Thanks for all your sympathies. I’ve been looking at the market and I think my most practical choice is to order an AMD board and re-use my existing shell. The fragile cradle, fragile threaded inserts, their failure to fix a critical defect (they designed a fix, but pushed actually fixing it off onto the customer), and their failure to fix the random thunderbolt disconnects when battery charge limit is below 100 that impacts 11th and 12th gen boards are all great reasons to not risk my money on more of their products but the alternatives are simultaneously twice as expensive while lacking key features.
For example, the StarBook was a close 2nd place, with similar availability of parts and the added feature of coreboot, but a minimum AMD build is $1400 and it has a low resolution screen and lacks hardware kill switches. Their larger StarFighter has kill switches but its far too large. On the framework side, the 11th and 12th gen boards are ruled out because 11th gen is defective and the 12th gen has the thunderbolt disconnect bug. That leaves the approximately equally priced 13th gen intel board and AMD boards, but considering all the issues the earlier Intel boards had, I figure its better to risk the unknown AMD board than hoping framework finally got the Intel boards right on the 3rd try.
Indeed. That leaves you with a laptop that every ~1.5 years without warning will refuse to boot which is not something I was willing to tolerate, but if someone is willing to tolerate that then its certainly the safest option.
I haven’t cleaned off the flux because its broken, so sorry that its a bit gross. The bottom pad came off (the one on the left-hand side of this photo). The top pad I think is still there under the solder but I could not for the life of me get that thing soldered to the cradle. The top pin on the cradle is entirely under the cradle plastic, not sticking out at all, so I was trying to sandwich my soldering iron between the pad and the pin.
Edit: ruh roh, maybe all frameworks have the disconnect bug. Well, I have an unknown quantity of weeks to decide if I want to cancel my pre-order: [RESOLVED] AMD F39 USB-C hiccups with external display directly connected via USB-C