I wish we were more informed on any of this, even though I get why it’s hard and maybe not the best thing to do.
I need a new laptop, so I’m still keeping myself to the End of Year line, but there’s also a real nice Lenovo from an outlet seller, but I really want to support Framework.
I’ve ordered mine on batch 4 and received it recently. I’ve used a reshipping company and got the laptop one week later from its shipping in the US.
For now the only issue I have is the ANSI keyboard instead of ISO which makes it missing a key for input, but other than that… All good!
I’ll just grab a keyboard once they open the marketplace… When they open the marketplace… Which for now has no date foreseen…
@MikeCH mind sharing what company you used for reshipping and how much import tax did you pay? And any other information you can share.
No, I don’t mind at all! It was MyUS.com but there are plenty of others if that one doesn’t fit the bill.
Taxes are very country subjective which in my case is roughly 8% plus some peanuts for the shipping company (in my case I’ve decided to use FedEx… Ironic, right?).
In the US I did not pay any taxes at all as MyUS has a location that is “tax free” and if you ship over there you don’t get charged any taxes.
Hope this helps 
Thanks for sharing this site and the whole idea. I just checked the estimate calculator and it would cost about $40 USD to ship it to Asia. Well worth it in case Framework wouldn’t be available around the world for a while.
Now just have to wait for them to make a 15" model and I would start to really consider it
I was not that lucky with using shipment forwarding. I got laptop with not working display module but it seem that if you use forwarder you are loosing warranty. @FrameworkSupport sadly despaired and not clarified their decision. Display Issues
Well that sucks…I was always reluctant to use forwarding companies. But might do an exception in this case plus I hate being raped by the customs every time I order outside EU.
Guess its best to just wait. Would be great if we would get some more info from @FrameworkSupport about the progress for EU shipping.
Is the plan of bringing it to Europe until the end of the year still on?
I’d guess not… I’ve asked already a couple of times if they were having the ISO keyboard available soon and all and the answer is essentially that it will come when they open orders to Europe and there’s no timeframe for it…
My guess is that with no announcements, it will be Spring or early Summer before we see official orders opening.
The small team has their hands full with processing USA & Canada orders (and those using shipment forwarding), oh, and along with trying to stay on that very fine line where they are meeting expectations, but not loosing too many people due to not being a big company.
From personal experience, and having watched a number of hardware companies launch, while there seems to be a lot of people, asking, just how many will actually buy, and is that worth the cost of opening up more distribution options.
My 0.02€ suggestion to @nrp would be to open up pre-orders for the EU, with a delivery date that is a couple of months past what is reasonably achievable, and see how many orders come in.
For me, I’d happily put down 100 or 200 euro, even if the expected delivery was August or September 2022.
2 reasons;
Fantastic idea! Some more reason for the pile:
… Although I can imagine taking people’s money from lots of different places being almost as complicated as just opening a business in Europe. Hopefully if we add enough extra reasons to @ymb’s excellent idea it might happen. Because it would be great if it did!
I’m sure framework is doing their best to make this happen, but I just decided to take a chill pill on this matter. I don’t think they’re officially landing on European shores this year, and by this point frankly I’d just wait and see what they’ll have for 2nd gen anyway.
According to the blog post from Nov 12 (“Scaling up infrastructure”):
We’ll open pre-ordering in the next few countries before the end of the year for shipment in early 2022.
It seems actual deliveries are expected to happen in Q1 2022. Also, the phrasing “[a] few countries” could suggest it won’t be available everywhere in the EU officially.
This seems to be the best idea anyways, with the big.little arch presumably coming for mobile alder lake intel might not even be strictly worse than AMD anymore, especially for laptops.
I think if you are about to open for the European Union, you don’t need a lot of these for every country, only for a single one, and even for that, things like localisation is not required at all. I am sure the initial target audience of framework speaks english and don’t need a localised keyboard either, especially since that will be easy to swap anyways once it will be available.
Agree. Power cord with a two-prong Type C plug should suffice for most of Europe. It’s called “Europlug” for a reason.
