Love the idea of a repairable, upgradable laptop. I would have loved to buy your current laptops but they just wouldn’t be what I need them to be. I want a to have a 17.3 inch screen, upgradable GPU, CPU, 2xM.2 slots, 2xRAM slots, maximum allowable battery for use on airplanes. Maybe even a slot on the laptop for an eGPU to plug in and finally don’t worry about how thick it is. Just make it good and thick for plenty of cooling so I dont have to hear a jet taking off on my lap.
My hope is that your company can start up a standard for how laptops are made. Like the standard ATX motherboard.
Does anyone have any ideas to add or an opinion on what they want out of a laptop?
A desktop replacement style Framework chassis would be interesting, but I’m glad they started with the thin-and-light as that fits my needs better. As a note, the Framework can support thunderbolt eGPUs.
I don’t foresee the Framework mainboard catching on as an industry standard. While I’d love a standard mainboard format, there is so much variation in chassis layout and port selection that it isn’t really feasible. Maybe something like the Raspberry Pi Computer Module would work. The chassis maker could design a mainboard to fit their needs, then you could slot in a compute module to upgrade.
On the side of the thickness you could keep it simple and have the internal parts of a slim laptop vs. a thick laptop top be the same with the difference being the thickness of the cooling solution with a swappable bottom cover to allow for which thickness you want.
The reason I can see of coming up with a nice standard size for certain types of laptops is so that the price of laptops can get lower. Less R&D going into making something that people may or may not like. I definitely dont think that every laptop will adopt a single standard since there will be 2in1s and ultra books. But at least something being standard would be great
From a 13" thin-and-light to a 15-17" workstation
There are a lot of happy coincidences / smart deliberate choices that make the first framework laptop a winner.
The next step to a ‘workstation/desktop-replacement’ will need a bit more good fortune / smarter choices. Some will be relatively easy, e.g. 4 ram slots, that would probably need the mainboard to be removed to access 2 slots on the top / underneath the keyboard. Others may be hard, an eGPU crammed inside a laptop chassis? I am sure there is a possibility to use an M.2 type PCIE solution. But maybe development in ARM silicon will make this a ‘dead end’ solution too quickly for it to pay off.