Comment by fwipsy
21 hours ago
Framework seems pretty popular here in general, but nobody really seems to talk about how repairable enterprise laptops are. Some laptops have clips around the edge of the bottom panel to hold it in place, which frequently break. On my brother's T480s, those clips were made out of metal and held in with screws, meaning they were themselves replaceable. More recently I worked on a Dell Precision 7550 laptop, and if you crack it open everything is labeled just like a Framework. Also, before selling it I ran the onboard diagnostic. I was surprised when it told me to check the touchpad cable, because the touchpad was working fine. Took it apart again and yep, the touchpad cable was loose.
Framework really caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle, but Dell/Lenovo/HP have been selling repairable laptops to IT departments for decades. In addition, they're a much more mature product -- been selling laptops for much longer at much higher volumes. Thinkpads are the prototypical example but I actually like Dells better. Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well.
> Framework really caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle, but Dell/Lenovo/HP have been selling repairable laptops to IT departments for decades.
Yeah, but does Dell allow you to change your laptop's mainboard for another mainboard with time? That is such a quantum leap. You do not have to adjust your self to a new keyboard just because you wanted a new processor.
Actually, they do. I'm not sure if it's officially supported, but the 7550 (10th gen) and 7560 (11th gen) have the same motherboard layout, and users have reported swapping successfully in other models. You also see reports of users putting the 7560's Ampere-series graphics cards in a 7550, which only ships with Turing.
A chassis is 10% of the cost of the laptop. Reusable chassis just to put new hardware in isn’t something the average consumer is interested in.
Also, buying a new mainboard every few years and putting the old mainboard on a shelf is a lot less sustainable than buying a complete new laptop and selling your old laptop to someone.
It's not just the chassis, it's also the screen, storage, RAM, ports, speakers, battery, and so on. And there is lots of demand for old mainboards, they sell pretty quick on Ebay. More sustainable to only buy and sell the part you need than the entire laptop, especially factoring in shipping costs. Plus the mainboards can be used like a mini PC.
The place where the framework design really pays of is the ability to trivially swap ports. most laptops have the usbc on the motherboard so a warn out connector is a $800 repair. Even those that have separate daughterboards for IO typically will be a ~1hr+ take everything apart to fix. With a Framework, replacing a worn out connector is ~$15 and 15 seconds.
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You can take the old mainboard and slot it into a cheap case and run it like a slim pc.
I agree with your point on chassis/mainboard matching but wrt "putting the old mainboard on a shelf," Framework does have some cases for bare mainboards made by coolermaster and I think the 3d printing files are available.
Yeah, every time they change my laptop's mainboard, they definitely do it with a ton of time.
Are there many laptop mainboards available and what is the price like?
Yeah, I started with their first laptop (11th gen Intel DDR4 ram) and upgraded to the 7040 AMD board with DDR5 ram. Now there's even newer boards available with desirable features like LPCAMM. Framework has absolutely delivered on the "upgradable mainboard" promise.
There's also 3rd party ARM and RISC-V mainboards, but I'd recommend the average user sticks to the x86_64 boards.
> but does Dell allow you to change your laptop's mainboard for another mainboard with time
Business laptops are swapped out every few years.
Reusable chassis? Literally no one asked for this, it makes no sense outside of a very, very small community of enthusiasts who think it's cool. Restricting yourself to no mechanical changes/improvements in perpetuity is not the flex you think it is.
Keyboards wear out, the chassis gets dented/scratched. Thermal requirements change.
This feature is for no one.
Old frame.work mainboards make fantastic proxmox home servers: 3 watt idle 8 cores 64 GB RAM.
You make a good point. And they do have the industrial knowledge / experience to create higher quality parts than Framework. But note that the value difference between Framework's offering and the others you cited is that repairability is today a lower priority for them (due to prioritising planned obsolescence), where as it is the core value around which the Framework business is built. Why aren't we seeing more modular laptops and smartphones? Sure, people cite technological advances and how electronics are manufactured today. But a major reason, in my opinion, is that it isn't seen as profitable as designing and selling devices that are not easy to repair or upgrade.
> Planned obsolescence
How is this supposed to work exactly? The company builds a product that fails quickly, so that people will buy another one? I'm highly skeptical that this works on consumers. Almost nobody will buy the same brand after the first one craps out. And I'm certain that it doesn't work on companies who will track failure rates for the product across a large fleet.
Cheap products exist because of a race to the bottom. Some consumers care a lot about quality, but there is also a market for $150 Best Buy laptops for broke college students. These companies make both high- and low-end devices, cutting corners as necessary to meet that price point while still competing on quality and features. They're not building products worse on purpose, because that doesn't work in a competitive marketplace.
Framework benefits from the same halo effect as Apple: They only make high-end devices, and so they don't get judged for the cheap crap they make. It doesn't mean either company's products are actually better than mainstream offerings at the same price point.
Even if I'm wrong, and planned obsolescence is actually very lucrative: how long do you think Framework's "core values" will hold up against market incentives? Fortunately, we don't need to rely on that. Manufacturers make good products because consumers pay for them; that applies to Apple and Framework, but also high-end laptops from many other manufacturers. If they weren't more reliable and more repairable than the low-end laptops, then IT departments would just buy the consumer devices costing 5x less.
- Why our tech fails us: Learning from century-old light bulb that never goes out - https://interestingengineering.com/culture/planned-obsolesce...
> ... 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.
Each new Fairphone has pushed the boundaries of what a modular and repairable phone can be, but people must accept that it comes with a very significantly higher price (although in their case that's not only because it's modular, but also fairer wages, more ethical metals, etc). The average person is not willing to pay twice as much for a repairable phone.
And don’t forget about parts availability. I can get a new screen for a 15 year old iPhone on AliExpress. I doubt you will be able to buy Fairphone 6 parts in 15 years.
A Fairphone is repairable right now but might not be in the future.
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You are right... I personally own a T480s and it is a remarkable device, which can be repaired just like the framework (although most parts are no longer available new). I added a glass trackpad (which is way better than the original) and ordered a WQHD Display + Cable to upgrade from FullHD to WQHD (2560x1440?). Batteries can be replaced, RAM can be upgraded (in a way, part of it is soldered) and everything has a unique part number that can be easily researched.
However, newer Lenovo Devices (like the Lenovo ThinkPad X9-15 Aura Edition which I would love to buy) are not that repairable any more. Sometimes I think it is for a reason, sometimes I think it may just be no longer reasonable. Even Framework claimed that their Desktop Ryzen 395+ RAM timings were to tight to allow using LPCAMM2 and if you'd like to get the last bit of performance out of a machine, short traces and soldered connections may be the only remaining option, even for SSDs. Additionally, OLEDs didn't make it into Frameworks notebooks yet and that might be a similar reason - harder repairability.
Whatever the reason is, I like Frameworks philosophy of LISTENING to customers and maybe their success has changed the way bigger vendors produce there stuff (if only a little bit). I'm not expecting Apple to do this, but at least HP and Dell seem to have slightly changed their path of vendor locking to be more repairable again.
I would bet that this story of a failed BIOS update reaches the support anytime soon and they provide a repair guide or maybe a replaceable BIOS chip. Stories like this are somehow sad but at least they help to improve.
BTW: Dell has great repairable business notebooks (I recently switched to a cheap Latitude 5420 - the T480s was getting to slow for some tasks), but there are caveats I immediately noticed and most people don't think of:
- Keyboard Backlight is way too bright in the lowest setting
- Keyboard layout is a bit off
- It cannot be opened with one hand
- Display Brightness steps are to low (using the ALT key could increase / decrease the step size, like in MacBooks)
- Display Brightness cannot be set to "off" / black screen (this only works on macbooks)
- The Dell 5520 Trackpad is horrible
- Nobody except Apple supports AudioJack-Headphones remotes for controlling audio playback and volume (with USB-C to audiojack Adapters this works out of the box on Linux)
> I would bet that this story of a failed BIOS update reaches the support anytime soon and they provide a repair guide or maybe a replaceable BIOS chip. Stories like this are somehow sad but at least they help to improve.
Original author here. I like your optimism, but I've linked multiple threads on their forums with people doing the same problem going back over a year. I also pieced together most of the stuff from people doing external flashing on the forums. Still, no official guides, no changes as far as I can tell. This post is the most detail repair guide available right now.
