Hey guys, I’ve had my FW13 since March of 2022. It’s always used indoors, my fingernails are kept short, and I’m gentle with it.
Today, I noticed a “spec” on my “A” key while the backlight was on. When I touched it, it felt bumpy, and eventually a section of paint within the “A” flaked right off.
I’ve never had this happen to any keyboard I’ve used in 30 years.
Would this be considered normal? I hate to think of what the rest of the keys will look like in a few years time, since I have no intention of getting rid of this laptop (which is why I got a framework to begin with ).
Yeah, I might have just been really lucky all these years. It’s obviously cosmetic (which still bothers me), but I won’t worry about it if it’s normal.
If/when the time comes to replace the entire keyboard, then I’ll do that. It’s a shame that individual keys can’t be replaced, though.
Replacing individual keys is not practical unless it is something that is designed to have keys and switches changed out like a mechanical keyboard.
Purchasing a replacement from the marketplace and offering up the used part but with a flaw on the forum. This would get a shiny new keyboard for the OP and someone else may not care about the A that is missing some paint.
Fingers with moisturizers on them (lotion, etc.) tend to wear away buttons on keyboards, cars too. Saw this a lot on used vehicles.
My 12th Gen Intel FW13 shed a patch of paint about 6 mm2 from the centre-top of the ‘O’ and ‘N’ keys after 2 years of daily use. The paint on both keys blistered first. The position and area of the shed paint is uncannily similar on both key tops.
While I don’t have any concrete evidence or inside knowledge I suspect contamination of the unpainted key cap interfered with the adhesive property of the coating. The blistering and ultimate shedding may have been exacerbated by the heat which dissipates through the top panel.
I was disappointed when this first occurred and I reflected on the 3 Dell laptops I owned in the 25 years prior to purchasing the FW. All have high-use keys that have had the legends on the caps worn away. Most key caps are highly polished (i.e. they’ve lost their matte finish). None have back-lighting. The noticeable degradation of their keyboards happened in the final 3rd of their operational lives. My FW keyboard has arguably attained a worse state in the first 3rd of its life.
The oldest of these Dell machines has the least worn keyboard. It still boots (Tiny Core Linux) and runs satisfactorily. I use it occasionally as a get-out-of-gaol console for my headless bare-metal servers.
That’s a much better description of what I saw happening! It was this “blister” that basically flaked off. Could be a surface contaimination issue, but I guess we’ll never know.
I’ve also had paint slowly rub off over time. The keys with the most pressure or consistent holding/pressing time are what had issues. I don’t game on my laptop at all, so none of the letters have worn. Just left CTRL, fn, left Alt, part of the spacebar I use most, right shift and enter. I guess I should use left shift more.
Each time it started as a small bubble, like others said, where moisture starts to seep into the paint.
There’s probably keyboard modules that don’t use painted on labels for caps for people who don’t care about backlit keys, never bothered looking into it.
Same issue, it actuly happened in the first year of usage. I have had many laptop brands and I never experienced key cap paint wear off so fast as on FW13.
That with the failure of a switch on island of keys P,) and 0 led to eventualy ordering replacment keyboard 2nd gen today.
I will be very much pissed off if the same paint issue happens on the new gen ass well.
And I am using external keyboard for my professional work and despite this the paint wear was still fastest on the fw13.
Some of the blame can also be shared thanks to the more environmentally friendly paints and coatings that are being used today. Couple that with the rising costs of manufacturing and keeping costs down because people have a hard time paying for quality with so much cheap garbage being out in the marketplace.
If Framework was not at least competitive, it would never have made it selling to more than just a niche group. Framework is not alone in this too; see the earlier posts in this thread many laptops and even major keyboard brands are showing “wear” when decades ago you never heard or saw any of that.
The silver lining here is all the components are replaceable and reasonably priced at that. I can not say the same thing for almost all other brands out there.
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