I think cases like this should be brought before a small claims court. It seems unfair. The company (Framework Computer) provided the software, but the software is faulty and broke ("bricked") the laptop. Can you imagine if a GPU driver caused the card to get bricked? Even if out of warranty, surely the manuf would be legally liable in many jurisdictions for this faulty driver.
The author's LinkedIn profile[1] tells me that this person lives/works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While the issue is already fixed, for others affected with the same issue, I would suggest the small claims route. Make sure to talk with an LLM to follow the correct steps to gather and prepare evidence for your claim. If you are lucky enough to win, then you should "go nuclear" on social media (and their own forums) to share the win and the exact details about how you did it. Framework Computer will surely (1) cave and provide replacements or (2) be flooded with small claims about this issue.
Author here. I am not even sure how much damage I can actually claim given that I spent $20 on tools to fix the laptop. If I bought a new board, I might be able to claim that, but filing small claims over $20 is likely not worth anyone's time.
The important thing here is awareness and helping anyone affected, not trying to get Framework fined for a tiny sum.
You're right, for you, since you had the ability to do the repair yourself (although Framework shouldn't have made you invest the time and effort it took to repair this on your own). The legal route would still be a good way to go for others who were forced to buy a new board though. Hopefully your site helps people avoid the time and trouble of going to court or the costs of a replacement.
People doing what you've done, documenting the problem you had and the steps you took to fix it, are what make the internet great. You also get bonus points for having that information well formatted/presented and accessible. Even without JS the page displays nicely, images included. Thank you for that! I may never need the information for myself, but I'm grateful that you took the time to put it out there.
Yeah, I don't know about the whole "THEY'RE on the hook". When it gets to the point where you discover that your lawyer didn't do what they're supposed to do, you're deep in the hole.
A recent experience for me was a lawyer I hired just forwarding whatever their LLM service said. Granted it was for a commercial contract so doesn't require that much legal muscle, I imagine, but I had to go through multiple rounds of feedback just to point out problems in their amendments. And the response was something along the lines of "yeah that could be a problem, let me review it". It was quite a bit of money too but the experience left me without much confidence that having a lawyer review the contract was any better than just running it through any capable model myself.
Then... double-check it yourself? The whole issue with hiring a lawyer in the first place is that defeats the point for the minuscule amount of claims being made.
Yes, but there are free resources available that guide you on how to go through the process without consulting a hallucination machine.
Judges don't like their time being wasted, and they doubly don't like plaintiffs and defendants who don't even go to the effort of trying to follow decorum.
And, I'm just throwing this one out here; contempt of court is one of the vanishingly few civil offenses you can be held in custody for.
And consulting an LLM is a great way to find guides and get basic information on feasibility and effort of bringing a claim. LLMs are not a replacement for critical thinking, and they never have been.
Just ask for citations by forcing the LLM to provide a verbatim quote from a linked source. If the LLM is incapable of doing so without hallucinating (cough, Gemini, cough) use a better one.
I don't get the LLM hate on this site sometimes. Just because it is easy to use an LLM irresponsibly doesn't mean all LLM usage has to be irresponsible.
I think the problem is that the original recommendation here was "just use an LLM" not "use an LLM [in this responsible manner]".
As an anecdote: I know people currently preparing to file suit against a former roommate who decided to leave mid lease and stop paying because they had an LLM convince them that they could just do that (they definitely can't, it's not even close under local tenancy laws).
Which fits with my general impression that LLMs are extremely inclined to validate that you can do whatever you want to even when that's not how the law works and my expectation that using them naively for legal matters is a really bad idea.
And applied to this specific case I can easily imagine an LLM picking up on the commenters outrage and supporting them that they're right, when I tend to agree with the actual author's comment that it doesn't seem like they have any actual damages since they fixed it for $20 (not that I'm a lawyer).
You beat me to it! That is exactly my point: An LLM can guide you to find the forms, fill them, and gather your evidence. Even the cheapest lawyer will far exceed the 500 USD repair fee that is the basis of your small claims lawsuit!
Another thing (this is me guessing here): The standard for evidence and "legal excellence" must be far lower for small claims court, compared to regular district court. The whole point is to provide a very low cost way for average citizens to sue other citizens or companies for recourse. As I understand, most small claims courts don't need or require a lawyer.
Related anecdote: This year, there was a story of a single Japanese mother using an LLM to file a lawsuit against the father to establish paternity[1]. (Note: This was family court, which, again, will have many people attending that cannot afford a lawyer, but the judge will show care that they receive fairness, given their limited knowledge of the law.)
Can you actually point out one thing he said that's wrong? Seems like your whole post history is just blindly raging against AI. I don't even see how AI psychosis applies to what GP wrote, it's not totally detached from reality as those subjects tend to be.
Read the court's forms and instructions then. LLMs are notoriously inaccurate regarding the law and conflating every legal system. Going in blind is better than going in misled by an "AI".
I had the same thing happen to me with my Thinkpad Nano, and researching how to fix this made me realize pc manufacturer really don't care.
PC bricked from BIOS update are still ultra common.
I uploaded a dump of the flash [1] in the bad state and they somehow analyzed it and made a fix.
Great for others I guess, but I'm still mindblown that the regular path would have been that this perfectly working laptop to this day become ewaste.
Being an embedded dev, I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins. Or some DFU mode you can boot into.
> I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins
Not enough of these cases happen under warranty for them to bother (and out of warranty cases are either neutral, or even beneficial to them if they drive sales of new hardware).
Lenovo also just had it happen with their Legion Go. They finally pulled the BIOS from distribution, but doesn't sound like they're doing anything to help the victims whose devices got bricked by a bad update.
Yep, you can do a DFU recovery on a Mac from another Mac over USB. Same as if it were an iPhone/iPad. Which makes sense since it's basically the same hardware.
In PCs it's usual for a lot of motherboards have a dual bios, so if something fails (eg no POST) in the update, the mobo fall backs to the other one. It's a cheap chip in bulk, that would help a lot in cases like this.
A bit off-topic, but kind of relevant. I firmly believe that if installing custom firmware voids the warranty of a device, installing official updates should extend the warranty.
I'm tired of sloppy updates or change of behavior that mess with how I use MY device.
At this point, I'm convinced Google is doing this on purpose. My Google TV has become slow since the Gemini update, which I wasn't asked if I wanted it. My pixel battery life gets worse with every update, etc.
I don't know. I'm sitting here with a framework laptop consciously NOT updating it because I'm in no mood to have my computer SOL because a company can't seem to get their shit together?
Of note, I really like my framework, and I have installed BIOS updates on the past without issue. However, there have been a lot of firmware problems and fixes that are not fixes (battery related) and then bios updates that apparently cut the sound volume down to far lower levels than before the update, etc.
A user shouldn't have to worry about installing a BIOS update from the manufacturer causing the machine to die without circumstances like power loss, etc.
I feel personally that if such a BIOS update bricks someone's device, it should unquestionably be "we are sorry, let us send you out a new board asap". They can then reflash using pogo pins and send them out to other customers.
Accountability these days doesn't exist anywhere. It's making the world shit.
Google seems to have "directives from high" where they shoehorn the latest fad into all their existing devices, regardless of whether it works or not, on a tight schedule. Gemini is the latest one.
I had Google WiFi points that worked fine, and then there was a directive to merge them into Google Home. They didn't show up correctly in the Home app for a year or so.
Google bricked all of the old fitbit scales with a firmware that glitches out and drains the battery. There were tons of reports at the time, but the devices were out of warranty so they didn’t fix it.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure the authors of software are liable for damages to property their software might cause. Regardless of whether that is the case, legislation should be enacted to ensure this and make complaints/remuneration standard and easy to extract without the costs of taking a huge company to court.
I don't know. Out of curiosity I went to framework website, found the software license for their BIOS firmware and it says
"Software distributed under the License is distributed AS IS basis, without WARRANTY OF ANY KIND..."
EU has a minimum warranty period (2 years?) on electrical goods. UK has Consumer Rights Act that amounts to a limited warranty for as long as a reasonable person would expect the item to last(!). These disclaimers are to specify that any language elsewhere that sounds like a warranty -- 'we take pride in our work and ensure every laptop meets exacting standards' -- has a silent addendum of 'not a warranty' so you can't actually win in court claiming "this didn't meet exacting standards" (ymmv).
I lost my google mesh network to a firmware update, ofc I didn't even ask for it to be updated, they just shipped an update that bricked the devices. Just got an "out of warranty" response after they gave me the normal suggestions of trying to reboot, etc.
I somewhat regret buying my framework laptop at this stage, because the answer to every fault is "buy a new component, from framework".
I'm not sure I blame them for this really, but there is no competitive market of parts (or really any market at all), which means that the reality is that you're just locking your money to them. They also often have stock issues, so woe betide you if your component fails at the wrong time.
It's very hard to predict costs here, but framework laptops do seem to fail more than other brands, and their laptops do tend to be more expensive. In comparison to MacBooks I've used over the years, which other than screen delaminating, have been faultless, at least.
We bulk bought a lot of Framework Intel 12th gen laptops to kit out our engineering team.
Within a year many of these (>20%) started experiencing the "400 MHz bug" where the CPU is either intermittently or constantly stuck at 400 MHz, and the laptop starts to heat up like an oven. As far as I know there has never been any conclusive fix for this issue from Framework, or even an official debugging guide.
It really soured me on the idea of repairable laptops - what's the point of it being "repairable" if you have huge fundamental flaws in the hardware that go unfixed?
I had a similar issue on AMD 7040, where it would lock too I think 800Mhz or something. It didn't get hot, it would just obviously be very sluggish until I restarted. The issue popped up a few times, but I think was ultimately fixed with a Linux change.
I've had this sort of thing happen with a Dell XPS, and their response was "purchase a new laptop". While it would be great if we had stronger consumer protection, for both economic and environmental reasons I prefer the Framework approach.
You didn't mention what the problem was, but Dell laptops are so ubiquitous that buying replacement parts on eBay is both very easy and highly affordable. This is one of the reasons I'm partial to Dell, even in the face of all the objectively better-designed alternatives.
When you purchase a new laptop, you can choose a different manufacturer who may have a more durable product. When you have a framework, you're forced to buy the same component from the same company that made it poorly in the first place, if it's even in stock.
When you buy a framework, you are not forced to buy the same component from framework. You are free to buy a new laptop like you would if your laptop from Dell failed.
having 2 fw 13s this is my experience as well (and also friends who bought into FW); i was willing to give the 13 pro a try until they downgraded my order. I inevitably cancelled and went with a dell xps14 and its a fantastic laptop. I am unsure bout any future fw purchases. also my m1 macbook pro is made so well I've abused this to the cows come home and i feel like it still has another 3+ years to it..
everytime someone brings up the e-waste aspects of fw, i don't know if its that simple...because i've definitely already generated much more e-waste with my frameworks than any other laptop i've bought in the last decade
that being said, i do like the fw vision, but they might be trying to do TOO much that their quality is suffering for it
A couple years ago, my personal laptop died and that was all the excuse I needed to finally get one of these Framework laptops that everyone was raving about. I was all set to part with roughly $1700. Pulled my credit card out of my wallet and everything. Until I started filling out the order information and they said it was backordered for 6 months! Yeah, I couldn't wait that long.
I started looking at refurbished Dell Precisions and came across one that was $800 with specs not _too_ far off from the Framework 16. Not exactly what a wanted, but it ticked all the boxes and was a very decent deal. I procrastinated a bit by accident and then happened to be checking back on the morning of Black Friday and saw that they had cut the price to $400. I've never clicked "Add to Cart" so fast in my life.
Now, to be fair, when it arrived the battery was pretty much toast and the webcam didn't work, so after sourcing replacements and fixing those myself, it ended up being more like a $500 laptop. Still a bargain for a pretty damn good machine. It has done everything I asked of it. I'm very happy that I wasn't able to order a Framework and walked away from the experience $1000 richer.
I can buy 3rd party: RAM, SSD, WI-FI,random Expansion cards from the marketplace. I can open and clean and change thermal paste, etc. I've heard the display can be bought from alibaba, etc.
ALL thermal paste ages. There is no thermal paste that never needs to be changed.
Thats like BMW saying their transmission fluid never needs to be refilled. It absolutely does, its just financially more lucrative for them if the transmission explodes and you have to buy a new one or a whole new car.
My post was not a fiery indictment of framework, more that I am musing that perhaps I have been duped. Not because they aren't repairable (they are), but because I didn't consider that the quality would be so much lower than other options.
