What I want is a frame.work equivalent repairable and parts-replaceable smartphone. I know it's not practical right now because the commodity and consumer-purchaseable parts that go into a framework laptop don't exist for a smartphone analog right now, and the phone would probably be unacceptably large for most people. But I'd buy it if I could just replace the flash myself every 3-5 years, battery every 2-3 years, e…
What's wrong with the Fairphone?
Can you replace the flash in a fairphone? (If you can, and at near-cost for the flash itself, then it sounds like I'll try to buy a fairphone)
This is great, but I can't trust a Lenovo device and I'm always a bit shocked when I see developers buying ThinkPads from a company that's demonstrated it can't be trusted to give you a secure device.
> from a company that's demonstrated it can't be trusted to give you a secure device. Is there a single technology company that you can't say this about?
Really depends on your threat model; I think most companies stop short of shipping malware from their UEFI implementation. That said, I don't think Framework has yet done anything questionable?
Probably 10 years ago, my brother installed some new RAM in his Lenovo laptop on Christmas day, after which point it refused to turn on - with either the new or old RAM. We contacted Lenovo and they sent someone out to our house about 2 days later to replace then entire motherboard. (They installed the new RAM, and the laptop worked great after that.) It left me with the impression that Lenovo had questionable qualit…
"Questionable quality but excellent support" 100% describes my experience. The mobo in my Lenovo laptop has died, like, three times at this point, but they'll send out a technician to my house to replace it within a day or two. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> until we can be sure everyone who worked there by the time is gone. That seems a little extreme. I always maintain a skeptical eye, but most corporate leaders have an eye for profits and PR, and their personal integrity/moral compass doesn't play a large role in their decision making. As long as it's bad/risky PR for Lenovo to do stuff like that, the incentives are on our side. Always be watching though, and I pers…
Well... I can look at it from the other perspective; in my previous org, the director came like 15 years ago from Oracle, and his ideas, management style, and goals were very much aligned with what you'd expect Oracle was like 20 years ago. It took firing him and two managers below him to turn around the org, despite adopting new practices, new ideas, working in completely new directions, etc. I wouldn't completely d…
Thanks for sharing, that does make sense. Humans are creatures of habit and the way we are brought up is a strong lean on us in future decision making. Changing philosophies can be very hard
On my EU wishlist is a law mandating standard form-factors for laptop batteries (and chargers). All batteries must be user-replaceable without tools and interchangeable with those from other manufacturers. There can be 4 to 5 different form-factors to address the various sizes and power-profiles of laptops. Batteries must have standard voltages and amperages but OEMs can differentiate themselves on other factors like mAh capacity, longevity, etc. Kind of like AA, AAA batteries but appropriate for laptops. Any laptop that doesn't conform to the standards should be hit with a 50-euro enemy-of-the-planet/douchehat tax (rather than an outright ban). The industry is already there since most laptops are designed by ODMs like Clevo and Compal. The last 20 years has provided little evidence of innovation happening on batteries and chargers in the budget segment. All the custom chargers and battery sizes are designed purely to force incompatibility on customers- for planned obsolescence, to reduce competition and charge more for after-sales support. Such a law would stop this practice by OEMs of engineering planned obsolescence into their bottom-tier cookie-cutter clevo-crap but still allow companies like Apple to "innovate" on vanity metrics like slimness. An industry consortium or committee (like W3 for the web or the 4G/5G committees) can be setup to propose new revisions to the standards (if required) once every 10 years (not lesser).
Friendly reminder that Lenovo has repeatedly shipped laptops infested with malware and backdoors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in... ) sometimes doing so in exchange for money. They've also hidden malware in UEFI so that even reformatting your hard drive wouldn't help. In one case, after they were found out they first claimed "we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not fi…
Friendly reminder that Lenovo has repeatedly shipped laptops infested with malware and backdoors ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenovo#Security_and_privacy_in... ) sometimes doing so in exchange for money. They've also hidden malware in UEFI so that even reformatting your hard drive wouldn't help. In one case, after they were found out they first claimed "we have thoroughly investigated this technology and do not fi…
this is just propaganda that was consumer side Lenovo laptops, IdeaPad and the like 7+ years ago. They learned their lesson and even there don't do it any more. This didn't affect ThinkPads. Every time Lenovo is mentioned someone brings this up and I am thoroughly sick of it.
> They learned their lesson and even there don't do it any more.
If I did this, I'd be learning my lesson in prison for 20 years.
Is this move in anticipation of upcoming regulations? That has to be it, right?
Lenovo is fairly competitive in the 700-1500€ market but the thin and light models have soldered ram. Not great when they sell you single channel with zero ability to add more sticks on some models. It's not as terrible now due to ddr5 but still leaves bad taste.
With "repairable" people mean repairs with freely available tools, parts and (ideally) schematics. Apple and others put in a lot of effort to stop independent repair shops from sourcing original parts or making them impossible to successfully replace due to hardware DRM. It is already impossible to upgrade some Macs with more RAM because they will simply refuse to boot if they find more RAM than they got in the facto…
Can you provide a reference for this? My web search didn't find a result.
Look up Lewis Rossman, he runs a repair shop and complains all the time about this
This is obviously somewhat subjective, but to me soldering does not disqualify something being "repairable", unless it requires a proprietary soldering machine or something. What you're describing sounds "modular"
When a repair requires soldering, it significantly reduces the number of people who can do that repair themselves. I can do it, but most of my non-technical friends could not, even though several of them could replace a hard drive or even a DIMM in their desktop PC.
On thinking about it more I agree with you. A very simply soldered thing is maybe ok, but the vast, vast majority of soldered things are no-gos for repairs for non-pros. It's too easy to damage components and destroy the board, even if you know how to do it. If the Framework required soldering, I'd be very critical about it's repairability/modularity, so I'm being inconsistent.