Hey guys,
Just here to remind you that in 1 week it will be the middle of November, which means we will officially be in “mid November”.
I imagine mid-November would be between the 10th and 20th of November, however, its exciting to know that in approximately 1 weeks time, we could be looking at an update regarding batch’s being shipped, I would imagine if the batches go well, on Tuesday, we could be looking at emails going out at the end of that week, or the start of the week later.
Agree, and you forgot below average or actually terrible webcam and fans that don’t seem to age very well, plus a plainly ridiculous 60W for GPUs, even in the 17 inch models, and yes, an aging form factor and design. ;). But the XPS line overall remains a very, very solid lineup. A XPS 17 with a RTX 4070 is a damn good laptop - I would use it myself. If the XPS17+ already existed, I might have not bought FW16 - might…
BTW, another strong alternative next to Razer 16 (mercury) would be the Lenovo P1 Gen 6, I just heard its GPU actually does (by some miracle) NOT overheat even with a RTX 4080 - wow, it took only 6 generations ;).
But yes, if we consider 2500 Euro price tag, sorry to say, Framework has some strong competition.
My current notebook just failed to turn on the weekend. Or rather fans were spinning but no screen.
Couldn’t even get into the bios.
And I was like nooooooooooooo. (Thinking that I’d have to buy a new one a month or so before I get my FW16 Batch 1)
But it somehow recovered… But is has been hanging a lot this week…
This morning it had vertical flashing lines on screen… That also went away by itself a few minutes later…
Waiting for Batch 1 emails with anticipation so I can throw money at FW so I can get a replacement ASAP.
I’m in a slightly similar boat. My old (6 year old) laptop was kinda starting to fall apart in some places, but one day it just randomly shut down and never turned back on. I think it was an electrical fault but I didn’t bother fixing it, I actually did more physical damage by accident while investigating it so it probably wasn’t workable anymore even if I replaced a broken chip.
That was three days after FW16 pre-orders opened, which is actually nice because I intended to get a FW16 laptop as soon as the old one died. Unfortunately I have to wait until Q1 now 
Fortunately, though, I did manage to get a laptop that I can borrow from a coworker until then 
(I do not like this laptop. )
I hope your laptop survives until your FW16 arrives 
On a similar boat. My laptop is about 4.5 years old. It has a few issues but if it does break before my FW16 gets here (Batch 4 Q4 2023), I’m just gonna have to get something else
My backup laptop is a pinebook Pro. It ha an ARM cpu, 4 GB Ram, a decent screen and did cost 200 US$. Shipping was almost mire expensive to Europe 
But that is largely enough for the time being if my current workstation breaks !
I was looking into the pinebooks a little while back. If they came with a 100Whr battery I’d probably have one. That battery life should be insane.
But it didn’t.
I only got my pinebook pro to idle slightly lower than my t480s so the battery life would not be as much as you might think. It is fun to play with but imo not really a replacement for an actual laptop.
I’m bemused with people with laptops just a few years old that are coming to the end of their life. My samsung is exactly 11 years so far. If it fails before the f16 arrives then I’ll be trying to manage with a raspberry pi, and I’m not much looking forward to that.
Gotcha, fair enough. I ended up buying the T470 w/ expanded battery so I guess it was the right call.
I reallly hope we get an update today or tomorrow.
Depends on your use case IMO, shouldnt be that bemusing. Wonder if your running windows, my 8 y/o laptop with 4gb ram is running quite sluggish. Definitely needs a repaste too. 11y/o still running windows would be pretty OP on day 1 or heavy optimization.
I’m currently working with a 15 year old Dell Studio 17" running Win7 on an Intel Core Duo (which is a pseudo 64 bit machine as far as I can work out), which is a hand-me-down from my wife when we retired. She got a new secondhand Dell as the replacement for her work laptop that she wouldn’t have any more, and she was having problems with this machine.
So I have ordered an FW16 which I am hoping will be the last machine I will need to buy, especially as I plan to max out the memory and disk.
Bad news :-(, check emails
Just got an update email from FW re the FW16 laptops being delayed. Sounds like mass production will start about a month from now only.
They also provide a list of 10 outstanding showstoppers, and to me, honestly, it all sounds very reasonable things to be concerned about. Most of these sound like fixes just need a full testing cycle.
The biggest sounding issues seem centered around power management, which is to be expected as its the firsts PD 180W/240W notebook on the market, also has swappable expansion bay and swappable expansion modules, all with bi-directional power flow.
It’s the thing that enables the single most defining feature of the Framework laptops, so I’m happy they work on getting these perfect.
Oh dear. Least they recognise that they can use the manufacturing capacity to get the FW13 AMD batches out of the way and use that capacity to ramp up the FW16 to catch up. Maybe my Batch 12 at the end of Q1 will still be on time.
If you didn’t get the email, here it is (part 1 of 2)
Based on the remaining engineering validation we need to complete and open issues that we are in the process of resolving, we have high risk on our first shipment timing (currently targeting mid-December) and on starting mass production early enough to get a substantial number of Q4-batch units out before the end of the year. We have dedicated engineering teams across Framework, AMD, our main manufacturing partner Compal, and our key module manufacturers working daily on closing the remaining open items, which we have more detail on below. We’re committed to transparency, and we’ll continue to keep you up to date with regular emails as we complete validation, start manufacturing ramp, and fulfill batches.
Note that we’ve fully built up factory capacity, so once we start mass production of Framework Laptop 16, we’ll be able to make our way through batches quickly like we have recently on Framework Laptop 13. We’ll also likely be fully through production of the pre-order backlog on Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) before we start ramping Framework Laptop 16, so we’ll have minimal contention for our manufacturing lines and fulfillment capacity.
We know this delay is disappointing, but we prioritize building products for longevity, stability and quality. To paraphrase the saying in the video game industry, delayed hardware is eventually good, but rushed hardware is forever bad (even when it’s repairable and upgradeable). This is especially true for Framework Laptop 16, where we’re locking in a first design and architecture now that we’ll carry forward over multiple generations of updates. We understand if the product timing no longer meets your requirements, and you can follow the instructions in the Knowledge Base article here to cancel and refund your pre-order if necessary. If you have an urgent need for a laptop and don’t have a strong screen size preference, Framework Laptop 13 is also in stock now for Intel configs and is about a month away from being in stock for AMD.
Details on remaining opens and validation items
We don’t want to provide messaging around delay risk without giving transparency on where the risk comes from. This is part of our core philosophy of showing you what goes into building consumer electronics products. For context on the list below, these are what we consider the most critical open items out of a longer list of engineering and operations tasks that are in progress. While there are smaller issues that we would potentially defer into a firmware update if needed, these are ones that pass the threshold to hold production for. For more context, this is also not an atypical list to have for a complex hardware product late in its DVT2 development phase. We were tracking a similarly critical (though slightly smaller) list in the weeks prior to Framework Laptop 13 (AMD Ryzen 7040 Series) mass production.
part 2/2
yes, I agree. it is refreshing to see an actually detailed, and reassuring, description of the issues.