Thank you for the additional feedback; I will be sharing this with our internal teams. I also agree that making the BIOS fully accessible is not something that can be achieved very shortly, but it is something that we all should be focused on.
If you have any other feedback about the laptop, our knowledge base, support articles, or anything else in the future, please keep sharing them here! Thanks!
Converting the light colours to tones would be fine, if trying to convert it to words “blue green red” etc would probably require slowing them down.
Yeah I was definitely going for tones, words are way too slow for that to be useful for most things (and also way harder to implement XD) and as far as I know blind people tend to have quite keen hearing. My first though is to convert the color to frequency and the brightness to volume, I think that could work, if it doesn’t I may try something else.
Hell I could see someone doing slow scan television straight to the brain like that XD.
After using the laptop, I have some more observations I thought I’d post.
The input cover does seem to have a very slight seem between the bottom part of the chassis and the input cover itself, which isn’t really much of a problem. Just something to note, though. At certain angles of interacting with the keyboard, this slight crack can snag on some of my arm hairs. I know this is probably a strange observation, and the angle at which I’m interacting with the input cover in this instance is with my elbows lower than the laptop input cover itself. It’s the wrong angle to type on for any length of time, but unfortunately, the desk at my work isn’t positioned very well. Using my laptop as a lap top seems to mitigate both of these problems quite well.
Thermals are quite good on the AMD 7640U CPU with all the basic tasks I’ve done, minor editing in Notepad and some web browsing. The fans don’t turn on unless I make them, by running a full file virus scan, or some other intensive task. I’ve not installed all the programs I’d normally use on a computer just yet, I’m avoiding keeping my personal data off the system for now.
The expansion cards seem to work very well. However, the outside of the inside edges of the ports seem to be sharp rather than being rounded off slightly. This probably cuts manufacturing costs, but it almost makes them seem cheep. The 3.5MM audio card doesn’t seem to have this problem, just USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, and presumably the display port card also, though I don’t have one of those to examine. The edges of the USB-A port will scratch some cheaper USB-A connectors with a plastic outer housing as a result of this. Unfortunately, there might not be too much extra space to work with to resolve this problem, but if there is, I’d be willing to pay an extra cost for a more premium feel to the ports.
Power switches for any card that draws power, which can have enough space to support it, would also be nice to have. I know this has been expressed elsewhere here on the community. I know the USB-A card will draw power without anything connected, even if it’s only a slight amount of power. It would be nice to have the ability to turn this off when I’m not using it. In the mean time, I’m planning to carry around some small USB-C to USB-A converters to use, which should work out nicely.
I’ve been typing on the keyboard more than I have on my first review, and I’m still enjoying the way it sounds and feels. I wish the touch pad wasn’t quite so large, though, but I do understand that those who use it, like that particular aspect. It can make longer typing sessions a bit awkward, since I’m used to the keyboard being on the edge of a table or desk without anything adding extra space to get to the keys, such as a wrist or palm rest. If there was a redesigned input cover putting the keyboard at the front edge with the touch pad above it, I’d like that, and I think others who type a lot would probably appreciate it, also. Unfortunately, that might make using the touch pad a bit awkward, so I suppose there’s trade offs for each design.
Everything is still working out great, and I plan to provide feedback on the Ethernet expansion card, if I have anything significant to report that hasn’t already been reported.
Thank you for the additional feedback!
I have more observations since switching to my clear input cover. In retrospect, I probably should have done the switch myself, I’ll go into more details on that below.
I really enjoy the feel of the clear input cover. The touch pad feels the same, but the keyboard has that nice, smooth feel of warn keyboard keys. And, as an interesting consequence, those that aren’t touch typists seem to have a problem typing on my clear keyboard. Especially since I keep the screen at the lowest brightness with the screen reader’s screen curtain on, which makes the screen completely black, from what I’ve been told.
Now, the reason I should have replaced my input cover myself. First, it would have made for an interesting and detailed experience I could have reported on here. And second, the individual who replaced my input cover stripped a couple of my bottom cover fasseners, and lost all of them. They were replaced with screws that are properly threaded to fit on the bottom and input cover, which use a hex key. I’ll be replacing those with the correct fasseners from Framework once they arrive, since I’m a bit OCD about things being the way they originally were as much as possible. If anyone has lost their bottom cover fasseners and had to replace them, any advice on some best practices while replacing them would be helpful.