I genuinely don't know which is cheaper or better for the environment: buying a macbook that I change out every 8-10 years (this is how long they would last, based on prior experience), or I buy a framework and change out parts as they fail.
The expansion cards always seemed a gimmick to me: it's just a USB-C port, loaded down with the extra plastic necessary to claim it's an expansion port. I guess some folks find it more convenient than a dongle, but when I'm using a laptop for portability it's rare I want anything other than USB-C. (When the laptop is sitting at home or in the office on a desk, just plug in a Thunderbolt dock and get all the ports I could want.)
My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
A modular gpu using a new standard that is form-factor specific for only a specific model?
Matte panel released a few months after the first 13.5 model was released with glossy panel as only option?
It sounds a bit fishy to me. But maybe I'm just a bit too cynical .
I see your point, but what i'm talking about is the company generating a strong incentive to people to buy upgrades or replacements.
This whole submission is about a user going extra length to recover a perfectly functioning main board (with price between 400 and 800 eur depending on model) after an official update went wrong and was suggested to buy a new one.
Mind that I am planning to buy one as well, so I don't have a bias against it. But those suspicious "features" pulled me away from the 16" model for example.
"Bricked" is a bad term for system without a proper software/firmware update path. A LOT could have been done here to improve "repairability" (with quotes, because this is a software issue on a perfectly fine mainboard).
A/B updates automatically recovering the bios is case of failed update, recovery from usb in case that somehow fails as well (InsydeH2O call it "crisis mode" I think).
Lenovo support both. Dell too afaik.
This is very much realistic to have, and I would expect it from a decent product.
A computer without this feature is pretty much designed to fail more easily.
If for some very weird reason framework was unable to offer this, then at very least they could have placed a header on the board with flashing instructions on the website, instead of advising to buy new hardware.
I mean, sure, I agree it would be ideal if BIOS updates literally couldn’t fail - I meant to ask what they could have done to resolve this situation now.
But yes, lack of an USB bios recovery path is a pretty terrible design fault, and I’m surprised that they haven’t improved this by now.
ah, you mean after the accident. Well for starter I would acknowledge the issue (thing that according to the liked thread did not happen, maybe it did not affect enough customers?).
Then they should either provide an official recovery guide instead of letting customers figure it out themself on the forum (I can see various pictures of people hooking clips to the flash chip and wondering want to flash exactly), or repair it pro-bono since it's a job that probably take ~10 mins for affected customer and it's an issue caused by a design flaw.
> My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
I think this is absolutely what you sell to investors. For it to be attractive to consumers though (and thus attractive to investors, since people actually need to buy the thing), there has to be a balance. They haven't even managed to conjure up a market for third party expansion cards, which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit.
At the moment they are living on borrowed time and good will from the tech / hippie community who want to be more sustainable and customizable. I think they have likely lost me at this point. I don't know how close they are to losing everybody else.
I think what expansion cards third parties are extremely niche (SDR) or have much better alternatives (to me, and I suspect most others If they thought about it, the 10gbE cards. Get a dock or two for the presumably limited locations you have 10gb infra and the need for it).
What most others have realised is that devices fit the 99% with USB-C, A and HDMI. Or, increasingly, just USB-C as everyone who needs one has a fleet of cheap dongles to provide just the right IO.
I mean, sure? Every other laptop company's main business is to sell laptops, so if you want those features or often time even a repair, you have to buy a whole new laptop. If you're Apple, you might need to buy a new laptop for a memory upgrade.
Thanks for linking the documentation! To be clear, when I wrote "header", I meant something with a connector that can be easily used for this purpose. Soldering on the connector is probably more difficult than the pogo pins that I used.
I also can't help but notice the linked connector is less than $1 in bulk on DigiKey and probably cheaper if ordered at Framework's scale.
Sure, but this is just one issue. How many potential $0.78 connectors exist? If one in 1000 customers has a need for a connector, and there are 40 different potential failure modes where a $0.78 connector would make recovery easier, is that worth the extra $30 per laptop?
I checked the pictures of my board, and there are 3 unpopulated headers that I can see. There's also the unpopulated BIOS chip socket, which is similarly cheap. I think I would pay the extra $3 per laptop for better repairability, which is Framework's entire sales pitch anyway.
Moving to sockets adds risk of the socket failing too. But this particular instance of not using an SOIC-8, for which test clips are readily available, seems pretty unfriendly.
I imagine there's a way to program the flash from a header or connector, or maybe it was programmed before being assembled onto the PCB.
Having a BIOS update BRICK the device isnt 'just one issue', they clearly need to do more work to protect devices from this, they can choose what they add but the BIOS needs a safer fallback and recovery process, that much is clear.
Definitley worthy of even an extra $1-2 per laptop if needed.
Good story, and surprising that there was so little assistance from the OEM. As an aside, I got to test out Asus crash free BIOS a couple of weeks ago. A strong thunderstorm hit and before I could get to my office a rapid series of deep voltage drops occurred. I shut down my systems and waited out the storm. When I powered my Asus tower back on it failed to POST, automatically restarted, recovered the BIOS (CMOS settings I assume), restarted again and booted Windows. Pretty slick, and instantly removed that cold lump of lead that had formed in my gut.
I really don't understand how in 2025 a competent company can't implement a trival A/B flash update. Do they depend on some obscure contractor for the firmware and have no power here?
As with many things, "It's complicated" but effectively, yes
Such system firmware is generally provided by AMI / Insyde / Phoenix and similar.
There are a few vendors who decide to go their own way (notably google using a fork of Coreboot for their chromebooks), but it's generally list of vendors that you can count on a single hand.
If it means anything I'm pretty sure AMI provides A/B updates on most products i've used with their stuff.
But that's always been the case. Phoenix and AMI have been the dominant BIOS providers for over 30 years. Both have always provided modular tookits for OEMs to customize their own ROM images, write their own ACPI tables, etc. UEFI gives even more control to the OEMs. If Framework isn't doing that properly, that's on them.
It appears that Framework contracted out the development of their (Insyde-based) firmware to somebody who, to put it mildly, does not treat them as a priority. Either way, Framework’s firmware is really bad, and that’s entirely on Framework; you can look around on the forums for the horror stories in the (open) EC code around power delivery for instance.
As another example of a vendor low-key screwing Framework in a way that I think it’s entirely appropriate to blame Framework themselves for, the first couple 13-inch models could charge off 5V chargers. The newer ones still have the necessary hardware, but whoever they get their power circuitry from cut that bit from the firmware on a newer chip version, and Framework obediently went “welp, guess we don’t have that feature anymore”.
In addition to no longer charging off 5V chargers (their first laptop could literally charge off a USB type A with no USB-PD), on the AMD 7040 I've got ~10% chance every time I plug it in to my dock that it will simply not start charging. Everything else will connect (display, USB) but power won't flow. Resolving that is as simple as unplugging and replugging in my laptop but if I don't notice until I'm in a video conference then it is a problem because my webcam, microphone, and headset are also going over that cable. Oh how I miss the OG 11th gen framework charging.
I heard a lot of talk about porting to coreboot (they even sent some motherboard to some coreboot developers I think).
Not sure what is stalling there, but sounds like a priority.
For the EC, I feel like a team of a single developer could arrange something there?
Intel / AMD and BIOS vendors simply do not expose their designs to everyone. So you have to go through an ODM to have an Intel chip-based motherboard design. The silicon industry is completely rotten at this point. Framework could simply be too small to get access to secret sauce.
The UEFI spec is open. The way to load Intel ME payload isn't. You need to do it otherwise the Intel CPU is as good as a brick. It will shut down automatically in 30 mins, none of the TPM functions will work, no power management will work.
It is not just payment. Without being "big enough" and guaranteeing some big volumes of CPU sales, Intel won't give you the specs. AFAIK only ODMs and BIOS makers like AMI has the full low-level CPU bootstrap spec.
This is just the CPU. Now add the other peripherals like HDMI controllers. You'd see the problem now.
I own the "original" gen11 Intel Framework 13. This is a company that wasn't able to ship a working RTC battery, a touchpad that would register a click when a physical click happened, a screen hinge that would reliably hold the screen in an upright position, or a USB-A port that wouldn't consume a watt of power when unused. You expect way too much engineering from them.
Heh, I remember the “remove the USB A” debacle when I had my OG.
That thing really hacked me off generally. Coming from a MBP 2016 that sipped power, the battery anxiety was real (especially standby drain), and I spent more time than I’d care to admit tweaking tlp to be still a pretty poor drain.
Then the backlight would only work in certain positions.
Love the dream, but it got sold and replaced by a MBP of 2x the price. 4years later the MBP has been used and abused like a tool, dropped from my car boot while trying to carry it and a child, and is still fresh as a daisy. I worry that FW doesn’t fit into “buy once buy well”
I did eventually tweak it to a very particular state where it had decent idle power use. Of course, it had to be re-tweaked occasionally.
Apart from that laptop, I've only ever used good-gen Thinkpads (and I'm back on one; the Framework now lives on my son's desk). The whole "we ship a screwdriver" gimmick gets old fast if you have to use that screwdriver on a regular basis (_of course_ they couldn't just use Phillips screws).
I still don't understand we are comparing a brand new company's engineering to Apple, who have been making laptops for what, 40 years now? Apple's GPUs used to over heat a fry the laptop. They used to make keyboards that would fully break because of a piece of dust, but they were riveted down so they were irreplaceable. Titanium powerbooks had hinges that would break in a year.
Because this isn’t a charity, I’m not paying to work out a new company’s engineering issues. I feel confident, based on the last few laptops, in spending £2k and having it last as my primary for 5 years or so, and then either still having some resale value, or being repurposed for simpler tasks.
I also had one of this 11th Gen Intel FW13s, and the RTC battery on mine worked for a short time because they for some reason used some garbage rechargeable one with a 2 yr lifespan instead of the more common not-rechargeable battery that every other PC vendor uses with seemingly 10x the lifespan
I know some higher end gaming motherboards that were targeted towards the overclocking community had two bios chips for exactly this purpose and switching between them was trivial from what I remember. If you overclocked too far, you wouldn't brick your system. It seemed like overkill to me. I'm guessing this is less common than it's worth to fix in software, but then at least continue to give support for the issue.
Original author here, and I agree. When overclocking, the most important feature is probably resetting the CMOS with one easy to reach button.
I was testing ECC previously in https://qt.ax/ecc and was trying to overclock the RAM to induce faults to confirm ECC was fixing them. Since I was using a cheaper board, I had to use keys to short the CLR_CMOS header and that got old really quick... I didn't ultimately succeed in creating a barely stable overclock that generated a ton of ECC errors, but that was a very awful experience.
Having some sort of BIOS recovery is definitely the baseline I'd expect these days, and having two BIOS chips so you can just keep using the device as if nothing had happened is the best solution.
If you need to do that again, maybe try turning the tREFI DRAM timing to the moon? That controls the refresh interval, which is very temperature sensitive. You could configure a marginally stable setting, let it boot, start running `memtester`, and then apply hair dryer directly to DRAM.
It's not a gimmick when the serious overclocking people do custom VBIOSes. Similarly for miners. That's when you need the recovery switch if things go wrong.
Custom Video Card firmware has been around a long time. It was possible to convert PC video cards to Mac use by flashing them. When I was faffing around with PPC64 Macs (I mean hey I got it for free) I picked up an ATI card on ebay that had been flashed.
I had sleep issues. It was the lowest-end G5. I ended up recycling it.
I really like what Framework is trying to do but this story is very hard to ignore. If a failed BIOS update can brick the machine, and the official solution is a CA$500+ motherboard (that's about $350+ USD I belieive), there's still a pretty big gap between being modular and being truly repairable
Not to mention there are no "alternatives" that you can look into to purchase these replacements. You are essentially just locked to purchasing from Framework only
Yeah but this is true for every laptop vendor. Framework is not worse here, and yes, Framework is supposed to be better, but it cannot be better in everything at once. It is already better that you only need to buy a 350USD motherboard instead of a 1200 Euro laptop.
Are there any reports out there of macbook OTA updates causing laptops to become entirely unbootable with no recovery options (and, in case it actually happened, Apple refusing to fix/replace affected laptops at no extra cost)?
I am yet to hear of it being a thing, and I would love to be proven wrong.
Having said that, MacBook is a very homogenous machine with minimal choices (which can be a good thing) so testing upgrades patches on them should be fairly easy as compared to other vendors (a good outcome of that thing).
