It's cool but the MNT reform goes out of its way to be way more open.
The Framework Laptop
621–630 of 1001 posts
Re: The Framework Laptop
#622Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many cases, the cost of the license to the OEM is negative. That's because the cost of the Windows license is more than outweighed by the payments they get for crapware, adware, and 30-day trials, they get paid to pre-install (and the crapware requires Windows). It would actually cost them more to ship with no OS.
That's been true historically in a lot of cases, but isn't the whole point of the Framework to do things in a different and better way? It would be very disappointing if a laptop like this was shipping with that kind of junkware installed as standard even on a Windows pre-install. In fact, it would instantly reverse my position having just heard about these guys from something like "I wish you luck, this is a much he…
No need to worry! Our Windows pre-install is vanilla. The only software added is the set of drivers strictly needed to make the hardware function.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#623Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've still never seen a PC with a sane touchpad. That's the first issue in a long tail of grievances with the PC laptop ecosystem. EDIT: This isn't a generic "pro-Mac" dig, I want a nice PC laptop because I like dabbling with Linux; however, even the high end trackpads are clunky, even with the pre-installed Windows (never mind the eternal sadness that is Linux trackpad configuration).
I feel like the XPS 13 trackpad is fine, what's your beef with it?
XPS trackpads have always been number one, from the very beginning. I'm working with a 10 year old laptop and its trackpad has performed flawlessly and is superior to any MacBook I've ever used (but especially older ones).
My XPS has the advantage of two physical buttons for left and right click. They require just the right amount of force to press (like a slightly softer mouse button with deeper travel). It makes dragging things around (which I do a lot because I don't use a tiling window manager) very easy. Which doesn't feel like something I should have to comment on, but doing this on a MacBook is pure suffering. Trying to hold down the giant button (which takes quite a bit of force) while trying to drag your finger... ugh. It's miserable. Because of the physical buttons I can actually play some games on my XPS without needing an external mouse (or putting up with misclicks)
In terms of hardware, what people are looking for is mostly surface feel, size, features. It's the former where cheap laptops fall down. Most of the ones I've used really suck, actually. Some of them are bad enough that the manufacturers actually texture the surface to try to slow your finger down, I guess because the accuracy of the touchpad isn't very good. High end touchpads like the one on the XPS or MacBooks have flawless feel: extremely low friction surfaces.
It's not commonly noticed, but software contributes at least as much to how a trackpad feels as hardware. Given the limitations of its hardware, I have no quarrel with Apple's software quality. (Though the defaults are weird, like not being able to tap-to-click. They really want you to have to use that damn button.)
Windows has historically sucked at this. I've seen about half a dozen trackpads that seemed absolutely terrible, and no Windows settings could make them better. After moving them over to Linux (on the synaptics driver) they suddenly became quite okay to use, even if the hardware was crappy. I'm afraid this era might be ending, sadly. I've had nothing but bad experiences with libinput. It lacks the kind of configurability you need to improve on the performance of a bad touchpad. (It's even quite bad under Wayland for the XPS touchpad - you can't set the combination of low speed, high acceleration that feels natural to me for this touchpad.)
Re: The Framework Laptop
#624Earlier quoted context omitted.
We used to have a far better solution for that, the pointer stick on Dell and IBM laptops. Direct control over the cursor without abrading your sweaty dirty finger skin over a frictive surface.
> a far better solution for that, the pointer stick on Dell and IBM laptops. Please search the web for "trackpoint drift".
This is not a problem on modern ThinkPads.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#625Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have the funding we need to bring the product to market (an odd downstream benefit of Oculus getting bought by Facebook), but we will be taking pre-orders with a deposit prior to shipping to make sure our SKU mix and production rates are matched to actual demand. We won't be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, but it's nice to hear that you'd be willing to!
Drive by suggestion here. I think you should offer a first-class Linux experience with this laptop. It's a genuinely underserved market, with a lot of overlap for people who care about the repairability and upgradability which are core to your offering. A market with premium mind share, as well. When I say first class, I mean something specific: you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good dr…
Totally agree!
I think there's a real market for laptops with Linux preinstalled - if they offered 2 or 3 distros, (Pop, Manjaro, Fedora for example) all with excellent touchpad drivers, I would snap it up.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#626I hate to be negative, but the market has decided it wants un-repairable and un-upgradeable devices.
Judging by how much interest this has garnered on HN, there does seem to be a market. I think people would at least like the option.
Every time I buy a laptop, it's a matter of tradeoffs. Some of these tradeoffs are technical (like battery life vs power), but some are purely based on what level of planned obsolescence the manufacturer thinks they can get away with.
I'm not sure if there was ever a time when manufacturers competed solely on putting features into their hardware, but the situation right now is at least as much about how many antifeatures they can get away with. The "free market" stops working when every manufacturer does this and the barrier for new offerings is impossibly high.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#627Earlier 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
There's Fairphone, already two generations of modular phone design. Unfortunately, they're only officially supported in Europe. But if you're in Europe, and want a modular phone, they're where its at.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#628Earlier 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 care a lot too - but I care about a lot of other features, too, and refuse to buy Apple. My conclusion was to disable the trackpad and always carry an external mouse. I do a lot of CAD work and there's nothing that compares to a real mouse for speed and precision. I'll use my Trackpoint nib in a pinch, but the trackpad ecosystem is so bad that I just write it off entirely. Yeah, keeping a mouse on hand is annoying,…
Not to dismiss your comment - my partner is an architect and also swears by the mouse to navigate in 3D - but I got an external trackpad when getting an external keyboard (to replace my poorly performing MacBook keyboard) and I have preferred the trackpad to a mouse for sometime. This is from someone who spends a lot of time in design software. I don’t think this is uncommon, either, although I’m not sure.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#629Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a far better solution for that, the pointer stick on Dell and IBM laptops. Please search the web for "trackpoint drift".
This is not a problem on modern ThinkPads.
> This is not a problem on modern ThinkPads.
Funny, because I see people complaining about it still in 2020 on brand new Thinkpads. See for instance https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/ken18b/does_your_... and the comments saying "They all drift, it's inherent by the sensor design", "It drifts on all my ThinkPads too", "Mine sometimes drifts".
So unless your definition of modern is "ones that haven't been released yet", I think you might be wrong.
Re: The Framework Laptop
#630How does this have 1400 upvotes. It's literally just a landing page for an unshipped laptop