Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Framework Laptop

frame.work

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

881–890 of 1001 posts

Re: The Framework Laptop

#881

Post by sanitycheck »

waheoo wrote: post #765
samizdis wrote: post #103

Ars Technica has a sceptical but optimistic/hopeful take on it: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/framework-startup-de... Edit to add quote from Ars article: Framework is promising an awful lot in its very first product—"thin as an XPS 13, repairable as a custom-built gaming PC" is a pretty tall order to live up to. We very much want to believe, but it's going to take a full Ars Technica teardown before we're c…

I'm very hopefully for this company. I just hope they drop the passive aggressive "block" remarks. Maybe its me but I suspect they're referring to decade old ThinkPad that have since evolved a lot to thin performance beasts. Passive aggressive remarks towards things your target market holds nostalgia for is likely not going to end well. It's also setting themselves up for failure if their cooling solution doesn't bea…

Hi, Dell Latitude user for 20+ years here. I buy them because they're easily upgradable and I can get parts after the (excellent) warranty expires. It's true I don't give a fuck about aluminium!

Dell started soldering RAM in the past couple of years though, so if this thing exists when I next need to buy a laptop and it remotely justifies its high price I'd be interested.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#882

Post by ForHackernews »

Toutouxc wrote: post #871
Something1234 wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't get what is so special about all of these trackpad debates. Honestly if my trackpad can do a 2 finger scroll I'm happy. Worst trackpad I've used was on my x201, and was only terrible because it was tiny and insensitive.

Would you consider using one of the trackpads you're happy with INSTEAD of a mouse? For non-precision work, that is. Browsing, navigating an IDE, clicking around the OS, stuff like that. In an emergency anything that does a two finger scroll and registers a click is okay, but would you enjoy using it for eight hours every day? Apple will confidently sell you a $5000 desktop machine with just their trackpad, because i…

> Apple will confidently sell you a $5000 desktop machine with just their trackpad, because it is that good.

I mean... Apple will also "confidently" sell you four little castor wheels for 700 quid[0]. I'm not sure we should view their eagerness to take money off you as a sign of how great they are.

[0] https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/product/MX572ZM/A/apple-mac-pr...

Re: The Framework Laptop

#883

Post by rkangel »

vagrantJin wrote: post #688
nkrisc wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, I've never used a laptop that wasn't a MacBook that has had a trackpad anywhere as amazing as what Apple has done. I don't know if the problem is hardware, software, or both, but as a consumer I don't care. I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better. That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be…

> I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better Funny that Commenting on a thread about a non-apple laptop that you'll never buy a Non apple laptop. That is true and unadultered fanboyism.

This is the best place to talk about that. There may be multiple suppliers of trackpads for the Framework and so they GP might finally have some choice.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#884

Post by rkangel »

nrp wrote: post #619
aidenn0 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But only if you order the kit, not if you get it preassembled I believe.

This is correct. There’s nothing technical preventing us from offering a pre-built bring your own OS system, but we figured there’s high overlap between that audience and those who want to assemble a kit themselves. This reduces the amount of pre-built inventory we need to hold.

> There’s nothing technical preventing us from offering a pre-built bring your own OS system, but we figured there’s high overlap between that audience and those who want to assemble a kit themselves.

This may be projecting myself onto others but I wonder if that's actually true, and I would indicate the Dell and Lenovo Linux options as evidence.

I personally run Linux on my laptop to reduce pain and time spent doing unnecessary maintenance - I run Fedora on a Lenovo and it works seamlessly. If I bought a Framework, it would be for upgradability and maintainability rather than for customisation.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#885

Post by rkangel »

nrp wrote: post #299
ploxiln wrote: post #237

I don't see any mention of the firmware and drivers efforts for this. Firmware and drivers always end up more difficult to deal with than expected. The Fairphone company was surprised by difficulties upgrading and patching android without support from their BSP vendor, causing many months delays of updates _and_ years shorter support life than they were planning for their earlier models. I purchased the Purism Librem…

Our Embedded Controller firmware is based on chromium ec, and we're using a mature off the shelf BIOS solution shipping in other notebooks today. We chose our key components with driver stability across both Windows and Linux in mind. We know this is something we have to get right to deliver a credible competitor to all the great notebooks already in the market, so it is something we focused on from the start.

Have you considered providing an out of the box Linux experience?

