I’ve just seen you’re now doing a 2.8k display on the framework 13, which is nice and all… but… rounded corners? lol
I have no objection to making these kinds of options available, I’m sure some nutters out there like the idea but please please for the love of goodness don’t completely phase out square corner displays as a buying option I don’t care about 120hz or 2.8k, but I really do care about having things like a horizontal scrollbar’s left and right buttons rendered in software but invisible on the device.
I know that you’re likely to keep some inventory of the previous model in so people can buy an old-style display, but if you’re buying a new DIY edition I’d really want to keep ‘square display corners’ as a choice
in fact on the subject of displays, I for one would actually prefer a lower resolution panel. at 13" I’d struggle to see a pixel on a 1080p class of display so when thinking about battery life or graphics performance, I’d rather my laptop not be rendering 2k or 2.8k worth of pixels when something like 1920x1250 would be absolutely fine.
another reason I prefer more “standard” resolutions involves media consumption. videos rendered in 1920x1080 or 3840x2160 both scale perfectly and look perfect on a device with 1920 or 3840 pixels of native resolution. when you scale that content to a device with a different pixel width it becomes noticably fuzzy
The announced 2.8k 120Hz display is a paid option!
Why FW gone with rounded corners can be read about in the blog.
The normal choice in the configurator is the normal rectangle non 2.8k display with only 60Hz!
thanks for the heads up on the blog post, didn’t know that was there. glad to see it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a permanent feature of all future displays
Yeah, I would expect they’ll keep the lower res / “standard” resolution display as an option. With a lower cost & lower power use, it has a reason to exist. Not even counting the unmatched corners on the new high-res option.
Creating a custom display is a major and expensive project, which means that Framework prefers to find display models that some company has already paid for the expensive design costs of. That helps Framework to avoid a significant expense, but means that they are limited in the displays that they can choose from.
Framework has made it clear that if they were designing the display they wouldn’t have gone with rounded corners.
The new display that Framework offers is suspected to have been designed by BOE for Lenovo, which means that Lenovo paid for the expense of getting a custom display design and therefore got to decide to make the corners be rounded. Framework is just buying that panel from BOE.
Personally I don’t see why the rounded corners are so offensive. I mean I prefer properly squared screens, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter. Personally my aging eyes would like a lower resolution screen or an OS that handles fractional scaling more gracefully, but that’ll be less an issue when I finally break down and get bifocals or computer glasses heh.
I wouldn’t say the rounded corners were ‘offensive’ but there are 2 issues with it. One is cosmetic, in that the bezel that holds it in place is not rounded, so cosmetically it looks like they’ve put the wrong panel in the device. For a premium device that’s odd. It shouldn’t take that much to get a bunch of bezels made with the matching rounded corners and it would cosmetically look way nicer.
The other issue is a practical one in that software expects square corners and expects to be able to render actionable information or buttons in those locations, rounding corners off means that such a button (or even clock display) won’t be rendered properly to the end user.
But yeah the more I think about it the more I’d prefer device manufacturers stuck to display resolutions that actually match or scale nicely with common media formats like 1080 or 2160
Unfortunately moving to a 16:9 or even a 16:10 screen ratio would be a whole new chassis unless you want inches of bezel. Now to be fair, I don’t consume a lot of media on my laptop, I spend most of my time working, whether it be in a browser, word or code and switching between a corporate issued Dell and my Framework I definitely find the 3:2 ratio and what that does for both screen and chassis feel to be ideal to me. Coincidentally it’s similar to what Microsoft has done on the Surface devices, which I also adore as professional productivity machines. Maybe as Framework grows they’ll get to the point of being able to offer chassis options around a common motherboard though.
Are you sure they didn’t update the bezel to match the display panel? I can get that being annoying if the bezel and display are different like that, but I honestly didn’t pay that much mind to the new higher resolution display.
Oh I don’t care much about 16:9 or 16:10. 3:2 is fine, pretty good for coding apparently too. I’d just prefer it was 1920 pixels wide. That way, when consuming 1920x1080 media, you’d get the expected letterboxing, but you’d be viewing the pixels in a 1:1 scale which improves clarity and definition over the software upscaling that has to happen to stretch it to fit a display that’s ~2200 pixels wide.
If you watch their youtube videos, they explain that they never wanted the rounded corners! This choice was made by the company that designed this panel for their laptops and this was the only option to get a better panel for framework. They are just not big enough to get their own panel designed.
I thought it’s going to be annoying, but in reality I don’t even see it and the rounding is so small, that it never blocks something. Especially in Gnome, there is always a black bar at the top, so it’s impossible to see the rounded corners (plus when hovering the top left or top right icons, they are rounded as well)
lol
but please please for the love of goodness don’t completely phase out square corner displays as a buying option 
I don’t care about 120hz or 2.8k, but I really do care about having things like a horizontal scrollbar’s left and right buttons rendered in software but invisible on the device.