So I just found out about your company. 15 minutes. I love your vision and couldn’t agree more. The amount of ewaste we produce is staggering and I could go on a 65’000 word novel length rant easily.
I had recently watched the movie Blackberry. And basically it’s about a company that came up with an innovation by combining technologies. I think the next innovation has to be simplification in the sense of rather than creating more physical technologies, and adding as I like to say “yet another screen” to the market, we look at what we have. Make our technology more modular, upgradeable, efficient, less cluttered. It’s time we Marie Kondo our technology. What Framework is doing with the laptops is an idea I’ve had for years. I’m one of many. My problem is, I don’t have the electronic engineering background or finances to start my own company. Also starting a hardware company has several risks.
So, in the last 10 years, I’ve been thinking about technology and modularity and trying to imagine the future. As well, I’ve been observing open source software and seen certain softwares give commercial equivalents a run for their money.
What I envision is this: all of our gadgets being run by one computer - our phone. Smartphones are very powerful. I imagine a scenario where we use our phones to dock with a laptop for instance. The laptop is just a screen and keyboard… no motherboard or cpu. Probably still requiring extra battery power for the screen, but otherwise a dummy system. So our phone is a dockable device… not sure how it would dock exactly.
The phone itself becomes a modular, partially open source device, eventually. Some components are built by companies, others might be created through open source hardware. How that looks exactly, I don’t know. The proprietary phones we have now cannot be continually sustained. It’s also ridiculous that we should consider upgrading every 6 months to a year. The industry certainly makes it seem that way. We take this tech for granted, but really a smartphone is quite the sophisticated piece of hardware that should last a while and should be easy to repair.
So, to get to the point, think about this idea/vision. Could Framework make an upgradeable phone that could dock with other … well, let’s say components? What if the next innovation is phone, laptop, desktop, tv, and more in one device?
The phone itself could also have limitless hardware addon capabilities. Someone could easily design attacheable nunchuck controllers to use the phone like a Nintendo Switch like console for gaming.
I welcome constructive criticism of the concept. I’ve been on this planet for 45 years and seen latest technology go from handheld super 8 8mm film cameras and tape deck stereos to Apple’s ridiculous ski goggles concept. I see technology and life through a particular lens. And I still don’t know everything. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day.