Fixing a bricked Framework laptop

> ... but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students.

Sure. Why do you think such a market exists? Compare it with the Automobile industry, where really cheap cars (comparable to the $150 laptop market segment) don't really exist. Instead we have a flourishing second-hand market - a whole new industry around selling used cars. Even if a cheaper, lower quality car were to exist, people would still buy a good-quality, used car over a cheaper, lower quality one. Why? Repairability. Why would I buy a cheaper low quality car, if I can buy a good quality car that I can repair as needed, for the same price or even lower. A market for cheaper, new laptops exist because today you fear buying an older computer that is no longer repairable or upgradeable. (And note that it isn't as if the old products wouldn't make money - people will still need to buy the parts for it. The profits would be lesser than selling whole devices though). It is because electronics have somehow escaped the purview of consumer rights and repairability that even the Automobile industry (and others) have started including more and more electronics in them to make their products less repairable.

Here's a little story to frame this a little better and help you understand my meaning: My second-to-last MacBook Pro before I quit the Apple platform was the 2016 MacBook Pro with the butterfly keyboard.

That machine had a flawed design that was never 100% fixed, and Apple swept the whole issue under the rug until media pressure intensified. They then made a warranty extension for the keyboards.

The fix did not work 100%. The underlying keyboard design was flawed. I got my MacBook Pro "fixed" under this extended warranty,

The result was a huge class action lawsuit, for which I just received my last check this year. I was not fully compensated or given a refund. What I ended up doing was unloading the laptop much earlier than my normal upgrade cycle to switch to the 2019 16" MacBook Pro (Intel) that no longer possessed this fatal design flaw.

This incident damaged Apple's brand perception with at least one customer, me.

So, I'm not saying there are zero consequences for Framework not making this right. At the same time, every company that makes products draws a line somewhere. A restaurant isn't going to compensate me for a bad meal I had a month ago. Dell isn't going to buy me a new computer because my 7 year old Inspiron is on the fritz even though I expect a device like that to last longer.

If you bring a 2016 MacBook Pro in to Apple to get the keyboard replaced under the keyboard replacement program, Apple will not do it for free. The program has expired. Even though the system cost Apple millions of dollars in a class action suit and the design is fundamentally flawed, Apple will not make it right for their customers indefinitely. They offered a limited time resolution for customers who experienced that issue.

There is not a customer expectation that all the products they buy will last forever or will be indefinitely fixed for free regardless of issue, so in practice it's a balancing act between minimizing your long-term support costs and pissing off your customer base.

To directly answer your question though, a lot of times bricking or severely handicapping products happens and companies are free to go. Ask me what happened to my second generation Google Nest thermostat. Of course, my reaction to that was to throw the thing in the trash and resolve to never buy a piece of Google hardware ever again. But I'm sure thousands of people responded by justifying an upgrade to the latest and greatest and calling that a win because shopping for something new and unboxing a package is a fun dopamine hit.

I don't think that everything I described above is what is happening with Framework in this situation. I don't think there is any indication that failed BIOS flashes are a widespread issue. It seems that the standard rectification for a bad BIOS flash is a replacement board because it is considered a rare occurrence.

Remember that, if you don't want to worry about this or any other hardware failure, you can go ahead and buy a 3-year extended warranty at time of purchase, and that sort of option is available with basically every piece of consumer technology on the market.

I would agree that it would be better for them to be able to service it for a lower cost or maybe have a BIOS recovery function built-in to the hardware, but other than that I don't see anything that deviates very far from standard industry practice and policy.

If, hypothetically, laptops have a 2% failure rate by age 5, that means you had an 81% chance of never encountering a dead laptop. With these hypothetical numbers, your experience is not extraordinary or indicative of an incredibly reliable brand.

The other thing that skews statistics in your favor is that you would have never bought a for-parts laptop. I.e., you buy a 3-year old laptop, which has a survivorship bias because it is currently working at time of purchase. You wouldn't actually buy one of the ones that broke between years 0-3 [1] and hasn't been repaired yet. Even if the failure rate by 5 years is much higher than 2%, your probability of experiencing a failure is still higher than if you had bought the computer new and kept it for 5 years (compared to buying a working system at 3 years old and selling it at 5 years old).

We can't actually guess your preferred brand because it's likely that 100% of consumer laptop brands last 5 years have a single-digit percentage failure rate.

The 3-year extended warranty for a Framework 13 costs $139 and the cheapest pre-built configuration costs $988. The warranty cost scales with part selection (e.g., configure the system to max it out at over $5000 and the warranty cost is now $259)

The industry average gross margin ((revenue - COGS)/revenue) is 40%

I'll take a "typical" configuration of the mid-tier AMD CPU, 1TB storage, and 16GB of RAM, pre-built cost is $1774.00 (no OS). 3-year warranty cost is $209.

We can assume the raw cost of the laptop hardware is approximately $1060, although that's without any consideration to operating overhead, shipping, etc.

That means if Framework's complete replacement failure rate at 3 years is higher than the ballpark of 10-20%, that extended warranty loses money.

That's a pretty high failure rate, but we have to also recall that extended warranties have about a 50-70% profit margin across the electronics industry.

I think our napkin math here generally aligns with the idea that the amount of consumer electronics that fail within 3-5 years or so is somewhere in the single digit percentage range.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve