Does it even slightly work?
Our lab just dropped $100,000 on a PCB fab suite, I want to try something.
Appreciate that the absence of Destroya returning with news likely means that there is none… but I am one of who knows how many prospective customers holding off making a purchase pending the release of the M.2 expansion bay… in my case it is the one feature that takes this machine past the capabilities of my LG Gram 16, which has a pair of 2280 sockets provided.
May I ask if there would be any possibility of Frame.Work considering some form of roadmap update to the main blog? Many other tech companies do this, so not unheardof. It would be really helpful to me, from a budgeting perspective, to know when I’m going to need to have the funds ready to make a purchase.
Thanks in hope.
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I don’t think we can provide a roadmap at the moment, but I definitely understand why you are requesting this.
It sounds like the product may be severely delayed (due to technical or supply-chain issues) or just completely killed.
I really want to see more FW16 parts and software/firmware come out, but it’s been slow going after launch. Hopefully we get some cool new stuff in the marketplace for 2025… or maybe even Christmas.
I believe @Josh_Cook was working on a Dual m.2 for the expansion bay in parallel. I do not know where he has left it off at. He had a few other things he was working on too.
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Thanks for re-linking to the announcement from Josh Cook. However, the link to the purchasing page shows the price has risen from USD55 to USD88… and there’s still no image to show a finished product. There is no information on fabrication, materials, finish/quality or even that it actually works.
Don’t get me wrong - I sincerely hope that Josh is successful, but, honestly, I’d like to see some actual evidence of product shipping, and a review or two, before I commit. And just to be clear… that isn’t because I doubt Josh’s commitment in any way, but because, as explained above, I’m looking to purchase an FW16 as well. I don’t have the laptop yet - and I’m in that “chicken and egg” situation of not wanting to commit the significant cost of the laptop purchase without knowing that Josh’s bay will work…
If he gets to the point where he is shipping in bulk and there are review copies getting endorsements, that changes things. If I already owned an FW16 and was just looking for the Expansion Bay, I’d absolutely take a punt on a purchase. But I’m reluctant to order a laptop on the promise that the Expansion Bay works as claimed.
I mean no disrespect by that; just being cautious with some hard-earned pennies…
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Guess what 
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Now for sale.
Yeah, but try and find a link to order the interposer required. No link in the email, no link on the page for the board (not even a “you may also like …” type link), and trying to search the outlet shows nothing, not even when allowing it to select out of stock items.
They made a bundle
Which just adds the interposer and the board (two items) to the cart.
The (graphics) interposer is also on the market place, it’s just among the 10 billion other things they have.
Which is quite wild. And I do think, the best demonstration of this concept, is to just scroll down on the marketplace. everything is there. And anyone can just go get.
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Oh, where did you find that? It wasn’t in the original email. I’ve since found the interposer and ordered them as two separate items. It does work out to the same price thankfully, so i haven’t lost out.
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email ? You sign up for newsletter instead of just going to the website and check?
I mean .. Not to judge, but .. ok. I mean if they screwed up in the email, I .. I don’t know.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I just placed an order for one, but my enthusiasm for getting one is much lower than 6 months ago.
interesting. I am just glad that they actually made it happen.
Though there’s still no like, update and stuff. And they haven’t updated the reference design CAD file, nor are there a PCB file. But they make it now.
This “semi open source” is driving me insane
Chillax, man…
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that Framework are already three or four orders of magnitude better than every other laptop/portable manufacturer out there:-
Self repair? *Check
Upgradeability? Check
Long life support? Check
All this, sensible prices, c’mon, what’s not to like?
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Hurrah!
Wahoo!
Glad to see a release just in time for Christmas. 
The irony is that the huge datasets I have that would benefit from all of this extra storage need the GPU card to run. But at the end of the day, I’m just happy that more expansion modules are coming out. Every release makes Framework’s future look a little brighter.
The fact that they went so far to build such an ecosystem from the ground up, but then proceed to not do anything about such a small (in comparison to, say, the 16 project) thing for literally a year is like, duh.
So, insane, but in a “but comeon” way. I’m not mad, since now I can get it from them. Whether I want to get one right now, I’m still debating – I might want to piece together a few more things for the order.
I am also somewhat disappointed to see that they moved away from a full copper heatsink to one with a vastly-inferior-ly bonded piece on the cooler. It technically does work, it does 45W on CPU and 54W package, but if it can do 60W CPU, and 80W total package, that’s significantly more exciting.
And you know it can – even at 50W the heat pipe isn’t even hot.
Wait. This actually reminded me – I have a tube of thermal glue. Sure. Let’s buy a heatsink with the SSD board.
Though, a whoppin 1.5mW/k is pretty terrible.
OK, now I understand - and I think you have a valid point. In one of my earlier posts, effectively addressed to Destroya, I asked if Framework would consider either publishing some kind of roadmap, or, in the alternate, if they would consider some kind of updates to the main blog, to let us know what is going on. I think we’re both looking for similar things.
But I think we need to be balanced here…
According to Google’s AI, Framework had 50 employees in April this year, with plans to expand that to 60 by year end. They were founded in 2020, with the aim of developing a range of easy-to-repair laptops. But here’s the thing… Setting up any kind of electronics/manufacturing company in 2024 is incredibly hard work. The hardest part of all is how to fund and grow a company when you’re competing against the likes of Acer, Asus, Dell, LG, Apple, HP and others… How to negotiate good prices for parts from suppliers like AMD, when you know you don’t have 10% of the volumes of these bigger names. How to fund orders of mainboards from an electronics fab when - for a start-up - the terms are almost always cash-with-order…
My sense is that Framework are still at a point in their development where a single bad decision could theoretically be enough to sink the company. They are going to have to look carefully at how to prioritize something like the M.2 extender against all the other things they need and want to do, like keeping their hardware current as processors, RAM and chipsets evolve - because they know people buying new laptops will always want current-generation technology. So even though there are a few of us in this thread making a lot of noise - we’re still a very small group of people. There’s what - less than a dozen of us here commenting in this thread. If you were running a laptop company, trying to sell machines in their thousands, would you prioritize your Team to go build an add-on for a dozen customers? Or would you prioritize a new mainboard design that would keep your flagship models on current-gen technology?
I think we have to remember that for Framework today, that’s likely to be an “either/or” decision, not “both”…
Doesn’t stop me being just as keen to see it as you are, mind. Though I’m also conscious that I’d much rather they keep improving the hardware. The current design now offers me almost all of the critical features I need - decent performance/lots of storage/the ability to swap external connectors in as needed - so now my interest is going to be how they address some of the known problems… things like the flexing keyboard and some reported reliability issues.
At this stage in their growth, Framework are going to be obsessing over the reliability side of things - they simply can’t afford too many RMAs or it will sink them. So they’ve got to get the design right just as fast as they can. From a “repairability” and “upgradeability” perspective, they have it nailed. From a “features” perspective, ditto. All the kit - maybe with the exception of the webcam, which will improve sooner or later and will be upgradable - is top-notch.
From here on out, they’re going to be concentrating on hitting their quality goals - to improve customer satisfaction and reduce their overheads; volume - to be able to make the sales to keep the lights on and grow the business; features and expansions - to keep interest in the brand. That and maybe buffing the design, to take care of things like the keyboard flex.
But if they focus on them in that order - quality, volume, features - then I think we should be celebrating, because it means there’s a good chance they will still be around in another few years.
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As a customer I definitely get it, I also would love to see a roadmap from a company I want to support. But unfortunately, it’s not that easy 
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