I planned to but it had a stupid(and unenforceable) ‘warranty void if removed sticker, which scared me off just long enough to decide it wasn’t worth wasting the money to upgrade the damn thing….next one was the one with soldered ram, end of 2019, at which point the one from 2017 was basically fried.(it still technically works….but I think the laptop I got in 2008 outperforms it 
)
I’m probably rambling, because it’s past my bedtime, but eh
as for space, yeah, that probably does help on that score….but I’m still mad at the computer industry for taking away my removable batteries, I’ll take the balk in exchange for being able to replace a bad part(and, in the case of batteries, a dead battery with a charged one )
imma go pass out now, laters
Space wise soldered ram is trading board space for z height, even something as inefficient as an sodimm slot uses less board space than the equivalent ram on the board but it is taller. Then again since wen need the height anyway for the heatsink this seems like a win in the case of non passively cooled laptops.
USB-pd kind of removed my usecase for (quickly) removable batteries as a good powerbank solves the same problem and it can also charge my phone and headphones and whatever else. I would however quite like slightly thicker laptops to get maxed out batteries and other good uses of the extra space.
Waterproof might be good.
I have seen designs of outdoor equipment that has the battery and all electronics sealed waterproof, and the heat pipes then go external, with some waterproof fans external also.
It does make repair more difficult because the seal needs replacing everytime you open it, and the inside is slightly pressurised, so one can detect leaks quickly.
it’d be really nice if framework could copy the arrow key layout from lenovo, two extra keys are much much nicer than squashed up+down arrows
yeah, a lot of the necessity has more or less disappeared, the ‘bad’ battery in the FW12 reports are whining about five hours, my first ones were lucky to get an hour or two…the worst one, somewhat ironically, was also the first one with a non-removable battery, I never got better then 40m out of that one, best is probably my panasonic cf-53…which is removable, I got it refurbished, not new, I’ve had it almost 5 years now, the battery is still good all day. in the former case? multiple extra batteries are almost required for anything…and you can’t have one. latter case? probably not a lot of places you’d need a second battery, but they’re available…I don’t think the one I have does, but some of those have two internal, removable batteries so you can just hot swap them when they start running low…I will almost certainly never need that much battery, but I love the idea
I was quite fond of the idea of add-on batteries. One of these days I’ll make one for the fw 13 as a shitpost, just a whole layer of 18650s under the laptop XD.