If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
> Original author here.
Thank you for making this guide. The knowledge in it can be transferred to other Brands, too.
> I like your optimism, but...
Well, I'm not saying framework is perfect. The Hardware is expensive, inferior to bigger brands and, as you stated, support is worse. The repairability promise is hardly relevant as long as you're keeping your notebook > 5 years taking good care of it like most people. The switchable ports are a nice gimmick but not a total game changer. However, I really hope they succeed while keeping most of their promises and not actively preventing repair like e.g. Apple.
> If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
That's the way it goes. As long as only few people raise their hand, nothing changes. That's why I'm thankful you kept going... Now it is likely you actually changed something for the better
From my experience they have been getting less repairable. Look at recent thinkpads.
My headcannon is that the only reason the T14G7 is as repairable as it is, is due to the whole right to repair movement, including framework.
The recent thinkpads are shit. They market high tech materials in the T14s machines but the bottom for a huge amount of the line is aluminium with plastic mounts glued to it. Those are fragile and break off. So really the whole magnesium alloy thing is performative.
I preferred the older plastic coated Mg chassis ones. At least they were honest about the materials.
Personally I avoid laptops now since the T430 line. Desktops are faster, cheaper, more reliable, easier to repair and replace bits and most of the time I don't need to carry a computer around.
I thought the very recent ones were going toward repairability? Like this year
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My last two ThinkPads (a P40 Yoga and a T14 Gen 2) were absolute shit.
The P40 spent more time in the repair depot than in use before I replaced it with something that didn't ship with a fucked M.2 slot, a touchscreen that failed out of the box and then a month after replacement, and a battery that pillowed within a month after that.
The T14 Gen 2 bricked on a BIOS update. The pinhole reset didn't work, so it went to the repair depot, came back two weeks later with the BIOS updated. Next BIOS update bricked it again.
Dell latitude 7480.
usb-c port is now dead, it is soldered.
Not going to happen to my https://frame.work laptop, 10 eur part, no soldering, not even a screwdriver, and good as new
Arent the USB ports on the framework also soldered on? I’m looking at a picture of the motherboard right now. Unlike my MacBook it doesn’t use a daughter board for the ports. It’s straight on the main board. Seems less repairable than my MacBook.
The ports on the motherboard are soldered, but you don't use them directly. You attach "expansion cards" which slide into a slot on the laptop case which locks them in place. So those ports seldom see any forces applied to them. All your day-to-day wear (plugging/unplugging, twisting, yanking) is going to be on the port on the expansion card which you can replace for $10. It's basically like a daughter board that is trivially user-replaceable rather than a daughter board that you have to open up your laptop to replace.
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You mean the dongles?
The actual USB-C port on a Framework is soldered to the motherboard. If you destroy the port electrically it is the same thing.
If you are inserting/removing cables like a gorilla, then buy a 3" dongle (aka magic Framework module) for your other laptop.
> If you are inserting/removing cables like a gorilla
You've never moved your laptop without realizing it is still plugged in? I've done that a couple of times. My framework gives me peace of mind because I know the only port that will be damaged from that is the one on the $10 card because the card is firmly attached to the laptop body. Your suggestion of a 3" dongle doesn't have that benefit so yanking a plugged-in laptop could still cause a loose or broken port on your motherboard.
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Most consumers are not an IT department, unfortunately.
I've been repairing my laptops for a long time. I loved my dell laptops for field work. Swappable batteries especially! Framework, for me, was just the natural extension of that, geared towards multi-use that included reconfigurability, which dell never had, and more compact overall.
On balance, I think the framework has been a cool talking point, but yes, a 2015 dell would have supported all the improvements I made over time to my framework, provided it had all the ports I needed originally. It'd have definitely been bulkier though!
Most people I know don't own enterprise computers. They are pretty pricy and visually tame - not really made for consumers. To me, buying a framework is more about ideology than them being the best at everything. You can't expect them to be the best when starting out either. I am buying a future.
I don't think any framework owner seriously thinks they are buying the most repairable laptop in the world or the most cost effective laptop in the world.
> They are pretty pricy
Stop buying new. Great retired business machines on eBay daily.
I don't disagree, but consider that second hand machines are of unknown state, and often have no (or limited) warranty. Just like with a second hand car, there is a higher maintenance burden. How does an average joe know if a machine on ebay is great? If the answer is "they have to learn how to spot a good one", it is already an increased burden.
People like you and I are happy with this, but the average person could not care less about computers and simply need something to send emails, do taxes, and browse the internet. They don't want that extra burden, they want something that is guaranteed to "just work".
Proper second hand refurbishment pipelines that are well known and trusted is something we should aim for and want, but I believe the current state is that people want new and want cheap new. What is wrong with wanting cheap + new, and wanting laptop producers to cater to this?
> nobody really seems to talk about how repairable enterprise laptops are
Thinkpads have been a meme since the early 2010s.
It's funny to bring up the T480/s as positive example because I remember people complaining about anything past ~xx20 series.
> caught everyone's attention with the fun DIY repair angle
Framework is a reaction to the cult following a lot of the business laptops had. When people are spending $$ to retrofit modern mainboards to vintage Thinkpad chassis you know there's enthusiast money to be made there.
It was Lenovo ditching the classic ThinkPad 7 row keyboard with the Ivy Bridge models c. 2012 that really pissed people off
Indeed, multiple civil wars have been fought since the Lenovo acquisition.
There's repairable and there's repairable and it's not quite as obvious as it seems.
The big issue we see on our Dell and Lenovo units is broken USB-C ports and the only repair method possible there is replace the motherboard. No ports on daughterboards like the MacBooks. And you can't just buy the parts from most vendors. Dell is utterly impossible and with Lenovo half the time they don't actually have any of the parts available or somehow manage to fuck up their shipping so they never turn up. Had to charge back Lenovo/Digital River twice. Zero support at all and impossible to contact anyone. And the whole PART NOT USER SERVICEABLE in the HMMs.
If you want Dell/Lenovo repairs just buy two of whatever.
At the same time iFixit are gushing all over Lenovo who are hell and pissing on Apple. The Apple who don't have this problem and I seem to have no problem getting parts for from their official parts store, the parts actually turn up and work.
Which thinkpad series? Newer ones seem not so great?
I think the latest ThinkPad t14 did get a 10/10 from ifixit repairability score.
I mean, I needed to replace my thinkpad x1 carbon gen 3 keyboard and I started looking at videos and... You can do it, but it's absolutely bonkers what you need to do.
I think the context into which Framework introduced repairable laptops is mainly the Mac dev crowd who've only ever experienced Apple's glued together brick with serial number locked parts that gets replaced whole or not at all.
In today's blog post, we are all studying the enshittification of the BIOS.
In general, I agree with you that the bigger laptop makers can repair laptops and do an amazing job.
What we're all here for though is 2026. No big company is coming to fix your machines, even big companies are waiting 30+ days for parts availability from the big company bros they bought from. If you're a consumer, forget about it.
"Many of them are Ubuntu-certified as well." I'm calling BS here. Dell and HP hide their limited, paltry Linux offerings in the back of their website. Define your use of "many."
Now we're down to the BIOS. Today's blog post encountered a failed BIOS update, and takes Framework to task for it. Some of the support team at Framework are really cool and would probably have detected this customer is https://xkcd.com/806/
This time he got the strict script follower for customer support. I hope it blows up on Framework.
https://ubuntu.com/certified
This is how I define "many." Dell in particular seems to certify lots of laptops for Ubuntu support, even if they don't sell them with Ubuntu. It's not just their enterprise offerings, either; I see lots of consumer models.
omg, thanks so much!
I’m assuming many people also haven’t experienced their warranties and service networks. I remember decades ago when I was a teenager and anytime my Dell XPS stopped working (or I dropped it…) a tech would come in a van within two days and repair the laptop on my kitchen table while I watched and peppered him with questions.
I love my framework because it’s the only laptop where I can design a custom plugin module to talk to my hardware and EE testbench, but DIY repairability pales in comparison to a service network where the tech arrives with a library of spare parts faster than you can get a replacement from Amazon.