I am absolutely drooling over the modularity/flexibility/upgradeabilty/expandabilty/repairabilty/etc. of the Framework 16.
But how long should I expect to be able to do this? Is it only going to be viable for one CPU-lifecycle (i.e. I won’t realistically be able to upgrade to newer/faster CPUs beyond the generation that comes in the iteration that I buy)? Or has this been designed such that CPUs could be upgradeable beyond that to future generations?
If we’re going based on how the Framework 13 has run, every year a newer version of the Motherboard is released with upgraded processors and inputs. This has been their MO this whole time. Laptops don’t use socketed CPUs anymore, so the entire board is swapped, but they’ve had a yearly cadence of releasing updated boards with upgraded CPUs consistently from the outset.
Yup, what @DtotheM said, that seems to the mainboard cadence. I’d say more matching the CPU makers cadence of updates, so perhaps not “yearly” per se, but that’s what it has ended up being since Framework got started.
As for the GPU module, we have no clue yet, since it’s brand new for Framework. I’d figure probably one per generation of new GPUs, not sure if we’ll ever see an Nvidia one or not. I wouldn’t be surprised eventually, but I wouldn’t bet on it for now.