Thanks, I have tried that now, and escalating it to the complaints department seems to have worked. I happened to buy the laptop with a warranty that includes on-site support and repairs, so someone will be coming out soon to fix it for free, which is nice. If I hadn’t had that upgraded warranty from the seller it would have been sent to a repair centre at my own risk and cost.
I agree, I totally did that upgrade in good faith. I had no idea that something so simple couldn’t be allowed.
In fairness, I should add that I stupidly volunteered the information that I temporarily borrowed one of the trackpad’s many screws to screw down the SSD. I hadn’t thought it through and naively assumed I would just find a screw ready in the laptop, or provided with the SSD. Still, I don’t think that it was plausibly the cause of the issue at hand.
Honestly none. For me the modularity and repairability of Framework products is just a hurdle that no other laptop manufacturer can overcome. At least not as the industry is today.
For this reason, the Framework 16 is in a class of its own.
I wish Thinkpads weren’t a shell of their former selves, but they are.
I have been very happy with my Framework laptops, and being a community moderator has allowed me to peak behind the scenes, and the way they run things and the true passion they have for their missions has just helped to cement my position even more.
Framework is the real deal and I can’t wait for the Framework 16 to roll out.
@Y11 - thanks for the reply, I am happy to hear that you are achieving resolution. It’s fortunate that you had the extra warranty, but I’d still argue that it ought not to be necessary. Thankfully you don’t have to go down that path. Looking forward to hearing your exploits with a Framework when you do pick one up.
If FW went up in a puff of smoke, well… just build a desktop, and buy a little ex-gov laptop for that occasional mobile use.
If mobility was a bigger part of my requirement, System76 has a nice range, but I’m not convinced they ship to Australia. Probably end up going with Asus.
*Edit: S76 do. They’re just all intel, all nvidia, and that would turn me away already. AMD just hasn’t put out enough mobile products for their kit to show up! So, no framework? I’d build a new desktop and get a whatever (cheap) laptop, probably ex-government.
For me, it’s not that the FW13 is missing things I need. More like “Whoa! It’s more customizable? Okay, gimme that one please!”
To be fair, if all of that can be had on the smaller 13 inch model, I’d buy it. I’m not a large laptop gal, but I’ll “deal with it” if I have the option to get a dGPU. The FW16 feels like a portable upgradable desktop. I can upgrade the motherboard/CPU and dGPU separately as needed. And the ability to reuse the previous parts to do something else is nice.
Who knows if I will do any of that in the future… but this was something I always wanted. Framework laptops was my 20-something’s pipedream that came true 20 something years later.
The other was Nexdock - mostly because I wanted something like that for working on computers (building, troubleshooting, etc). However, I don’t do that as much anymore - I still got a Nexdock though and it has come in handy a few times already!
If someone makes a expansion card that can turn a FW laptop into a portable crash cart (like the Nexdock) as needed, it’d be next in line to get it.
And regarding thinkpads, framework still has to show that they can compete with the gold standard of sustainability in the entire industry: old thinkpads ;). I organised in total 4 different thinkpads for friends which are now all around 10-15 years old, and all of them still run and are used for browsing web/youtube by them still sometimes. Everyone talks about sustainability, just wanted to mention that we had it long ago ;).
I’m almost certain that literally as you were typing this I was in the middle of replacing the screen of a W520. I was a little nervous at first cuz it was just the panel, not the whole top half assembly, and I wasn’t sure what it would take to extract the panel. Would there be glue? Tiny plastic clips that will almost certainly all break? 100 tiny screws?
I looked up a guide and 10 seconds later exclaimed aloud, “That’s it?!” Man I love these things…
Haha, I have to admit I am no hardcore enthusiast or know a lot about them, but I simply found them always extremely good. Best notebooks I personally ever had. Ah, W520, that brings back memories…
Admittedly, I also often found myself wondering why old thinkpads could so easily replace batteries, and ALL other notebooks could not…
Or another moment: when people stopped using CD ROMs I simply exchanged the CD ROM Bay with a new bay including a SATA SSD. Again, a moment where others said: “Wait, you can do that?” ;).
My main point is that I hope framework will have a build quality that is very, very good. But it remains to be seen, of course. Noone needs a notebook that is easy to repair. We need a notebook that doesn’t have to be repaired - something we had a long time ago.
PS: But I know this is aiming very high. I doubt it can be achieved. I would be happy with a notebook that survives 5 years - would be less than half of what old thinkpads do, but at least more than average.
I think it is impossible to make a computer strong enough or stable enough to never need a repair by any user. I would prefer that when my error-prone self does accidentally break my laptop to be able to easily fix it up.
Yeah. That would be really nice indeed. I have small firewall apu4d2 which is a dedicated AMD powered 4 ethernet port device with 2GB Ram that does its job beautifully, using CoreBoot. I love that BIOS.
I was thinking about getting a P-series thinkpad. Maybe P16?
On the other hand, I refuse to use windows, so I run Linux which is hardly possible with nvidia gpu, so I am happy FL 16 has AMD kit.
Currently I have thinkpad p50 with nvidia gpu and on average every second upgrade of either kernel or nvidia drivers breaks the GPU, so if you consider reliable linux support, dont go with nvidia. Sure, you might get lucky but that was not my case.
Of course, you are right. I of course didn’t mean that any notebook would NEVER need to be repaired. What I was pointing at was the need for framework to focus on build quality. Repairability is nice, build quality is better ;).
