- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
It started with notebooks, but that wasn’t the master plan.
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I would love to see them make modular and repairable:
- Phones
- Tablets
- 2-in-1s
- Televisions
- Monitors
- Cameras
- WiFi routers
- Printers (copier, scanner)
Those things so often end up in the dump just because one small part fails, or gets too outdated. Think about all the parts in a wifi router that work just fine, but get thrown away anyway, because the radio module doesn’t support the shiny new WiFi version.
Average people really don’t care about newest wifi version, so I’d say routers are one of the longest living electronics in most households, unless they are rented out from your ISP who might be interested in updating it often to justify the rent.
I hope not phones. Fairphone has the repairable market, and that would take away from Framework as well as Framework taking away from Fairphone, making both weaker.
Maybe tablets would make sense, if you could reuse components from the laptops.
Options and competition are good things for consumers. Not sure why you would be against that.
When you have a small market niche, competition can kill both companies. I’m not worried about options, I’m worried that soon both companies won’t exist.
Please just nail laptops and get where they are in stock and new parts keep being released before you spread yourself too thin.
Honestly? Yea. There’s so much potential revenue selling to businesses that they haven’t even begun tapping into yet.
not to mention they are still way more expensive and impossible to obtain outside the us and europe. it would be nice if they showed us first if they really can support a modular product like this in the actual long term.
My employer bought a bunch of Framework laptops for events, but is struggling to get them in a way that they can be provided as employee laptops.
Do electric cars next. No AI bullshit. Just modular, repairable, customizable vehicles.
Their 18M investment is missing a few zeroes to do that.
Well maybe they need a…
000 18M investment!
Jk, how about electric bikes then?
Already a crowded and fairly repairable market.
framework p r i n t e r
As someone who has been there and done that a few times (Worked at Apple with the first touchpad, Blackbird, laptop, the transition to PowerPC, the Apple Newton, Jawbone headsets and speakers, Leap Frog educational toys, Palm Pre mobile phone, Maker stuff at Intel, and more… sorry for the humble brag), I am salivating at the possibilities for more open (or maybe just open) hardware, forward thinking and innovative, and hackable, like the good ol´ days perhaps.
Maybe our tech can become less black box (especially to the up-and-comers who learn javascript and how to comment out the stuff that doesn´t work) and more inspirational.
If there is a one word label to tag the difference, I will go with Woz over Jobs…
Go Framework, Go!
Tablet?
I would think they’d do a phone first given the market for phones is way bigger.
Isn’t that basically what Fairphone is?
It’s very similar but with a different philosophy. Fairphone is about sustainability and being ethical. Framework is about repairability and upgradability(which the fairphone isn’t).
Honestly I had considered buying a framework but with that article… I think a thinkpad will do for the next 4 years at least Lenovo had figured out how to not get bankrupt.
I don’t think that will end well. Don’t start good things and drive it into a wall please :(
Framework tackling phones is useless if they go the mainstream SoC route (Qualcomm, Mediatek) as they don’t have the software team needed to make those work properly (I would argue alot of handset manufactures don’t either). From what I hear you need a hell of software team to “fix” the garbage Android SDK released for those chips. Most importantly is if they go the closed mainstream SoC route which have EoL SDK support dates then what’s the point of building a durable repairable phone at a higher price point when you have to throw it out at the same as everyone else?
I want to see Framework enter the Linux phone market using “open” chips like Rockchip alongside Pine64’s Pinephone (Pro) and the Librem 5 as I think they would more likely have the funds, dev time and community support to help bring say PostmarketOS into a usable state then have to rework the SDK. This way the phone’s EoL date would be determined be the local phone infrastructure shutdowns. A much longer amount of time.
Please, do phones! Not only are far too many millions of phones being discarded every year, but it’s such a large consumer base (literally everyone) and the current offerings really offer nothing sustainable. It’s also a product category that’s perfect for modularity!
Yes, ok, Fairphone. They don’t sell them anywhere outside of Europe.
Other products like printers, tablets, monitors, TVs, etc. just have too long of a product life cycle to consider them as their next project. I can’t see a huge customer base of people wanting to repair their monitor or printer (no real upgrade path for Framework to offer here).
Yes, ok, Fairphone. They don’t sell them anywhere outside of Europe.
It used to be the case, but it seems like it no longer is:
https://murena.com/america/shop/smartphones/brand-new/murena-fairphone-4/
Another person mentioned that company, but they aren’t Fairphone.
They seem to buy the phones, add their own custom ROM and then resell the phones. Not in Canada, either. And no mention of where to get parts.
Also out of stock on all variants, and they don’t sell the latest model, so it’s not really an option.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That’s one of the biggest reasons it just raised another $18 million in funding — it wants to expand beyond the laptop into “additional product categories.”
Framework CEO Nirav Patel tells me that has always been the plan and that the company originally had other viable ideas beyond laptops, too.
Framework might choose an “equally difficult” category or might instead try something “a bit smaller and simpler to execute, streamlined now that we have all this infrastructure.”
(Patel recently suggested to Jason Carman that Framework might adapt its marketing to reach more everyday audiences.)
The company’s $9 million seed round paid for the original 13-inch laptop design, which has carried on for three generations of components.
Today, Framework has about 50 employees, and it plans to expand to 60 before the end of the year, with “a bit of additional team growth” in 2025.
The original article contains 653 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
After five years building laptops, what might Framework add to the portfolio? Patel won’t say — I only get the barest hints, no matter how many different ways I ask.
Thanks for the nothing burger?
Please god revive project Ara, maybe using the GPU connector for all the modular pieces.
