I am new to the project and not an owner of any FW hardware.
I did a cursory look around the site, but could not find anything about this topic.
I am considering purchasing a FW16 and FW13. The FW16 will be for myself, and the FW13 would be for another family member.
I am wondering if some components are compatible between the two.
Obviously there are some components that cannot be shared due to physical and electrical constraints.
I am interested in stuff like USB-C ports, HDMI ports, Display ports, wifi modules, antennae (perhaps), memory modules?
Do the product streams (FW13 and FW16) share some basic compatibility for these things?
I know this can be difficult design decision when creating new products, but is this something that is being (or will be) considered for future FW products.
I could see that over time if other family members purchase FW computers, we could a small cache of components that could be used and reused as various members do upgrades at different times.
I would suspect this might be a great selling point for companies that plan to purchase FW computers in quantity. Their IT department could reconfigure and redeploy equipment at lower costs if subcomponents are interchangeable across the FW product lines.
Only the expansion cards (13 has built in Audio jack) and storage can be shared between all models. RAM can only be shared between the FW13 AMD and the FW16. The RAM has to be 5600MHz too, there are issues with lower speeds causing the laptop to not boot.
The FW 16 will use DDR5 RAM. The AMD mainboard for the FW 13 also uses DDR5 RAM, so likely any RAM that works in one would work in the other. So far, all the Intel mainboards for the FW 13 use DDR4 RAM. That would not be compatible with the FW 16.
As for storage drives, both the FW 13 and FW 16 use M.2 - 2280 drives for storage, so those would be cross-compatible. The FW 16 has an additional M.2 - 2230 slot that the FW 13 lacks.
All of the expansion cards (USB C and A, Ethernet, HDMI/DisplayPort, etc., even the audio expansion card) will work in the FW13 and FW16.
It is possible that the Wi-Fi cards would be compatible with either machine, though I can’t say for sure. The antenna modules likely would not be cross-compatible.
I think there is another component that is the same between the two. Might have been the webcam module, but I don’t remember for sure.
Otherwise, they are completely different. Display, keyboard, trackpad, mainboard, casing, speakers, etc. They are very different machines.
I feel like I recall that as well, the webcam being the same, but I’m not certain either. I think there was another thread about FW16 / FW13 component compatibility and Framework staff mentioned that.
Basically all the expansion cards are compatible with both models, and all the standard components such as WIFI cards and NVME SSDs. Both the AMD models uses the same memory as well (SODIMM DDR5 5600 M), but not the Intel FW13 (DDR4).
With the WIFI cards, make sure it is not CNVi or CNVio (“Connectivity Integration”, Intel Integrated Connectivity I/O interface) because they’re a proprietary connectivity interface by Intel that only work with Intel CPUs. Intel sometime makes a similar model of WIFI card with and without CNVio. Make sure you get the right model if you plan on using an Intel WIFI card on an AMD platform.
And as someone stated, the webcam module is the same too. I also remember reading that somewhere by someone who works at Framework.