I’m loving the 12 and really like the idea of just buying a second one for spare parts (&c.) rather than buying just a new mainboard!
After a lot of consideration, I don’t see why a pen and a touchscreen wouldn’t work together on any model. Do they not want us to own both the 12 and the 13? I’ll probably buy both anyway, but it means I’ll have a pen (or more than two ) that is useless on one of them when it really doesn’t need to be. Since the 13 Pro opens fully flat onto a table, we could easily turn it around with the keyboard facing away from us and draw to our heart’s content.
I’d have loved for the 13 Pro to fold back 360° and double-up as a sketchpad, but I assume the design team had enough challenges to contend with.
As I understand it, this screen type is fine for fingers to touch, tap, and drag, but it won’t take a stylus or register levels of pressure that permit accurate sketching or writing. I assume this would have been considered, and the design idea fell to the cutting-room floor.
I don’t see why a professional laptop would have a touchscreen, if it doesn’t support a pen. When I was researching the Framework Laptop 13 Pro to buy, my immediate thought was whether it would work with a stylus. My hope for the future is that we will have multiple display options to choose from for all models. That way when we can’t wrap our heads around why we’d reach over a keyboard and mouse to touch the screen… could just change it to be the one we want. If I do wind up getting one I’m not going to go so far as the hack it, I just won’t use the touch screen.
Yes, I sort of agree - the design is in no-man’s land. Personally I think that even if it had the right screen/touch hardware, it still isn’t very useful because the keyboard’s in the way. I acknowledge it folds flat, but that still feels too weird to me.
At some point I will disable my 13 Pro touchscreen, in an attempt to improve battery performance, though it has been handy when I’ve needed to reset the touchpad!
I should say these are minor quibbles though: this is still the best laptop I’ve ever owned. I’ve probably been through eight or nine, definitely lost count.
Yeah, it’s definitely not a big deal; I still plan on owning a few. It’s a good idea to disable the touch screen to save battery, **think it would have to be at the hardware level though.
It would be neat if they could progress to something like a Build-A-Bear for laptops. I mean, that’s what we can do with a desktop—build it from scratch.
Maybe when I retire I’ll have time to buy a 3D printer and build something myself, although I do like the idea of wood grain for a laptop too, or a mix of materials. I know the Novena board that I have originally was crowdsourced as a Novena Laptop. But, I’m guessing it’s no MNT Reform—that looks like a beast, but I can’t justify buying it yet!
Some of this comes down to being able to market and be profitable with the products that are offered. It may sound like a lot of people want touchscreens (it is frequently mentioned) the reality is they really are in the minority of users.
It is nice that the Laptop 12 was designed around having a stylus and being able to be a platform to draw on artistically. That added expense and complexity may not have paid off for the time invested in trying to bring a more expensive panel to the forefront. The counter is well they could offer two options, now that just added a mess of logistics to manage more parts for the same device. This works with large companies but is a large hinderance on a small tech company.
There are a number of people who have ventured to create their own adaptations which is always a good sign of product flexibility. With the modularity of the Framework Laptop’s it would not surprise me if in the future something like this is offered when it makes sense for them to manage well.
I like the idea from Squiggler of disabling it internally. Then I could buy an original 13 display to replace it. Using the touch screen on a side project or again for a spare parts.
On the 16, you can choose different displays (or at least I think so, I saw we could a while ago in the ordering process). But I don’t need all of that just yet$. Now that I know I can customize the display on the 13, I am definitely leaning toward that one.
I’ll just have to order a screen for the original 13 and a 13 Pro.
Add: looks like there’s two non-touch displays ta choose from.
So far, there’s just one type of display hardware BUT two generations of FW16 display panel. When the NVIDIA dGPU was released for the FW16, display panel firmware was updated to support G-Sync. I wouldn’t be surprised if a new panel gets released for the FW16 in the near future, but that’s pure speculation.
Anyways - kinda off-topic. Carry on and good luck!
@Conor thanks. Maybe it was the Framework Laptop 13 where we could choose from different displays? In the store, they have a 2.2K and a 2.8K display for the same, so that might have been it. I’ve had different shopping experiences depending on whether I was using my phone or my laptop on this site and over the years. Hopefully for the future, many more than me, then I won’t need all the spare parts so pass them down.
) that is useless on one of them when it really doesn’t need to be. Since the 13 Pro opens fully flat onto a table, we could easily turn it around with the keyboard facing away from us and draw to our heart’s content. 
then I won’t need all the spare parts so pass them down. 