Pretty innovative I’d agree just hard to justify it when its one step forward 2 steps back.
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100% agree here, I would love to see an ARM mainboard in a framework style laptop in the future, so we’ll see if/when that happens.
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To be clear, I don’t like soldered on components, but they expose an interesting trend with modern electronics that further complicates the repairability issue. Many innovations which contribute to making the M1 chip so fast are directly in opposition to the repairability of the system. You can see things like the unified memory stacking the RAM right onto the SOC directly improving system latency, while making the system way more difficult to repair (and forget about upgrading). You can even see this in Framework’s responses here on battery life, where they allude to the fact that using socketed DDR4 sodimm slots means a real-world impact to battery life, compared to soldered LPDDR4X.
Obviously I’m in the camp of “more sockets more better” since I’m enthusiastic about this laptop, but I do find it valuable to expose some of the benefits of going in the soldered components direction. There are reasons beyond the simple black and white of being pro or anti-consumer.
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Given all the issues there can be with Trackpads, and the frequency with which many user’s will expect to do Gaming on the machine, it would be especially nice to be able to get an option with REAL buttons and not just a trackpad. I basically don’t buy laptops that don’t have real buttons.
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Does anyone know if the touchpad ‘clicks’ if you press on it, or does it only support tap to click?
Assuming it does physically click, can tap to click be disabled? (I assume yes to this part because of the mention of windows precision drivers)
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The touchpad has a piano hinge. So yes it can physically click, but only across the bottom 3/4 of the surface with a bit more force needed the higher up the touchpad you press.
In Linux tap to click can be turned off, I assume the same in Windows.
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Dammit, that’s a deal-breaker for me 
I’m so used to Apple’s Force Touch touchpads (I’m even using one with my Linux workstation), that any hinged touchpad fills me with frustration.
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Funny, I’m actually a little on the other side. Touchpads usually don’t bother me too much to use for general computing, but the force touch trackpad I’ve tried out on an M1 mac just whigs me out a little. It’s like the haptic feedback is just convincing enough that it draws my attention to it every time, that there’s a clicking feeling but no physical depression of the pad… I wouldn’t say the experience is a dealbreaker but it’s a small negative mark for me until either it gets even more convincing, or I get to the point I stop noticing it. For me tapping to click feels more natural on force feedback pads.
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Interesting, for me it’s totally convincing tactile-wise. I have HP c1030 chromebook in front of me and I don’t really see much tactile difference with Apple trackpad - travel of the tactile switch underneath is so short that it’s unnoticeable. But the fact that the click works only on the lower half drives me nuts.
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Not only this, I’m interested to see how the multi-touch gestures hold out. Those for me have made my experience using macbooks over the last decade very enjoyable. Obviously I know part of that is OS related, but the hardware can make or break it, as stated!
Now to find a distro I’ll enjoy… will probably end up dual booting it with win10 on the 1TB NVMe stick I ordered so I can reliably run my apps like GR2Analyst for storm chasing, and maybe some non-linux games too.
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From my experience with the framework, the glass trackpad feels great. Not sure how it would compare with a modern mac for long use, but the multitouch gestures are using windows precision drivers (so the standard Windows set), with the main driver for the experience being the big glass surface making it much nicer than my past laptops to use. Previously they were a gimmick for me, now I actually have been using them consistently
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I’d like to see RISC-V mainboard…
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@nrp I just noticed that my fingerprint sensor is kinda hinging outwards. Did you intend to have your power button do this or is this just an issue with my laptop?
EDIT: I’m assuming this is an issue, and if so, could I get an fprint sensor kit sent to me?
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Haven’t seen a description of exactly what the fingerprint reader protects. Is it only for logging into the OS or is it required to boot the computer? I hope the BIOS can be configured so that a fingerprint unlocks the boot process and not just to log into Windows after the computer is up and running.
If it doesn’t inhibit booting, I would like it if we had an option to require a specific (my) Yubi key to be present in order to boot and launch any OS or to access the BIOS settings.
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This question will likely reveal how old all of my current laptops are:
I just noticed this track pad doesn’t have buttons.
How does someone right click with one of these?
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You can right click with this by pressing or clicking with two fingers instead of one. Alternatively, you can switch the right side of your touch pad to a right-click (Not sure about this on windows but it’s true for me on Linux).
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@Kyle_Clements
A lot of the newer thinkpads still has left and right click buttons by the trackpad but then you don’t need to use them. Almost all new computers have trackpads with built in left and right click so if you press down on the left or right hand side of the trackpad, it will act as a left or right click. It’s quite hard to explain, I would recommend you go in an electronics store and find a laptop on display and try it for yourself. Ask your in the store how the trackpads work, they are usually quite good at explaining those things.
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Usually, the bottom edge of the trackpad simulates the left and right click buttons - so either tap/click with two fingers, or click on the bottom right of the trackpad 
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The touchpad sounded great, until I read this detail. Assuming @jeshikat is right about the hinge, will it be practically feasible for users to experiment with other kinds of touchpads, assuming they have sufficient skills in electronics, programming, etc. and are willing to modify their Framework in the process? Or do Framework themselves perhaps plan to offer other options?
Subjectively speaking, I’ve never liked using hinged touchpads of any kind in the past and I wouldn’t expect the user experience to be radically different with Framework’s touchpad, however well-engineered it is in other respects. (Personally I’d prefer to use a hingeless capacitive touchpad – ideally with a few physical buttons to make middle-clicking easy, though a pressure-sensitive touchpad might be able to emulate three buttons well enough; for example something from the Cirque GlideSense series might work – that’s just the first example I found of a hingeless and pressure-sensitive touchpad).
If the touchpad simply communicated directly with the mainboard I’d expect it to be relatively straightforward to experiment with other options (possibly involving simple electronics work, 3d printing, etc. to make them physically and electronically compatible with the Framework), but the blog post notes:
Like all modules in the Framework Laptop, the touchpad is easy to replace if you ever need to. We also routed the keyboard and fingerprint reader signals through it, simplifying the system to have a single cable that connects all of the input devices to the mainboard to make upgrades and repairs easy.
…and it’s not clear from that brief description how nontrivial it would be to integrate a third-party touchpad using, e.g., an I2C or USB interface with the single-cable system. (Maybe it would be doable using a small microcontroller integrating all three signals and routing them to the mainboard itself, or something along those lines.) I’ll look for documentation that might clarify things, but additional insight from people who understand these topics better than I do would certainly be appreciated! 
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Hi all,
Sorry for asking silly questions.
I’m trying to make work the fingerprint sensor in my PopOS Linux, and apparently I can’t find the device.
Do we know through which interface it connected, and what is device ID?
I would love to make it work,
-rth
UPDATE
Oops, found it!
ID 27c6:609c Shenzhen Goodix Technology Co.,Ltd. Goodix USB2.0 MISC
1 Like