With framework and effectively with other vendors, this is where a lot of problems come from. And the problem is significantly harder.
As far as I am aware a failed bios/firmware update on any device can cause it to brick, thats why they always come with massive warnings everywhere. I personally do not just do bios updates because some OEM marketing said so. The old saying does me well, "If it aint broke dont fix it"
It's interesting to read this. Because I recently had something similar happened to me and I had mixed feelings like the author here.
I have the original Framework 13, but I have almost changed everything inside of it (motherboard AMD 7840U, wifi 7, ram 96GB, ssd, better hinge, the CNC shell, hdmi dongle v3, APU Fan, speakers v2, webcam v2). I still was using the original battery and it was at 60% health. So, I decided to update to the 61W battery.
After changing the battery, I decided to turn on the battery charge limit to keep the battery at a cool 60% charge to increase its lifespan.
First interesting thing I faced was realizing that Framework has 2 methods for the battery limit implementation. You have to use framework-tools and set it on the ec instead of the standard Kernel module. The kernel allows you to set the min and max, but the ec just allows you to set the max, and it will automatically set max-5 as the min.
But what was more frustrating, was realizing and when it gets to that threshold it constantly discharges 5-9W until it gets to the min and then charges the battery again back to the threshold. So, if you set a threshold it keeps charging that 5% once an hour, instead of parking the battery and waiting for the natural discharge to get to the min (which should be days later, since when you're plugged in the battery is not used for anything, it's like your laptop is off, not sleep, off).
But the good thing is the ec code is open source, I found the code, dug into it, found a bug, fixed it, flashed it, and for the past 2 weeks my battery is working perfectly.
I opened a PR, then found a multi hundred forum post of people talking about something similar with no proper solution, or any fixes in the ec. And my PR has been sitting there with no attention from Framework. Setting a battery threshold is actually worse for your battery because of this bug, but nobody is in a rush to fix it!
So, I'm mad that Framework operates this way, their circuitry, power delivery, and software is flawed (just read the forum thread[1]). On the other hand I'm happy I can see the code, find the bug, and fix it at least for myself! Feels like the hardware version of Linux! If you are technical, you can literally change how your kernel behaves. You can't recommend it to your Mom, but you definitely prefer it to the closed alternatives.
It's crazy, the last time any PRs got merged was back in January 2024 [0]. Seems it has just become a black hole completely ignored by anyone at framework.
The original from 2021, so 60% health after 5 years? Coupled with how they don't have a bypass sounds to me like they don't have their battery in order. Your linked thread also mentions that it happens at 100% too, which would explain the extreme degradation: leaving it plugged in by default thrashes the battery without a bypass.
The lack of support from Framework is so damning. Nirav has been a fun CEO to watch, but this feels like a huge, huge miss. Can anyone defend this? Why would anyone purchase anything from this company ever again?
I've had Dell XPSs and Lenovo Thinkpads exclusively prior to Framework, and they all died by component failure. Sure, Dell will send a technician to your house and Lenovo has off-shore call centers, but the end result is the same: either buy an eye-wateringly expensive warranty that won't cover most failures or buy a new laptop.
While I'm all for stronger consumer regulation when it comes to this stuff, on balance I prefer the Framework approach here relative to the other options available to me.
Can you really compare failing components to an optional update they sent you an email to encourage you to install that bricks your working laptop? This is 100% their responsibility to test thoroughly before recommending right?
I agree nothing is perfect in the grand scheme, there are always trade offs. But using that as argument against this specific failure being wrong and bad doesn't help IMO. Framework should handle this better, and maybe they still will.
I think all manufacturers generally vet their BIOS updates and that it's probably not possible to stop 100% of all BIOS update failures.
This laptop has been owned for 3 years, so you have to benchmark against other 3-year-old laptops. What percentage of those fail or get bricked in some way? What is the cost of a solution for those failures?
It would be nice if this laptop had a BIOS recovery feature, and perhaps competing laptops have such a thing as well. I've mostly seen that feature with desktop gaming boards, and if it's common with other PC laptops, Framework should implement it.
If an update bricks your MacBook Pro or Lenovo, I imagine the cost and method of repair is exactly the same. These laptops get sent to a service depot or a tech comes out to your house, and they replace the board. Unless you happen to find an extremely nerdy repair shop like a Louis Rossmann situation, the techs don't mess with reflashing BIOS or other board-level stuff like replacing capacitors. It's just not really worth the labor/parts balance. Spending an hour or more on labor will likely cost more than spending 10 minutes on labor and $400 on parts.
Perhaps this looks worse for Framework because you the consumer is seeing how the sausage is made. Framework doesn't have a white glove repair service since the computer is designed to not need one. You're just buying the part yourself and installing it.
This solution doesn't cost more than the competition, and maybe it even costs less. Plus, you might even get an upgraded board out of it, which is unheard of with the competition. But it doesn't feel like "repairability" compared to dropping off your computer at your local certified Dell or Apple tech and picking it back up "repaired."
Right, really what Framework is saying is "we don't have a repair center that tries to re-flash BIOS." Neither do the other manufacturers, it's just too much of an in-the-weeds repair that's not worth their technicians' time.
The fact that the RAM isn't soldered is such a huge benefit here as well. The most recent 7040 series board that sold on eBay with no RAM or SSD included only cost $269. Even if the author decided to just buy that board, that kind of repair cost is unheard of. That's battery service cost territory if you own a MacBook Pro.
Or you can just use the opportunity to upgrade, which a repair from a competitor is not offering.
I disagree with a lot of the assessments the author made:
> First, it is clear that Framework’s BIOS updater is broken, at least on the AMD 7040 series.
This is only true anecdotally. I have installed this exact same BIOS version just fine on my 7040 series unit. It's not broken, works on my machine, my anecdote is worth exactly the same as theirs.
> Secondly, Framework encourages users to perform BIOS updates in their newsletters, and yet if the update results in bricking
Again, anecdotally.
> Thirdly, Framework claims to have made a repairable laptop, and I think my experience and the hoops I had to jump through to flash the BIOS have decidedly shown this not to be the case.
I would definitely welcome a built-in recovery flashing mechanism and more general repairable design within the mainboard. Any improvement is welcome. That said, Framework is already well above industry standard in regard to repairability. There are not many laptops out there with non-soldered RAM and removable WiFi modules.
The trouble here is that they invite this criticism upon themselves by offering repairability as a flagship benefit, but the reality is that it's not very practical for 100% of the computer to avoid every possible pitfall with long-term ownership. Yeah, after 3 years of ownership, X% of laptops get bricked for some kind of reason. This is why extended warranties cost hundreds of dollars regardless of brand. Consumer electronics are just not risk-free purchase transactions.
You also see how the sausage is made because you are doing the repair yourself. If you brick your MacBook Pro and take it to an Apple repair center, they might just be throwing your board in the trash and replacing it, charging you $500, and you get your computer back "repaired." Framework doesn't have a repair center since all repairs that they would perform in a repair center are repairs that you can perform at home, so you get to see how repairs actually work in practice. No computer OEMs and essentially no authorized repair centers hire component-level repair technicians, it's just not a business they want to be in.
I'm sure if you took your Framework to an electronics market in China you could get your BIOS flashed by dozens of vendors for $20 while you wait.
> This is only true anecdotally. I have installed this BIOS version just fine on my 7040 series unit. It's not broken, works on my machine, my anecdote is worth exactly the same as theirs.
This isn't an anecdote at this point, but a pattern. I don't think the BIOS updater is working as intended if every update is like playing Russian roulette.
> That said, Framework is already well above industry standard in this regard. There are not many laptops out there with non-soldered RAM and removable WiFi modules.
Yes, but they are below industry standard for BIOS flashing issues.
> The trouble here is that they invite this criticism upon themselves by offering repairability as a flagship benefit, but the reality is that it's not very practical for 100% of the computer to avoid every possible pitfall with long-term ownership.
The part that upsets me isn't that they aren't warrantying this. The problem is that they promised to make a laptop I can fix myself and provide all the documentation to do it with confidence long after the warranty ends. That's why I bought into the ecosystem in the first place.
Turns out, they claimed to do better and then does all the anti-repair design anyway for BIOS flashing. They didn't even provide any documentation for fixing it myself, which I would have done gladly and then praised them for having documentation.
Right, that's a thread with 38 posts. Only the people who have a bricked system would post to a forum, the rest of them with working systems are not there. The repair thread has 78 posts. Keep in mind, not every post is posted by a unique person (people post multiple replies to the same thread).
Are they below industry standard for BIOS flashing issues? How do you know? Do you have some data to point to? Do vendors like Lenovo or Apple make that information public?
I'm not trying to shill or defend them or anyone else in this industry, and I think they should have a BIOS recovery method built-in like my desktop does.
However, it's important to understand how statistical analysis works for issues like these. As of 2024, reports indicate that Framework has sold a six-figure quantity of laptops. So we have here about 116 posts on the subject of BIOS update failures, 0.1% of sales volume or less.
I realize this napkin math is flawed in itself since we should be isolating to the AMD 7040 series, and we should not assume that every person who has a BIOS flashing issue is posting on the forum, but I think it gives you a very rough idea on why we can't say one way or another whether these issues are common.
If there was a forum post with thousands of anecdotes about this issue, or even better, a class-action lawsuit (law firms will only do this if there's a large enough class to make it worth it), I'd be more inclined to be on your side.
> If you brick your MacBook Pro and take it to an Apple repair center, they might just be throwing your board in the trash and replacing it, charging you $500, and you get your computer back "repaired."
No one bricked their own laptop! They installed an update provided by the people that made the laptop! You bet your ass if installing software provided by apple bricked a macbook pro they would fix it for free. If they didn't it would be equally as unacceptable. Why are you defending a company that is doing the wrong thing? Framework is unequivocally wrong here.
Apple absolutely does not fix bricked systems out of warranty, regardless of cause or fault. Certainly not two years removed from the warranty. They can, in very rare cases, get bricked by failed updates. It’s not totally unheard of.
“Unequivocally wrong” is highly debatable. You may feel that way but I don’t. I’m not defending anyone, I’m just providing a reality check on how things work when you buy a product from anyone.
I think the only thing framework did wrong is fail to provide a BIOS restore fallback function, which my desktop motherboard has, but not every laptop has a feature like this.
For one thing, any conclusion that a BIOS update failure is automatically Framework’s fault is a big jump to conclusions. A BIOS update has a small risk of failure with any device. Find me a motherboard manufacturer who will bail you out outside of the warranty period and I’ll do three cartwheels for you.
This sounds like an extension of my logic beyond my meaning. This implication is that any manufacturer can just brick devices en masse, perhaps even on purpose, with no consequence or recourse, which is not at all what I was saying.
Here's a little story to frame this a little better and help you understand my meaning: My second-to-last MacBook Pro before I quit the Apple platform was the 2016 MacBook Pro with the butterfly keyboard.
That machine had a flawed design that was never 100% fixed, and Apple swept the whole issue under the rug until media pressure intensified. They then made a warranty extension for the keyboards.
The fix did not work 100%. The underlying keyboard design was flawed. I got my MacBook Pro "fixed" under this extended warranty,
The result was a huge class action lawsuit, for which I just received my last check this year. I was not fully compensated or given a refund. What I ended up doing was unloading the laptop much earlier than my normal upgrade cycle to switch to the 2019 16" MacBook Pro (Intel) that no longer possessed this fatal design flaw.
This incident damaged Apple's brand perception with at least one customer, me.
So, I'm not saying there are zero consequences for Framework not making this right. At the same time, every company that makes products draws a line somewhere. A restaurant isn't going to compensate me for a bad meal I had a month ago. Dell isn't going to buy me a new computer because my 7 year old Inspiron is on the fritz even though I expect a device like that to last longer.
If you bring a 2016 MacBook Pro in to Apple to get the keyboard replaced under the keyboard replacement program, Apple will not do it for free. The program has expired. Even though the system cost Apple millions of dollars in a class action suit and the design is fundamentally flawed, Apple will not make it right for their customers indefinitely. They offered a limited time resolution for customers who experienced that issue.
There is not a customer expectation that all the products they buy will last forever or will be indefinitely fixed for free regardless of issue, so in practice it's a balancing act between minimizing your long-term support costs and pissing off your customer base.
To directly answer your question though, a lot of times bricking or severely handicapping products happens and companies are free to go. Ask me what happened to my second generation Google Nest thermostat. Of course, my reaction to that was to throw the thing in the trash and resolve to never buy a piece of Google hardware ever again. But I'm sure thousands of people responded by justifying an upgrade to the latest and greatest and calling that a win because shopping for something new and unboxing a package is a fun dopamine hit.
