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Before they do that, I kind of wish that they'd be a laptop company that makes laptops that have 100 Wh batteries.
It occurs to me: might Framework’s team need to focus on a few lingering laptop issues before moving on to new territory?
Yeah. Like, if you have only 60 employees, you should have a lot of room for growth in the laptop market. Does it make sense to start spreading out resources? I'd rather see them become successful in the laptop market than become a flash in the pan.
I don't understand why companies keep putting such small batteries in laptops. Especially in the 16" laptop, anything less than 90 is just not acceptable in something that actually costs real money and isn't an ultra thin device. Cheap garbage? Fine. You get what you pay for. Starting at $1700 pre built? No.
Anything with over 100WH batteries would need airline approval before you can fly with it. This is why laptop makers rarely exceed this limit.
https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devices-with-batteries
Yeah, but that's not what I'm talking about. It's really hard to find laptops today that get up to 100 Wh. And the guy you were talking to wanted at least 90 Wh.
It ain't the FAA making laptops have 50 Wh or less batteries.
A current Thinkpad T14 with the largest battery option is 52 Wh.
The few laptops that you can get in 2024 with a 100 Wh battery are generally very-high-power gaming laptops with a relatively short usable battery life off one charge.
Tuxedo Computers out in Germany makes a non-gaming 14-inch InfinityBook with a 100 Wh battery.
There are some very expensive "ruggedized" laptops with large batteries intended for use away from civilization, like the Panasonic Toughbook (can take two batteries and do 136 Wh total).
It's really uncommon today.
It does add something by way of weight, but I just can't believe that the entire market out there honestly wants to have shorter laptop battery life over a slightly-heavier laptop. I mean, sure, all else held equal, I'd take a lighter laptop. And there's some size where I don't want a larger battery -- like, I don't want a Tesla Powerwall glued to the underside of my laptop. But at 100Wh, the current airline limit? Hell, yes, I sure as heck would rather have the longer battery lifetime.
And let's even say that someone is completely fine with their existing laptop battery lifetime -- like, they usually use their laptop plugged in, only have short stints away from a plug, like a conference room. Then you still can trade battery capacity for other desirable things. Stick a brighter screen on. Have a higher refresh rate. Have a more-powerful CPU or GPU and the fans to cool it. Have the capacity to drive external USB devices that may slurp power off the laptop's battery. Restrict the maximum-charge level so that the battery's lifetime is extended -- batteries degrade rather more quickly if fully charged, and a number of devices have settings to permit them to be only partially-charged -- without needing to cut into the capacity for a single charge.
I absolutely understand small-battery, budget laptops existing for people who strongly want the price to be at a minimum. Cut RAM down to a bare minimum, put in as little storage as possible, slash the battery to what's tolerable.
I also understand that there are people who are hell-bent on ultra-light laptops, want everything at all possible stripped out. That's fine too.
But surely there are people who don't fall into one of those two camps.
I just can't believe how hard it is to find 100Wh laptops in 2024. And traditionally, that wasn't the case. You could find plenty of laptops with 100Wh batteries. In the past, some laptop vendors let you choose the size of battery you wanted, and some even had dual batteries, one internal and a hot-swappable battery.
I get that USB PD powerbanks can help alleviate some of the problem, and I'm sure that that has to have been the factor causing laptop vendors to start slashing internal battery sizes, but they also aren't the same thing as an actual internal battery. There's no protocol for them to report their charge, so a laptop can't report life remaining. Theoretically, one could have one pretend to be a UPS rather than a battery, and there are various protocols for those, though OSes don't -- well, Linux doesn't, don't know about other OSes -- treat UPSes as another battery, so you're not gonna get software packages incorporating it into their "time remaining" estimate in the dock, and I'm not aware of any USB powerbanks that actually try to use this route. It's another box and cable to lug around, and another port on the laptop tied up.
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.
Modular ports would be great. I’d love to have two USB ports on a phone rather than a USB and headphone jack.
two USB ports
I don't know if both could provide the same amount of power, and I'd bet -- given that laptops don't -- that the phone would only be able to charge off one.
USB ports aren't perfectly interchangeable today. If they can't be made to be, I kind of wish that at least USB would have a set of standards for indicating power-in capable ports and ports by wattage capability. Like, reserve one color or symbol or something for one, one for another. Right now, device manufacturers just do whatever and sometimes don't indicate what is what. I mean, yeah, it's great that they're backwards compatible, but when you have ports that don't all behave the same, it'd be nice for it to be immediately-obvious what they do.
Also, while I'm dreaming, I'd like power-pack and battery capacity to be listed in watt-hours rather than amp-hours, given (a) that voltage isn't universally the same and (b) that what people care about is about how long something can be run ("I have an N watt device and an M watt-hour battery...").
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.
You can get laptops that have 5G radios that you can use for data with Linux.
As I understand it, there's no support for voice/SMSes at the radio level, but in theory, if you were willing to tolerate it and your cell service provider offers support, you could do WiFi calling.
Could also get service from a random other VoIP provider, use that over the data connection.
Probably not as battery-efficient, requires more of the stack to be awake to be listening for incoming calls.
I think that a larger downside is that Android software is designed for a touch screen and low power usage and low data usage across the board, and GNU/Linux software generally isn't.
I imagine the lack of voice support presents some compliance issues with emergency calls.
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".
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.
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 .
As long as the company itself doesn't become greedy and doesn't change it's mission & vision i always support it
i just cant escape the headphone jack jihadists even in this thread
We won't rest until every washing machine has 2.5, 3.5, 4.4 and 6.35 jack sockets by default.
Good.
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 🤌
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 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.
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.
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!
It would be nice if they partnered with fairphone.
