I am new here and just learned about this laptop after me and my partner had a discussion about Fairphone. As a former electronics tech who also did BGA board level repairs, this laptop is a wonderful piece of kit and a MASSIVE game changer, upgrading CPU via new logic boards? I’m down when my Surface laptop has no life left in it (the RAM is my main bottleneck I’m likely to come up against, and its soldered), this will be my next upgrade. Id be the first to try and replace an SMD fuse or part on a broken board, for example, but fully modular parts is a game changer for the average joe and even techs who can do repairs it can change a several hour repair job to minutes.
But I am curious as to Frameworks’ stance on Conflict Minerals. Some manufacturers (like Fairphone, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung etc) seem to have very high ratings for removing conflict minerals in their supply chains.
How does this affect Frameworks’ parts? Are parts if bought from them made this way, conflict low/free? This could be a very interesting selling point if this is also something that is done here, as it is a factor I use in purchases.
Lovely forum, laptop and community. Hope you are all well!
Did you find out anything more about Framework’s stance and ambitions re conflict free minerals? Now getting to end of life of laptop and looking for a Fairphone-equivalent if possible. Framework seems great in terms of potential longevity/replacing parts but if not concerned with how raw materials are sourced and what that is contributing to, I am reluctant to support this. Haven’t found any other comments on this.
Framework doesn’t seem to make much mention of ethical concerns for their products that I’ve noticed. They do seem to try to address environmental impacts (selling carbon capture, avoiding too much plastic, not offering anodized coloring), but I haven’t noticed them mentioning it too much. They have possibly on rare occasion made reference to working conditions (and there are some videos of their factory in Taiwan, and they seem to make a fair number of products in Taiwan).
With regards to conflict minerals though I can’t recall them mentioning anything about it. My assumption would be that they probably do not focus on it at this point. And while that is unfortunate, I believe even companies that do focus on it often only do so for part of their supply chain. Given that Framework’s can be upgraded and repaired, it’s possible that a Framework laptop could lead to less conflict minerals overall due to less overall e-waste. Of course they also wouldn’t be helping to support building ethical supply chains.