I don't think that everything I described above is what is happening with Framework in this situation. I don't think there is any indication that failed BIOS flashes are a widespread issue. It seems that the standard rectification for a bad BIOS flash is a replacement board because it is considered a rare occurrence.
Remember that, if you don't want to worry about this or any other hardware failure, you can go ahead and buy a 3-year extended warranty at time of purchase, and that sort of option is available with basically every piece of consumer technology on the market.
I would agree that it would be better for them to be able to service it for a lower cost or maybe have a BIOS recovery function built-in to the hardware, but other than that I don't see anything that deviates very far from standard industry practice and policy.
You've given so much data about why it's reasonable for hardware to fail. I get it. Hardware fails. In the Apple example that keyboard shit was unequivocally WRONG. They eventually admitted that and offered a fix. They handled it poorly. But they did acknowledge it. IT WASN'T AN OPTIONAL SOFTWARE UPDATE EITHER HOLY SHIT.
Also in your example with google..
.. why did you resolve to stop buying Google products? ..
5% of all hardware fails, google can't possibly make things perfect, blah blah fucking blah, same fucking argument applies. They didn't do it on purpose! They can't make all hardware perfect! How dare we expect them to do the right thing?
Because the way they handled that case was WRONG. Framework is WRONG. Apple's keyboard's were horrific and their response sucked but at least they tried to respond and tried to make it right on some level?
Framework have calculated that doing the right thing here is too expensive and they (so far!) aren't doing it. That pisses me off. It should piss you off too. Defending them is wild. They don't care about you. Their behavior is WRONG.
When your laptop dies what would you prefer, to be able to buy the specific broken part easily and replace it yourself or be forced to buy an entire new laptop?
But the problem isn't buying the specific broken part here? I would have gladly replaced the BIOS chip if they made it socketed or something, but what Framework support told me is to throw away the perfectly working CPU and buy a new one because it happened to be soldered to the same board as the BIOS chip with incorrect data.
I expect an optional update to not brick my laptop, and if it does, the company to fully replace it because they own the fact that they fucked up.
Completely unrelated: Yes! I do prefer to be able to replace specific broken parts when they die. That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?
> That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?
It sort-of does. Naturally this situation can be resolved much cheaper with a flasher, but in this situation you absolutely have the option to replace the "broken" motherboard, while still keeping your screen, laptop chassis, battery, ram, SSD, wifi card, expansion cards, sound board, webcam. Another commenter said the board is available on Ebay for $270 which is going to be less than just the ram for a new laptop.
I assume you have when in italics to show this is a “when, not if” scenario.
Some anecdotal evidence for you:
I’ve been buying used laptops of a certain brand for almost 20 years. I buy when they are 2-3-4 years old, keep them for 3-4-5 and then sell. Usual buy price is around $1000, sell around $300.
I tote them around the world. Writing, light dev, photo and video editing. Thousands of hours of use, plenty at +40C in the dust.
I’ve never had a single failure of any part, selling the laptops 100% functional. I’ll let you figure out the brand.
That means you've purchased about 10 laptops at most during that 20 year timespan.
If, hypothetically, laptops have a 2% failure rate by age 5, that means you had an 81% chance of never encountering a dead laptop. With these hypothetical numbers, your experience is not extraordinary or indicative of an incredibly reliable brand.
The other thing that skews statistics in your favor is that you would have never bought a for-parts laptop. I.e., you buy a 3-year old laptop, which has a survivorship bias because it is currently working at time of purchase. You wouldn't actually buy one of the ones that broke between years 0-3 [1] and hasn't been repaired yet. Even if the failure rate by 5 years is much higher than 2%, your probability of experiencing a failure is still higher than if you had bought the computer new and kept it for 5 years (compared to buying a working system at 3 years old and selling it at 5 years old).
We can't actually guess your preferred brand because it's likely that 100% of consumer laptop brands last 5 years have a single-digit percentage failure rate.
The 3-year extended warranty for a Framework 13 costs $139 and the cheapest pre-built configuration costs $988. The warranty cost scales with part selection (e.g., configure the system to max it out at over $5000 and the warranty cost is now $259)
The industry average gross margin ((revenue - COGS)/revenue) is 40%
I'll take a "typical" configuration of the mid-tier AMD CPU, 1TB storage, and 16GB of RAM, pre-built cost is $1774.00 (no OS). 3-year warranty cost is $209.
We can assume the raw cost of the laptop hardware is approximately $1060, although that's without any consideration to operating overhead, shipping, etc.
That means if Framework's complete replacement failure rate at 3 years is higher than the ballpark of 10-20%, that extended warranty loses money.
That's a pretty high failure rate, but we have to also recall that extended warranties have about a 50-70% profit margin across the electronics industry.
I think our napkin math here generally aligns with the idea that the amount of consumer electronics that fail within 3-5 years or so is somewhere in the single digit percentage range.
after a decade of buying that same laptop for a hundred bucks 10 years after retail release ... I have a similar experience where so far none have died of their own accord ...
To be fair, I've bought things for more that promised zero support, but at least you know what you're getting into with that. Bad support is just plain bad.
> Can anyone defend this? Why would anyone purchase anything from this company ever again?
I mean, if you want my personal reason - I assume any company warranty is barely worth the paper it's printed on - I'm very hesitant to do a bios update ever, only to address specific issues. So yea, I'd buy another framework (currently have a 12, and I love it despite the many flaws)
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.
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.
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.
Here's the thing: this argument you are making has made the assumption that Framework laptops are a huge compromise versus just buying a regular laptop. This line of thought assumes we are giving up something to get modularity and repairability, and that value proposition doesn't make sense compared to selling your used laptop and buying a new one from a traditional manufacturer.
This argument is flawed for two major reasons:
1. You can do perform the exact same non-modular ownership experience with a Framework laptop. It's just a regular laptop. You don't have to use the modularity or repairability at all. You can treat it like any other laptop and sell it when you're done and buy a new one.
2. Framework systems are getting increasingly competitive over time. The 13 Pro is quite competitive in its field and is one of the best options in its size/price/use case category. What other Panther Lake laptop is offering a drastically superior value? I'm looking for a portable system with long battery life (Intel Panther Lake) that is primarily for text work and coding while being capable of decent gaming on the side (Nothing crazy, the X7 Panther Lake chip gives me enough GPU usage for my needs). I did a ton of research and basically narrowed down my list to the ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition and the ASUS Zephyrus G14. Last I checked the ThinkPad was roughly 10% cheaper with an equivalent spec, the OLED screen is lower PPI and worse for text work, the battery lasts 5 hours shorter performing office productivity tasks (Just Josh's testing methodology), and the webcam is/was broken in Linux. The 15" screen is almost exactly as tall but it's wider, I call that neutral to negative for backpackability (3:2 screen ratio is lovely). On the plus side, the ThinkPad does push more power to the CPU/GPU, improving overall performance compared to the Framework. The ASUS Zephyrus is only in the same price category if I buy the 2025 model which has more compromises compared to the current model, especially for non-gaming battery life (no Panther Lake). Even if I open up my wallet to buy the 2026 model, I am missing out on things like a haptic trackpad, and of course, if we think Framework's support/repair experience is lacking, we don't even want to talk about ASUS RMA horror stories.
Other Panther Lake options with the X7 356H:
HP Omnibook 7 16, $1419: too big, off-center keyboard with numpad (don't like), low PPI display.
Acer Swift 16 AI, $1549: too big, off-center keyboard w/numpad, 16GB soldered RAM, non-premium chassis, no charge port on the right side, loud fans
LG Gram Pro 16, $2999: more expensive than the Framework 13 Pro with same specs
ASUS ExpertBook Ultra 14, $3599: more expensive than the Framework 13 Pro with same specs
Of course, Framework's other systems like the 12, 16, and base 13 are not really as competitive as the 13 Pro in my mind, but still, I think there's this whole vibe like Framework buyers are really giving up a lot of basic laptop things and paying way more to get modularity. This was much more true 5 years ago, not so much today now that Framework has been selling in higher volumes and refining their designs over the years.
To add to point #1, the depreciation rate on framework systems seems quite low compared to competition when I check eBay, since any model you buy is compatible with all the parts and upgrades. There’s much lower buyer risk with a 5 year old framework than there is with a 5 year old Dell.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
Your link doesn't really work right, but note that light bulbs are not at all planned obsolescence. It's been known for a long time that making the filament temperature of an incandescent bulb hotter makes it brighter, more efficient, and whiter, but also burn out faster, due to the tungsten sublimating. Anybody can make a super-long-lasting bulb that is really dim, inefficient, and dull just by making the filament temperature lower. Nobody will ever buy one to actually light their home, because it sucks compared to the competition, but it can run for a crazy long time in a museum or something. And the useless museum bulb will cause a bazillion news and blog articles to be written in support of a mostly-false narrative that we don't make things to last.
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.
That's true. On the other hand, it's trivially easy to salvage and transplant a screen from another Fairphone. There's still people selling FP2 parts in the forums.
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.
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
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.
It's a complete overstatement. The USB-C ports are still soldered onto the motherboard and their parts supply chain is shit.
I don't trust iFixit's quite frank "press handjob" because they're giving higher repairability rankings for that junk compared to Apple who have replaceable ports and a good supply chain available to the end user. Also they were all over selling battery kits for Pixel phones which are a complete pain to replace the batteries in compared to an iPhone.
Not that Apple are the bastion of repairability, just their claims are less insane than both Lenovo's and iFixit's.
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.
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.
It’s a €20 / 5 minute fix on the MacBook to swap out the USB daughterboard. The solution framework uses takes up a lot of space and doesn’t really help you if you short out the port or drop the laptop on its side.
As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't sell the daughterboards so you have to go spelunking for salvaged parts with your macbook. I can get all my first-party brand-new replacement parts at https://frame.work/marketplace .
> 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.
But in that situation, you know the damage _wont_ be to the USB ports on the motherboard. The motherboard is screwed to the case, and the expansion cards are locked to the case, so they won't move relative to each other. You expansion card might get damaged by the initial tripping over the cord, and some other parts might get damaged from the fall, but you can trivially buy first-party replacement parts for anything you broke. MagSafe would be nice, but the expansion cards are doing their job to protect the motherboard.
If you drop a framework on its side the impact on the dongles will push them onto the board. Plastic flexes. There isn’t any shock absorbing happening. I don’t see any strain relieve on those dongles.
That specific issue, but they didn't get the other benefit of expansion cards: being able to "change" the ports on your laptop without needing some external dongle. Also, your fists must be tiny.
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.
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?
99.9% to 100% feedback over 10,000 transactions has done the trick for me. EZ.
People would buy refurbs a lot more if they were more noticeable/marketed. People “want” whatever electronics are on the shelf in front of them when it’s time to buy, if we’re talking general public now (I wasn’t trying to).
The main firms refurbing are also selling new, and so aren’t in a rush to eat their own lunch.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The entire USB-C situation with the Frameworks (I have both the original gen 11 and the AMD 7040) is a massive train wreck. They have clearly given up on fixing it. Only some of my ports work, and not reliably. Th EC controller is a bug fest. If you don't believe me, check their forums. I wish I could get back all the hours I spent debugging this, to no avail.
I'm lucky that I had no USBC issues with mine I guess. Unlike my ryzen desktop that hard locks when resuming from suspend sometimes when it goes to enumerate the USB devices. If I time a key press right I can get it to continue some times, but if I miss the window it just shuts down entirely.
AMD has had several USB based issues on their 500 series chipsets, x570 etc. so part of me wonders how much of these problems are on the vendor vs the integrator.
If you're on Linux you might be able to use a combination of modprobe + udev + systemd unit files to hardcode a solution.
Either you hardcode your keyboard and mouse absolutely into kernel parameters, or you make two systemd unit files: one that runs with before suspend and one that runs 'before' resume.
You make the before suspend unit file manually temporarily disable USB enumeration. And the before resume unit file enables it again.
This trick at least works with Gigabyte Aorus 5XX motherboards that have an infamous suspend bug, where any used PCIe SSD slot would prevent the system from properly suspending and you have to disable the slot temporarily.
Also, always check the NixOS repo for stuff like this. In some ways it has started to rival or even surpass the Arch wiki for finding workarounds for hardware quirks.
My support experience has been quite similar. Lots of required evidence, slow responses, and then just links to buy replacement parts in the store.
