What should we build next?

Personally I don’t intend to buy another piece of electronics for the next 4-5 years.
If you could bring something even more open than the fairphone that could be interesting to me, but I’ll only be in the market for one once the current one expires.

Honestly premium-display options for the framework 13 (OLED or the like) would be currently more interesting to me and something I’d be very willing to sink money into.

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A repairable power bank:

  • IP 68 waterproof
  • energy efficient charging (low losses)
  • rugged for outdoor use
  • with the opportunity to change 1860 cells
  • USB A and USB C with all power delivery standards covered
  • one small form factor to charge phones
  • one bigger form factor to charge tablets and the framework laptops
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Presume you mean 18650

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@MJ1 you’re right, I missed that. Thanks for pointing out!

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I don´t knwo if it has been mentioned yet, but a framework OS would be nice. An elegant, cool and innovative.

They have said they have no intention on doing software.

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After seeing the custom bezels It’s literally the only thing remaining to make it truly customizable. Given the endless posibilities it’s a great opportunity for the 3rd party ecosystem to blossom. All we need is access to the marketplace and the open-sourcing of 3D models for all the covers.

Please make a phone that can be upgraded! I’m in yet another emergency phone purchasing mode because an essential banking app suddenly decided that the OS is too old, and there is no way to upgrade it.

The camera is perfectly fine, the screen is fine, the battery is fine, the housing is fine, and it has a new case from only a few months ago. It irks me to no end that all of this perfectly good hardware is now functionally useless.

Worst of all though, the absolute best the market currently offers is five years of updates, and that’s if you pay $$$ for the latest flagship model, even with Fairphone. My socks last longer than that.

So now I’m trying to sift through the used market to try and find a one or two year old model, which is like trying to find a needle in a haystack because the used market is flooded with thousands of phones past their service life, which are equally useless as the one I’m being forced to replace.

I understand that’s probably not entirely up to the manufacturer if certain suppliers don’t provide updates past a certain life span. But I’d be quite happy to buy a new motherboard without the offending hardware and keep everything else.

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I think there is a great unexplored niche within the typewriters guild. A keyboard tailored to this community will make the Framework laptop basically the only viable portable alternative to digital typing machines since all other laptops incrementally degraded their keyboards.

Maybe even two versions:

  • 2.5 mm key travel membrane - for quite environments
  • 3 mm key travel mechanical - for the ultimate experience

Currently only some high-end gaming laptops have mechanical keyboards but they don’t cater for that market because of their excess power consumption, high price and bulkiness.

Heres my dream list:

Printer - with options for ink tanks instead of cartidges
Phone - simply easy to open to replace the battery, camera, etc
Monitor - replaceable/upgradeable screen possibly the option to install a 13 or 16 mainboard for an all in one
Everything else imaginable - REPAIR EVERYTHING lol

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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. :relaxed:

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OLED is such a drain on power that I’m surprised people recommend it for laptops. QD-OLED has all the benefits without the downsides, at least for the consumer.

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You should check out NexDock.

Good idea, although there are gamepads that attach to a phone in a similar way. Or you could use a gamepad and just Bluetooth it to the phone.

Definitely room for innovation, but a much more niche market and hard to make money in the space. You’re more creating a product and hoping people will gravitate toward it to displace already existing product categories, rather than what the FW13 and FW16 do which is outcompete products in existing categories with established consumer bases. From our perspective it’s a great long-term idea, but business wise it’s a bit hard for them right now probably. Maybe in the future.

That’s pretty much exactly what I’ve been envisioning. Brilliant. I wonder when they started. I gave out my idea once a few years ago, but it would be conceited to think that one of their devs read my post at the time. :rofl: Though you never know.

It definitely is a product to consider in the future. And one that’s dockable of course. I think you’re on the path that eventually goes there. So in the meantime you have an opportunity to throw it on the drawing board and play with the concept. I also think it’s a kind of product that requires many many people and user community to work on, to let it grow into its own well rounded product organically.

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Huh? In theory QD-OLED can be more efficient and brighter than regular OLED. Although in practice, at least for TV’s, it’s basically a wash at the moment (see Samsung S95C vs. LG G3) and they both still suffer from burn-in.

Didnt realise OLED had a hail mary. Last we checked the tech was way behind QD but okay. But QD definitely is much better with burn-in - its listed as still being a thing long term, but in reality its a non-issue. LTT has done a lot of videos on QD and how it wins over regular OLED

Why not Framework just build a whole gamepad controller? Definitely would have the sales volume. Modularity and repairability and personalisation would be a perfect fit.

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I don’t recomend it, I want it. The high power use can be mitigated a lot by using dark themes which I do anyway and they do look fantastic (sure it won’t get as power efficient as some of the low power lcds, but it also looks way batter).

If there were qd oled laptop panels I’d want one of those but until then I’d take regular oled.

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Here’s my wishlist:

  • First and foremost, whatever it takes to “stay focused” on laptops. I’ve only got an 11th gen Framework 13, but (speakers, battery, Linux touchpad situation) it could still be better.
  • Framework 13: Waterproof Toughness Edition
  • Skimmed the thread, didn’t see it much: mesh WiFi hardware for placing behind a router. I’ve got an old Asus router for the “guest network” and their long term support of it has been mediocre. Bought two Asus routers for a “mesh” setup with a wireless backhaul, which are alright, but I don’t remember finding a real alternative to the ones I bought without a “the cloud” account. I wish I could do vlans over WiFi but I can’t.
  • A 100 W power bank. Maybe the Framework 16 could have a 100 Wh battery, could use the same component both places, maximum airplane battery pack.
  • Internet of Shit, sans Internet: I’d buy a non-creepy, non-Internet “smart” thermostat where I had root access. If it can stay limited to my local network, there’d be a real benefit.
  • A Framework charger with a couple USB-C ports, high wattage, good efficiency, minimal idle power usage, some power factor correction… I need one or two more of these to flesh out my collection of too many USB-C power sources.
  • A USB-C cable identifier. Not just resistance. I want to know bandwidth. How many HDMIs will fit on this cable?
  • If I could get them, I’d like a better alternative to Philips Hue bulbs – whatever available standards stay off WiFi frequencies and don’t go on the Internet, a high CRI rating, decent brightness, adjustable white balance. Guess that’s not so modular, unless the extra radio’s a module for the WAP above, eh?

My wishlist of things I’d guess are less of a good fit:

  • A good Linux tablet – depends on the open source community producing good touch UI.
  • A Linux phone that supports GrapheneOS (and therefore also supports less restrictive Android distros). I’ve been intrigued by this for a long time. I’m never buying a Google phone or letting my phone talk to Google, if I can help it. I don’t suspect “Google-hating potential Android user” is a very large, stable market. If you’re just making another Android phone, is there really a point?
  • An E Ink tablet – I want one of these that isn’t locked down, but I don’t know how hard it’d be to get the software right (including say with good PDF text rendering) vs the market size of something that’s not a Kindle or Kobo. The Pine64 people are doing one of these with, I assume, minimal software support.
  • Seconding what somebody up the thread said, a dumb TV. OS updates for support, sure, but no Internet connectivity. I genuinely want this, but the margins and competition in this space have got to be absolutely brutal, especially with the companies all being sleazy and selling data. Then again, I thought the same about laptops. Then again, I wouldn’t spend money on a TV the way I would on a computer, and I’d be extra-picky about colors, lighting, and contrast.
  • A good, non-proprietary implementation of Bluetooth speakers would be great, and fit for radio upgrades at some point earlier than replacement of the speakers themselves, if they were decent quality. But I’d be too picky about the sound, and I’d want ease of use.
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