Kind of just tossing a question in the air: How has it been faring?
I got my unit late 2024. I believe. Nov 12. Its been about 2 years of very heavy use. it’s been dropped, have bits of food fell on, etc.
Hardware issues (chronological):
- slotted screw in the dual m.2 carrier card isnt thick enough for certain m.2 SSDs.
0.5. Thermal issues with Liquid Metal. This one’s widespread. But. TPM kits are available, and. you can re-paste.
1. Marginal FX-Beam, might require more than one try to get both SSD to show up in post.
2. a screw came off, rattled around the case, and blew up the main board. This one is not entirely sure, but sure, whatever.
3. various expansion cards. This one is entirely on me, and frankly its kinda expected. Gummed up ports, etc. I end up ultrasonic-clean some, and re-solder some (Type-C)s.
4. The “D” key has been pressing itself because a spec of dust or something got underneath the membrane, and it started to press itself. I have to remove the D key cap. Eventually this resulted in a keyboard replacement.
5. Trackpad pogo pins. Somehow started to wear out and have contact failure. I noted that the pads on the trackpad module has starting to wear out, so I re-surfaced it by covering it with soldering tin. Doesn’t seem to improve that much, but it might be due to the inconsistent height of my work. I will work on it later.
6. FX-Beam failure. This one is on me. A grain of dust got in it, and I lost PEX_TX0P. Somehow PCIe link masking kept it up.
n. Screw well for screw 1 on the battery has stripped clean. Not expecting that, but. might need to figure out something at some point.
Software issues (chronological):
1. Triple Fault during sleep. this one is basically “idk bruh honestly just screw this”. Is it “MAXIO Technology (Hangzhou) Ltd. NVMe SSD Controller MAP1202 (DRAM-less) (rev 01)”?
2. black screen upon hibernation resume from Linux. This one seems to be more Ubuntu 2404 than other linux like Debian 13.
3. Keyboard pressing when lid closed. When lid is closed, keyboards are still active. This can result in .. undesired things.
Note: This has been addressed with keyboard firmware update.
4. USB power failure. This seems to only be a thing since BIOS 4.X. But memory is a fuzzy thing. Port 1, 2, and 4, 5 would fail to provide power to connected peripheral / refuse to be charged via. Reattaching the expansion card would often fix the issue, but not always.
note: new BIOS update has mostly addressed the “inability to charge” issue. but power to peripheral is still not a guarantee.
I like the framework sixteen. Its big, majestic, and fast (even on the iGPU). it’s expensive, but it’s also the only laptop that can get 4x m.2 slots, and the screen is .. flawless. Its good resolution, good color quality, and the 165Hz is just a bonus. Its modular, repairable … …
Definitely some of those come at a cost, and I am deeply aware of that.
And I’m not pointing fingers at either Framework or AMD. I like “messing around” with pieces, but I also expect it to “just work”.
But. As I am planning on ordering my 4th batch of parts. I wonder if some of that cost is … sort of high. To be fair. Even in the current, “oh no its semi-broken” state, its still very useable. PCIe link remap was able to somehow keep the disks online, and I just disable the machine from entering sleep modes. The only real imminent issue is the “5. trackpad disconnect”. I need to check it out.