The kicker is that the things they were telling me to buy didn't even fix the problem. My fingerprint reader was very flakey, and after replacing it and all cabling connected to it, it still didn't work.
They then told me to buy a whole new input cover which was the wrong solution again. The issue was the touchpad, which routes the signal for the fingerprint sensor through its circuit board.
They also encouraged me heavily to update the BIOS and firmware of everything aggressively before really digging into any of the kernel messages I was seeing.
All that said, it's really hard to complain that for $50 and some waiting I was easily able to fix the problem.
Compared to replacing the battery on a MacBook pro which took me 5hrs and required complete disassembly of the chassis sans fans it was a dream.
Here's to hoping that framework does better, they do seem to take well to community feedback.
Thanks for posting this. IT comes along at a perfect time for me. I am investigating linux laptops for one of my children, still in college. I have been looking for machines that come out of the box with linux and Framework was up there on the list. Others include Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, and Tuxedo.
I like the apparent upgrade ease of the Framework since I have a pile of old laptops, tablets and netbooks dating to late 1990's already. If I can find one that is long-term upgradable then that is a big plus.
I had almost convinced myself that Framework is the way to go with their hot-swappable ports and easily replaced internals.
I found Tuxedo not long ago. They seem to be a valid competitor in that space. I know they're a German company but I think they ship to the boondocks in Texas.
I read that BIOS recovery procedure and was reminded of all the times I had to flash and then recover on desktops or laptops and how much fun it wasn't. The fact that Framework treats you like a second-class citizen after the warranty expires is very valuable information in a case where your problem is caused by their recommended procedure. The hack of their partner company feels so relevant today when companies can still leave PII open in public datasets and suffer no consequences.
I will more strongly consider Dell and Tuxedo. I have long experience with Dell workstations and have found that even though a lot of their components like Mobos are proprietary formats requiring a Dell part to repair, that those parts are identifiable and generally available thru Dell or eBay.
I don't know enough about Tuxedo so if anyone has experience I would appreciate some insight. The use case for us is typical document authoring, programming in python with maybe Jupyter notebooks, complicated spreadsheets, photo documentation of field sites, and GIS work maintaining project map resources using ArcGIS most likely. Gaming is probably another option but it is not necessary for it to run top games though it does need decent graphics.
I also managed to brick a motherboard, though mine was a Supermicro, by missing a line in the README that tells you to move some hardware jumpers on the board before applying the flash. I found one jumper, but the other one was in another corner of the board, and the README says "if you have both, move both", so I thought I just had a board with only one jumper.
Notably, the flash process itself does not check for the positions of the jumpers and exit, or anything like that, it just proceeds merrily along, and renders the board unbootable. I've been around with Flashrom a dozen times and can't figure out the right sequence of flash-this-rerun-that to recover the thing. (It's an X9DR3, if anyone here has hints.)
So I wish I could be mad at Framework, but only the tiniest bit. It's sadly common.
My understanding is that you can usually flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked, though it's a paid feature upgrade (though I think someone might have cracked the algorithm on older boards).
At least, it has been the case on several boards of mine, including an X10SDV which bricked itself, as far as I can tell, just from bad luck somehow.
As far as I can tell, the jumper dance was to enable the main BIOS to use the Management Engine controller to perform some other part of the flash, which would ordinarily be locked out with the jumpers in their normal position. But now that it's tried and failed, it won't try again, maybe?
I'm on my third mainboard trying to combat what seems to be an AMD platform issue that causes random freeze-then-reset events. It doesn't just affect Framework. If you search AMD Data Fabric Sync Flood you'll find a lot of discussion across various forums. The open Framework issue is: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/SoftwareFirmwareIssueTr...
I keep on having issues with my WD SN850 dropping offline and coming back R/O but it still fails to produce any reads and my system still crashes. I've applied all the pcie power management fixes on the kernel command line and still having problems. That sounds similar to what you describe. It starts off with vscode disappearing, then UI locks, and then it dumps me to a virtual console spitting kernel errors for a bit.
The nvme drive itself reports no media errors so I really do think it's a system side problem with the pcie controllers...
I like my framework, but I do wonder if the repairability angle is overstated if you're already used to fixing normal laptops. Yes, Framework's parts are easier to find, and the laptops are easier to open, but it's not like doing any of the typical repairs - keyboard, screen, touchpad, battery - are impossibly difficult on those other guys.
Used thinkpads and the glut of EBay parts for them reach about 85% of what Framework does for me, and at half the price. But it's a different experience.
Framework does seem like better build quality than most laptops I've had, but I'm used to cheap crappy ones.
On the other hand, you do seem to find more cases of multiple people doing things like the linked bios update procedure on framework.
I had a very different experience with the Framework team. The battery died (within the warranty period), I reached out to them, they asked some questions, then sent me a brand new one.
Very satisfied with my Framework laptop and the customer support. I can't imagine buying another laptop.
Replacing a battery that failed under warranty should be a baseline expectation.
Not "terrible" obviously, but a slight negative that the battery failed under warranty and a slight positive that they honored their published warranty.
This reply seems like a non-sequitor and does not respond to GPs concern. How would you feel if a BIOS update outside of warranty bricked your motherboard? I am sure you would not say the same.
I was responding to the person casting doubts on whether he/she should buy a Framework laptop by providing my own experience as a very happy customer. I still think he/she should go for a Framework.
As for BIOS updates outside warranty, I think it's always been risky for all brands. Maybe I'm wrong.
I had good experience within warranty period, but there was still some funky-ness with a non-posting board... I do sometimes wonder if it was a bios corruption - It died after running the battery 100% to zero...
That being said, I think the particular bios-chip is a design flaw that they should communicate about and fix for future boards... Probably a teething issue thing, but they should fix it. Either a usable replaceable chip so they can just send out a fix, or the fallback bios chip....
Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.
That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.
> Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix.
What I found from my research while writing the post is that both Dell and HP have BIOS recovery options without having to open the laptop at all, so that's not quite true. I think there's more Framework could have done here to make this a much less painful experience.
From what I can tell, HP's non-invasive BIOS recovery options are very model-dependent, and even models which do allegedly support recovery reportedly refuse to boot into recovery mode for some folks.
But yes, Dell is the outlier that has me saying “likely” instead of “definitely” above; they've had orders of magnitude more time and money than Framework has to throw at BIOS development, and it shows. I agree with you that Framework should be making a priority of getting their BIOSes to that level; I'm also willing to extend them some grace given the company's age and resources.
> For three years, the laptop has served me well, until Framework suggested via newsletter to install the latest BIOS update, version 3.20, with a bunch of security fixes. Unfortunately, the system hung and displayed a corrupt image on the screen, signifying a failed BIOS flash.
> Naturally, I reached out to Framework support, who told me to unplug the laptop, let the battery drain, and power it back on again afterwards, hoping the laptop would recover by itself. Unfortunately, it never did, and after giving Framework a bunch of information, they informed me that since my 1-year warranty has expired, I have no option but to purchase a new Framework motherboard, which will cost at least CA$500.
This is very disappointing.
1) Framework failed in not implementing a bootloader which takes a BIOS file on a USB-Stick and flashes it w/o requiring a working BIOS/Firmware or even a CPU/RAM. Every $70 Desktop-Mainboard worth its salt has this feature.
2) Considering 1) and that it was an official BIOS that caused the issue, Framework should repair (replacing/re-flashing the BIOS chip) for shipping fees max.
I am furious. We have recovery-bootloaders in devices with $10 bill of materials. Its not rocket science!
> bootloader which takes a BIOS file on a USB-Stick and flashes it w/o requiring a working BIOS/Firmware or even a CPU/RAM
For those unaware, this is sometimes called "BIOS recovery" or "crashfree BIOS". In short, if a BIOS update fails and bricks your motherboard, you can load the image of a known-working BIOS update onto a USB memory stick. Normally, a single USB slot on the motherboard has a special marking to indicate that it can be used to "unbrick" the motherboard. Insert the USB memory stick, start the PC, and the BIOS recovery should be automatic. I agree with the parent post: This would be an excellent feature for Framework Computer to add. From a simple Google search, it appears that their desktop computer already has this feature.
I sympathise with both parties. As customers, things like these really do test our patience. I wanted to support Jolla / Sailfish and purchased their phone but dealing with the bugs in the OS, for years, even as I was using it as my main phone, was sometimes exasperating, if not down right frustrating. At the same time, it was also disheartening to see Jolla make wrong business decisions, and struggle to stay alive as a business. Sad to see Framework struggling with their products too. It is difficult to not be angry at a company you want to support but are also pissed at because you are not getting your money's worth.
I recommend people who have a soldering iron to start experimenting with enameled wire. It's easily sourced from any random coil/inductor/switching transformer/broken speaker even. Dip the tip of the wire in some flux and keep it on the tip of the iron for a bit so enamel clears away and tins the wire.
This way you can solder the thin wires in crammed places, don't have to stress about them shorting out anything they touch, easily routable and they don't put stress on the solder joint, like a regular thicker wire would.
Working with this type of wire made things easier for me in these sorts of situations. And it's perfectly adequate for signal (withing reason, if not very high speed), and even some power, few mA needed for these kinds of chips is no issue.
Original author here. I have a Raspberry Pi, but I still recommend the CH347 instead of the Pi since it's $5 on AliExpress and you can buy it at the same time as the pogo pins probe, which you need. The advantage of the CH347 is that you don't need to fiddle around with the pinout and risk frying the chip if you screw up. You can just plug the probe in (via the level shifter) and you are good to go.
Also, if you are doing the Raspberry Pi, you'd still need the level shifter since the Pi is a 3.3 V device.
This systemic lack of support for the product for two problems of their own making, both the original design flaw of inadequate recovery from a broken BIOS and producing a bad BIOS for some models and actually encouraging its installation, is more than alarming.
My primary concern about Framework was if they would survive so they were capable of following up on their goal of modular upgrades. That was a risk that I was willing to take.
However, that a company that targets a market segment of fairly sophisticated technologists would fail this badly on _both_ engineering and customer support is a deal killer.
Framework is not even on the shopping radar now for me.
My framework was sitting in a drawer for two years and now will not turn on no matter how long I charge it. I assume there’s a dead coin cell in there somewhere or something that needs changed but it’s pretty disappointing.
IIRC the only Frameworks that have a coin cell in them are the 13-inch 11th-gen Intel ones (i.e. the OG model), and it should be right there staring you in the face as you lift the keyboard. There’s indeed a known design flaw[1] around that cell in that it the laptop isn’t wired to drain its own actual battery instead; an email to support or a look on the forums should allow you to sort things out.
I looked at the shared link. The laptop manuf is recommending that people solder a wire between two points to eliminate a coin battery from the motherboard. Wild.
Yup, I had to do that to get mine to work. It is a good thing that I am more experienced then the average bear when it comes to soldering. When it was **ed, I could still get it to boot with an AC adapter plugged in, so you can try that.
This happened to my old framework. After a while of troubleshooting, I removed the battery and it will now boot reliably while plugged in. The replacement batteries aren't terribly expensive, so I'll probably buy a new one soon.
I bought a Framework 13 in 2021. I was so stoked. I used it for 5 years, and of those 5 years only 1 was heavy use. I had to replace the battery and the input cover. I never had to do that before. I never had a laptop I wasn't able to use for 5 years so the repairability was actually not that much better for me. I gave up on Framework because after 5 years they still didn't give a crap about terrible battery performance on Linux distros.
I was using a Macbook Pro before. Went back to a Macbook Pro again. I don't want a Mac. I just can't find anything else remotely worth my money.
From reading online, linux battery seems to be a-lot better on the new intel board, and also if you configure linux with sleep to hibernate, you get really good behavioral performance. My experience is that the sleep states really drain the battery since the low power mode is not _that_ low power, at least with the ram I have.
For context I have a 13th gen intel with the old battery and only get ~4hrs of battery life, but generally go a week or 2 between full shutdowns, since I hibernate all the time. I can close the lid, throw it in my backpack, not use it for the weekend, and when I open it it is ready to go, not having lost charge.
I generally have a better experience than when I was on windows.
Don't bother with the motherboard, the new BIOS is worse. I have two that just randomly shut off whenever they feel like it. I just bought a thinkpad instead, shrug.
After months of waiting on preorder (in which time I could've cancelled it), my Framework 16 finally arrived just yesterday, so this is a very unfortunately timed article for me.
