- It is simply not possible to build a device that is both elegant and repairable. Look at this beautiful MacBook, your idiot hands couldn't repair it. If it was easy to repair, it
would be some thick flimsy, 2010 looking piece of crap. Actually, no, those excuses
no longer hold any water. The team over at Framework has managed to not just create a laptop that is easily repairable and upgradable, but it's also a thin,
gorgeous, performant laptop. So without further ado, let's get to building this thing, because it did not arrive in one piece. By the way, casually I bought one. Oh, what I also bought is the segway to our sponsor, G.Skill. G.Skill's Z5i is the first mini ITX with a sleek five-sided design and curved tempered glass side panels that can still install a high-end
triple slot graphics card. Get yours today at the link
in the video description. (upbeat music) The story behind how Framework started is amazingly relatable. The creators noticed
that 10, 15 years ago, consumers and manufacturers
were all on the same page, that a device that you purchased, be it a desktop computer or a laptop, should have some kind of upgrade path so that you could extend
its service lifetime. Nowadays, through a combination of glue, soldered, and
non-standard components, laptops are pretty much, use until some little
thing goes wrong with it, and then toss in the trash. Oh, not this one. Most laptop manufacturers out there are saying well in
order to build something that anyone would actually
want to buy and use, we have to have this level
of tight integration. Framework says well, on
something as compact as a phone, okay, maybe I kind of see your point. On a laptop though? You've got kind of a lot
of room to work with. So this is my first
hands-on with this thing. And I got to say, I see their point. It's like ultra book, sexy, thin, and yet what are all these modular
doo-dad-a-ma-jigs here? Ouu, it even comes with a screwdriver. Can I take a moment to appreciate that the one non-modular bit of
IO is a headphone jack. Heck yeah. Wait, are these captive? Only five screws required
to pop the bottom off, which means that compared to
buying the preassembled one, you are almost surely going to find it worth it to assemble it yourself for the $300 of savings. Oh my God. Not only do they have a camera shutter, they've got a microphone hardware switch. How cool is that? Actually, let's talk about
the design philosophy here. So Framework is made up of ex-engineers from Lenovo, HTC, and Apple predominantly who had the basic concept of all right, instead of trying to generate proprietary solutions to everything, why don't we just go
around to component makers, ask what are you guys super jazzed about? And then find a way to integrate that into a repairable, upgradable design. There are so many things
to love about this design, that it's hard to know where to start, but I'm going to settle on these QR codes. Why open up a paper manual when you can just put QR codes that walk you through compatibility and how to upgrade the various
components inside your system, you can see they're all over the place. They even go out of their way to say this battery is replaceable. No kidding made with love
by the Framework team. That's freaking awesome. There's also the fact that
while many of the screws use different threading or different lengths, they're freaking color-coded. How amazing is that? It takes so much
guesswork out of trying to take something apart and
put it back together, when the screws are different colors. So you won't accidentally
put one in the wrong place, and they actually include
some extras here in the top, just in case you misplaced one. It costs them probably
a fraction of a cent, but it means so much to
the end user's experience. The philosophical difference
between engineering things to make them harder for the end user because you don't trust them, and documenting things
to educate the end user so that you know can trust them, like, look at this, just little things, unplug this connector
before removing the battery, helpful things. It's
got a 180 degree hinge. Look at this. Even the touch pad, huge touch pad, screws, no glue. The most mind-blowing thing about this is that the team of
engineers that designed this did it in just a year and a half. So was it actually impossible
for a company like Apple that spends literal billions
of dollars a year on R and D? No. The answer, just like anything, is that they just didn't want to. - [Alex] They also
apparently are hiring and- - [Linus] Yeah, it's all over the inside. - [Alex] Yeah. - Look at that. How beautiful is it? I'm going to start with the
thing I recognize nice least. Ah, yes. This, this is one of their little modular IO connectors. Now the funny thing is that this isn't even a new dream. Razer showed off a concept PC way back that wanted to use Thunderbolt, which uses a USB type C connector, as a way to allow anything from storage to even graphics cards,
to be just slotted in, in a really consumer friendly way. Well, as far as I can tell, these are the first guys that have actually managed to pull it off. So no matter what it
is you want to install, you just plug it in and it'll interface with the machine via USB 3.2. That's not to say that
you have to plug in IO. The thing that I put
in just now is actually a one terabyte storage drive. I wouldn't boot off of that one, but hey, if you want a
big fat Steam library or something like that, that is absolutely the way to do it. Another thing traditional
laptop manufacturers do that Framework is changing is maintain an unnecessary level of secrecy about the actual components they're using to build the device. We did a video recently about
