Hello Framework community. I have been looking at your laptops for a while and I want to buy one as soon as I can afford it. It is nice to finally see a company that respects my values. I have been wondering of there will be a cheaper framework built around a celeron or pentium and optimized for battery life.
One of the intel pentium gold 8505’s has a intelligence processing unit. I would love to see an option for lower power processors in the framework line, and using the pentium silver and gold series would make the framework cheaper. These processors would also give an edge over laptops in which the likes of hp or lenovo went with a last gen chip knowing most people won’t care. That is one of my biggest pet peeves in buying low end and mid range computers.
This range of chips appears to be a good option.
(https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/compare.html?productIds=212329,214754,226449,226265,226262,212330)
Possible but unlikely. More than likely the next series to come out will be some version of AMD followed by potentially an ARM/RISC-V board. Your best bet would to buy something used off of a user on the forum once pricing comes down to earth. I’ve looked at last gen laptops on eBay and the pricing there is totally out of whack. Over 1K for last gen doesn’t make a lot of sense when I could purchase new for that price…
I don’t see it happening. Celeron or Pentium computers are usually in a race to the bottom with the big brands, and so a smaller company like Framework wouldn’t be able to make any profit. Everyone would be like “Why would I buy that when it is twice the price of a similarly specced Acer or HP?”
When you have a niche product from a small company (like Framework is, unfortunately), some things have to be cut or else it could harm things for everyone.
As I’ve mentioned in other threads, an AMD Mendocino could be an ideal budget option with it being a quad-core Zen2 chip with two RDNA2 iGPU compute units on the inexpensive 6nm node with a teeny-tiny die which would therefore make it even cheaper.
The only bottleneck is that it almost certainly doesn’t support DDR4 just like AMD’s other current mobile-focused products, so I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Framework wouldn’t consider AMD to be an option until even Intel drops support for DDR4 (presumably with Intel’s 14th gen)… though by then Mendocino will probably have had some sort of successor of its own (maybe something Zen4 based or, heck, Zen4c based?)
I was wondering the same also! will there be a cheaper option?
@Jason7 Used and Refurbs if they ever restock. Other than that…don’t count on it. Not with this chassis at least. It doesn’t make sense to pair such a high-resolution display with a cheap CPU. If they do build a cheaper model, it’ll be something entirely new.
Honestly I could see them doing an i3, but that’s the lowest I could see them going… But then they could go out and announce a Pentium version tomorrow, so who knows!
Pentium and Celeron no longer exist. End of a venerable branding.
The brands are gone but the lower end CPUs still exist. They’re just called Intel processors now, without the Core brand. It wouldn’t reduce the price all that much though; they might manage to shave $150 off the price tag with a lesser but still acceptable CPU and perhaps axing the fingerprint reader, but that’s about it because the other premium components (display, keyboard, trackpad, WiFi card) and the build will still cost. Without those other things, I don’t think the result would be a computer they would want to put the Framework brand on.
Getting down to a more mass-market price point like $500 would require a radical rethink of the product, with cost reductions happening everywhere while retaining the core value of repairability. It would likely have to use a 16:9 display because that aspect ratio is mass-produced for TV-related uses; any other shape costs extra. It would also require being a bigger company that can negotiate better deals on key components. Someday Framework might be ready to take on that project, but as things stand, with them still doing limited volume production and selling everything they can make, I don’t think it would be a good use of resources. Get the 16" out first, then maybe take on a lower end system in a year or two. Or perhaps a 2-in-1 next, and THEN the low cost system…
I noticed that intel is phasing out the pentium and celerons in favor of the new “intel processor” line. The best of the low power cpus in this line is the intel n200. Although there is a better model in the core i3 range called the Intel core i3 n300, which I think would make a great cpu for an energy efficient framework. It has a TDP of 7 watts with a 32 execution unit iGPU.