…for my Batch 4 AMD 13" Framework to be delivered!!!
Seriously though, they’re putting a lot of lipstick on incremental bumps now. I guess that’s what you get for being the “pick up and go / ease of use market leader” but it sure makes me feel good about the future of Framework!
Yeah, M3 is underwhelming this year. Weird memory configurations plus an 11 core M3 pro. Must be high defect rates for 3nm.
I suppose that’s unsurprising giving a bunch of people abandoning it due to access (ie everything going to Apple I guess?) and the setup being so new.
Technology is fun!
128GB RAM in a laptop is actually noteworthy — a real pro feature for once. Then again, the few things I’ve read did not mention ECC, so I wonder how stable it would be running large, memory-intensive workloads. Also I wonder how many channels there are, with some RAM amounts divisible by 3.
I won’t be cancelling my F16 pre-order, though. I’m just too stoked about repairability and, to be honest, the blinkenlight panels.
Apple is contracted for every TSMC 3nm wafer right now
Three channels, though the memory bus got screwed over causing some weird amounts, e.g 18GB & 36GB
As soon as I heard them mention “all made from recycled aluminum” I instinctively responded with “pre or post consumer?” knowing they wouldn’t mention it as it’s probably pre. While it’s great that they have recycled aluminum at all, Framework is trying so much harder than them to use post-consumer aluminum that all their environmental back patting just feels hollow lol.
But isn’t that’s what most races are like if you have to battle it out periodically? You just need to win by winning enough, never show what you really have in your tank / arsenal. e.g. Road cycling - win by seconds, stage after stage…just need to win enough so your opponent suffers at this stage…and still trying to recover the next day / stage.
Plus, my guess is that what we’re seeing from the m3 today was already planned on the architecture roadmap even before m1 was being fabricated.
The direction for the MBPs…they’re aiming for that specialized professional market sector. That’s always been the goal…but now, they’re really going at it from an appliance / apparatus angle. That 128GB memory configuration…they know what sector they’re aiming at, and with that, they know what that sector needs in compute horse power.
So, incremental, sure is. Their focus is weighted more towards the commercial sectors in recent years.
If you’re still on the x86 platform, you’re either not their targeted professional users (professional use case and platform choices are largely dictated by the tools / software / toolchain available in their respective fields / discipline), or you’re just the average joe trying to do the easy stuff. (Granted, they’re finally trying to pull the last of the x86 mac users over this year)
When you’ve reached the appliance level of product maturity, and able to execute what it meant to do as a tool, every little change you make is about refinement, because you’re no long trying to fill that big functional demand gap left by your previous product iteration due to immature use case fulfillment capability. Your product has left the consumer market sector at that point. Think camera systems, think internet exchange routers…
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Totally agree 1000%. But then your brand is about innovation and you say the word 100 times in the presentation T_T. I also use apple devices happily 
Also they didn’t even dress Tim Cook up as a pumpkin. Missed opportunities.
hahaha…Innovation isn’t just about pure horse power though, like, some of their innovations are already in history:
If Apple continues this trend on the GPU side, they could really go against Nvidia on commercial AI side of the market / AI datacentre.
…and they absolutely innovated the worst laptop keyboard, and worst repairability and worst upgradability in the history of general purpose retail laptops.
For sure. Big fan of Apple-- have used them as my daily driver for over a decade. I would actually argue that in most cases innovation has nothing to do with horse-power.
Just to nit-pick (and this is entirely pedantry), I wouldn’t really call most of those things in your list as listed “innovation” per-se although most have innovations that contribute to them.
Their M series chips were innovation-- demonstrating that ARM could be architected to exceed what was being achieved in the stagnant general compute market in a variety of ways, whilst throwing off extra value in others (and yanking their entire platform along for the ride!).
Their touch-pad was innovation when it was released (multitouch etc), and when they removed the mechanical bits without any noticeable change in feel.
etc. etc. etc.
They keep their market position by ensuring they maintain a feeling of quality in all of those things which is what you’re describing with “Best” and “Lowest” above. They set their pricing so they can guarantee that quality AND make buckets of money on top.
I suppose the point of the above was that when Apple puts on an event (particularly one that opens with a shpeel from an un-pumpkined CEO about how innovative they are) you want to see something in there that you can at least pretend is innovation and get pumped about. Nothing in that session was innovation-- it was incremental improvement to stay ahead of the pack, which is not an attack! Its super necessary but IMHO didn’t require them lightly gaslighting the portion of their audience (including myself) who were up for watching their “event” (time released video?). Also… so much of what FW are doing right now is innovation so its much more fun place to be.
But mostly I thought it would be a fun excuse to thumbs up what the team here are doing .
Doesnt really matter how ‘advanced’ they get when they do the ultimate dumb thing of soldering the SSD chips to the motherboard and incorporating part of the BIOS/OS in it so when (it will most likely) fail the machine is total junk.
No thanks.
It does start to feel like they’re out to get you after a while.
I get a lot of calls from Apple users but I refuse to work on them. Most of the IT repair guys I know do also. Either too much trouble to fix,impossible or the owners are insufferable.
I’ll only do data recovery on external drives or older machines with HDDs.
Apple made sure that it’s not even a choice you can make. It’s the only thing you can do that’s shoved down your throat.
Indeed. The thing is I have got several of those people to switch to non Apple.
You should see their face when they find they can upgrade their machines and get them repaired for stuff other than “dropping it in the toilet!” Not to mention support for non Apple devices they might want to connect to their non Apple laptop.
It’s a revelation.
I did not expect that plot twist. 