That tends to be an issue with unlabeled keys, I know someone that went a step further and put the keys in random places (within the right height of course) to confuse people trying to use his keyboard XD.
Well. I got my bezel and replacement fasseners today. Adventures. And more adventures
First, I replaced the bezel by removing the old one carefully, starting at the top left and right corners with the screen opened almost flat, of course. There wasn’t too much adhesive on the bottom portion, and once it was removed, I was able to put on the new one. I tried to start at the top first, figuring that might be easier, but I found that starting at the bottom was simpler. And, to make sure I didn’t have to worry about pealing adhesive, I didn’t remove the little paper strip along the adhesive portion of the bezel. I think I’ll probably just leave it there, since it seems to be working just fine without it removed. I made sure the bottom was flush and realigned it ever so slightly to make sure the wires weren’t interfiering with the bezel in any way. I wouldn’t want to pinch delicate wires when the lid was closed. And finally, I closed the laptop. There was no clicking or resistance that there shouldn’t be, but I did end up closing my long carpet in the lid. Oops.
I did notice some little plastic or paper pieces of film over the webcam and switches, I wish this had been one long strip. It would have been easier to deal with, in my opinion.
Now, replacing the fasteners in the bottom cover. That probably took me at least a half hour. At least. Since I have no visual frame of reference to even try and align the threads with their inserts, I had to do a little bit of trial and error, and not lose the fasteners in the process, of course. Those Torx T5 heads are tiny things, but not the smallest there is for Torx. I carefully aligned each one, probably initially started them ever so slightly crooked each time, but they did go in, and once they reached their straight post for their captive design, I backed them up until they clicked to align themselves with the input cover threads, then screwed them in place. I did not use Framework’s screw driver for this, because its bit is just slightly smaller than a proper Torx T5 bit.
There is only one fastener that isn’t captive any longer. The front left one, since that requires a clip to make it so. And, I don’t have that any longer. The threaded insert in the bottom cover on the front left must be longer than the rest are, I wish this wasn’t the case. I understand why it is this way, so the fastener can lift up that part of the input cover slightly. However, losing the captive clip is a problem in this instance, so I suppose I’ll have to be very careful with that fastener, and perhaps do a little trial and error to see just how far it needs to be removed before the input cover itself is able to be removed, that’ll be a fun project to do some time, I suppose. Unless Framework sells something that can make this captive again, or if anyone else has any ideas, feel free to chime in.
It’s all done now, I have all my original bottom cover fasteners inserted. And I really, really hope I don’t have to deal with that again. I actually prefer the hex key screws I had in one sense, they’re easier to deal with being longer than the originals, if only slightly. They’re a bit too long, though, and do tend to stick out of the bottom cover just a bit. And, since they aren’t the Torx T5 the Framework came with, it bothered my OCD. All is almost okay, though, except for my non-captive front left bottom cover fastener. Poor fastener.
As I someone who recently started using transparent keyboard, I feel the only issue is the function key placement and sometimes the numbers,since my previous laptop had a slightly different layout for the shortcuts. But I am still concerned how it would look in few years compared to normal one.
That might just be me xD
Not only did I scramble the keys, I’m using Colemak CAW on my PC to add to the confusion.
I immediately got hyped when I saw that there’s a blank keyboard for the FL16 available.
Yup, the fn keys are the only thing that I needed to check a few times. I know the placement of the media and brightness controls now, but I might just change the entire layout with QMK soon anyways.
What do you mean by that?
I feel the keycaps would get scratched over time and would look quite bad
Ah okay, as they’re translucent. Yeah I see that, luckily not an issue with the black keycaps on the blank iso keyboard I’m using with my FL 16.
5 posts were split to a new topic: My review from a blind person’s perspective (FW16)
Today, I decided to take a plunge and open up my Framework 13 myself. Luckily, all of the captive fasteners remained in, with the exception of the one that would normally push up the input cover at the front right corner. The last person to work on my laptop claimed these fell out, necessitating their replacement. But, I didn’t lose anything, and nothing fell out of the bottom while I was flipping the laptop back over.
My first thought upon opening the laptop was, this input cover is thin. A lot thinner than I thought it would be. My second was, I didn’t expect the input connector cable to feel like a thin flat peace of paper. I’ve encountered some cables like this before, a type of ribbon cable I believe. I suppose I should have expected this given how thin the laptop is, but I’d never actually felt the input cover cable before.
