How much do yall think this device will cost? What’s the price range?
TL;DR My thinking is, this device should cost between $499 and $899 MSRP retail. For volume purchases, it should start at $399 per device.
Right now, there’s no announced MSRP, but we’ve seen the chip being used in this device before, Intel Core i5-1340P. Back then, though, a pre-built 13" Framework cost $1,049. Framework sells Refurbished boards with this chip for $780–a 25.21% decrease in price. Which makes sense. It’s a known quantity at this point, so it’s easier to manufacture.
Looking at pictures of the chasis, it’s hard to tell, but it looks like they simply made the borders around the screen chunkier. It’s going to use a different topcase (the power button has been moved to the right-hand side), but otherwise it’s similar-enough. So, it’s possible that they are, in fact, using the same motherboard and are doing some driver tuning in the BIOS to get touch support and screen orientation to work. Other than that, though, it should be interoperable with future boards going forwards. Otherwise, they’d have develop mainboards expressly for the 12 and that sounds like a lot of redundant R&D.
All of that being said, my speculation is that this device will/should cost around $499 at the low end, to $899 at the high end, for MSRP. In terms of volume purchases–since that is part of their promo–it would be more $399 per device. It’s being made with students in mind, so it can’t cost too much. College students are broke and K-12 students’ parents have to foot the bill, so unless their school district engages in contract negotiations to get bulk purchases, it’s not going to be dirt cheap.
Not the same CPUs either. Both “U” (low power), not “P” CPUs, and the entry-level’s a Core i3, which was never offered with the FW13. Should cost less, even the Core i5 version. Plus these CPUs should be pretty heavily discounted by now.
Based on this information, the only chipset that fits the bill is the Intel® Core™ i3-1215U. It’s the only chipset from the past couple of years that supports DDR4 and DDR5 socketed RAM (all the other ones use LPDDRX embedded RAM) and has the closest to the purported “max supported” 48GB RAM limit, with 64GB.
With a launch date of Q1’22 and being part of the Alder Lake family, it’s old-enough to be primed for heavily discounted pricing but not so old as to be EOL. However, there’s no “Recommended Customer Price”, so I don’t know how much it would cost per unit. The closest analogue I can find is the Intel® Core™ i3-1215UE, which has similar specs and a list price of $285, so roughly $300 is the ceiling for the 1215U.
I recently purchased the Intel Core 1 155h mainboard at discount, but the full price would have been $700 before tax. The RCP for the 155h is ~$500, so it looks Framework is able to get a roughly 30% discount on the chipset, which means a 1215U-powered mainboard would cost ~$400. I guess that would make the computer roughly $500, at the low end. Bearing in mind, I’m pricing this as if the chipset in use is current and not from 3 years ago, so the pricing might be even lower than that. If we instead take the discount I got, from waiting for an upgrade for a couple of years, and use that as the list price, then the mainboard would cost ~$350 and the MSRP would be more like $400.
Regardless, it’s expensive for a “low-cost”, e-waste laptop, but not horrendously so for a repairable one.
Now, if we wanted to get ludicrous with the pricing, we can look at the difference between the RCP of the Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 Processor 165H at $460 and Framework’s original, non-discount mainboard list price of $999, before tax. That’s almost a ~75% difference. If we were to apply that to the RCP of the 1215U, it would cost a mere $72/unit. At that price point, even if we threw in ~$150 for screen, battery, touchpad, topcase, all the other stuff AND some expansion cards, it would still only cost $220 out the door.
Perhaps that counts as “pretty heavily discounted”–especially at bulk pricing–which would be pretty sweat, but I don’t know. I doubt Framework could sell a brand new laptop MSRP for that price, because you don’t even recoup R&D at that point, but one can dream…
It’s difficult to figure out which family these chips belong to, because Intel goes through so many product refreshes. So, we’re currently on Series 2 Core Ultra and 13th gen is part of the first series of Raptor Lake. The 1315U is from the 13th gen, which makes it 3 generations old. All of that, taken together, is sufficient for these chips to not command high prices tags–either as individual mainboards or as part of a volume licensing deal? Did I get that right?
Why not go with the 1215U, instead? It’s only one generation older and it still implements big.LITTLE architecture, so it’s supported. If bulk discounts scale with the age of the chips, relative to the most recent release, then wouldn’t this family be even cheaper? On the other hand, there are diminishing returns for using a chip that is too old, even if it is still supported, so maybe Framework is optimizing for price:performance rather than purely the lowest number available. That’s how you get e-waste products.
The 1215U and 1315U have the same die size* and use the same manufacturing process (unlike the Core Ultra CPUs which use newer and more expensive nodes), so for Intel the manufacturing cost should be the same. I doubt the 1215U is meaningfully cheaper unless Intel has excess stock to sell off (and if the Framework Laptop 12 sells well enough to go through any excess stock and cause more production of the 1215U then I doubt it will be cheaper).
Additionally while both are still supported the question is for how long? The final Alder Lake CPU (the architecture the 1215u uses) came out nearly 3 years ago, whereas Raptor Lake (the architecture the 1315u uses) had a couple “new” CPUs earlier this year. This isn’t necessarily guaranteed, but that could result in it receiving security patches from Intel and other support for multiple years longer (or if might be exactly the same).
So the 1315u has the same manufacturing cost, slightly higher performance, and potentially slightly longer software support.
* - I couldn’t find reliable sources for the 1315U die size. However the P-series models (which have mostly the same die but with 4 more cores) have the same die size (217 mm² according to TechPowerUp, other sources report various numbers around the same level). I would be surprised if the 1215U and 1315U aren’t also the same size.
He said 1215u, however in that same video it was visible that the motherboard was labeled i3-1315u (and Framework’s blog states that they are offering a 13th gen i3 and i5). I suspect he misspoke.
My guess is also that it’ll be on the pricier side. Linus tried hard to sell the “affordable” expectation, while finishing with “less than $1k”. If it really was that affordable they would let him communicate a cheaper ceiling. But then again. I’m overthinking all of it.
Hope they release final specs soon - already too invested in so much speculation on the forums
They probably don’t want to get people’s expectations up for a quality “budget” device. Better to have people expecting “expensive” and surprise them with “not-expensive”, than to do it the other way around.
