Finally received my laptop!

After much weeping and gnashing of teeth in regards to the Fedex shipment, I finally got my laptop yesterday. When I found out it had been delivered, I was so excited that I forgot my keycard in my dorm room and locked myself out for a few hours while I waited for the RA to grab my package and unlock my room.

Unboxing the device, my first impressions were that it seemed extremely well-packaged and much more well-built than I had originally expected. Nothing on this laptop feels plasticky or cheap. I had reservations at first about the 3:2 aspect ratio but I quickly realized it was not going to be a problem.

After getting my components installed (the only difficult thing was the wifi card, oh my god that thing is a pain in the ass), I installed Windows 10 Pro. The laptop took a few minutes to boot the first time, but it doesn’t take very long now. The expansion cards are kind of hard to get out, but I suppose that is a good thing. The color scheme is nice, though I do wish it came in all black.

What really surprised me was the keyboard. This thing feels amazing. Going from a mechanical keyboard to this, I still feel right at home due to the increased travel of the keys. I had absolutely no problem with accuracy or speed like I usually do on laptops (I work at Best Buy so I get a lot of hands-on experience with various brands) and am easily able to get the same ~120WPM that I could get on my mechanical, with even more accuracy. And, of course, the backlighting is a great touch, especially because the keycaps aren’t so transparent that the letters don’t show without backlighting (a common problem for mechanical RGB keyboards).

On top of all this, I got a device that is significantly more powerful than the average OEM laptop for barely any extra money. I mean, I paid $1500 for this when all was said and done, and I got an i7, 1TB of storage and 64GB of RAM (3200MHz). Not that most people really need 64GB of RAM, but for those who do, this is nowhere near the price of equivalently spec’d laptops that you’d have to replace the minute you spilled some water on them.

Overall impression - amazing job! 2 minor gripes that I would love to see addressed:

  • Make sure to specify somewhere in the packaging that you need to use a flash drive or something to get the Framework drivers (as no wifi drivers = no internet = no drivers). I can see how someone with less technical knowledge would be pretty upset by their laptop not connecting to the internet, seemingly without explanation. Another option would be to include a USB drive with the drivers that could even double as an OS installation drive. Especially with the relatively low cost of flash drives these days, a 16GB $3-5 drive would be plenty to hold the ~1GB driver package.
  • Please ship through UPS, at least until Fedex gets their act together. They’re super understaffed in most places and it’s causing huge delays and other shipping issues. I don’t know how feasible this is, just if it is, please at least offer different options to the customer on checkout.

TLDR laptop better than expected

15 Likes

The driver thing did confuse me. It’s not a special Framework part or anything, it’s just an Intel AX610…. It amazes me that some sort of driver for it isn’t in the basic windows build!