It’s not so simple. My unit has not been particularly blessed by QA and tolerances, but from everything I’m reading online, it seems to be like, aside from the Golden Samples, every unit has something slightly off about it.
I’ll tell you what. Including myself, I know 4 people in real life who own or owned a Framework 16 at some point. I saw and tried the units myself. Enough to know that my unit is not among the best, but it’s not the worst I have seen. The worst I have seen came with a DOA mainboard, touchpad input modules that legitimately slid up and down with absolutely no resistance, a misaligned expansion bay shell and a panel lid with the aluminium “cover” that was somehow not glued down and it was bulging up / could be bent down with your finger, something that my first unit also did. But it didn’t have the bent keyboard, shakey expansion cards and the rattle of my unit. That unit got returned after 3 weeks with no news on an RMA approval, that person ended up returning it and is currently debating between a Tuxedo and a Legion. Another unit I have seen is a more recent one - it’s pretty good but the touchpad module is bent up pretty badly and it looks pretty scary. The owner - my friend - said that he personally doesn’t mind and he’s not RMAing it (also because the laptop is a secondary machine that is used really infrequently), but it’s there. To compare, my touchpad area modules look and feel significantly straighter and more refined. Another unit - the luckiest one so far - seems to be a Golden Sample. Looks perfect, feels perfect. But it has very weird USB behaviour under Windows with constant USB resets, still unaddressed. I’ll throw in another I have not personally seen from a person I know online: the first main board died overnight and stopped posting, and it got replaced with a new main board with the deflection modules attached that has thermal issues from the get go and cannot boost past 40-41 W right off the bat, on Month 1 - Something that even my unit has, but 6 months down the line. The other two units are currently untested.
Replacing my machine for the second time would probably cost Framework a lot of money and achieve nothing. It would just be a reroll of my chances at a quality device, with a decent probability of ending up with a downgrade instead. I have seen enough units to back my claims that the unit to unit variance / tolerances are scary high. Counting my initial unit, that’s 5 units. 5 may be a low sample size, but if 4 out of 5 of these either were RMAd or would have been eligible for an RMA, that’s surely not encouraging numbers IMO.
That’s just what a first generation design is about. I took the deliberate risk and I took a gamble, one I ended up losing. To keep me interested Framework doesn’t have to make me re-roll the RNG a third time, but I want to see future generations of this product that are considerably better and more consistent in tolerances than what I’ve seen so far. Basically, release something in N years that - by the time I will decide to upgrade my laptop - will convince me that things are different now and that I should give this product line another shot rather than migrating to a safer, more mass-produced laptop from a huge company. Framework says exciting things are planned for next year - and I hope one of them will be a Framework 16 2.0 that addresses at least some of my complaints. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be a generation-to-generation 100% fix. But I’d love that to be there some 4 years from now!
(Edit) Yes, to be clear, I am still open to the possibility of buying future Framework devices and I will not make any conclusive decisions on claims on a pre-order unit of the first iteration of a new design. The fact that the 13 is faring much better is reassuring enough - hopefully we will see a similar slow, iterative improvement on the 16 year after year after year.
