It's 2021 and I can't believe we have to recycle perfectly good laptops because of swollen batteries or other replaceable components not easily serviceable. That was not the case for my 1983 Apple //e. And now Chromebooks EOL, sealed Macbooks, the next best Surface? Computers have become appliances for the landfill after data extraction from the platforms. I hope frame.work marketplace thrives, consumers need freedom from the tyranny of convenience. 50 million metric tonnes of e-waste and going https://www.ft.com/content/26e1aa74-2261-11ea-92da-f0c92e957... We need a different mindset.
The Framework Laptop
821–830 of 1001 posts
Re: The Framework Laptop
#822Re: The Framework Laptop
#823Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be the best. 100%. On my personal devices I don't want to compromise on trackpad or keyboards (I like that apple went back on the butterfly keyboards). The rest of my comment is just my personal experience so take it with a grain of salt. I've found the trackpad experience on the XPS and Thinkpad X1 laptops to be excellen…
> I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money. May I suggest sponsoring Hector Martin on GitHub[0]? He’s working on building first-class support for the M1 architecture (including drivers) into Linux. [0] https://github.com/marcan
Caveat: may not include an awesome trackpad driver.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#824Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be honest, I've used a laptop as a primary computing device my whole life - and I have no idea what a "sane touchpad" would even be. They really are so frequently bad that I can't imagine what a good one would be like. I mostly use PCs (often with Linux), but used a mac for work for while - and I can't really say I saw the appeal in that touchpad either. Besides issues that come from low-quality pads + linux dri…
I'm with you on this one. I just find them incredibly difficult to use long term, despite multiple years across the various Macs and PC laptops I've used. I strongly suspect most of the complaints about PC trackpads are a bit like Windows/Linux/Mac users complaining about the current font rendering on any of the others. I can't help wondering how much is just personal preference + a bit of echo chamber.
Well actually, Win10 font rendering is broken, i.e. 1 and l look completely the same on Courier New on Win10, but not on Win7 ... there are years old bug reports (it broke in some feature update), but of course those have been ignored.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#825Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've got the street cred but producing and marketing hardware is so damn hard. Ouya and the Essential phone are two cases that immediately spring to mind where the founding teams were credible, but the products ended up being massive flops. Good luck to them anyway. The idea is cool and I think if I were on the lookout for a Linux laptop and they delivered on their quality promise, I'd consider them.
Yes, I remember being particularly disappointed when Google's Project Ara [1] to create a modular mobile phone was shelved. It seemed like a fantastic idea, and I truly thought that Alphabet/Google had the cash/clout - and will - to deliver. Still, I haven't lost my optimism just yet. As you say, good luck to Framework with the laptop project. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara
I was never very optimistic about Ara. In general, modular electronics is a good idea in paper, but a terrible one in practice.
- It comes with quite the price tag, adding connectors everywhere gets expensive fast.
- Some interfaces are very tricky to modularize, RAM & CPU are very closely linked, and it’s very hard to protect them from ESD.
- Which generally points you to the PC solution, don’t protect it, enclose everything and standardize.
There’s also the more “business” part of modular electronics. PC parts are only cheap through massive volume, but building a modular phone requires you to (mostly) build all of your parts. The only way to make it feasible requires more than one device using the same modules, which defeats the uniqueness of the device.
Laptops are way more feasible just because that modularization is already on the market, and you don’t need to build your own RAM SODIMMs or SSDs.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#826Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like the XPS 13 trackpad is fine, what's your beef with it?
Yeah, I'm not sure about any of this, I grew up with PC trackpads, used them on Linux all the time and other than a few annoyances with accidentally tripping the trackpad when typing, never had a problem with them. The Macbook actually took quite a bit of time to get used to and many settings had to be adjusted (looking at you backwards scrolling). In fact, I think I like the trackpad on my cheap Logitech K400 just a…
Do you use gestures at all? I have both a MacBook Pro (for work) and a Logitech K400+. Two-finger scrolling on the MBP is fine; light pressure on the touchpad is enough to scroll very smoothly. Two-finger scrolling on my X230 is also fine, if a bit jumpy - I can at least keep my place while I'm scrolling, and it still takes only light pressure to recognize the gesture.
Two-finger scrolling on the K400+ is painful. (Actually physically painful; I have RSI in my right arm and poorly-tracking touchpads can be a trigger.) It requires fairly heavy pressure on the touchpad to trigger gestures consistently (though they can be triggered inconsistently with light pressure which is also frustrating). And especially on macOS, it's difficult to actually scroll a consistent distance with a two-finger gesture with the K400+.
I'm fairly certain this has to do with the K400+'s touchpad not being recognized as a touchpad by the OS. The device is instead emitting mouse wheel events in firmware when a two-finger scroll gesture is detected. macOS will then, of course, apply mouse wheel acceleration, which makes sense for some mice but absolutely does not make sense for a touchpad.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#827Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I'm also not sure i'd be willing to give up on being able to run linux natively on a laptop I buy with my own money. May I suggest sponsoring Hector Martin on GitHub[0]? He’s working on building first-class support for the M1 architecture (including drivers) into Linux. [0] https://github.com/marcan
Caveat: may not include an awesome trackpad driver.
If it includes a GPU driver, then the trackpad driver is trivial compared to that.
Actually manufacturing the trackpad hardware might be difficult/expensive, but since that's already a given, the driver can be tweaked in tons of ways to fit the regular macOS experience...
Re: The Framework Laptop
#828Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself. The hardware does a lot of processing of the raw signals before it hands the data to the trackpad driver. The driver does additional processing, of course, but this also means that alternate trackpad implementations need more than just the right driver code. The firmware plays a key role.
> I suspect the key software is in the firmware of the trackpad itself. What your parent comment (the comment you replied to) said refutes the reply you made. They installed OSX on a ThinkPad , and observed the desired OSX-like trackpad behavior. Apple does not write firmware for thinkpad pointing devices, so it cannot be firmware-specific behavior.
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Re: The Framework Laptop
#829I think the best comment is this in Ars:
"The reason stuff like this doesn't succeed isn't because you can't do it, it's because few people are willing to pay for the increased costs or other tradeoffs to get something repairable/configurable/upgradeable."
Which is a same, but it is what it is...
Re: The Framework Laptop
#830I don't see any information on the licensing of the adapter card / inter-module interfaces. Can others build a Framework laptop without approval? Can others build cards without approval? Will it be a platform? Tell me how this isn't a Nespresso machine for silicon pods. :-) Edit: To be clear, even a "we have a generic base laptop and you can pick your I/O" concept is potentially a nice value prop, but it'd be good if…
Nespresso pods for silicon sound great! I’m not a hardware engineer, I’m just tired of $800 “replace the entire main board” repairs when I broke my ‘H’ key.
I agree with you. I cannot avoid saying: you don't have to throw your whole coffeemaker out after every pot if you don't have Nespresso.