Although Framework’s US power cord seems to use three prongs, I’d actually prefer an ungrounded one for portability. Not sure if there are any regulations that would require (what I think is) a 50W USB-C charger to be grounded. USB-C phone chargers apparently don’t have to be.
Even better, the AC adapter could just have replaceable plugs for global compatibility. My Nikon camera (from the official European distribution, not a parallel import) simply came with the same battery charger as for the US market, and a separate Type C plug adapter to put on top of it. Perhaps the higher power rating makes the same unfeasible for a laptop AC adapter but one can dream.
In any case, if the plug were integrated into the adapter, I’d prefer to get the US one, as it’s the most compact one, and then put my own adapter on top of it. Anyway, since the charging port is standard USB-C, it’s a non-issue.
As for the keyboard layout, anecdotally it would appear power users across Europe prefer the US English layout, perhaps just with a different shape of the Enter key, and such laptops are also being sold in Germany, so it’s not a hard requirement to have the German layout. Framework could throw in a complimentary keyboard sticker set for DIY installation for those that need it.
CE conformance is self-declared, and whichever OEM assembles the Framework laptop has likely completed most of the paperwork already. Other hurdles mentioned refer specifically to Germany, which is just one of many EU countries. Other companies with a similar business profile often seem to base their EU/EEA operations elsewhere, such as in the Netherlands or Ireland, likely due to the lesser regulatory burden.
Overall, I get it that the estimate to have the laptops available in Europe by the end of the year was an optimistic one, and it needs to be revised. But it really shouldn’t be blamed on bad Europeans and their unreasonable demands. That part of the blog reads a bit like “dog ate my homework.”
I’m not so sure about this one. I know for a fact that for businesses above a certain size you have to charge VAT at the country of delivery, not of dispatch, and different European countries have different VAT rates, even within the Eurozone. It might also be possible that above that size other requirements apply according to EU regulations, such as keyboard layout and official support in the local language.
Yeah, there is this requirement if the sales to other EU countries exceed €10k, but (generally) you only have to deal with the tax authorities in your own country, and make quarterly filings. This page has more details if anyone’s interested: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/business/vat/vat-e-commerce/oss_en
The broader point is that of course there’s some bureaucracy involved but it’s largely a solved problem you can even outsource completely. Just need to throw some money at it but it shouldn’t cost much time to set up.
I think they couldn’t reasonably be expected to do so, at least as long as they’re not actively marketing to users in that country, which they probably won’t, at least in the beginning. For the time being, it’s a niche product, and people who want one know about it already, others are discovering it through word-of-mouth and social media (not country-specific). If Framework were running TV and outdoor ads in Germany without providing support in German someone could take objection to it but it’s not operating at this scale (hopefully one day but not yet).
Of course it makes a lot of sense for commercial reasons for Framework to provide national keyboard layouts in countries where people expect it, so to be clear I’m not disputing that. Just saying they could get a “framework” operation running first and then worry about such details.
On a general note, I’ve just registered here (although I’ve been following the project for some time) and, to be clear, I’m not here to criticize Framework. On the contrary, it’s a great project I very much hope will succeed. Just hoping they can finally get their international/EU sales up and running.
We are arguing in this thread (and elsewhere) that Framework could have started shipping to customers in europe, east asia, etc. sooner. But noone seems to ask the question if they “should”. In other words: what does Framework, as a business, gain from a “rushed” release?
I may be wrong, I often am, but to me it is clear that Framework is planning a “controlled” approach when comes to scaling rather than a rushed one: If they ship to a country, they want to fully support the customers in the country. They want to sell to a broad audience, retain a “good” name and as a company leave the impression that their business is going to last and customers can rely on them for the years to come.
Selling a hand-full of units to impatient customers a few months earlier, doesn’t get them much long-term.
From rushed released in EU they would get nothing, they seems to struggle a bit with the attention they have in US and Canada that makes them big demand already. Releasing for EU as they are in different continent is just additional money to pay, not earn (if done early).
But as they will earn enough money in america, make production faster (what they managed by what they post in blog last time), they will fill out demand in one region and go to another.