This is designer Nick from Framework. First of all I want to thank to all the press reviews and online unboxing which really help us to communicate with the public on the details we’ve thought through over past 18 months.
I saw a lot of people are asking why we have single aluminum color as well as many comments on the design form factor. I knew that I’ve elaborated a bit in the previous thread Awesome concept, strange execution - #6 by Poyu_Chen. But I would like to spend some time to talk more about the design thinking behind the product.
As our mission is to build a repairable and an upgradable laptop. We aimed to design a laptop which is super easy for users to do any repair or assemble from the beginning. That made us encountered such strong challenges compared to other laptop products on the mechanical design and architecture design because everything should be easy-removable but keep the great rigidity while fixed on laptop as well as keep the compact dimension. So any other extra geometry change may impact and slant our initial standpoint , I just do what I think we really need to do on this laptop. For example we may need another type screws with longer length just in order to fit the ID shape at somewhere on the laptop, that we may increase one more screw type on the laptop, and people are getting confused while fixing the laptop and may increase the possibility to damage the laptop by taking the wrong screw into the laptop. which those changes may make our design getting complicated and harder to use from user experience perspective. Those are the results which pretty deviated our intention a lot. That’s part of reasons we keep the design as simple and minimal.
Design-wise. We really want users to keep this laptop as long as they want to ( I hope ). So the first thing came to my mind was " what’s the design that can live lasting after 8~10 years." Let me take a metaphor, like in the fashion industry, every year the design shows you what’s the most trending color, pattern or outfit. But I bet everyone has 1 or 2 white or black T-shirt in you closet more than less, right? That’s something which might not be your favorite one , but you are super comfortable and willing to wear it at any occasion. That’s the kind of feeling and the factor I want to bring out on this project and the story behind we determine the form factor and color. I truly hope the more I try to let people know the design thinking behind the scene, the more people would agree with our mission and like our product as well. I hope this message resolved some questions in your mind and love what we are doing right now.
Happy to hear more feedback from you and appreciated all the great support for each one of you.
You and the team did a quality job! It looks solid, utilitarian and quite timeless - not to mention the functional puzzle going on when you open it, it must have been very complex making something that appears so ‘simple’
I would echo that sentiment as well. What you and the team have accomplished is fantastic. I think a lot of the reasons things are the way they are on the laptop is not something widely understood by the (potential) user base, and so posts like this are important.
My order should be shipping today, and I genuinely cannot wait. I intend on being a customer for life.
Thank you again for the hard work, and keep it up!!
I would love to introduce anything related to design on the Framework laptop as more as we can if that helps people to know Framework more from product perspective.
Hey Nick! I love the philosophy behind the Framework laptop- you and the rest of the design team did a great job with how it came out.
With this philosophy in mind, how would you approach a second iteration of this laptop for a GPU user in mind? Would you try to design a larger all-in-one chassis or create a separate, repairable eGPU enclosure?
For the next product, we are doing the early explorations and try various concepts. But one thing for sure is that the next product gonna follow our design principles and link with our ecosystem tight. Please stay tune and enjoy having your Framework laptop.
A really good laptop that i am considering to buy in the future. I am interested in having a laptop for bussiness with a long battery power. When will it be available in Europe ? Do you estimate a price in Euro with the transport and all ? Having a changeable Mainboard would be awesome. Maybe you can implement a mainboard with the new integrated graphic cards or even a dedicated MX from nvidia.
Hello and great work on this framework laptop. I really like the idea behind this and think you’ve done an amazing job so far. As a person who doesn’t like compromises I really like seeing that everything is so modular and yet still so slim and stylish with nice display size. Cudos to you all!. There is however one thing I’m wondering about the design and that has to do with the chosen size for the expansion cards. Because I’ve read around in the forum and it seems that they are just too small to fit multiple ports on them but looking at the current expansion cards you offer they seem larger than necessary so I’m just wondering if there is particular reason for the size or of it just happened to be this way.
Hi @Junior_Asante
Thanks for the feedback! The expansion cards are pretty small for some of the ports we offer, for example inside the display port card, the connector takes up almost half of the space, fitting the other necessary components is quite tricky given the limited space we have. HDMI is similar, as we have to have both a PD controller, and a DP-HDMI protocol converter, and a fairly large HDMI connector too.
Thanks for the reply and I see your point. It is a shame that it is a tad bit too small since for me personally I think having multiport cards would be one of the most useful expansions cards. Mainly because that would allow me to have more exotic cards without having to swap out cards all the time. So refusing to give up the idea of achieving that are there any thoughts of introducing bigger cards for future framework releases?
and @nrp 's reply about the possibility of double height cards sounds like this could happen in the future.
Also, seen a thread or two about RJ45 ethernet cards.
Yes I saw that which sounds like a nice idea and I’m excited to see how that turns out. But I’ve been thinking and based on some of the pictures of the laptop I came up with a slightly different idea as to how the cards could be expanded. I’m thinking of expanding over the space between the card slots. As far as I can tell that space is used for the unlocking mechanism and there dont seem to be any electronics in there the power on light. So my idea would be to have that part made removable by for instance a screw to allow for, what looks like, 8-10mm of extra width. Now of course this would mean that there would be a need for a new solution for the locking of cards. For that my solution would be a top side rail where the removable middle part is, for fixture and a side rail to replace the now missing rail for the second card. With this solution you would be able to have one “extended” card and one ordinary card, one dual card that takes both slots or two separate cards if you reattach the center piece. This modification would be on the next version of framework laptop but could also be made available for current version by providing a new frame where that centerpiece is detachable.
). So the first thing came to my mind was " what’s the design that can live lasting after 8~10 years." Let me take a metaphor, like in the fashion industry, every year the design shows you what’s the most trending color, pattern or outfit. But I bet everyone has 1 or 2 white or black T-shirt in you closet more than less, right? That’s something which might not be your favorite one , but you are super comfortable and willing to wear it at any occasion. That’s the kind of feeling and the factor I want to bring out on this project and the story behind we determine the form factor and color. I truly hope the more I try to let people know the design thinking behind the scene, the more people would agree with our mission and like our product as well. I hope this message resolved some questions in your mind and love what we are doing right now.