Do Dell, or Lenovo, or … share their batch sizes? Why expect FW to do so/
OK. Again, no need to get defensive and derail this entire thread.
Dell, Lenovo, and others are very old companies that share financials (pay careful attention to my full statement you quoted, particularly the word “or”, and note that I never said I “expected” anything). I am not throwing any shade at Framework. I truly hope they are successful, and the point of this thread was for folks here to share their journey to the Framework 16.
Several of the replies really reinforce why we’re all hopeful that Framework succeeds. On that note, @Alan_Pearce and @Magic, I would love for you to share your journeys to Framework (the 13 or the 16).
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Publicly traded companies are required to share financial information. Privately held companies are not.
That might take a while! 
I’ll try and keep it brief. We had a BBC Micro when I was a kid as that’s what the schools here used. First family PC in the 486 era when I was at college.
Cast your mind back to the mid-90s and I had a couple of cheap secondhand PCs at Uni so I wasn’t dependent on the IT labs - first an IBM PS/2 Model 80 full tower, then a cheap Packard Bell from a family friend.
Got a part time job in the local Computer Superstore, earned enough money to build a Cyrix 6x86 PC from parts. Also picked up a Toshiba T2130CT (486DX4-75) as my first laptop (again used) from a colleague, which got replaced by Toshiba Satellite 480CDT (P233MMX) a couple years later for my final year. Got a bargain on that one - customer bought it in the store, and it went faulty within a couple weeks. Customer got a replacement, the faulty one was just outside the 7 day return window as dead on arrival, so went back to Toshiba for repair. Parts availability problems as it’s a brand new machine, so took about 4 months for it to get fixed and returned to store. By which point it was discounted to clear out old stock, so I got it very cheap. Used it for 2 years, sold it for more than I paid originally, After that was a Dell Inspiron 8100, which I just got back from my sister after she found it when moving house.
We’ll stick with the laptops for now. After the Dell was a MacBook Pro, bought a week after they came out. Mostly stuck with Macs as daily drivers ever since. A 2008 aluminium MacBook, a 2011 15" MBP, a late-2013 15" retina MBP after that as a consumer law replacement due to Radeon issues and currently a 2019 MBP. The FW16 will replace that.
Desktops - variety of self built stuff over the years. The 6x86 machine got a P200MMX upgrade as the Cyrix had terrible floating point performance so 3Dfx games ran … poorly. P2-350 after that, which got a P3-700 CPU swap. P4-1.8A after that, which I still have somewhere.
Current gaming rig has evolved over time with mainboard swaps still using the original case. Started off as a Core 2 Duo with an X1950 then Radeon 4850, then went to an i5-4670K, with an R9-290, then an HEDT X299 board with i7-7740X and a Vega56. Currently an i9-10920X in the same board with an RTX 3070. It’s mostly used for Sim Racing, with a full cockpit setup so evolves to keep up with the software.
Tend to keep a Windows type laptop around as a separate machine nowadays, usually ex-corporate used ThinkPads up until ordering the FW16. Why ThinkPads? - went to work for IBM after graduating for a few years, and the job after that has been buying IBM/Lenovo as long as I’ve been there. So I know them pretty much inside out and they’re dependable. T540p, then a P50 when one came up at a good price in late 2019. Recently acquired a T480 for fiddling around learning Windows 11 as they’re really good value at the moment.
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Memories!
I had one of those at some point too. And now I am remembering the “I checked my notebook!” ads. 
I also had a Toshiba laptop. It had an issue that I can’t recall but I did have to send it for repairs and I didn’t get it back for 6 weeks. Yet another reason to look forward to the Framework.
i made the mistake of buying a ‘high end’ chromebook, because i am long since done with windows as a primary os, i was frustrated with apple, and finding a thin linux-intended laptop with decent battery life is historically misery.
turns out chromeos was a much greater misery… a bunch of the features that were ‘any day now’ never actually manifested (to my knowledge my model still doesn’t have borealis support), the os constantly shifted in ways that made UX difficult for me esp for accessibility needs, and it turns out that even if you run your own org, and register your chromebook to that org, google has the power, ability, and willingness to override your decisions at random.
it hit the point where the machine was an active health hazard for me. so i went back to staring at the market, depressingly aware that if i wanted a lightweight (i am disabled and moving heavy things is hard) high power efficiency machine capable of doing substantial loads on demand, that meant apple again.
of course, i couldn’t quite meet all my goals… even apple won’t sell a macbook air with enough ram to meet my workloads, and the macbook pros are much heavier than i’d prefer. still, i came within a micron of buying a high end refurbished M1 max macbook pro with a crapton of ram (and would have undoubtedly been too heavy, but at the time i wasn’t thinking hard enough about that), when i happened to look closer at one of the articles that came up in my research and went…
“framework? … wait. those guys are still around? i thought they’d fold in less than a year.”
so i dug in closer. and saw the established history – which, like kyle_tuck, i find optimistic but not reassuring, they ARE still a young company – and went, “okay. maybe it’s time.”
