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The Framework Laptop is now shipping

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Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#641

Post by JoshTriplett »

nrp wrote: post #239
elric wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their warranty is utterly ridiculous. Even the EU mandates 2+years for all consumer electronics. I'm not expecting Next Business On Site warranty from a new company (though that would be nice...), but an option for at least 3 years is the very minimum for me.

We'll certainly be complying with EU warranty requirements before we start selling there. For longer warranties in general, that is something we would like to do. We're giving ourselves some time in market in order to price it appropriately, but since our product is easy to repair, we believe our costs for supporting warranties will be lower than it would be for less repairable products.

> We're giving ourselves some time in market in order to price it appropriately, but since our product is easy to repair, we believe our costs for supporting warranties will be lower than it would be for less repairable products.

Absolutely. In particular, I wouldn't expect an "at-home service" warranty this early in the life of your company, for such an easily repaired laptop. Rather, I'd expect a warranty in which you cross-ship a replacement part, provide instructions to replace it, and say "just put the old part back in the box we shipped you the replacement in and drop it in your outgoing mail".

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#642

Post by formerly_proven »

foldr wrote: post #582
formerly_proven wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LPDDR does many, many things to reduce power consumption (the current version even does DVFS, which I think is a first for main memory; graphics cards have been doing interface DFS for a long time, but a high end graphics card will burn around 30-70 W in the memory chips, and uses extremely high speed PHYs running at around 20 GBit/s per pin in the current generation). The only thing that really changes between DIMM…

> That accounts only for a very small increase in power. What are you basing this statement on?

PHY is only part of the DRAM chip, and trace length is only a part of what determines energy per bit, so increasing trace length by x % wouldn't increase overall power by x %, but a fraction of that. Thinking about it, there is a bigger problem than just energy/bit scaling; since LPDDR switches dynamically between high-speed and lower speed modes, the high speed mode is likely not used a lot. However, the low speed modes rely on being able to turn the termination off, which saves significant amounts of power. A socket may make that difficult to achieve, and if you have to run with ODT in the, I'm assuming, mostly-used low power mode, you might end up with a significant increase in power.

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#643

Post by goodpoint »

ribit wrote: post #286
victor9000 wrote: post #254

This device is seriously the answer to all my laptop problems. I really like the form factor of the XPS 13, but now I'm stuck with the complete inability to upgrade RAM. In what universe is that normal? Then I accidentally nuked the USB-C ports on the left side when it got wet, and now I'm left with a single port for everything, including charging. What!? Why? I tore the entire thing apart and there's just no way to…

> In what universe is that normal? In a universe where you want high-performance energy efficient RAM. Premium ultracompact laptops have long moved to LPDDR which is both faster and consumes significantly less energy than regular modular DDR. And LPDDR does not come in DIMMs. And then you have Apple who are using custom package technology with custom RAM chips to cut down RAM power consumption to under one watt activ…

> In a universe where you want high-performance energy efficient RAM

You are cherry-picking an example that fits only a specific category of laptops.

Even so, CPU and RAM could be bundled together into a socketed cartridge that is easy to upgrade.

The real reason is all about planned obsolescence and profit margins.

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#644

Post by formerly_proven »

Const-me wrote: post #577
magicalhippo wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall underclocking the RAM on my video card a few years ago when in desktop mode. Reduced the heat in the PC case by several degrees.

Performance difference between system RAM and VRAM is an order of magnitude. Specifically, DDR4-3200 peaks at 25.6 GB/second per channel, modern high-end GPUs peak at 500-900 GB/second depending on the GPU model. VRAM consumes substantial power to deliver that performance. On many GPUs, VRAM chips are actively cooled. System RAM doesn’t even need passive heatsinks, uses too little electricity to care.

GPUs do use fairly fine-grained dynamic frequency scaling on their memory chips for precisely this reason: having a top-end GPU run at around 15-20 W under light loads simply wouldn't be possible otherwise.

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#645

Post by formerly_proven »

emodendroket wrote: post #360
Delk wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it's because I'm often looking at business-oriented laptops as a consumer, but I usually find the RAM and storage to be on the low side compared to the CPU specs. I don't need a top-of-the-line i7 CPU (the improvement when going from e.g. an i5 usually isn't enough to really matter), and the premium you pay isn't negligible. On the other hand, the lower-end models that don't splurge on an i7 and come with a mid…

Supporting tons of slightly different configurations is an impediment to efficient operations though. There’s some logic to doing things that way.

Tell that to European car manufacturers, almost no two cars are identical. I've heard that some models have more possible variations than there are v6 addresses.

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#646

Post by SkyMarshal »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #626

This looks great. My only comment is whether the population for whom this is interesting wouldn't be more likely to want Linux? I suspect the focus on Windows is misplaced. I might get one, but I'd want 100% Linux support, notably wrt. power management. EDIT: language

PoP!_OS would be worth trying, it's built for laptops, could probably do power management well on this one.

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#647

Post by goodpoint »

least wrote: post #578
vimacs2 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the "free market" argument. Remind me of how that one went with the headphone jack. Seems I have less and less choices in that department these days, especially at the flagship tier - despite it objectively being a worse device for it with almost no positives except saving a little bit of cost for the manufacturer. I do not accept the arguments on it being necessary for water resistance or providing much savi…

The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist because they're banking on there being enough people that care about this sort of thing to buy into their device rather than buying from a well established brand. That assumption will be put to the test very soon and advocates for this sort of device have a great opportunity to do so. The bitter reality though is that there might be a market large enough to…

> The free market is allowing a company like this one to exist

The "free market" is controlled by a very small set of conglomerates.

They get caught red handed deploying anticompetitive strategies every other week.

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#649

Post by mikepurvis »

ribit wrote: post #556
mikepurvis wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until relatively recently, a lot of laptops and even phones would put the connectors on separate PCBs connected by a ribbon, so that damaging those wouldn't mean a $500 motherboard replacement. I definitely remember ordering a replacement headphone socket board for an old MacBook and just putting it in myself, and I've done similar with, eg, the connector port board on a PS4 controller. But I guess this is one of…

If I am not mistaken the ports on recent Apple machines are on a separate, easily replaceable board.

Seems like this stuff maybe comes and goes— like here's a repair guide for a 2010-vintage MBP which definitely shows all the connectors being right on the logic board:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Logic+Board...

Re: The Framework Laptop is now shipping

#650

Post by jsmith45 »

nrp wrote: post #513
skavi wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could the current model have TB4 enabled via software? Is everything there on the hardware side?

We have the hardware for it, but until we can complete certification, we can’t claim Thunderbolt compatibility.

I suppose what this really means is that you have USB4 with support for the optional PCIE tunneling, and support for the slightly higher frequency alternative mode, which is generally enough to function with peripherals labeled as Thunderbolt, since it is literally exactly the same protocol.

Somewhat obnoxious that you need additional certification to actually call it what it obviously is.

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