This is my issue with Fairphone too. I love the idea and execution and I understand those things cause the product to be more expensive but twice the price to comparable products is just too steep for me.
I’m sure a Framework phone is at least an idea for them to produce. Definitely an extremely difficult challenge. It would be nice if it allowed for removable RAM, but it could be hard due to SODIMM being relatively large or due to RAM being put on SOCs. I imagine it shouldn’t be too much to ask for removable storage at least, given how small NVME drives can get. Upgradable SOC/motherboard is a must.
I want one with an e-ink display. That way I can swap out the e-ink display when I need to for a proper display. That wouldn’t work on a normal laptop but should work for their uniquely modular design.
I don’t know how well eInk would work for most tasks, though. I mean, sure, it’s great for reading documents, and you can do so outside on a sunny day. But most PC software isn’t designed to work well with a slow refresh rate.
The battery life savings on an e-reader with an eInk display compared to an LED or LCD screen can be very large, but then the software is designed for it.
If I were only gonna read documents, I think I’d lean towards just loading them onto an eInk e-reader. That just takes, what, a fraction of a minute? Then all the software is designed around the screen’s characteristics.
I want to use it programming so I don’t get eye strain from staring at a screen all day, and the display is mostly white text on a black background anyway.
Obviously I invert that on an e-ink display. It’s white on black is to reduce the amount of white light that I get blasted with. When you’re programming most of the screen is blank because each individual line of code isn’t really that long in most cases it’ll be shorter than in English sentence.
I’m waiting for them to offer a chassis to convert their laptop parts into USFF PCs. Reusing old parts after an upgrade is pretty attractive. I think they mentioned this a while back, I’ve been waiting for it to happen.
I’d also like to see a thunderbolt or oculink GPU bay part that would enable eGPU use with their machines.
And if we’re wishlisting top facing speakers would be 🤌
I’d love to see them make other devices. But I want the company to actually be viable and entrenched before they spread themselves even more thinly.
They’re already having trouble releasing firmware and driver updates in a timely manner, especially for Windows users who can’t rely on driver updates packaged in the kernel.
But man I can think of a few cool Framework devices that I’d be into buying…
i see it as giving their industrial engineers something to do.
when you have to design a chasis for reusability and backwards/fowards compatibility, you dont really have the flexibility to make that many changes. instead of just letting them sit there, its better for them to start designing other things in the meantime.
Surely they are aiming for a repairable and modular smartphone eventually. That’s going to be super hard to do. My guess is their next form factor will be a tablet.
We can say that for any kind of drivers needed to run a mobile phone.\ Manufacturers of components are less and less providing any documentation, just throw a binary blob and say “put it in your Android build”.
You can get laptops that have 5G radios that you can use for data with Linux.
As I understand it, there’s no support for voice/SMSes at the radio level, but in theory, if you were willing to tolerate it and your cell service provider offers support, you could do WiFi calling.
Could also get service from a random other VoIP provider, use that over the data connection.
Probably not as battery-efficient, requires more of the stack to be awake to be listening for incoming calls.
I think that a larger downside is that Android software is designed for a touch screen and low power usage and low data usage across the board, and GNU/Linux software generally isn’t.
Mmmm. I dunno. You’re talking about location availability off the hardware?
Last month, I had to call 911 when some random druggie lit what I thought was a building on fire across the street from my car (it turned out to just be a bonfire in the parking lot; figured that out while running over). I didn’t know the cross-street for my location, and asked the dispatcher if she could just send the fire department to the location she got from my cell phone via E911. She had no idea what I was talking about, needed me to manually provide location.
So I’m not totally sure, at least in the US, what the compliance requirements are for availability of location information.
If you’re talking about 911 usability without logging into a phone from a lock screen, I don’t think that that’d create any issues – that’s all software, can do whatever if you’re doing the OS.
E911 is a thing in some places and not in others depending on what each county dispatch wants to do and pay for. It does require some call center upgrades as I recall when I was working EMS and fire. It was kind of sketchy when I was working. But, everything is a bit sketchy when working in a very rural area in public safety.
More referring to selling a device classified as a mobile phone that might not be able to connect to emergency services without any tinkering. My google-fu is failing me now, but I’m trying to see what the actual requirements are, if they exist at all, to sell a mobile phone. All I’m seeing is that the radio shall connect to any available base stations during an emergency call regardless of subscriber status.
I don’t know how the linux phone OS’s are handling these kind of interactions with their baseband processing, if at all.
