Last Monday I started my day normally with the laptop docked on a USB-C monitor for power/display/peripherals and worked for around 3 hours. Then, without me touching the thing it powered off. It seems to be completely bricked, no power, no fan spinning, no indicator LEDs, nothing.
I raised a support ticket and in the mean time, I tried some of the troubleshooting guides to reset (re-seating all the things etc). A colleague even let me test my laptop with the battery from his identical framework.
Support got back to me the next day with some further troubleshooting steps (pressing chassis switch 10 times, other chargers etc) and still no signs of life. I provided all the pictures support requested and that was the last I heard from them (7 days ago).
As an aside the slow pace of support has been really disappointing. The startup I’m working for was refreshing hardware for all platform engineers this year and I advocated heavily for framework as an approved device vendor after a successful trial device was bought. This has basically killed the chances that anyone within our organisation will approve the purchase of frameworks as this is not the level of support any businesses expect.
Wondering if anyone else has experienced the new Ryzen 5 Frameworks bricking themselves out of no where?
With FW stating that their support is during working hours for timezone Taiwan (I think that’s the timezone), 5 days a week, with support essentially reasonable effort within 48 hours but not guaranteed. So, at busy times, it could take a lot longer.
If you need better support than that, you would probably need to do your own MTTR (Mean time to repair) numbers and hold enough spares locally to meet that. I suggest using a spares delivery time of about 14 days, in the MTTR calculations.
Essentially, buy a few extra FW laptops, to put on a shelf next to you in case one breaks among the many your company might own.
You can probably do that for a similar price as HP or DELL would charge for 4 hour, onside repairs support.
For example, I don’t know what support contract my company have with HP, but I had a simple fault with my HP laptop. One of the keys had broken. I took it into my company support and they had to swap the whole laptop out, because fixing the 1 key would have taken many hours work. That would have been about a 5 second job on a FW laptop.
Both cases still rely on spares being available locally, at my company.
As for failing like you describe. I have not seen any other failures like that elsewhere on this community forum, so I think it is rare. Their have been a few reports of USB power chips failing, but those are rare also. There have been a few reports of batteries failing, but those are rare also.
I do understand the constraints under which support is operating, and yes we could maintain a supply of spares to perform our own repairs to maintain business continuity. But being realistic I could try to sell that approach to leadership but I think we can all guess what the response would be… (we wouldn’t need to do this with Macs/ThinkPads/Dells etc). The standard warranty support process for those vendors would simply have covered this in a far more timely manner. And ours will not be the only small business that will decide frameworks aren’t worth the bother if this is a trend.
Even in busy times I don’t think you can excuse taking a customer through the troubleshooting stages of support and then ghosting them for 7 days, leaving them with no further recourse. It leaves a very bad taste in the mouth to not start an RMA process after the user has followed numerous troubleshooting guides to no success.
Were this some other vendor I don’t think I’d be as disappointed. I really wanted framework adoption within our business because I believe its the right approach for sustainable tech and so we could provide the sort of in house servicing you suggest above once the scale was right. But we’d still need RMAs to be handled within a timely manner.
I agree with you. RMAs etc. are currently taking way too long.
If FW can sort their RMA process, lead time, out, the MTTR experience would be more on par with the likes of HP and Dell.
My personal experience, with a RMA touchpad. Time between FW saying they would replace my touchpad (I.e. after completing their diagnosis process), and the touchpad actually arriving was 10 days.
To be fair to FW, they sent it Fedex from somewhere in Europe, but then when it got to the UK (where I am), Fedex gave it to “trusted 3rd party distributor” which turned out to be British “Royal Mail”, that are well know as being the worst postal service in the entire UK. For example, they have a service called “Tracked 48” which used to mean it turned up within 48 hours at its destination. That now means that it may turn up 3-7 days later with no tracking information.
Sorry to hear about your experience with support, can you do a follow response on your ticket? So it get’s visible to whatever queues your ticket is in? Also a friendly reminder you may want to prepare an Ubuntu 24.04 live or Fedora 40 Live images, for the series of test support may request.
Hi again @Loell_Framework , I’ve still not heard from support following my response yesterday. I suspect maybe the problem is my replies to the support ticket email aren’t bumping it? Over the past 7 days I’ve sent 4 emails requesting an update that haven’t been acknowledged, including yesterdays.