Relatively new framework owner and so far loving the product - had an idea I wanted to share:
TLDR:
Idea - two half width expansion cards in place of one of the full width slot (FW13)
Requires - mainboards to have additional USB C header (hence 5 total, not sure if feasible) & new design of bottom cover to transform 1 of the full width slots to 2 half width slots w/rails, etc
Benefit - users must have 1x USB C for charging, so in real terms, have 3 slots to use (which is relatively few), this idea accepts that one narrow slot will be used for a USB C card and gives users the remaining 4 slots (3 wide, 1 narrow) to customise, all of which would have full* speed USB C connections
Drawbacks - not backwards compatible; narrow slot can only be USB C / other expansion with narrow port with small control electronics
(*as full as each mainboard allows ref intel/amd FW13)
More info -
One thing that quickly sprung to mind using the FW13 was that we’re effectively bound to mounting at least one expansion card slot for USB C in order to charge the laptop.
Whereas I agree with other forum posts that it’s best not to have a permanent USB C slot in the laptop body to avoid scrapping a motherboard due to port damage, perhaps there’s another alternative.
Initially the idea of a dual USB C port or combo C/A (that others have suggested and would be great as it’d be plug and play!) seemed good, the above idea to divide the current ~30mm slot into two narrower 15mm slots seems like it could yield greater flexibility/customizability for users if it were technically feasible to have 5 USB C headers from the main board.
Candidates for half sized ports could be (depending on size of control electronics):
USB C
Micro SD
3.5mm Jack
USB A appears infeasible (just), maybe with just a bit of extra width it could work.
Not a computer designer so have no idea how many IO ports can be pulled from a mainboard, just noted that a lot of other products in this segment have a greater number of ports.
Thanks for reading, look forward to hearing from you all and contributing to the community!
This doesn’t really make sense, the CPUs don’t really have that many USB-C (or even Thunderbolt) ports. The Framework 16 already uses a buildin USB controller (or hub, not sure) to control the two front ports, which is why these have pretty limited functionality.
The other problem is the electronic inside the expansion cards. Apart from the plain USB-C and A ports, most of the mare already quite “full”, e. g. the ethernet card even protrudes a lot (not only because of the ethernet plug, there’s also simply not enough room for the electronics inside the standard form factor).
Even using one port for charging, you’d be hard pressed to find a laptop with more than 3 USB-C ports, let alone at least 2 thunderbolt ports on separate controllers [1]. The only laptops I know of with 4 are the Framework laptops and the most recent Dell XPS laptops. Even Macbook Pro’s only have 3.
On top of that, if you’re going to have a bunch of stuff plugged in you’re likely going to be using some kind of dongle anyway, so just plug the power into that and now you’re only taking up a single port.
That said, maybe I’m “holding it wrong”. I have a fixed set of expansion cards on mine and never swap them for anything, using them more as a sacrificial port that I can easily replace if damaged rather than something I’d swap out regularly.
[1] There are lots of laptops with two ports, however they’re usually wired up to a single controller therefore sharing the 40Gbps bandwidth and other capabilities (i.e. max 2 screens, etc.) between them. Framework uses a separate controller for each side of the laptop giving each side a full 40Gbps.
Hi both, thanks for your feedback.
To address your points:
Understood and agreed - having multiple full potency USB-C ports is rare. As you’ve said other manufacturers must be using internal controllers dividing bandwidth to allow for more numerous ports with lower bandwidth requirements.
To respond to this I would say you can look at it two ways:
Convenience and genuinely using all ports at once
Convenience:
I don’t think I’m alone in disliking the idea of carrying a dongle or alternate cards with me while out and about. They are prone to being misplaced or damaged at the bottom of a bag (or worse damaging your laptop if in the same pocket), the ports filled with dust/dirt and generally a pain to take with you.
I think people would agree that more ports = better, otherwise the FW16 wouldn’t have 6 and that integrated ports are more convenient that loose ports.
Actual use of all ports:
This circles back to the comments about numbers of full speed usb-c ports. On this side I tend to agree that using 4 full speed connections is unlikely for a vast majority, however using all 4 ports without exploiting full bandwidth is fairly common.
E.g. you’re charging; using a software license dongle, ethernet and a usb port for loading data to said software. Now you have nowhere to plug in a mouse!
Or you’re uploading holiday pictures from an SD & micro SD, jamming to some music from the high fidelity audio card and charging, full house!
In both cases you’re nowhere close to using the full bandwidth available, but you have used all the ports.
Assuming that additional high speed connections aren’t available, increasing ports from 4->5 in a permanent method as originally suggested is worse as it means you’d have reduced full speed ports (3) for an additional 2 ports with shared bandwidth which would be a downgrade for those few who need 4 really fast ports.
For the rest of us, I guess the best solution is an optional, yet well integrated usb hub of some description.
That could be a dual-port card as suggested in other threads;
It could be a card made of two halves - allowing users to choose their hybrid (though this is probably very difficult to achieve due to electronics volume required);
Or something else…!
Do you think the ability to trade a high speed port for a couple of low bandwidth ports is worthwhile investigating?
Afaik it also handles port #5 (right side middle port) and. The port on the back of the graphics module. The reason that port #5 supports charging but the other ports on that hub don’t support charging is because of the PD controller setup, not the hub.
To clarify, the controllers integrated into the CPU are dual port controllers, however afaik each controller has access to enough PCIe and USB bandwidth for each port to get full bandwidth. Only DisplayPort is shared (although the total bandwidth available across both ports is still higher than what a single port can achieve).
That’s the case with framework laptops, yes. A lot of other laptops only use one of those controllers however and split it into two ports, if they even have two thunderbolt ports.
Then perhaps, since there are multiple ports that are common/standard perhaps they could change the ports to have a single expansion slot on the left that is double or triple the size of the normal expansion slot. Having a single larger expansion would be more space and resource efficent but still allow for replacements/upgrades later. This larger expansion slot would contain the required USB-C, a USB-A, and a HDMI/Displayport and possibly others like a microsd if space allowed. The right side could still have the 2 current size expansion cards for backwards compatability with the current cards.