how some laptop manufacturers were changing the memory
installed in their systems in a way that significantly
impacted performance. Well Framework, without forcing me to open this thing up and actually check the product IDs
of the chip says, okay, well this is using a Phison controller. It's got Micron NAND. It's
capable of performance of around one gigabyte per second. And it's got support for self encryption. One happy challenge right now is I was concerned that these were going to kind of come out too easily, but the truth is I actually cannot figure out how to get it out. It looks like you're just
supposed to press this button and you should be able to slide it out. There's even a little like, oh yeah, no, you just gotta,
you just gotta give her. So why don't we pop out this USB-C that Alex installed earlier. So this is a simple USB-C expansion card, and obviously you're
going to need at least one of these so that you
can charge the device. Oh, pfft. Oh, wow. You
have got to be kidding me. Hey, you know the laptop you like, it's got everything you need except man, I sure wish I had a
full-size DisplayPort port, Framework's got you
covered. That's awesome. Man, I am not a fan of having
USB type A on the right. I have a tendency to use a wired mouse because, why do I use a wired mouse? Whatever, I use a wired
mouse, deal with it. And I don't like having the
cable sticking out on the right, cause it interferes with my
comfortable spacing here. So I like my USB type A on the left and with Framework, I can do that. Now, the fit and finish, ain't perfect. You know, there's a slight lip here. - [Alex] Yeah, cry me a river, Linus. Look, I have to acknowledge these things because that's the justification that traditional laptop manufacturers have had for making everything so integrated and so impossible to upgrade. But it's also not a big deal. It's on the bottom of the device. Okay, what else do we have here
in terms of expansion cards? We've got lots of USB-Cs, in case you're into that sort of thing. You know what? I'm going
to pop out that SSD and I'm going to go HDMI- damn it. I just realized I could carry around a full freaking complement of these and they would take up less space than my stupid type C dongle that I already have to carry anyway. Of course, we gotta talk
about the motherboard. Now, like any other laptop, the CPU is soldered directly to the board. That's because laptop CPUs are simply not available with pads on the bottom, but that doesn't mean that when this laptop has run its course, you couldn't still continue
to use it in some way. Framework has specifically
designed the motherboard to be able to run outside
of the laptop enclosure. And they've even gone as far
as to provide CAD drawings, so if you wanted to design your
own case for it, you could. Meanwhile, other laptop manufacturers have chassis intrusion,
detection switches. So the thing won't even turn on, if you don't have it completely closed up. What a diagnostic nightmare that is. This puppy is going to go right here, got a little mini PCI express right there. Oh, look at that. Conveniently,
the screw is already in- Be really careful with these, especially if for whatever reason you have to take them
off and put them back on, cause you can actually rip them off, the solder pads on there. Oh man, I love all the
little cable management. Look at this. If I ever
had to replace the display, for example, this would
be so easy to take out and rerun because they got just these little rubber grommet things right here. Boom, I have now re cable managed it. It took that long. Like that's the thing that a lot of people don't understand when you
talk about right to repair, it's not about telling you you're not allowed to have your iPhone. Go have your iPhone.
I don't give a (beep). There just should be other options. That's all. Next up, memory. Now they sent over three SODIMMs. I guess the point they
were trying to make is that you can kind of do whatever you want. You can mix and match. You can put in one, you can put in two. It holds a maximum of 64 gigs of dual channel DDR4 memory though. So that is what we are going to install. I'm trying to figure out, where I'm compromising here. I mean maybe, maybe a
more proprietary design could have squeezed in a
little bit more battery, but it's just whether they
make a conscious choice to put glue on the bottom of it or not. - [Alex] Yeah cause that's
a 60 watt-hour battery. - [Linus] Yeah. - [Alex] That's a pretty similar size to like a surface laptop
that's 45 watt-hour. - Very, very respectable in
terms of the size of the device. Like I don't, I don't see it. Like now I want to invest. Something that's nagging
at me a little bit though, is that while yeah, there's
better support for maintenance, like swapping out a
speaker module if it fails, or changing out the battery
once it starts to degrade. In terms of user upgrade ability, we've got the IO, but
most laptops out there do have upgradable storage and do have upgradable wireless
modules, for example. And there are still many
that have swappable Ram. So unless they're actually addressing upgradable motherboards in some way, they haven't changed that much. - [Alex] They only have
11th gen right now, Intel, but they say variety of x86, maybe ARM, and possibly even RISC-V in the future. - Of course, we've seen larger
companies than Framework promise this kind of upgradability and fail to deliver, (cough) Dell. But of course those
companies weren't built around openness, upgradability
and repairability, as a core pillar. Let's
close it up, shall we? [Alex] Sure. Which keyboard do you want? - Oh, that's what this
other box is, isn't it? Wait, what is this? Oh my God. I can have a light bezel if I want. - [Alex] So also.