Mine is using the AI 300 chip and is presumably on the latest bios so this specifically wouldn't be a problem for me, but it doesn't fill me with future confidence either, though I suppose if you look hard enough you can find similar stories about any manufacturer
I know that firmware (and software in general) has bugs. But I wonder why modern firmware for UEFI has to be so complex, that it needs updates on a regular basis. It would be nice to have a dead-simple hardware-initialisation system that doesn't need regular updates and that only has very limited attack surface.
The bootloader part of UEFI FW is quite straightforward. It requires updates due to vulnerabilities found in it and also to update certificates.
However modern FW of PC clones don't only contain a bootloader and a "simple" hardware initializer. Modern laptops have tens of sensors, power measuring parts, power controllers, completely remote management (Intel ME / AMD PSP), embedded controller code for fingerprint, embedded controller code for keyboard etc.
Companies ship a new product line every single year. This churn causes nothing but shitty FW to be developed. Moreover the component manufacturers also slightly change things every single year. That's why sleep sucks with PCs. That's why Fn shortcuts don't always work correctly. That's why batteries drain.
Everything is fixed in the 6 months to a year following the launch in PC industry. Then they start to work on the new model and only supply security updates.
That is the dream isn't it? But there's no such thing since even a simple one that requires no updates would have some sort of vulnerability that needs an update, and the cycle continues.
I agree. But we could still try to have a smaller hardware initialisation system. And if there is the occasional need to patch a security vulnerability, then that patch is probably a lot more straightforward.
Not a hardware engineer so feel free to fact-check all of this.
My understanding is Coreboot is a minimum-viable firmware implementation to get your hardware initialized ... and not much else.
Once Coreboot is ready you then use "Payloads".
Payloads can be as varied as booting into Linux directly, GRUB directly, or a whole UEFI/BIOS implementation.
SeaBIOS is a whole FOSS BIOS implementation (commonly used for emulators like QEMU) and is somewhat tractable according to my prior research (~50k lines of C).
My comment about CPU support is due to modern systems using UEFI - the payload for that is TianoCore EDK2. It's quite large (900k+ lines) and while it has much more eyes on it, if minimalism is what you're looking for I doubt it would qualify.
That leaves you with systems from before ~2013 or so - assuming you can even flash Coreboot to them, which only supports a handful of systems.
I suppose you could just jump into Linux though. Perhaps it's silly to do anything else.
If the update is only for supporting new hardware, then there is usually no benefit to the user. They already have a machine that is supported by a previous firmware version. Only in those cases where a user upgrades the hardware there might be a benefit.
Why can't the BIOS/UEFI offer some basic initialisation functionality and then the OS (Linux, Windows, ...) does a more advanced initialisation? Why does it have to be so complicated?
Great write up. This is a frustrating issue and I would have expected Framework to better. Most people can't flash a BIOS chip, they would be up a creek. Even as someone who writes software, flashing a BIOS chip would be outside of the realm of things I'm comfortable doing.
Only semi related but I would like to give MSI credit here, a few years ago I was dealing with a bad graphics card and as part of diagnosing it I tried to update the BIOS. I botched it and bricked the mobo (which to be fair was under warranty so a different case to this). I called MSI and RMA'd the motherboard even though it was my fault. Still using the replacement Z-97 PC mate today.
I've had some rough moments with my Framework 13, but overall I appreciate it because when something like this happens you have a way out other than binning the entire laptop. I agree with the author that Framework should have a better answer than buying a new motherboard, /but/ at least you can buy a new motherboard and move all the components over. Realistically, any >$1000 computing device should have the ability to boot BIOS from USB to provide a fallback if the BIOS is damaged, this is pretty standard on most high-end motherboards, and I think its a fair expectation from Framework. Hopefully they will see this thread on HN and make changes to the product in the future to improve this.
While it's nice to know that I can buy a $100 replacement keyboard (I'm about 6 months out of warranty) it's also frustrating that Framework wouldn't own up to what is obviously a manufacturing failure.
I have a framework 13 for. Actually the same model as OP (AMD 7040 series). I have never been as conflicted on a laptop as this one.
I do love many things about it : The whole expansion card system is awesome. It does feel a bit redundant with a simple usb-c hub that do the usual network, hdmi, usb-a, but being able to set it on the side that fit my current setup is much appreciated. I love the form factor and the screen ratio also.
The linux support have been very good for me. And being able to open it up with just one tool and have detailed repair manual is amazing.
But on that last point, it's also the first laptop in a while that I had to get into to fix something. The webcam never worked. That's not a linux issue, it's just that my fw13 is a hand me down from a previous colleague who I believe borked the webcam installation. But I don't use the webcam, so I never cared. On the other hand, when I first got it, the cpu fan was emitting a constant high pitch whine. After some research I wasn't the only one affected, and the support had me do a lot of steps before sending a replacement part (which was very easy to install, but the problem should not have been there in the first place). I also had some random crashes that I was never able to debug. The mic is very meh also. I never use it in anycase with my setup but still.
But at the same time, I don't see myself switching to another laptop. Despite all, this is still the laptop that felt the most "right" to me. I do believe that Framework has to seriously step up their support and QA game. But it does feel like it's a company that is "suffering from success". They got big investment, lots of publicities in some circle and so I feel like they have to produce and sell way more computer than the rest of the business can reasonably handle. I hope it's a “necessary evil” for them to get enough customers and revenue to start being able to attract more investment and being able to invest more in the “quality” side of the biz.
EDIT: I should say, being in the E.U make it so that I have an automatic 2 year guarantee, so I didn't have to experience the whole "just buy new parts lmao"
Honestly, this is why I like Dutch consumer law. Dutch law states that the guarantee duration is dependent on the expected lifespan of a product. Continued official BIOS support is evidence that the device remains within its supported lifetime and also dutch law treats defective or incomplete updates as non-conformity. Therefore, in this situation it would be framework fault and the device would also be within warranty.
The Australia consumer laws are also famously strong. One question: That Dutch law is not zero-cost. Does Framework Laptop charger higher prices compared to the US due to this consumer protection laws? My point: We can presume that Dutch buyers will make more (valid/accepted) warranty claims than those in the United States (with comparatively much weaker consumer laws).
Yeah, the ACL is fantastic. I have an AMD Framework 13 that had a fan bearing fail, which caused the fan to scream and spin up/down erratically. I had a long back-and-forth with Framwework support where they told me what I already knew (the fan bearing failed and the fan needed replacing) and that it was out of warranty (yeah nah, not in Australia). As soon as I mentioned the consumer guarantees under the ACL, I was invited to remove the SSD and ship the unit to their service centre for a fix.
The machine has been fine since and I still really like it.
It helped that Apple had a page for their statutory warranty in AU, so I could point to the sticker price of both machines and say "look, Apple acknowledges the consumer guarantee for at least 24 months after purchase and possibly longer, and I have paid a similar amount of money for a Framework".
> Without limiting consumers rights, Apple will provide its own remedies equivalent to those remedies in the consumer guarantee provisions of the Australian Consumer Law at any time within 24 months of the date of purchase. For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.
> Still, I was very disappointed that Framework chose to entrust sensitive information to a third-party who obviously couldn’t keep the data safe.
Then you're going to be very disappointed a lot. When HIBP first came out, I worried over each incident. These days, breaches of non-payment data are so common that I don't even bother to sign up for notifications.
When it comes to PII, we live in a de facto panopticon.
This was the only point I disagreed with the author on. They used metabase, a tool for their internal employees to manage the business and review their data. It's not some crazy 3rd party marketing tool or something, it's an internal BI tool that had a zero day. More zero days are coming.
I've bought 12th gen i7 FW, and after about a year, a fan bearing had failed. Despite originally sending me a laptop through a freight forwarder (FF), they both refused to send me a replacement fan for free, and to sell me one to FF address.
I had to use other means to buy myself a new fan (It is not sold separately from the heatsink), paying around 50 bucks for it.
After another year my motherboard stopped working completely. Framework refused support besides the post light interpretation, did not give any schematics, and outright ignored emails from my company with requests for schematics. Autopsy shown that CPU just freaking cracked in the middle.
I've got a replacement 12th gen i5 from a friend of mine, and not 3-4 months later it met pretty much the same fate, except it looks a tad bit more alive (no visible damage to the crystal, no blown mosfets, no nothing). I cannot diagnose power circuitry without spending time to reverse engineer it, and no local shops would accept it.
At this point, given that you don't have any documentation nor parts available in most of the world, FW is generally less repairable than a macbook.
For macbooks you can at least buy docs at Vinafix (and for most other laptops too), and chineese replacement parts pretty much anywhere.
I don't really care what they are telling about «waa waa cant release schematicc nda» or «scammers use ff u will die using it». System76 doesn't care about FF, and provides warranty replacements. They could have tried to renegotiate NDA terms for older boards, or outright let someone leak them; they could have remembered their Coreboot promises; they could have done lot more to actually make something that doesn't just look repairable and hackable.
Instead, they've spent their money to make a nice to use, yet unfixable piece of trash currently lying in my closet and waiting for some cheap board to show up on aftermarket.
So, heed my warning. As good as their promise sounds, you better off supporting someone who actually cares about the mission of repairability, and not just doing whatever poser shitshow they are doing.
It's a shame Framework don't offer support for component-level repairs, but sadly neither do other laptop manufacturers, if you don't count leaked resources. They could certainly do better, but I wouldn't see it as a reason to switch to e.g. ThinkPads.
Anyone else bothered by the author’s constant return to whining about how Framework did not do enough for this specific repair? Each time I found myself thinking “ok, rant over, now on to the interesting technical bits” only for the rant to resume a few paragraphs later.
No. I feel it's at least 50% of the story because FW themselves make so much hay about it. They aren't just failing at something, they are failing at the single differentiator that they charge more money for. their one and only selling point and value proposition.
It deserves to be laid out and reiterated, and it's the author's choice what they want to talk about, and they want to talk about FW as much as the technical incidentia.
If you just want to learn how to flash an isp chip, there are surely countless sources.
The non-zero chance of a BIOS update bricking my computer is why I NEVER do them to a machine that's out of warranty, unless I'm experiencing some problem that a BIOS update is _well documented_ to actually fix.
I pre-ordered the very first Framework 13. I was so excited that I loaned it to Level1Techs to make a video of it, and at one point early on it also failed - everyone I communicated with had their name printed on that motherboard, all the way up to the CEO.
I was hugely disappointed when the CMOS battery completely died and the only solutions were: "Don't leave it unplugged or put in a new battery every n months". (Btw the battery holder was a very fragile piece of plastic).
I also pre-ordered the Framework 16 willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - growing company, first product, etc.
In general I like Framework, but this is unacceptable. Get your act together.
My standard for repairable is Schiit Audio. I've had 3-4 things from them (out of like 12 I own) die in various ways, some their faults, some mine. In every instance, I've sent it back to them, and received the same unit back a few weeks later with a new component of whatever failed. Sometimes at my cost, sometimes at theirs. And they do everything in the US too - I'm shipping it to Texas and they are employing someone in Texas to solder on new parts.
Get your act together Framework. This is against the spirit of your mission. No one cares about warranty periods. Buy a new board should be an absolute last resort.
good writeup. a similar approached once saved my bacon when my laptop got bricked during the covid supply chain fiasco.
the programmer, especially with crocodile clips, can be used for other laptops with bios chips of the size. however, it is always nice to have info from someone else who has previously done this. while it took a lot of digging for the specific laptop i had, at least with framework we hope to see more high-quality writeup like this.
If the motherboard has so many parts that could fail independently, and each part is small money, then maybe the motherboard should also become modular?
I apparently have a very uncommon viewpoint on this, given the flavor of the comments.
I won't try and say that this situation is totally fine, or ideal, or anything close to it, but I think that in order for us to know how to feel, we need one very important piece of information that is missing: was the actual BIOS update itself bad in some way, or was this just the kind of error that happens sometimes, especially as hardware ages.
If it was the former, then this becomes quite bad: Framework released (even if they were not the ones who made it) a software update that bricked someones computer, and it is incumbent upon them to fix it, even out of warranty.
If it's the latter, then, I'm sorry, but that's the kind of thing that happens sometimes. Yes, having dual bios chips or some other way to recover from a failed flash would be nice, but I don't know the engineering trade offs to make that happen. Lots of desktop motherboards have it, where space is not at a premium, but do any laptop motherboards have it? My guess is that, at the bare minimum, it's much much less frequent.