Everything was very tightly placed within the laptop chassis, more so than I expected. I thought there might be a little room to work with things a bit more finely with some room for error, but there doesn’t seem to be. It takes some getting used to, and I doubt I would ever attempt to upgrade the Mainboard myself. I’ve read enough horror stories about the tiny WIFI antenna connectors to know that I’d rather not have anything to do with them if I was ever changing a WIFI card. Not to mention all the other connections to the Mainboard. I suspect changing the battery would require a great deal of accuracy and care, at least on the FW13 where the little pins are for the battery connector.
While the laptop was open, I switched to another SSD, a Samsung. I wanted to see if I could get Arch Linux running on the system, which I did, though it was just a basic console install. Oddly, for some odd reason, fwupd did not recognize my EFI partition despite it clearly being marked and mounted under /boot, and I have the same exact install on another system with no issues in that regard. A problem for another day, I suppose. And, Arch took a long time to boot. Most systems using such an install take perhaps ten seconds to present the login screen, but on the Framework, it took over thirty seconds. No idea why, as efibootmgr recognized it just fine.
Anyway, dealing with the tiny fastener for the SSD was an adventure I wouldn’t want to do too often, but I did manage to put in the Samsung SSD. Then, when I was done, I switched back to the Western Digital SSD that was originally in the system. However, now that I’ve put the input cover back on for the second time, something sounds hollow underneath the keyboard, despite the fact that the input cover appears to fit perfectly. Everything is working at the moment, and whatever is hollow sounding, I have no idea. It’s bothering my OCD though, so I may have to figure out what I’ve done wrong and fix it before I’m completely satisfied. Perhaps I slightly misaligned the thermal pad on the SSD when I put it back on.
Also, in dealing with the input cover, I did bump or rub one of its edges against my screen. I very well could have scratched it, I’m not sure. But, individuals helping me read my screen on my phone didn’t seem to have any problems reading anything, and they didn’t mention any scratches, though I never asked.
Opening the laptop is definitely not something I’m going to do very often, if I can avoid it. I wish there was more room to work with things in the system.
Laptop keyboards overwhelmingly use those, often multiple in multiple places (On lenovo ones it’s usually one for the keyboard and one for the backlight and track-point). The connector is a lot more user friendly than what you’d find in a normal laptop though.
They are the devil, though you may actually be slightly advantage there as it takes a combination of violence and fine motor skills to connect them and seeing doesn’t help much as the fingers get in the way anyway.
It’s probably not particularly dangerous as the battery has protection circuitry but the connector is kinda fragile.
Are you sure that is boot time and not the laptop itself posting, cause that bit is indeed pretty slow on the amd platform.
It could be the post process for boot times with Arch. Rather bothersome though, I have one Mini PC. Only one, which will boot Windows 11 in 13 seconds from a complete shutdown. Not this half hybrid hibernation shutdown, but a full shutdown where nothing is stored to disk. Sadly, it’s only this single Mini PC that does it, I wish Framework could do it as well.
I did check the UEFI settings later on, after putting the original SSD back in the Framework, and it’s only set to boot the default entry after 2 seconds. Not long, but nothing that would take it 30 seconds to deal with, unless something else was going on that I did not see, even with assistance. In any case, I may or may not experiment further with Arch later on, I doubt I’ll be changing SSD’s too often unless I have to.
A barebons arch install can boot in sub second on my t480s but that is after post and bootloader XD.
It’s not a timeout it is actually doing something during that time, memory training and testing and stuff like that (even with stored memory training, without that it takes minutes). Amd really needs to figure that out at some point cause it’s even worse on desktop.
No need to change the ssd everytime for that, just install to an usb drive.
Except, the Framework 13 at least, has this problem with USB drives where accessing multiple files at once causes the drive to reset or some such, disconnecting and reconnecting. That’s the only reason why I’ve not tried to test Arch on a USB drive before.
I have had very good luck with usb drives on the mad framework 13, the only outlier being a 970 evo in an asmedia usb4 enclosure on linux (change any one of these variables and it works). The power output on the usb ports is pretty weak and has very trigger happy ocp I could see some less well behaved usb drives having issues but I am sure you can fine one that works to experiment with. Certainly less of a pain than constantly switching ssd.
