Speculation on the future of Framework

Hi. Happy FW13 owner here.

The one-year anniversary of the FW16 is coming up, and since FW has reiterated its mission to make “consumer electronics more repairable”, I thought it would be fun to speculate a bit, and get a feel on what the broader community thinks about FW’s future.

I hope they are going to launch a new product in the coming months, or at least 25 - after all, they have a pretty big team. While incremental improvements on the FW13, like the better screen and webcam module, must have taken a long time to bring to fruition, I think they might have even more in store, especially to further their brand image and reach.

Here are some product categories I can see Framework moving into, and some I think they should (and will, because I’m just one rando on the internet, and they are a business with many bright minds) avoid. The list is in ascending order, so don’t discredit me yet (;

  1. Printers
    Need I say more. Everyone f-ing hates printers. They are unintuitive, don’t give clear information to debug problems, are a hassle to set up, and often require proprietary ink and cartridges.
    It would be a HUGE undertaking, as printers don’t have any good margins, and have an immense amount of moving parts, making the engineering challenging and very cost and time intensive, but I think that it could be a real product, especially with the room to grow, and the Framework teams legacy of innovation.

  2. Handheld Gaming Console
    MSI, Lenovo, Valve, Nintendo, Ayaneo, and a bunch of no-name brands on Alibaba. Everyone and their mom is making a handheld gaming console at the moment.
    But all these devices have one thing in common: They are obsolete, as soon as a successor is announced. At the same time, buttons and joysticks wear out, and can’t get replaced on the current devices.
    The FW13 Mainboard has already been made into a HGC by a modder, but a custom design is needed for commercial success of such a product.
    I don’t think such a product will get released by FW this or even next year, but I don’t think there is that much difference between the laptop market pre-framework and the HGC-market now.

  3. Tablet
    Neither of the FW laptops have touchscreens, and while it is certainly more of a challenge in designing a Tablet over a Laptop, because of the increased size-constraints, I believe it is entirely possible for FW to engineer a Tablet with replaceable components.
    The big challenge could be windows support. I have no idea of the state of windows tablets, but I think, since Microsoft is selling the surface, it should not be that challenging?
    If instead, Android is the OS of choice, it would realistically need an ARM processor, and would put require even more effort to upstream drivers, use exclusively components that already have drivers upstream, or create and maintain a custom AOSP distro, so I think it would need to be x86 and use Linux and Windows.

  4. Mainboard upgrades
    AMD Strix and Krackan for FW13
    Fire Range and hopefully ( :pray: ) Strix Halo for FW16
    Snapdragon X Elite mainboard? Idk if Qualcomm’s support is good enough, but I also doubt that it would sell well, judging from sales overall
    Intel mainboards ofc, but tbh idc

What do you guys think? Am I insane, do you have other ideas of product categories worthy of Frameworks attention, or do you think they are purely going to stick to laptops?

Really excited to hear back from you

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Ok, I think I’m on the right track.
A recent reply to a thread of 500+ comments from 2022 bumped this thread into relevancy again, and it seems a LOT of people also want to see a tablet and printer from FW.
My point still stands that I think creating a printer that does not suck is incredibly hard, but maybe it will come at all after all

I’m hoping they fix their current products first before expanding into new products.

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Can you elaborate on what needs to be fixed? I for my part don’t have any problems with my 13

Gotta say I agree with @Tom1. I just got a FW13 which arrived with a pretty glaring QC issue (display cable munged on the display end). Initial shoddy experience notwithstanding, I love the mission of Framework, and I love that I was able to fix said QC issue relatively easily myself, which is why I hope that they double down on quality and incremental improvements of the existing product line-up rather than foraying into totally different products like printers.

Sure. Issues I’ve experienced:

  1. When I plug in my AMD framework laptop, there’s a 10-30% chance that it won’t start charging. This is quite alarming when you discover this in the middle of a work video conference and you can’t unplug+replug your laptop because your webcam is going through the dock.
  2. Sometimes the fan won’t turn on even though the laptop is boiling hot
  3. Sometimes the temperature sensors fail to read due to firmware bugs
  4. Sometimes a kworker will get stuck at 100%

I also had my fair share of issues on the 11th gen intel board (most annoyingly being thunderbolt would briefly disconnect, but only if your battery charge limit was less than 100%) but I don’t know if those have been fixed.

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The problems are numerous. We can talk about iPhones have trouble connecting to framework laptop’s but only AMD platforms. We can talk about the terrible firmware practices that even after almost a year have not really improved. Or at least I can tell they have improved because Framework is not good about communicating it. We can talk about the numerous topics or examples given about the RMA process taking an absurdly long time to complete. Like 1 month plus for a warranty repair to complete. We can talk about the PROCHOT issue that a casual search shows affects up to 13th gen and has yet to be resolved. Again, we don’t know how prevalent this or any particular issue is because Framework doesn’t tell us.

I’m glad you are happy with your laptop. Genuinely I am. I’m not happy. If I didn’t need a laptop for school and there was anything worth spending the time to try and switch to, I’d sell mine. As it is, I’ll sell it once TB5 comes out. Probably within a month or two actually. I spent a considerable sum on this laptop and it’s been a complete disappointment. There are other reasons that I won’t get into publicly becuase they aren’t appropriate but I am incredibly bitter. So yes, I agree that I would prefer to see that Framework work on fixing existing products and keeping in the existing product categories before they branch out. Laptops haven’t exactly been nailed down in execution.

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if they are expanding there products id tell them to go with a Tablet. preferably a 2-1 so added optional keyboard.
as currently sinds i already have a beefy desktop i realized i dont need a laptop as something like the Surface Pro 11 will do everything i need and has more uses for me. (i just didnt got one yet because im waiting for TopazAI to support the Snapdragon X Elite Chips.)
i would prefer a more repairable and customizable 2-1 from like Framework though but well they dont have it yet.

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Actually just had this happen as well. It was my 5 one (3 kids and a wife) and only 1 with an issue other a usb cable on another unit with the insulation torn up in multiple places. Like you I had it totally fixed in 2 weeks (over christmas/New years break which is probably worst time of year in the US to try and do anything) and overall I remain extremely positive but they do need to work on QC. I would like them to come out with a miniLED 13 inch panel and get the new AMD chips in their line up as they look absolutely amazing though from what I’ve seen in posts might not be possible till camm memory (over my head just regurgitating). My 12th gen is fine for work anyway.

I think other products are a pipe dream if they are going to stay competitive even as a boutique laptop dealer. So far hasn’t been an issue but they are updating the bios at a glacial pace and again, my understanding is limited but the new AMD chips are very different mainboard design from the past is my understanding and it is a super small company for what they have already accomplished.

Last thing, I want them to do a partnership with that company doing the solid state cooling. A strix halo chipset in teh 13 inch with solid state cooling…mmmmm I pray to the engineering gods as that would be awesome

FW should focus on their core business which is the laptops. Launching new laptop mainboards at market speed is essential.

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