I have no intention of using the Ubuntu provided with a Lenovo laptop if I buy one, but the fact that that there is a fully working Linux distro for that machine means that all of the requisite bits and pieces are somewhere in the Open Source community (and because I use Fedora, I'm almost certainly using a new enough version of Kernel, Gnome etc. that they're already there).

Re: The Framework Laptop

#886

Post by rplnt »

Liskni_si wrote: post #332
nrp wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyboard and touchpad quality were high priorities for us. We built in 1.5mm key travel, which is unusually high for a <16mm thick laptop. The touchpad surface feels great and performs well. I hear you on the touchpad buttons though. That is something we've done a little exploration on. The touchpad is an end-user replaceable module, but we can't commit to a three button version materializing just yet.

Key travel isn't everything. The layout is important as well. This is the best layout humanity ever invented: https://www.notebookcheck.net/fileadmin/_processed_/c/0/csm_... Classic arrow keys, separate volume buttons, separate back/forward/pageup/pagedown, F1-F12 as the primary functions, …

While I agree with you one the F keys and home block, I also understand that's something that people might not prefer.

What I don't understand are the arrows. I've been using MB Pro daily for over 3 years now and I still regularly miss up/down arrows. I would never buy a device that merges them into size of one key as the MB Pro does, as well as this one.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#887

Post by jack_riminton »

enw wrote: post #811
nkrisc wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, I've never used a laptop that wasn't a MacBook that has had a trackpad anywhere as amazing as what Apple has done. I don't know if the problem is hardware, software, or both, but as a consumer I don't care. I'll never buy a non-Apple laptop until I can find one that has a trackpad as good or better. That's my personal requirement. On a personal laptop I always use the trackpad so I want it to be…

I'm guessing a big reason why it has never been prioritized is due to the difficulty of quantifying the impact of great trackpad UX (and as a result, the negative impact of the shitty trackpad UX every non-Apple device offers). Higher-ups don't like things that aren't easily quantified.

It’s an interesting point. There must be some metrics i.e. latency, accuracy that a trackpad can be measured by

Perhaps it needs to be a score via a user test e.g click these small randomly appearing boxes in the shortest time possible

Re: The Framework Laptop

#888

Post by Liskni_si »

jpetso wrote: post #833
com2kid wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See, I disagree, I use home/end/pageup/pagedown all the time, and having them separate in an awkward spot is annoying. I prefer having them overlaid on the arrow keys, with fn to access them. IMHO that is the one area laptop keyboards can superior to full size keyboards.

This is what makes newer ThinkPad keyboard layouts great at least in terms of arrow keys - the useless icon keys from the GP's posted image are now PgUp/PgDown, meaning you can access at least two out of the four without annoying two-handed operation. Home/End can still be bound to arrow keys plus modifier, but even there it's nice to have a dedicated key available. Basically, full-size arrow keys are what really mak…

I actually use those "useless" keys (back/forward in the browser) more often than PgUp/PgDown, as I usually scroll using the touchpad.

But it doesn't really matter, as long as the physical keys are there. They can be remapped.

Re: The Framework Laptop

#889

Post by coldtea »

ankka wrote: post #864
coldtea wrote: post #827

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Doing output is trivial compared to properly handling any type of free-form user input.

A GPU driver for a new undocumentated architecture is "trivial" compared to properly doing an input driver for a touchpad?

You make "properly handling any type of free-form user input" sound like rocket science, when it's the regular multi-touch kind of driver we have on billions of mobiles, and laptops...

The "properly" here is just the sauce for macOS handling, not some inherent difficulty of "handling any type of free-form user input" on a 2D surface...

Re: The Framework Laptop

#890

Post by opan »

lmm wrote: post #842
tomtheelder wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the SD card example encapsulates the issue perfectly. I'm pretty sure that in 2021 that is an _extreme_ niche use case. I feel like only extremely serious photographers and perhaps a particular slice of musicians use them. It makes absolutely no sense for them to have that built into the laptop. 99% of people who own Macbooks or whatever don't own an SD card dongle because they don't need it. However, and ext…

If we actually got enough USB-C ports to make up for all the removed ports (like, 8 or so?) then I'd agree with you, and be willing to put up with the temporary pain of dongles for the sake of a glorious future where everything's USB-C. But we've ended up with the worst of both worlds: say I bring out my laptop for movie night and I want to plug in power, projector, surround sound, a DVD drive, and a mouse, that was…

They make hubs/docks with many ports that only need one of your USB-C ports. There's also daisy-chaining to consider. I think you most likely could connect all those things.
Post reply on HN