I think that, in the latter situation, the main thing that I would like to have seen from a company like Framework, with their ethos, is to provide the pogo pin reflashing tool (at a reasonable price), along with the necessary instructions and files, either for the user, or for a local, inexpensive computer repair shop (depending on the users preference). So even in the latter situation, I do think that Frameworks support is lacking here. This seems like the kind of thing that, with the proper tools (which seem cheap) and instructions and files, that this wouldn't actually be that hard, especially for the type of consumer that would buy an upgradeable, modular laptop.
But, in the case that the BIOS itself was not bad/caused the bricking, then I think the rhetoric around this is overblown. I'm not sure that any laptop I've ever had before has ever told me that I needed a bios update (aka: provided that level of support post purchase).
Again, if the BIOS was in fact bad, and caused the brick (and no, a thread of people who experienced the problem is not enough to conclude this), then that's a very different situation, and the level of failure exceeds even what is described here. And even if it wasn't bad, I don't think think that "buy a new mainboard" is the appropriate service response when "buy these $20 dollars of parts and tools, and follow this guide" would likely have solved the problem.
But, as I understand it, BIOS updates are always somewhat dangerous. If Framework is on the hook for every time a BIOS goes bad outside of warranty even in situations where nothing they did directly caused the issue, then what they will do is just stop offering BIOS updates outside the warranty window. We can hold two ideas in our heads at once: Are they completely and perfectly living up to their ideals? I think that the answer here is obviously, even in the least bad case, no they are not. But are they providing better service than other laptop manufacturers? I think that as long as the BIOS file wasn't bad, the answer is yes. No laptop manufacturer would have offered to fix this out of warranty if they even provided continued BIOS updates, and for most manufacturers, their answer would have been "buy an entire new computer", and your only alternative would be third party resellers or used parts on ebay to get a new motherboard.
-edit- After doing a bit more research, BIOS recovery paths in laptops, while not universal or as common as in desktops, are also not exactly rare, and not having one, in a company with Frameworks ethos and stance, is worse than I initially assumed.
I think that, even if this isn't due to a bad BIOS or updater (which, again, would make them, in my opinion, liable for fixing it), then this is a very significant oversight, and the fact that they don't provide the support necessary to route around it (reasonably priced tools and clear, well written instructions) is even worse.
While I've had issues doing bios updates on my Framework, it's been more due to the fact that my main drive has too small of an EFI partition to update with the main drive in the laptop (who knows why it takes so much space to update the firmware in the first place).
That said, with another drive (and a larger EFI partition), I've been able to do 4 or 5 different bios updates on my AMD 7040 Framework 13.
FWIW I bricked a ThinkPad motherboard not that long ago by toggling the wrong BIOS options. Wasn't even a BIOS update (although ironically that would've fixed it), just toggling setting in the F2 Setup Menu. The target configuration was supported, but apparently there was a BIOS bug where if you toggled two different settings without rebooting inbetween, it bricked the motherboard (technically people online found some solutions that involved resoldering chips on the mobo but that's a little outside of my comfort zone). I believe it was Quiet Boot and... some sort of Thunderbolt controller mode? But I don't remember exactly.
This problem was not the natural result of "exiting". There is no reason FW couldn't supply a recovery method. That's not "hey that's life on the bleeding edge!" For that matter, the whole product isn't bleeding edge since years ago anyway.
Someone else noticed that there is actually a (unpopulated) header for flashing, which avoids the janky pogo pin thing even unpopulated. Why didn't fw point him at it when explicitly asked? And even if they had, where is the firmware image to use with it? They have it, so there is nothing about the "exiting" nature of the product that stops them from saying something more helpful than "throw the motherboard away".
the conclusion section is a pretty damning and disappointing read.
i'm realizing that framework's marketing swayed my opinion a lot more than i thought. i was seriously considering a framework laptop when my current one dies, but i'll probably just end up going with a thinkpad again, as the level of serviceability seems a lot closer to equal than i was lead to believe, and apparently there is no "feel good" advantage of buying framework.
I think cases like this should be brought before a small claims court. It seems unfair. The company (Framework Computer) provided the software, but the software is faulty and broke ("bricked") the laptop. Can you imagine if a GPU driver caused the card to get bricked? Even if out of warranty, surely the manuf would be legally liable in many jurisdictions for this faulty driver.
The author's LinkedIn profile[1] tells me that this person lives/works in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. While the issue is already fixed, for others affected with the same issue, I would suggest the small claims route. Make sure to talk with an LLM to follow the correct steps to gather and prepare evidence for your claim. If you are lucky enough to win, then you should "go nuclear" on social media (and their own forums) to share the win and the exact details about how you did it. Framework Computer will surely (1) cave and provide replacements or (2) be flooded with small claims about this issue.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/in/guanzhong-chen/
"talk with an LLM to follow the correct steps"
Or, if you need legal advice, go to a lawyer, not an LLM.
In Canada , there are cases where people self represent in court because they think a LLM replaces an expensive lawyer.
The last one that tried that was fined 5,000$ for wasting the court’s time.
Author here. I am not even sure how much damage I can actually claim given that I spent $20 on tools to fix the laptop. If I bought a new board, I might be able to claim that, but filing small claims over $20 is likely not worth anyone's time.
The important thing here is awareness and helping anyone affected, not trying to get Framework fined for a tiny sum.
You're right, for you, since you had the ability to do the repair yourself (although Framework shouldn't have made you invest the time and effort it took to repair this on your own). The legal route would still be a good way to go for others who were forced to buy a new board though. Hopefully your site helps people avoid the time and trouble of going to court or the costs of a replacement.
People doing what you've done, documenting the problem you had and the steps you took to fix it, are what make the internet great. You also get bonus points for having that information well formatted/presented and accessible. Even without JS the page displays nicely, images included. Thank you for that! I may never need the information for myself, but I'm grateful that you took the time to put it out there.
Consulting a lawyer would most likely be more expensive than whatever small claims compensation one would potentially be entitled to.
So you don't get your money back then. Using a hallucinating robot to guide you legally is a great way to be caught with your pants down.
Small claims court is specifically oriented towards self-representation and not requiring hiring an attorney.
Not requiring a lawyer and not doing your due diligence aren't mutually exclusive.
Just because you don't need a lawyer doesn't mean it's not in your best interest to get one.
A lawyer isn't going to hallucinate case law that doesn't exist. And if THEIR AI does? THEY'RE on the hook, not you.
Yeah, I don't know about the whole "THEY'RE on the hook". When it gets to the point where you discover that your lawyer didn't do what they're supposed to do, you're deep in the hole.
A recent experience for me was a lawyer I hired just forwarding whatever their LLM service said. Granted it was for a commercial contract so doesn't require that much legal muscle, I imagine, but I had to go through multiple rounds of feedback just to point out problems in their amendments. And the response was something along the lines of "yeah that could be a problem, let me review it". It was quite a bit of money too but the experience left me without much confidence that having a lawyer review the contract was any better than just running it through any capable model myself.
Then... double-check it yourself? The whole issue with hiring a lawyer in the first place is that defeats the point for the minuscule amount of claims being made.
So it's not worth it to file the claim then!! What's so hard to understand about that?
You need legal advice? You need a lawyer.
The lawyer costs more than what you've lost? Sorry, you're SOL then unless you want to piss off a judge and definitely not get the verdict you want.
Again, small claims court's entire reason for existence is that you do not need a lawyer so that you can pursue small claims like this easily.
Yes, but there are free resources available that guide you on how to go through the process without consulting a hallucination machine.
Judges don't like their time being wasted, and they doubly don't like plaintiffs and defendants who don't even go to the effort of trying to follow decorum.
And, I'm just throwing this one out here; contempt of court is one of the vanishingly few civil offenses you can be held in custody for.
And consulting an LLM is a great way to find guides and get basic information on feasibility and effort of bringing a claim. LLMs are not a replacement for critical thinking, and they never have been.
Basic hallucinated information...
Just ask for citations by forcing the LLM to provide a verbatim quote from a linked source. If the LLM is incapable of doing so without hallucinating (cough, Gemini, cough) use a better one.
I don't get the LLM hate on this site sometimes. Just because it is easy to use an LLM irresponsibly doesn't mean all LLM usage has to be irresponsible.
I think the problem is that the original recommendation here was "just use an LLM" not "use an LLM [in this responsible manner]".
As an anecdote: I know people currently preparing to file suit against a former roommate who decided to leave mid lease and stop paying because they had an LLM convince them that they could just do that (they definitely can't, it's not even close under local tenancy laws).
Which fits with my general impression that LLMs are extremely inclined to validate that you can do whatever you want to even when that's not how the law works and my expectation that using them naively for legal matters is a really bad idea.
And applied to this specific case I can easily imagine an LLM picking up on the commenters outrage and supporting them that they're right, when I tend to agree with the actual author's comment that it doesn't seem like they have any actual damages since they fixed it for $20 (not that I'm a lawyer).
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You beat me to it! That is exactly my point: An LLM can guide you to find the forms, fill them, and gather your evidence. Even the cheapest lawyer will far exceed the 500 USD repair fee that is the basis of your small claims lawsuit!
Another thing (this is me guessing here): The standard for evidence and "legal excellence" must be far lower for small claims court, compared to regular district court. The whole point is to provide a very low cost way for average citizens to sue other citizens or companies for recourse. As I understand, most small claims courts don't need or require a lawyer.
Related anecdote: This year, there was a story of a single Japanese mother using an LLM to file a lawsuit against the father to establish paternity[1]. (Note: This was family court, which, again, will have many people attending that cannot afford a lawyer, but the judge will show care that they receive fairness, given their limited knowledge of the law.)
[1] https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20260325/p2a/00m/0na/02...
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Can you actually point out one thing he said that's wrong? Seems like your whole post history is just blindly raging against AI. I don't even see how AI psychosis applies to what GP wrote, it's not totally detached from reality as those subjects tend to be.
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Read the court's forms and instructions then. LLMs are notoriously inaccurate regarding the law and conflating every legal system. Going in blind is better than going in misled by an "AI".
The $500 for one person's motherboard would not be the point.
Thank you. The commenter had me onboard right up until that point.
Lawyers cost hundreds of dollars per hour...
I had the same thing happen to me with my Thinkpad Nano, and researching how to fix this made me realize pc manufacturer really don't care. PC bricked from BIOS update are still ultra common.
I uploaded a dump of the flash [1] in the bad state and they somehow analyzed it and made a fix. Great for others I guess, but I'm still mindblown that the regular path would have been that this perfectly working laptop to this day become ewaste.
Being an embedded dev, I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins. Or some DFU mode you can boot into.
[1] https://github.com/fwupd/firmware-lenovo/issues/484
> I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins
Not enough of these cases happen under warranty for them to bother (and out of warranty cases are either neutral, or even beneficial to them if they drive sales of new hardware).
Lenovo also just had it happen with their Legion Go. They finally pulled the BIOS from distribution, but doesn't sound like they're doing anything to help the victims whose devices got bricked by a bad update.
> Or some DFU mode you can boot into.
Ironically, Macs do have that, no?
Yep, you can do a DFU recovery on a Mac from another Mac over USB. Same as if it were an iPhone/iPad. Which makes sense since it's basically the same hardware.
In PCs it's usual for a lot of motherboards have a dual bios, so if something fails (eg no POST) in the update, the mobo fall backs to the other one. It's a cheap chip in bulk, that would help a lot in cases like this.
A bit off-topic, but kind of relevant. I firmly believe that if installing custom firmware voids the warranty of a device, installing official updates should extend the warranty.
I'm tired of sloppy updates or change of behavior that mess with how I use MY device.
At this point, I'm convinced Google is doing this on purpose. My Google TV has become slow since the Gemini update, which I wasn't asked if I wanted it. My pixel battery life gets worse with every update, etc.
> installing official updates should extend the warranty.
That sounds like a big incentive to never ship updates.
I don't know. I'm sitting here with a framework laptop consciously NOT updating it because I'm in no mood to have my computer SOL because a company can't seem to get their shit together?
Of note, I really like my framework, and I have installed BIOS updates on the past without issue. However, there have been a lot of firmware problems and fixes that are not fixes (battery related) and then bios updates that apparently cut the sound volume down to far lower levels than before the update, etc.
A user shouldn't have to worry about installing a BIOS update from the manufacturer causing the machine to die without circumstances like power loss, etc.
I feel personally that if such a BIOS update bricks someone's device, it should unquestionably be "we are sorry, let us send you out a new board asap". They can then reflash using pogo pins and send them out to other customers.
Accountability these days doesn't exist anywhere. It's making the world shit.
