Why is there no paid repair options for out of warranty issues? Support wants me to buy a new board to solve problems I didn't cause

Community Support
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Taking Framework’s morals, stance and positioning in the consumer electronics space into account, does anyone else think it’s absolutely wild they aren’t offering a paid repair service?

I doesn’t take a genius to see that QC has been in the toilet the past year, and it seems that a lot of the earlier 13s are now falling apart with failures that render the board unusable long before the expected lifespan of something in this price class.

After being told by support that the only way out of my warranty-less 12th Gen 13’s problems (that existed since day one, were never solved in my warranty period, and were no fault of my own) was to buy myself a new board.

I would happily sign up for a $100-300 service to guarantee that I would receive some kind of working board back, be it fixed/refurbed/upgraded depending on the problem.

To me, one of the reasons I signed up with FW was to keep silicon out of landfills, but being sunk-cost-fallacied into buying a new board because “omg upgrade so easy”, even if it was my fault or not (it wasn’t).

“but framework provides schematics for independents so you can arrange your own repair!”

Yes. OK. But that’s not what i’m talking about. My issue is a BIOS issue. They haven’t been able to solve it within my warranty period, nor in the BIOS updates outside of my warranty period. They’re now ignoring the issue and support tell me to buy a new board. What is an independent repair shop going to do for me in this case?

There’s a myriad of known, repeatable and and seemingly unsolvable bugs across all generations and configs evidenced here and on reddit that a repair shop wouldn’t have a chance in hell of being able to fix, and the fact there’s no other way out than filling my garbage can and emptying my wallet is basically unforgivable and stands against basically every moral Framework claims to have.

Instead of selling e-waste disguised as “mystery boxes” and putting the responsibility of the disposal on the user, maybe they should spend a bit more time actually living up to their tagline “Let’s fix consumer electronics”.

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We provide largely swappable components. The charge for the OOW part replacement, would be about the same as purchasing one in our Marketplace. We can arrange to have a repair technician test and replace any parts that they determine need to be replaced for an additional fee + parts if that’s what you’d like to do. Most customers choose not to go that route and would rather replace it themselves.

As for recycling, instead of sending most parts back, we ask customers to keep the item (for dev, DIY, tinkering) or to dispose of it in an environmentally safe manner. We have a list of some e-waste recycling programs here.

I’ll be happy to take a look at your ticket and see if there’s any other options available if you’d like. Shoot me a DM / Modmail with the email address you used on your support ticket.

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