As a prospective buyer, I’d like to see a much greater focus on the existing Framework 13 (and 16) laptop models, building up the infrastructure needed to lower prices instead of diversifying into different sectors that have entirely different needs.
You don’t need to destabilize the entire electronics industry from day 1; to be honest, the way you’re spreading yourself so thin from the very start makes me worried you’re not going to be around anymore when it would be time to me to upgrade. At the current price-point, it’s a really hard-sell, even for the people who would be willing to shell out for a Macbook, and Especially with the American economy being the way it is right now. The prices need to drop or else the demand will dry up, and that can only happen with better infrastructure that can only happen with more focus on a specific niche. Amazon started as a bookstore, after all, and they only moved on from books after they’d perfected and stabilized their place in that market.
I get the passion, but if you really want to fix the entire industry, you gotta get a solid revenue stream first, and then use that to plant new companies with new focuses. It’s like a factory game: before you expand, you need to ensure your supply.
The Framework 13 has a niche, and it’s one that’s getting wider by the day as Microsoft and Apple find new and unique ways to shoot themselves in the foot. But the cost is stopping demand. Use your money to cement the Framework 13 as a big name in the laptop industry by making it more accessible, then slowly branch out to new things. Right now you’re priced as if you’re competing with Macbooks, when your market competes with Thinkpads.
The other thing I’m kinda turned off by is… well, I keep asking myself if it’s all just a gimmick. While the upgradable motherboard and CPU, and all of the internals really, being open and accessible is exactly what I want in a laptop, the ports and the different keyboard configurations just feel so gimmicky. So much space (and a good bit of battery life as far as I can tell) is being taken up by the massive adapters, when to be honest, I’d rather get that space back and bring along my own dongle or converter.
I can’t think of any reason to swap the physical ports on my laptop except to upgrade them (e.g. USB 2.0→3.0→C as new tech increases speeds), which- wait now that I think about it, that can’t actually be done with the current setup!
If you were to make the ports modular in design, instead of in shape - allowing them to be removed from their place on the motherboard and reinstalled, using the same kind of high-bandwidth bridge used for the graphics card (that can theoretically transfer more data than any port available today can accept) - I’d happily shell out for the extra cost of that bridge, since it gives me assurance that when the time comes, I can upgrade and keep the laptop working.
Everything in your mission statement and objectives and marketing checks all the right boxes, which is why I’ve gone through like five times picking a configuration, thinking about it, trying a different configuration, looking at parts, checking reviews, and seriously considering your product more than I have anything else in the past few years. I keep having to stop myself from buying one now and thinking critically later, because it looks so cool, but when I look at it critically, I’m worried.
You guys say that you wanted laptops to have the renewability of a desktop, and I couldn’t agree with that more. But your whole business model revolves around your users being able to trust that you’ll be here in five, ten, fifteen years. You’re competing with companies that have decades of factories and capital under their belt, and I’ve seen too many startups stay stuck on the gimmicks that attract first buyers. We crave the certainty of steel, not latches.
So basically, my ideal Framework is a well-tested laptop series that’s had time and love poured into perfecting it, and just has parts made for past models. Even if it isn’t fully “modular”, even if every new iteration has different internals (which I’d want, since it means you aren’t stuck with technical debt from the original chassis), it has the same consumer-friendly features as you’ve included in the 13: not soldering in the RAM, WiFi card, or SSD, keeping open-sourced specs, and designing it with repair in mind even at the cost of a larger footprint.
But instead of being flashy and gimmicky with hotswappable parts that I’d never want to hotswap, I want it to have the same build quality and reliability as the crappy $400 Thinkpad I had ten years ago: it may have been made of plastic, but the dang thing just wouldn’t give up. I’d be more than willing to spend $1500, $2000, $3000 on that. Maybe a bit more to not be made of plastic.
Now the problem is that I don’t know what else to get to replace my laptop, since the Framework is the only one that I’ve ever had actually catch my eye. Seriously, it pains me so much to walk away because I want one so badly. I’m almost considering getting one anyway just to support your mission. But whether I buy it or not, I wanted you to know what’s stopping me from diving in head-first.
(Since everything longer than a paragraph has to specify this nowadays: If you look at the draft logs on the backend, you’ll see that I spent like two hours writing this entire thing by hand. I’d never ask the lying machine to communicate for me, I like communicating on my own. I’m just sad because I wanted it so bad.)