You certainly shouldn’t let the colour slow you down – there are lots of FW skins available from dbrand – which is a better solution to that problem, easier to have way more options and cheaper.
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Dbrand skin comes pretty close tbh
No they don’t but there is flickering because of the self illuminating pixels similar to ctrs which also did not use pwm. Not a problem for most people but some are sensitive to it and I feel sorry for them.
Noone is asking for the lcd option to go away, we just want oled to also be one.
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Apple has four colorways. Just about every laptop brand has 2 or more colorways once you hit their customizable/premium entry price-point (i.e. Framework’s competition).
I think there are a lot of people who will not buy a Framework as long as the only color choice is unanodized aluminum, and that there’s also a decent chance that Framework will at some point decide to offer at least a black/grey color option.
Good news! Framework now offers other color options! frame.work/laptop12
But of course you probably meant the FWL13, or at least a more premium device than the FWL12.
Then those people might be waiting a long time, if they’d like a Framework. Perhaps forever. 
Do note though, it’s not unanodized, it’s just anodized without any dye.
I think there is a great chance Framework will offer additional models which don’t use aluminum. Instead, perhaps glass-fiber reinforced plastic. Business class laptops, like T-series Thinkpads, have used that for decades. Since it can be really tough, and has the benefit of not holding a deformed shape if bent. People are notorious for being rougher on anything that they didn’t pay for themselves.
But some people won’t accept that, because they think it doesn’t feel premium. Those are the people who may never get to enjoy a Framework.
I could be wrong, but I suspect, and hope, that Framework won’t compromise certain base principles that they’re said are important to them.
There is also a chance that FW will find a company willing to handle color anodizing responsibly, at a reasonable cost. Or perhaps they’ll offer carbon fiber. That should satisfy at least some of those who need to feel it looks premium to others.
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I think it’s a bit of both
As shown here, an OLED screen is like a high-density “LED matrix”. To illuminate all pixels connect all Rs to Vcc and Cs to GND. To illumitate the upper-left corner, connect R1 to Vcc and C1 to GND. To illumitate the lower-right corner, connect R8 to Vcc and C8 to GND. If you want to illuminate both upper-left and lower-right, you would connect R1 and R8 to Vcc and C1 and C8 to GND, right? Wrong! Doing so will illuminate the other two corners as well so you need to alternate between R1,C1 and R8,C8. Flickering is inevitable.
However more and more modern OLED screens are flicker-free on full brightness, since displaying image requires different brightness of individual pixels they must found a way of avoiding the “LED matrix” issue above. Maybe the connections are H*W now instead of H+W? They still use PWM at lowered brightness, varies between models, some are below 99% brightness, others are below 50%, 30% or even 10%.
Buffers have been invented a long time before even the led, I don’t think that was ever an issue with oled.
Using simple bufferless multiplexing would have massively limited max brightness which for some reason is a number they are chasing so it seems pretty logical that they moved away from that pretty quick if they ever used it in the first place.
Can you point me at a source for that?
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Analysis: DC Dimming vs. PWM – Can you dim AMOLED displays without the flickering?
At 50% brightness, there is no flickering anymore, which only occurs at very low brightness levels.
I love my FW13 and all it stands for but the form factor and especially the base plate is a big downer. The silver aluminium is as ugly a color as I could imagine it being possible to make a laptop out of. I don’t really know about the environmental impacts, but my old XPS 13 had a beautiful black carbon fibre base plate, if something like that came out I would jump at it.
It is true that having a premium laptop that looks bargain basement quality puts a downer on the whole experience. I really thought that the modularity of the FW would result in lots of customer choices, but this hasn’t materialised. I do understand there are issues with economy of scale, but just wish the base options were better.
Seems a bit extreme to say it looks “bargain basement quality”. It’s a laptop. I care more about how it feels than how it looks personally. The FW13 arguably has a premium laptop feel not even considering it’s a repairable device. The keyboard is far superior to my husband’s MacBook Pro and trackpad is just as snappy.
But dbrand’s textured skins like this dark circuit skin are a decent option for those interested in changing the aesthetics (they even have a black carbon fibre option). They do a decent job in terms of coverage and I’ve had a dbrand skin on the top cover of my FW13 for over a year now and it’s held up quite well.
I really don’t think Framework is going to make more base options because it goes against their environmentally conscious approach and would multiply SKUs just for the sake of aesthetics.
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why no aluminum bezel like the old macbooks
Having a removable slim aluminum bezel wouldn’t perform the same and would be expensive though would probably be more prone to snapping and making the camera & mic slides as well as the lens pieces would be a logistical nightmare. Plus metal on metal contact on a part that repeatedly open and close wouldn’t be ideal.
I also found that people have addressed the same question here in more detail:
The problem with the dbrand skins is that you have to buy a full set just to get the palm rest cover and the best looking ones don’t come with a palm rest cover anyway.
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i sincerely hope this is not true. if so, i will never buy one and i know a lot of people are in the same boat. they really need to drop the crap and make an anodized chassis. additionally, a redesign of the chassis is severely needed. the current one is grotesque.
Bot of the statements made by Christian are true afaik.
The second point more emphasizing on the environmental than the cost aspect though.
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Grotesque, 
I guess some people have a serious hatred for silver.
If the design is more important to you than its unique features, framework probably isn’t for you anyway. And I don’t mean that in any negative way, it’s just a different use case. If repairability, upgradeability and hot-swappable expansion cards are not that important to you, there are probably cheaper options that fit your use case.
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With the rather lackluster battery runtime, I’m thinking Framework is deliberately / consciously not offering an OLED panel option. Imagine how bad reviews would look with an even shorter battery runtime. That would be setting itself up for failure.
They need to really address / polish up all the power related issues first before offering an OLED option, I would think.
I highly doubt that’s the issue. When it comes to review cheesing putting in an oled would probably help because the battery numbers are allready not great so turning the meh score on the screen into something much better gives you an overall better score.
Then again if they did care about reviews they’d probably have done low hanging fruits like fixing the fan curves and stuff long before any of that (at least they did switch to ptm now).
The definitely need to work on power stuff in general (even if the bulk of the bad ryzen ai numbers are probably not their fault) but that is quite unrelated to oled.
If Framework can improve battery life like they did from 13" 1st gen to 3-4th gen, this would be awesome.
Honestly, the 5-hour battery life I get for SW development is already incredibly impressive to me and I never felt constrained by it. If they can turn it to 7-8-9 hours, it, of course, would be even nicer.
Youtube short addressing why the FW13 only comes in one color:
The chassis is anodized, it’s just not dyed and their justification is sound (“by skipping out on the dyeing process [they] are not adding to any additional waste created in the manufacturing process”).
I doubt you’ll be able to change their mind as it’s part of their mission statement to be environmentally aware just for personal preference when there are products like dbrand skins out there. If you managed to change Framework’s mind, my respect for them as a company would go down for losing sight of their primary goals and values that they were founded upon. If literally a silver color is what’s keeping you from getting a FW laptop then that’s your loss. I’ve had this fully repairable laptop for years and it’s not like it’s yellow or a garish color, it’s silver. It looks clean especially if you pair it with any one of their transparent bezels.
I think improving battery life should be much higher on their priority list than this.
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