with the amd mainboards being there, the framework 13 looked like… it was almost my ideal. good ram capacity, solid cpu, surprising battery life (multiple benchmarks suggested it was actually, in some metrics, meaningfully competing with an M2 macbook pro, which was startling)
but i just kept hitching over the screen (that aspect ratio is terrible for me), and the port count. i actually use all the ports on the horrible chromebook i needed to get rid of, on a regular basis, and the fw13’s four expansion card slots would have left me short without an external hub or dock.
so even though by all the numbers the 7840 version of the fw13, with a large amount of ram, would do what i needed, i kept staring at the framework 16. which would run the same workloads, have more ports, and even have an optional gpu. and a numpad! and…
… be over 2kg. which brought me back to the disability problem; the 1.4kg chromebook is right at the edge of my ability to consistently manage. so the fw13 is clearly the right call, right?
but the fw16 has replacable keyboards! technical documentation for custom parts! what if i could, after all these years, get a custom keyboard in a laptop that actually met my ergonomic needs? (which, btw, is basically still a standard us qwerty keyboard, but at 18mm key pitch. small hands. i don’t even need mechanical switches, i’ll take membrane if it’s decent quality. i’m not that picky)
the more i thought about it, the more i thought about an idea i’d had in the past but never followed up on: installing some kind of laptop arm that’s able to hold up the weight of a laptop, but in the arrangement suitable for my needs as someone who spends a lot of time bedridden. with a great deal of help and planning, i got some furniture modified, got an arm together… and just needed a machine to test it with.
obviously i didn’t want to buy a computer i didn’t know if i could use yet, so… i pulled out an old mid-2012 retina macbook pro, and refurbished it my own damn self. over two days of effort, but a little under $300 of materials, and now i am running a fairly ancient core i7 machine with 16 gigs of ram, weighing right at 2kg, with a laptop arm that is capable of holding more than that in the positions i want, while being able to trivially relocate as needed.
victory: i have proven i can have a 2.1 to 2.3kg 16" laptop. ALSO i was able to shelve that DAMNABLE chromebook so it could stop stressing me out badly enough one of my service animals kept thinking it was biting me and trying to shove it off of my lap. (gently, at least.)
framework 16 preorder placed. batch 15. estimated Q2. at the moment, no gpu in the order, because honestly the rdna3 stuff will probably meet my needs. it’s cpu and ram that matter for my workloads. but i might request an edit in the intervening months based on reactions from people in earlier batches? idk.
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The early ones could be a bit glitchy. The internal CPU cache failed on mine just before the warranty ended. When I pulled it out the CPU socket was scorched! They were really quick, but flew a bit close to the sun. The seller replaced it and the board, the new one was a low-voltage version and ran way cooler.
I’m thankful my dog is not nearly as concerned with my well-being. The way I yell at technology, which is to say at the drop of a hat, everything with an on button would have bite marks! Even at work I can’t control myself. I make programming look like an emotional roller coaster.
Unfortunately, as far as I know you can’t change the GPU without losing your place in the queue. You can only change the accessories they sell with it.
I have a 15" LG Gram running NixOS (Linux). I’ve been super happy with it, but my E key is starting to become stochastic, and my 9 key is completely dead. Today, I just noticed my hotkeys for turning down and muting the volume are not working. In addition, my audio jack is super unreliable now.
I took it into Best Buy to talk to the Geek Squad guys about it, and to repair the keys and audio jack, only to find out that they can’t work on it, even with all their tools. And they suggested I not try to replace the keys, because they get people trying this and ending up with dead keys all the time. And if I want to replace the audio jack, I’ll have to replace the whole motherboard, because it’s soldered on.
I’m a big hippie. Vegan, stopped flying, sold my car, don’t use heat or A/C, limit my showers, and limit my purchases of things in general, try to get most of my food now from the farmer’s market.
The easiest thing in the world would be to just get another LG Gram and replace it, but I would feel guilty about that. And it just is against my whole family’s heritage of being tinkerers. If I could easily take apart the LG Gram, clean out the keys, resolder the audio jack or figure out what’s going on there, I would, but I know it’s not designed to be maintained by mere mortals, so that’s why I’m here.
I’m not on the waiting list yet for the 16" model. I am sure everyone’s least favourite question is, “When will it be in bulk production,” but man, I could desperately use one of these right now.
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This is me, btw. I’m briefly pseudo-famous again, as the 30th anniversary of Doom just happened, but back in the day, I was prolly best known for porting Doom to Linux and/or the cheat codes.
I work as an advisor at several tech and game companies and as the CTO here:
I do all my coding in vim on a transparent terminal with ASMR vids running in the background to keep me calm about the ever-swelling size of my codebase. I don’t actually want GPU perf on my laptop. I just want long battery life.
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awkward, but good to know. well, i can endure.
edit: looks like the gpus are “coming soon” in the marketplace now. it seems plausible i’ll be able to independently order one around the time my batch rolls up? since that’s out in q2
so, there aren’t any actual guides there, but ifixit rates the lg gram 15" (2016? is that your year?) as a “9/10” repairability. the mid-2012 macbook pro i recently resurrected is listed as a “1/10”, so presumably this device of yours is more approachable.
the elaboration on this rating goes:
The LG Gram 15’s repairability score of 9 out of 10 is equally as impressive. This high score is due to all of the internal components, besides the keyboard, being easy to remove after taking off the device’s lowercase cover. Additionally, the RAM and SSD are both user-replaceable and upgraded parts are available. Furthermore, the LG Gram 15 uses only Phillips screws, meaning users don’t need any special tools for disassembly and repair. The only downside to LG Gram 15 repair is that LG doesn’t provide repair documentation to users.
if you’re in dire enough need, i would personally risk taking a look, and seeing how bad it is.
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That’s so late in the pre-order that I would think it would be available. Either that or you would have to wait for a little bit. But that’s not so bad.
Oh wow! Thanks for that! Such amazing memories. My jaw hit the floor too when I first saw Doom.
I am still a big fan/user of vim as well. When I use another editor, I always end up entering random characters trying to navigate the file.
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I summarized my journey with a spreadsheet, with a few charts…
The good thing to notice is that, except date and price, all scales are logarithmic. Who knows for how long…
[Pietro's computers - Google Sheets](My journey to Framework 16)
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Just wanted to confirm this is in fact the case, as noted here (emphasis added):
the following changes cannot be made to an existing Framework Laptop 16 Pre-Order without cancellation:
- Switching from DIY to Prebuilt or vice versa
- Changing the System choice - e.g. changing the choice of CPU or changing from Performance to Overkill
- Changing the Expansion Bay Module to add or remove a Graphics Module
- Adding or Removing a Power Supply from a DIY Configuration
Notably, I was able to contact FW Support to remove the expansion bay shell from my pre-order, because that didn’t add or remove the graphics module itself (which I also ordered). So it’s certainly possible to ask FW Support to make some changes that you can’t do yourself, but unfortunately adding a graphics module is not one of them.
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I mainly used my laptop for coding HW simulators and FPGA development, so I value hardware stability a lot. (Design synthesis takes a long time, so does compilation for large projects.)
Unfortunately, I owned several laptops that were supposed to have decent hardware but suffered from a plethora of software issues: Bloatware, incomplete driver offerings, etc.
I knew about Framework through an LTT video. While their modularity and repairability stand out, I looked into the software side of things more. I decided to pre-order one after a deep dive into the documentation and support pages of Framework 13. The complete absence of bloatware, ease of driver/BIOS downloads, and abundance of community support make the laptop look promising to me.
Here is a short list of the laptops I owned:
-
(2016) Alienware 15 R2. i7-6820HK, 4K, 32 GiB RAM, R9 M295X.
Dell thought it was a good idea to install the OS on the HDD instead of SSD, and of course, it came with a spectrum of bloatware. However, the Dell support site offers a complete range of drivers, so I just wiped and reinstalled W10 with (relative) ease.
Didn’t install Linux for this one. -
(2018) Surface Book 2 15’'. i7-8650U, 4K, 16 GiB RAM, GTX 1060.
There were plenty of small bugs: USB ports failing for absolutely no reason; Detaching and re-attaching the screen suddenly taking away 30% of battery capacity; etc.
I finally lost it when MS released a W10 patch that specifically made my laptop crash. I was so mad that I still remember the patch number: 1803 November update KB4467682. MS retracted it pretty quickly, but the damage was already done for me.
The closed nature of Surface hardware stops me from trying Linux altogether. -
(2019) Thinkpad X1 Extreme Gen 2. i9-9880H, 4K, 64 GiB RAM, GTX 1650.
This one has been pretty OK in terms of software. MyLenovo was a slightly cleaner “bloatware”, but I needed it for the battery charge limit option so I kept it. Driver offerings are complete so I could do a clean reinstall without any issues.
Linux support was decent - after all, it was later certified for 20.04 LTS. -
(2023) ROG Zephyrus M16 (GU604). i9-13900H, 2K, 64 GiB RAM, RTX 4070.
ASUS never disappoints me in terms of bloatware. Armory crate is textbook garbage, and MyASUS serves no use besides limiting my battery charging. Making matters worse, the ASUS support page does NOT offer the complete drivers: The TB4 driver was missing. I found out only after I reinstalled the OS, and I ended up downloading a sketchy driver package from the ROG forum to make my laptop work with my docking setup.
Linux setup “kinda” works for 22.04 LTS - definitely no RGB and MUX switching, but other stuff worked OK.
On a separate note, I did consider Macs at one point for their (relative) stability and lack of bloatware due to their closed ecosystem. However, I hated Apple’s design choices that made their laptops less (or even not) repairable: T2 chip and soldered RAM + NAND were the dealbreakers that steered me away.
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Very cool. I mainly played Doom on Windows but I think I did spin it up on my early-mid 90’s Slackware instance just for the hell of it.
Thanks for the suggestions & love! I went ahead and got another LG Gram for now so that I can afford to badly attempt fixing the old one, which is otherwise in great shape. My next will definitely be a Framework 16", though!
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