Eh, Pinephone and Librem 5 made it work, but there’s still a fair amount of software limitations here, and I didn’t think Framework should be a software company. But the radios themselves probably aren’t the blocker you make them out to be.
They absolutely did not make it work. Go read any of the reviews and the complete unreliability of the cellular functions of both devices are chief among the criticisms.
My understanding is that those issues are due to suspend to save battery life, which isn’t directly related to the radios. A more appropriate SOC (i.e. one designed for mobile use) would probably be more reliable with the same radios they selected when going on standby.
You can install Linux on their Chromebooks, so it would be good to have the choice. Some people will prefer a slightly more seamless Android experience and some people will prefer Waydroid
Chromebook makes sense. They could also do full on Linux. Star labs has a tablet coming out, so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel for software (I assume, I haven’t tried touchscreen Linux).
Arm machines that are repairable to compete with Apple would be very cool in my opinion. Maybe team up with an integrator like sys76. Could be very cool. I’d personally line up to buy.
I was thinking about ARM at one point, but you’ve got a couple of major drawbacks.
Most ARM devices are SoC, and where they get some of their cost and power savings. That’s kinda the opposite of modular.
ARM running ARM binaries can be more-power-efficient than x86 running x86 binaries. An ARM platform can run x86 binaries via x86 emulation, but then your power benefits go away (probably get worse power efficiency). For Windows, I assume that there’s some form of OS-level emulation, but you’ve got a lot of binary software out there. For Linux, if you’re using all open-source software that can be rebuilt for ARM, and assuming that you have ARM driver support, then you could maybe run only ARM binaries. But if you want to, for example, use Steam, then you are going to be using binary-only x86 software. Now, okay, that depends a lot on your use case, but that may be a real drawback if you play games on the thing.
That also sounds kind of like compatibility is still limited – they’re saying that some ARM platforms can’t do 32-bit x86 binaries, at least two years ago. Dunno if that’s still an issue.
I mean, what is the difference between the current SoC and the soldered CPU? Sure you can save on upgrading RAM, but then what else? Especially if the SoC has PCIe. They can make a daughter board for the SoC to make it simpler to upgrade if they want, alà pi compute module.
its not that simple. high performamce parts are high performamce because the devices that need the fastest speeds have the shortest traces from CPU to said device. its for instance, why the ram slots, and the fastest m.2/slot as well as pci-e lanes are nearest to the cpu, else youd have to resort to adding a south bridge.
the pi compute module works that way because the ram is already on board making it not a problem, and latency to whatever it gets mounted on isnt of highest priority for performance.
its why sodimm for instance has hit a peak speed limit, while lpdde hasnt, and why dell pitched the camm form factor for ram. distance of components to the cpu and its stability is cruicial for performance.
What I am saying is that the current soldered CPU approach on laptop space is not that different from switching an ARM SoC on a daughter board. The only difference is that you cannot change RAM. Maybe that too will change as you said with CAMM standard. Next is that some SBC already supported PCIe for external M.2 storage, so you can theoretically hook up a removable GPU there.
Now, what to do with the old SoC daughter board? The same as with the old framework motherboard. You can repurpose it as another computer.
The point is, framework repairability comes not only from part swapping, but also the promise of providing schematic for board level repair. They can totally make ARM based laptops with SoC repairable if they wanted to. But I suspect they will not (at least in the near future) since there is a lot to do for them.
m.2 to gpu isn’t completely foreign nor new, but less practical than more recent standards like Occulink. the problem, specifically with the lower end model in particular, is using 4/8 pci-e lanes for a port that not everyone is going to use is a waste of the already limited amount of pci-e lanes available to the user because of the CPU choice. hence, it makes sense to keep 1 users with the side option to using usb4/thunderbolt gpu docks
I don’t see what’s non-modular about ARM. Most of the stuff that’s user-serviceable on a Framework laptop would be serviceable with ARM:
ports are all USB-C
drives are NVMe, SATA, or PCIe - Pine64 has boards with each (IIRC)
GPU is PCIe - again, Pine64 has that on their RockPro64
The only difference is RAM, and theoretically they could design a socketable SOC to reuse existing boards (not sure what happened to Project Skybridge). The only difference is RAM, at least for the user, and I really don’t think that’ll be a deal-breaker. Modern x86 chips are already essentially SOCs anyway…
The next product should be a sustainable, not publicly traded company. If investors take majority ownership and IPO, Framework’s perceived mission will evaporate quickly in the inevitable search for ever growing profits. I sincerely hope Nirav and Co actually give a shit about the repairable product and retain majority shares. If not 👉👌…
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