I think you’ve brought a really interesting point up. A lot of these laptops are the way they are because miniaturisation. Framework trades that off. But for some, this tradeoff isn’t in the right spot.
The challenge for framework is to build a modern laptop, that doesn’t have these tradeoffs. Which is an impossible challenge, hence why all of the other manufacturers ditched it. (That and repairability being bad for business)
So, a framework laptop, that’s as light, thin and fast as a mbp, while being a comparable price and being able to pull tabs to swap ram. The better their engineering, the closer they get to this and the more customers they can please.
I think what’s lost here is when the framework project was launched, all the companies were moving to SoC designs and reliability was unknown.
Replacing a stick of ram is still much cheaper than buying a whole new MacBook, but these systems seem to be reliable enough that ram failures aren’t front of mind. Same for SSDs.
The current benefit for a Framework is that you can swap out the entire inner/guts without being an expert and everything still works together. Most of the laptops I have provide 2 SO-DIMM slots and a slot for either NVME or SATA for storage.
So for me, there is little value in that in most scenarios. There are a few laptop chassis that I am very fond of and have wished I could "use that chassis with that hardware", but even then I haven't seen Framework chassis designs that give me that impression. I'm not saying they're crappy, but I'm thinking of different types of brushed metal, magnesium alloy stuff, etc.
It makes me wonder who their audience is if they are targeting users that will pay a premium for an upgradable system, but are afraid of modifying the guts of the computer.
Replaceable GPU and CPU is the big draw draw for me. Heck, the config nature of the shop also means I can chop off buying ram and memory instead of haggling with the store, since I have quite a few spare sticks lying around.
On my experience, every time I’ve been in the situation of looking for more capacity because the software requirements have gone up, I’m 1-2 generations of DDR behind and it doesn’t really make sense to do the upgrade anyway.
How often are you actually going to do that though? My desktop from 12 years ago has 16GB of RAM and Apple only just upgraded their base specs to 16GB.
Ok granted my new desktops have 128GB, but that's massive overkill so I can have like 12 VSCode's open. For normal people 16GB has been the sensible amount for at least a decade.
I tend to agree. But some people at least want the option. I would also say only in 2025 has that shifted for me as well. I've been perfectly fine with 16gb of ram for at least a decade, but local LLMs have me wanting for more.
Good logging is critical and actually having the logs turned on in production. No point writing logs if you silence them.
My company now has a log aggregator that scans the logs for errors, when it finds one, creates a Trello card, uses opus to fix the issue and then propose a PR against the card.
These then get reviewed, finished if tweaks are necessary and merged if appropriate.
I know, what’s so special about email? The common thing between your accounts, that the company that has a lot of chat history is allowing you not to change?
They're getting slaughtered by the more focused Anthropic team who decided they will have the best coding model.
Given how bad things have been going recently (5.2 chat bombing and being behind, opus being the code GOAT, G team dominating media, Grok existing and meta / the Chinese dominating opensource), they should niche to the general purpose llm before that's all they're left with by market forces.
I'm still pretty sour they didn't have the vision at the time to build an ecosystem around them and instead went for those building the ecosystem on them.
Businesses literally try to track and optimise virality these days as part of their marketing.
Not just businesses. It's governments, too.
There's a public park near me that is tracked for likes and social media engagement. If it misses the city's goals for social media engagement a certain number of months in a row, it can be turned back into a parking lot.
I objected to this measure of "success" during the public meetings about it, but nobody cares about the old man in the back of the room.
Number plates are just one of the privacy tracking technologies. Any modern connected car infotainment system will report and have that data sold or anything that has Bluetooth can be tracked.
At least as per Carpenter v. United States, that data requires a warrant, not just any cop/LEO in the country typing in a license plate with reasoning as 'investigation'. That's a much better standard.
For China there is no plan B for semiconductor manufacturing. Invading Taiwan would be a dice roll and the consequences would be severe. They will create their own SOTA semiconductor industry. Same goes for their military.
The question is when? Does that come in time to deflate the US tech stock bubble? Or will the bubble start to level out and reality catch up, or will the market crash for another reason beforehand?
China has their own fabs. They are behind TSMC in terms of technology, but that doesn't mean they don't have fabs. They're currently ~7nm AFAIK. That's behind TSMC, but also not useless. They are obviously trying hard to catch up. I don't think we should just imagine that they never will. China has a lot of smart engineers and they know how strategically important chip manufacturing is.
This is like this funny idea people had in the early 2000s that China would continue to manufacture most US technology but they could never design their own competitive tech. Why would anyone think that?
Wrt invading Taiwan, I don't think there is any way China can get TSMC intact. If they do invade Taiwan (please God no), it would be a horrible bloodbath. Deaths in the hundreds of thousands and probably relentless bombing. Taiwan would likely destroy its own fabs to avoid them being taken. It would be sad and horrible.
If they invade Taiwan, we will scuttle the plants and direct ASML to disable their machines which they will do because that’s the condition under which we gave them the tech. They’re not going to get it this way.
They’ll just catch the next wave of tech or eventually break into EUV.
imo the most likely answer is that asml funds a second source for the optics that isn't US controlled and starts shipping to China. The US is losing influence fast.
It would likely take ASML decades to develop an alternative EUV light source not encumbered by US defense technology, at which time it may not matter.
Everyone is still dependent on a single American manufacturer for this tech after decades of development. This strongly suggests that it is considerably more difficult than just "funding a second source".
That'd be the belief in good old American exceptionalism. Up until recently, a common meme on HN was "freedom" is fundamental to innovation, and naturally the country with the most Freedom(TM) wins. This even persisted after it was clear that DJI was kicking all kinds of ass, outcompeting multiple western drone companies.
It's probably true that free enterprise helps a lot, but China has that in large part. Even though the CCP calls itself communist, China is very capitalist in a number of ways. But I guess China is showing us that capitalism can exist without democracy.
The challenge for framework is to build a modern laptop, that doesn’t have these tradeoffs. Which is an impossible challenge, hence why all of the other manufacturers ditched it. (That and repairability being bad for business)
So, a framework laptop, that’s as light, thin and fast as a mbp, while being a comparable price and being able to pull tabs to swap ram. The better their engineering, the closer they get to this and the more customers they can please.
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