- [Linus] Wait. (beeping) (distorted yelling) - You can see the switches. the highlight features
of the keyboard include a millimeter and a half of travel. And as we mentioned before, shocking rigidity considering the thinness of the design, and for the track pad, it features a four millimeter
separation between sensors, so that's about as high
end as you can get, a glass top and of course uses
Windows Precision drivers. And that beauty is more
than just skin deep. These names might not mean a
ton to the average consumer, but when I hear that the
keyboard was built by Lite-On and the track pad was built by PixArt, I'm going well, that's fantastic because these are OEMs that have decades of experience
building these components. And it gives me a ton of confidence. Oh incidentally, the power
button slash fingerprint sensor was built by Goodix and
features Linux drivers. Convenient included pull, in case you needed to take
it off and swap it out. Oh wow, wait. They all use the same bit, don't they? - [Alex] Yeah. Every screw in the whole
laptop. That's something. Replacing the bezel for the white one that we don't want to use is as simple as pulling off this magnetic cover and swapping it on a little
something like that. This also gives us access to the screws that hold on the display panel. Unfortunately at this time
there only one option, a 2256 by 1504 resolution,
three by two display that does not have any touch. Touch support is built
into the motherboard, so there's no reason that that couldn't be added in the future. It does feature 400 nit peak brightness as well as full coverage
of the SRG color space. But I personally would
love to see a touch option. This is so cool. This also gives you access to change out the camera and microphone module, which appears to be all
one piece here, yeah. Why have little clips that can get broken when you can have little
magnets that won't get broken. You know how one of the ways that you can evaluate the
build quality of a laptop is like a kind of a twist test, right? And a lot of the time, that's the justification given for these tightly integrated devices. And yet here we are. Yeah. There's some flex. That is not an unreasonable
amount to flex. So here's an XPS 15, which is basically gold
standard, as far as flex goes. There's still a little bit, okay, fine. But this, it's configurable. Where's my type A port Dell? The Dell's not even (beep) thinner. And the hits just keep on coming. All the drivers install
in unattended mode. Why is it that every
motherboard, for example, doesn't have just an
unattended driver installer, so that I don't have to click
next, next, next, next, next, like some kind of monkey. No doubt, this is better. You've gotta be kidding me.
The charger's modular too. Would you look at that? - But like you have your
charger plugged into the wall, someone comes along and they're like, oh, I want to charge my phone.
Here's a type C cable, yoink. Yeah, basically I'm saying that my girlfriend's a terrible person. (laughter) - Well. - [Alex] Yeah. So it's gallium nitride. We've only seen them in really
high end laptops so far. - Well that's awesome. It's so compact. And this'll do up to 60 watts at 20 volts. Not bad at all. Holy crap. That's like actually not that bad. - [Alex] So 1080p 60 FPS has a one sixth of an inch ONI Vision sensor. - How you doing? - [Alex] And an F2 lens
with four elements. - Yeah, so, not a ton of dynamic range, but it's doing, like it's respectable. - [Alex] Yeah. - Huh. You know how
Apple and Microsoft are the only ones that can do
magnetic charging connectors because of their stupid patents. Well, now some little hacky guy somewhere could just make a magnetic
charging connector clone that just slots into your thing. Framework doesn't get in trouble, cause they didn't make it. It's like- I mean, I didn't say anything. So it turboed to 4.2, I think that's about as
advertised, like 4.2, 4.3. - [Alex] Yeah. - Temporarily, it'll
do around 3.5 all core. I liked that their fan
just ramps instead of just letting the CPU go
to a hundred degrees. If you hear that, it
has no (whining sound), has no has no whine to
it, which is really nice. Like technically a
hundred degrees is okay, that doesn't mean that I have to be comfortable with it though. So all core, we ended up at about 3.3, it looks like it's just
going to hold there, at around 80 degrees. This thing is cool. I bet they even have
like a configurable BIOS. Battery disconnect. Oh, that's so cool. If you know you're going to run the thing plugged into the wall all the time, which can cause your battery to swell and be a potential fire hazard, you can just go battery disconnect, run it off wall power and
just let it sit there latent. Power on AC attach, like it just powers on if you plug it in, I could
see that being useful. Like when do you plug in your laptop when you don't actually no, well, sometimes I plug it on in my bag, cause I'd just want to charge it up before I leave the house, okay, I'm gonna leave that off. (laughter) I'm sold. I don't know if I've actually ever done this before, but I'm ordering one right now. - [Alex] Damn. - Bloody hell, hold on. This is not in US dollars. I'm surprised they even
have a Canadian site. How are these guys so together? - [Man] They got a strong framework. (laughter) - So Alex actually brought
up with these guys a concern. This is affordable, so how are you guys
going to stay profitable enough that I can trust that you will still exist in two years? And they basically said, well, it comes down to the
direct to consumer model as well as just a more
open-minded approach. Framework is counting on people coming back to them
for upgrades over time. Not because they build a shoddy product, but because people want to invest in improving the
longevity of their device. And obviously where else am I going to go? Like if I want a different color bezel or they do like a partnership with some anime show that I love for a keyboard scan or
something like that, I'm going to come back to Framework for that kind of customization and that kind of upgradability. And I think that's really,
really smart of them. So here you go. They're only
taking hundred dollar deposits. They're shipping in the summer right now, and I'm doing it. Thanks Micro Center for
sponsoring this video, you can get the best prices and selection on anything tech at any
one of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. If you use Micro Center's
Custom PC Builder, you can spec up the best
PC at any price point. And once you're done in the PC Builder, just add your computer and set up to the Micro Center
Custom Builds Showcase, which is a great place for people to gather and discuss each other's builds and get inspiration for their next PC. So don't wait, head to the link in the video description to check out Micro Center and get a coupon code for a free pair of wireless
Bluetooth headphones. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy, I mean, when's the last time
someone made a real, like- - [Alex] I was going to say- - Effort at modular anything. - [Alex] Well, our DIY switch build, that's kind of why I was scared of this. - Oh, that was fun. - [Alex] Yeah, but- - Sure, go watch that, it wasn't as good. - [Alex] Yeah, the thing was terrible. - But it was fun. - [Alex] Yeah, video's good.
Web archive of the https://frame.work website:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210725024128if_/https://frame.work/
Other things to consider:
https://fwupd.org/lvfs/vendors/#framework
https://community.frame.work/t/does-the-framework-laptop-support-linux/180/4
They even have a discussion page with actual info about Linux support!
Basically it looks like everything should work so long as you’re on a fairly recent kernel (5.12) and a newish version of libfprint (1.92) for the fingerprint reader.
Wow, I think I've watched, maybe, one half or so of a Linus video in my life. But it was pretty cool seeing him get so excited about the things that I feel like should be the norm.
Personally I've been getting so sick of consumer products recently. That laptop is pretty sick. And seeing it at a time when I've been moving away from my precious ThinkPads because I feel like they've been slowly going to shit too.
I want one. Does it come in black?
Edit: grammar
I'm just sad that, to my knowledge, Intel don't sell LGA/PGA mobile CPUs or I'm sure Framework would've jumped onto that.
QR codes on the components though, a website with a genuinely useful Q/A and fully open about all the specs. It's like we've been shipped to a parallel universe where manufacturers actually care about the end user.
This video is making me want to buy one, even tho I most definitely do not need it at all
it looks awesome, I love it
I want so much to get a laptop from them, but sadly I live in France and they don't sell here for now.
This is a super laptop for people in general, but I think their laptop will be especially good for companies, I can't wait for them to come here !
Should I sell my M1 MacBook Air and get this instead? I’ve been meaning to switch to Linux full time as my main desktop OS, and both the easy repairability of most components and the Linux friendly engineers on their forum seem like great selling points. I don’t know whether the Asahi Linux project for M1 will be useable anytime soon or not, so I don’t know if I should wait it out or not.
Wow that's fantastic. Charges from 60W usb-c too just like my existing portable battery can deliver. Damn, I kinda want one.
I tried clicking their Configure Now button on the site but it responds with a http 500 (Internal Server Error) response code and reloads their home page so they're clearly busy after this video.
I was most blown away by how actually reasonable the prices are for this laptop. You can get the barebones model with standard specs for under $2000, which is very reasonable considering this is their first product and is comparable in price to similar spec laptops on the market. Id want to see how they run for ppl over the next year, and if all goes well id be very interested to buy a 2nd gen model in about a years time maybe