I was thinking having an option to by the full laptop shell with all the components would be a great option. I plan to upgrade my wife’s laptop to a framework. Having the option to buy the shell and using my old motherboard would be great.
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I’ve seen this request float around a couple of times but the answer seems to be that its more complicated or difficult to do than it would seem. Nevertheless, I think it would be great for increasing the life of mainboards after people upgrade. Effectively turning one laptop into two!
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There’s not really any excuse for not offering it IMO.
There’s going to be a point (probably already) where the amount of chassis (pl.) on the market is dwarfed by the amount of mainboards. Not everyone needs a overpowered rpi.
A 1 click DIY package on the marketplace would be ideal.
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Why? In offering such empty shells the the amount in production could be increased and the price decreased. And those shells are produced anyway.
We already have the answer as to what support thinks in this thread. The purpose of the thread seems to be that we’re expressing our desire for a mobo-less shell, and discussion why.
I’d urge you to consider if you’re actually contributing to the discussion before hitting reply, it seems to be a common thread in your posting.
I would agree with Brandon, on this, it is very similar to what frame work is already doing with other parts of their laptop, like their motherboard and screen replacements, you can buy them separately and use them for a framework if one part is broken, if you crack the case of your framework it would be good to be able to buy all the parts you need in one place. The only problem is producing more, but at this time framework is large enough(probably, I don’t know) to have the machining ability to make shells more widely available on the part store. and they already have a lot of the parts available on the store already, you would just have to assemble them yourself, and find all the parts, so this would just speed up the process if they essentially made a kit that has all the parts and bundled it together on the store. In my opinion they don’t even have to do the assembly for the shell to make it a viable product on the store.
I am a volunteer community moderator, not a Framework employee.
My understanding, which is just a semi-educated guess, is that it creates tax/import issues because it’s not a functional laptop so it can’t be classified as such for tax or customs. It also might cause issues for shipping because the restrictions on shipping batteries are different when they’re installed in a device vs spare and there could be question as to which one it would qualify as without a mainboard to hook it up to.
Once again, I want to be very clear that this is not any kind of official answer but just an educated guess by a long-time member of the community, and I am not a Framework employee. Framework employees will always be tagged with “Framework Team” or “Framework Support” so you can easily tell who they are.
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Import / Tax issues was one of the reasons given for the DIY units being more assembled than originally expected.
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Yes, they have! For the empty shells 