How to buy a laptop without breaking the bank or the planet

Nov 26 2024 | by Nirav Patel

Most companies want you to buy their products as often as possible. We don’t. We want you to use Framework products for as long as possible. Our philosophy is to build great, high-performance laptops that last, by making them simple to repair, upgrade, and customize. Replacing products less often is the single best way to reduce their environmental impact. As the Founder of Framework, I recently appeared on the Netflix documentary Buy Now to go deeper on this. We’ve shared our thoughts around holiday promotions before, but to summarize it, we believe in keeping pricing consistent and predictable. Instead of running time-based promotions like Black Friday sales to entice you to buy a product when you may or may not need it, we keep pricing stable so that when you do need a product, it’s at the lowest price to date.

You might think that with that operating mode, our products would need to be unreasonably expensive. We price our products competitively and find ways to reduce the cost of entry wherever possible. We have both pre-assembled laptops and our DIY Edition where you can bring your own memory, storage, and Operating System to save more. When we introduce a new product generation, we permanently discount the previous one until we run out of stock. We also refurbish and resell the small number of product returns we get at reduced prices through the Framework Outlet. Additionally, when we have excess material from manufacturing, rather than scrapping it, we find ways to repurpose it into Factory Seconds products.

Once you have a Framework Laptop, we want to make sure it works great for you for as long as possible. It’s your product, not ours, and you can choose what to replace and when. Every part of the system is replaceable using the single tool that we include in the box, and we publish easy-to-follow step-by-step replacement guides. To further reduce waste, we also enable ways to re-use modules like the Mainboard outside of laptop, with open source 3d-printable designs and projects. We’re excited to continue working with you to remake Consumer Electronics!

12 Likes

…because if they’re not sold, then you’ll definitely lose money in this bucket, which would eat into the profit margin of the sold-units bucket. At least this way, it would mean the first-hand units would be cheaper (relatively speaking) than otherwise. Nothing goes to waste.

Other companies just outright don’t sell factory seconds/b-stock. Although it seems logical, its not too common.

2 Likes

This is a win-win for Framework and its customers.

1 Like

:tada: Thank you for keeping things fair for Framework and the consumer. Discounts and promotions are short term solutions that devalue a brand against what it tried to create. :chart_with_downwards_trend:

2 Likes

yes. :smiley: