After reading through many of the threads on the forum, it seems that the community has raised the idea of a buyback/refurbished/used section of the marketplace. With this in mind I’d like to take it a step further:
As part of a “buyback program” or something of the like we could incentivize the donation of used boards to the education system/impoverished communities that wouldn’t be able to afford an ultrabook in the first place. The way I see it, this could be used as an opportunity to do some good with the platform at scale as well as saturate the market with the platform as a standard. I’m unsure of the economics around the cost of the housing, but I could see a world where a middle-schooler could carry this machine through to college, with periodic upgrades as part of a grant program facilitated by used/donated hardware of the community. As someone who upgrades semi-regulary, I could enroll in the program and receive a considerable discount on the latest board, and framework could receive a tax credit.
Thoughts?
I really like this idea. I think Framework should have this on a roadmap and work out logistics and specifics so that they can enact on it once they become more established and have enough of a stock to make this a reality.
The donation side also gives another pathway for technology that avoids a landfill.
My assumption is that the cost of the Framwork housing can be brought down significantly as production scales up.
As I see it, the parts that are proprietary Framework are these:
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Framework housing (bottom cover, input cover housing, bezel)
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Framework Mainboard
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Speaker units (?) unsure
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Webcam/Microphone module (maybe this can be swapped out for a generic part, not sure of specifics)
The parts that are easily available are these: -
DDR4 RAM modules
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NVME Wifi cards
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NVME SSDs
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Keyboards (made by Lighton, but they can likely ramp up production faster than Framework)
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Power button/fingerprint reader (made by Goodix), see reasoning above
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Touchpad (not sure if the whole thing is made by PixArt or just the controller for it), I still think that other touchpads could be swapped in if needed)
I think, given how upgradeable this laptop is, if other parts can be swapped in for the Framework specific ones, this will relieve the burden of Framework for all production, and make this very laudable idea much more achievable.