It started with notebooks, but that wasn’t the master plan.
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The next product should be a sustainable, not publicly traded company. If investors take majority ownership and IPO, Framework’s perceived mission will evaporate quickly in the inevitable search for ever growing profits. I sincerely hope Nirav and Co actually give a shit about the repairable product and retain majority shares. If not 👉👌…
I’d love to see them make other devices. But I want the company to actually be viable and entrenched before they spread themselves even more thinly.
They’re already having trouble releasing firmware and driver updates in a timely manner, especially for Windows users who can’t rely on driver updates packaged in the kernel.
But man I can think of a few cool Framework devices that I’d be into buying…
i see it as giving their industrial engineers something to do.
when you have to design a chasis for reusability and backwards/fowards compatibility, you dont really have the flexibility to make that many changes. instead of just letting them sit there, its better for them to start designing other things in the meantime.
Cool. How about a repairable phone with a headphone jack? I’ll be a day one buyer.
How about a repairable phone with a headphone jack?
The Framework 16 notebook doesn’t even have a headphone jack, only a USB-C to jack adapter.
Removed by mod
Modular ports would be great. I’d love to have two USB ports on a phone rather than a USB and headphone jack.
I’m pretty sure that a USB hub would work at least on Android, giving you as many ports as you want.
Repairable, open phone, you can load whatever OS you want. A phone that is more akin to a computer than a smartphone. A pinephone, but better.
If you don’t care about 3.5mm a FairPhone comes pretty close to that description.
A Framework phone with 2 modular Framework sockets would be amazing. I don’t care if it’s thick. Make it repairable and support Linux Phone OSes like postmarketOS and I would absolutely buy it.
Surely they are aiming for a repairable and modular smartphone eventually. That’s going to be super hard to do. My guess is their next form factor will be a tablet.
Any Linux phone is DOA for the foreseeable future because of the cellular radios.
We can say that for any kind of drivers needed to run a mobile phone.\ Manufacturers of components are less and less providing any documentation, just throw a binary blob and say “put it in your Android build”.
They didn’t say Linux phone though, it could still be android with a custom ROM.
Eh, Pinephone and Librem 5 made it work, but there’s still a fair amount of software limitations here, and I didn’t think Framework should be a software company. But the radios themselves probably aren’t the blocker you make them out to be.
They absolutely did not make it work. Go read any of the reviews and the complete unreliability of the cellular functions of both devices are chief among the criticisms.
My understanding is that those issues are due to suspend to save battery life, which isn’t directly related to the radios. A more appropriate SOC (i.e. one designed for mobile use) would probably be more reliable with the same radios they selected when going on standby.
Tablet is almost free, just don’t have a hinge and have a touchscreen. Release as Chromebook, it will run Android applications
Why Chromebook?
To run Android stuff on x86
Linux can run Android apps since we have Waydroid too and it’s universal, no need for single device - single OS nonsense.
You can install Linux on their Chromebooks, so it would be good to have the choice. Some people will prefer a slightly more seamless Android experience and some people will prefer Waydroid
Chromebook makes sense. They could also do full on Linux. Star labs has a tablet coming out, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for software (I assume, I haven’t tried touchscreen Linux).
A reminder that if something can run Android or ChromeOS doesn’t mean drivers would be available for Linux. And usually they aren’t.
You can order that tablet with Ubuntu, mint, Manjaro, zorin, elementary, etc. There’s gotta be some kind of driver support to build on, no?
Arm machines that are repairable to compete with Apple would be very cool in my opinion. Maybe team up with an integrator like sys76. Could be very cool. I’d personally line up to buy.
Would love it if they just had a shell that takes single board PCs
You can run the mainboard outside of the chais in an external enclosure.
Pine64 has a laptop that’s essentially that. The SBC inside could pretty easily be swapped.
I’d kill for a 2-in-1 framework with a detachable keep board and pen
Dm me i’ll tell you the possible locations and id of the target the 2-in-1 framework laptop will be mailed to you after the kill is confirmed .
Kinky.
🤦♂️
As long as the company itself doesn’t become greedy and doesn’t change it’s mission & vision i always support it
I’m waiting for them to offer a chassis to convert their laptop parts into USFF PCs. Reusing old parts after an upgrade is pretty attractive. I think they mentioned this a while back, I’ve been waiting for it to happen.
I’d also like to see a thunderbolt or oculink GPU bay part that would enable eGPU use with their machines.
And if we’re wishlisting top facing speakers would be 🤌
Didn’t cooler master come out with one a little while ago?
Ah, I guess they did - thanks!
I thought they already offered 3d print models, you can just print out and presto?
Tomorrow, it wants to be a consumer electronics company, period.
Patel won’t say — I only get the barest hints, no matter how many different ways I ask.
I’m curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn’t expect they’d be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there’s some more niche target they have.
I’m sure a Framework phone is at least an idea for them to produce. Definitely an extremely difficult challenge. It would be nice if it allowed for removable RAM, but it could be hard due to SODIMM being relatively large or due to RAM being put on SOCs. I imagine it shouldn’t be too much to ask for removable storage at least, given how small NVME drives can get. Upgradable SOC/motherboard is a must.
I want one with an e-ink display. That way I can swap out the e-ink display when I need to for a proper display. That wouldn’t work on a normal laptop but should work for their uniquely modular design.
Please let it be a smart TV.
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!
cool - but if their product lines are modular and they try to break out of their niche market. whats to stop someone with a lot more capital from snapping them up (Dell, Lenovo, etc)?
Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don’t know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it’s not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.
Money talks.
When the owners of a private company are offered millions more than they’ll likely make over the nest ten years, the odds of selling are very high.
Look at all the software devs that gets bought.
There’s also few but existing examples of people that resist the selling urge, like the VLC dev
There’s also few but existing examples of people that resist the selling urge
The story is literally about a funding round for Framework. Those investors don’t just give away the money. They buy a stake in the company.
Yes, the exception. That simply supports my argument.
And we’re talking about stuff we see. Again, I bet you’d never heard of FolderShare or UbiBoot before I mentioned them here, and those are just 2 tools of many that I’ve lost to acquisitions over the years.
How many other tools/products have companies quietly acquired and killed that we don’t know about?
VLC
Exceptions are possible. Money isn’t everything for everyone.
Exceptions are possible.
And being exceptions proves the norm.
I’ve seriously lost countless tools because MS acquired them and shut them down. Thousands of dollars gone.
I’m not holding my breath.
Nothing, but it’d still be a win for the consumer because then we’d have repairable/customizable laptops across the board?
We’ve also seen other brands aren’t interested in it because it’s harder to make smaller/thinner laptops when they need to be customizable. Also they make more money from having people throw out their old laptops and buying a new one.
More likely not.
Microsoft is well known for buying software companies to shut them down.
Foldershare was a product in 2005 that enabled you to share windows folders across the internet just like sharing across a LAN. MS bought them.
Same with Ubiboot - it enabled you to move a windows install from one machine to any other hardware - on boot it would reconfigure the drivers. Worked brilliantly.
I’ve used countless products over the years which no longer exist after they were acquired by MS. Things which don’t even exist within MS offerings. Clearly bought to be shut down.
This can’t be right because capitalism breeds innovation like they said! Right? …Right??
It does. Those were both innovative products.
Not sure why you feel the need to derail the conversation with your ideology.
Your conversation is about shelving products so other companies cannot compete.
The modularity makes it easier for them to grow slowly and incrementally. Slow and manageable growth is the key for a business to not overextend themselves to the point they get snapped up by the competition
