2x Expansion Card Expansion Bay. Or just have fixed I/O like USB/DP/Ethernet. eSATA (maybe). Full-sized SD card would be nice.
25G 2x (RX and TX) Fiber link. Not sure why anyone would want that.
External (via a thick cord) PCIe 8x slot/enclosure (probably not gen 4, maybe gen 3/2. Doesn’t really matter). Graphics back-feed? Not entirely sure how that works.
“Legacy Bay” – RS232 (maybe 12V power as well?), Parallel Port, PS2 (maybe), dial up, PCMCIA(?). Maybe built-in VGA (or better, DVI-D). Doesn’t have to be super powerful.
4x NVMe 2280 (or longer) RAID. SATA support would be very nice.
Speakers/3.5mm jack with a hardware equalizer! This laptop already has huge potential as a producer’s dream. Nothing would be funnier than flipping your laptop over to fiddle with some SMD slide pots for better sound.
An Oculink female bay would be amazing!
The newly released GPD Win MAX 2 (handheld gaming PC) has one and it seems to be a really good solution for a cheap eGPU. Also, the GPD WinMax 2 is using the AMD Ryzen 5 7640U so it makes me think that it could be possible in the new AMD Frameworks.
See this video which summaries the benefits: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMASet1yLzg
Oculink connection would be amazing to have as a individual expansion bay, but also added to other expansion bays (specially if it does not increase the price too much). For example an extra battery expansion bay with oculink or even the mobile gpu expansion bay with oculink, so you can connect a eGPU when you get home.
Yes I was also going to mention that. I think GPD will like this cooperation.
Ayaneo already jumped on.
Regarding the implementation, I don’t know how it’s implemented. It might be a simple …
Oh Oculink! Basically SFF8643. Yeah basically a PCIe riser. I can see this being a good solution.
I think a oculink + battery card is very doable, since Oculink is basically a PCIe interface so “adapting” it from the Framework Expansion Connector is not going to be expensive. The rest can go to battery.
Or tie it in with the “moar IO” card, since technically you can Oculink other things (server memory/storage).
There are a lot of concepts that are cool and Id like to see them all thrive, but I expect to purchase each of these if they were well designed and priced appropriately.
*additional or “Second” battery
*Mega I/O - any/all of HDMI-IN, DP or HDMI Out, double usb-c, double usb-a, 10g ethernet, full size SD card, etc.
*dGPU
I hope there is a barrel power connector at the back too, to free up one expansion card slot on the side.
For my usecase with the 16inch Framework (which is programming work) an Expansion Bay Battery would be the first thing I’d buy. Battery lifespan is the bottleneck for me.
The card slides in like a normal expansion card, but it has a long body about three or four expansion card widths out from the laptop. Facing the user are several slots for expansion cards.
An Oculink port, an nvme slot and one or several slots for standard expansion modules.
It might be a good idea to have the option of having bigger expansion modules (the size of two standard expansion modules + the size of the support in the middle) and make the central support removable so that this can be either two standard modules or one bigger module.
I wish framework would have done that for the expansion modules on the sides of the laptop as many of the suggestions from users would not fit in the size of a standard module (for example 2 USB-A ports).
I can imagine a bigger module with 2 USB-A, a 3.5 jack and maybe an HDMI port (all sharing the bandwidth of 1 USB-C at the back of the module) and also one USB-C which is a direct pass through to the second USB-C at the back of the module.
To fit the different requirements of different people, maybe a different, larger expansion card system that can fit larger ports like RJ45…
Maybe analyze the mechanical requirement of all the reasonable requests here, and start a larger module design base on that. The expansion bay itself can be a good chassis for the new expansion system.
Also a single expansion slot doesn’t nessarly need to fit in only one expansion module right? What if you can have a single large slot that you can install either a single large module, or more then one small module?
It’s a mildly surprising omission from the FW series, these are quite common at this price point. The adapter probably can’t fit flush with the sidewall of the chassis, but the Ethernet adapter doesn’t either. That’s no big deal; external 4g adapters for example always hang out as a dongle, awkward and annoying, yet people buy them. At least some of this one would be inside the laptop body.
Seems kind of obvious for some enterprising soul to design one of these and stick in Marketplace… if legalities on mobile signal devices don’t get in the way too much.
bluetooth dedicated audio device, preferably with some form of pass-through. There are a number of devices on the market that tend to be built for getting bluetooth audio on game consoles, for example this one for the nintendo switch. Since the peripheral itself is the one doing the pairing this avoids the need to copy the pairing keys between operating systems when dual booting while also enabling the use of bluetooth audio on operating systems that have poor or non-existent bluetooth audio support.