That's better than bricking devices
Yeah we should go back to Windows XP or some other OS that no longer receives updates. Now they can't break it!
Just also make compagnies liable about any unpatched security issues for hardware newer than X years.
Google seems to have "directives from high" where they shoehorn the latest fad into all their existing devices, regardless of whether it works or not, on a tight schedule. Gemini is the latest one.
I had Google WiFi points that worked fine, and then there was a directive to merge them into Google Home. They didn't show up correctly in the Home app for a year or so.
This is literally the case, and it's not just with products that get shipped externally.
I’ve had that problem with Roku, Google, and Vizio updates too, over the years.
At this point I’m comfortable saying that on device “Smart TV” software is a crime against humanity, full stop.
Google bricked all of the old fitbit scales with a firmware that glitches out and drains the battery. There were tons of reports at the time, but the devices were out of warranty so they didn’t fix it.
IANAL but I'm pretty sure the authors of software are liable for damages to property their software might cause. Regardless of whether that is the case, legislation should be enacted to ensure this and make complaints/remuneration standard and easy to extract without the costs of taking a huge company to court.
I don't know. Out of curiosity I went to framework website, found the software license for their BIOS firmware and it says "Software distributed under the License is distributed AS IS basis, without WARRANTY OF ANY KIND..."
EU has a minimum warranty period (2 years?) on electrical goods. UK has Consumer Rights Act that amounts to a limited warranty for as long as a reasonable person would expect the item to last(!). These disclaimers are to specify that any language elsewhere that sounds like a warranty -- 'we take pride in our work and ensure every laptop meets exacting standards' -- has a silent addendum of 'not a warranty' so you can't actually win in court claiming "this didn't meet exacting standards" (ymmv).
Again, IANAL, but you can't disclaim certain liabilities.
I lost my google mesh network to a firmware update, ofc I didn't even ask for it to be updated, they just shipped an update that bricked the devices. Just got an "out of warranty" response after they gave me the normal suggestions of trying to reboot, etc.
I agree with their conclusion.
I somewhat regret buying my framework laptop at this stage, because the answer to every fault is "buy a new component, from framework".
I'm not sure I blame them for this really, but there is no competitive market of parts (or really any market at all), which means that the reality is that you're just locking your money to them. They also often have stock issues, so woe betide you if your component fails at the wrong time.
It's very hard to predict costs here, but framework laptops do seem to fail more than other brands, and their laptops do tend to be more expensive. In comparison to MacBooks I've used over the years, which other than screen delaminating, have been faultless, at least.
We bulk bought a lot of Framework Intel 12th gen laptops to kit out our engineering team.
Within a year many of these (>20%) started experiencing the "400 MHz bug" where the CPU is either intermittently or constantly stuck at 400 MHz, and the laptop starts to heat up like an oven. As far as I know there has never been any conclusive fix for this issue from Framework, or even an official debugging guide.
It really soured me on the idea of repairable laptops - what's the point of it being "repairable" if you have huge fundamental flaws in the hardware that go unfixed?
I actually got bit by this particular bug (I think) just a few days ago.
At least in my case, a proper cold shutdown was the remedy. (Many normal reboots were attempted in vain)
Have you seen any of the fixes people talked about in that thread? Apparently some fixed it, hopefully something works for you https://community.frame.work/t/framework-400mhz-issue/83910/
I had a similar issue on AMD 7040, where it would lock too I think 800Mhz or something. It didn't get hot, it would just obviously be very sluggish until I restarted. The issue popped up a few times, but I think was ultimately fixed with a Linux change.
I've had this sort of thing happen with a Dell XPS, and their response was "purchase a new laptop". While it would be great if we had stronger consumer protection, for both economic and environmental reasons I prefer the Framework approach.
You didn't mention what the problem was, but Dell laptops are so ubiquitous that buying replacement parts on eBay is both very easy and highly affordable. This is one of the reasons I'm partial to Dell, even in the face of all the objectively better-designed alternatives.
When you purchase a new laptop, you can choose a different manufacturer who may have a more durable product. When you have a framework, you're forced to buy the same component from the same company that made it poorly in the first place, if it's even in stock.
When you buy a framework, you are not forced to buy the same component from framework. You are free to buy a new laptop like you would if your laptop from Dell failed.
You're always free to purchase a new laptop, though.
While that's true, I'd still rather replace a single component rather than turn a whole laptop into e-waste.
having 2 fw 13s this is my experience as well (and also friends who bought into FW); i was willing to give the 13 pro a try until they downgraded my order. I inevitably cancelled and went with a dell xps14 and its a fantastic laptop. I am unsure bout any future fw purchases. also my m1 macbook pro is made so well I've abused this to the cows come home and i feel like it still has another 3+ years to it..
everytime someone brings up the e-waste aspects of fw, i don't know if its that simple...because i've definitely already generated much more e-waste with my frameworks than any other laptop i've bought in the last decade
that being said, i do like the fw vision, but they might be trying to do TOO much that their quality is suffering for it
A couple years ago, my personal laptop died and that was all the excuse I needed to finally get one of these Framework laptops that everyone was raving about. I was all set to part with roughly $1700. Pulled my credit card out of my wallet and everything. Until I started filling out the order information and they said it was backordered for 6 months! Yeah, I couldn't wait that long.
I started looking at refurbished Dell Precisions and came across one that was $800 with specs not _too_ far off from the Framework 16. Not exactly what a wanted, but it ticked all the boxes and was a very decent deal. I procrastinated a bit by accident and then happened to be checking back on the morning of Black Friday and saw that they had cut the price to $400. I've never clicked "Add to Cart" so fast in my life.
Now, to be fair, when it arrived the battery was pretty much toast and the webcam didn't work, so after sourcing replacements and fixing those myself, it ended up being more like a $500 laptop. Still a bargain for a pretty damn good machine. It has done everything I asked of it. I'm very happy that I wasn't able to order a Framework and walked away from the experience $1000 richer.
> because i've definitely already generated much more e-waste with my frameworks than any other laptop i've bought in the last decade
How so? Most FW parts seem quite resellable, did you just throw them away after upgrading or something?
> In comparison to MacBooks ...
I can buy 3rd party: RAM, SSD, WI-FI,random Expansion cards from the marketplace. I can open and clean and change thermal paste, etc. I've heard the display can be bought from alibaba, etc.
I can't even open my Mac.
> change thermal paste
You know what’s even better than easily changed thermal paste?
A laptop that doesn’t need it changed.
Land Rover guys love to say how easy they are to repair, and forget to mention they need ten times as many repairs as other vehicles.
ALL thermal paste ages. There is no thermal paste that never needs to be changed.
Thats like BMW saying their transmission fluid never needs to be refilled. It absolutely does, its just financially more lucrative for them if the transmission explodes and you have to buy a new one or a whole new car.
This exactly.
My post was not a fiery indictment of framework, more that I am musing that perhaps I have been duped. Not because they aren't repairable (they are), but because I didn't consider that the quality would be so much lower than other options.
I genuinely don't know which is cheaper or better for the environment: buying a macbook that I change out every 8-10 years (this is how long they would last, based on prior experience), or I buy a framework and change out parts as they fail.
The expansion cards always seemed a gimmick to me: it's just a USB-C port, loaded down with the extra plastic necessary to claim it's an expansion port. I guess some folks find it more convenient than a dongle, but when I'm using a laptop for portability it's rare I want anything other than USB-C. (When the laptop is sitting at home or in the office on a desk, just plug in a Thunderbolt dock and get all the ports I could want.)
The tech is not news, but the execution is also matter.
Like Airpod after all is just a bluetooth earphone, but it is way more successful than traditional one.
My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
A modular gpu using a new standard that is form-factor specific for only a specific model? Matte panel released a few months after the first 13.5 model was released with glossy panel as only option?
It sounds a bit fishy to me. But maybe I'm just a bit too cynical .
Manufacturer forces you to throw away previous device and buy a new one: it's a conspiracy to make money
Manufacturer lets you replace each part separately: it's a conspiracy to make money
I see your point, but what i'm talking about is the company generating a strong incentive to people to buy upgrades or replacements.
This whole submission is about a user going extra length to recover a perfectly functioning main board (with price between 400 and 800 eur depending on model) after an official update went wrong and was suggested to buy a new one.
Mind that I am planning to buy one as well, so I don't have a bias against it. But those suspicious "features" pulled me away from the 16" model for example.
> a perfectly functioning main board
If I understand correctly, the problem was that the board was the exact opposite of that. The post title uses the phrase “bricked”.
I agree that FWs handling was pretty bad, but then again, what exactly is the proposed ideal-but-realistic solution they should have offered here?
"Bricked" is a bad term for system without a proper software/firmware update path. A LOT could have been done here to improve "repairability" (with quotes, because this is a software issue on a perfectly fine mainboard).
A/B updates automatically recovering the bios is case of failed update, recovery from usb in case that somehow fails as well (InsydeH2O call it "crisis mode" I think). Lenovo support both. Dell too afaik. This is very much realistic to have, and I would expect it from a decent product. A computer without this feature is pretty much designed to fail more easily.
If for some very weird reason framework was unable to offer this, then at very least they could have placed a header on the board with flashing instructions on the website, instead of advising to buy new hardware.
I mean, sure, I agree it would be ideal if BIOS updates literally couldn’t fail - I meant to ask what they could have done to resolve this situation now.
But yes, lack of an USB bios recovery path is a pretty terrible design fault, and I’m surprised that they haven’t improved this by now.
ah, you mean after the accident. Well for starter I would acknowledge the issue (thing that according to the liked thread did not happen, maybe it did not affect enough customers?). Then they should either provide an official recovery guide instead of letting customers figure it out themself on the forum (I can see various pictures of people hooking clips to the flash chip and wondering want to flash exactly), or repair it pro-bono since it's a job that probably take ~10 mins for affected customer and it's an issue caused by a design flaw.
Tons of motherboards for other computers have dual BIOS update processes so it can roll back to the old version if the upgrade is unsuccessful.
They could have also had the BIOS chip be socketable and sold it individually pre-programmed.
I agree not everyone does this, but its not like some incredibly out there idea.
Seriously?
ASUS CrashFree BIOS 3 utility. That's from a 10-year-old MB. Probably a few other examples.
Every day I show up to work is a conspiracy between me and my mortgage lender to make money.
> My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
I think this is absolutely what you sell to investors. For it to be attractive to consumers though (and thus attractive to investors, since people actually need to buy the thing), there has to be a balance. They haven't even managed to conjure up a market for third party expansion cards, which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit.
At the moment they are living on borrowed time and good will from the tech / hippie community who want to be more sustainable and customizable. I think they have likely lost me at this point. I don't know how close they are to losing everybody else.
I think what expansion cards third parties are extremely niche (SDR) or have much better alternatives (to me, and I suspect most others If they thought about it, the 10gbE cards. Get a dock or two for the presumably limited locations you have 10gb infra and the need for it).
What most others have realised is that devices fit the 99% with USB-C, A and HDMI. Or, increasingly, just USB-C as everyone who needs one has a fleet of cheap dongles to provide just the right IO.
I mean, sure? Every other laptop company's main business is to sell laptops, so if you want those features or often time even a repair, you have to buy a whole new laptop. If you're Apple, you might need to buy a new laptop for a memory upgrade.
> Framework chose to not provide a header for flashing the BIOS, which, when combined with issue #3, forced the use of pogo pins.
Op probably missed https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/FrameworkDebugger#jspi. Though, the connector is not populated for cost reasons.
Otherwise, I agree with the author, this is a pain.
Original author here:
Thanks for linking the documentation! To be clear, when I wrote "header", I meant something with a connector that can be easily used for this purpose. Soldering on the connector is probably more difficult than the pogo pins that I used.
I also can't help but notice the linked connector is less than $1 in bulk on DigiKey and probably cheaper if ordered at Framework's scale.
Sure, but this is just one issue. How many potential $0.78 connectors exist? If one in 1000 customers has a need for a connector, and there are 40 different potential failure modes where a $0.78 connector would make recovery easier, is that worth the extra $30 per laptop?
I checked the pictures of my board, and there are 3 unpopulated headers that I can see. There's also the unpopulated BIOS chip socket, which is similarly cheap. I think I would pay the extra $3 per laptop for better repairability, which is Framework's entire sales pitch anyway.
Moving to sockets adds risk of the socket failing too. But this particular instance of not using an SOIC-8, for which test clips are readily available, seems pretty unfriendly.
I imagine there's a way to program the flash from a header or connector, or maybe it was programmed before being assembled onto the PCB.
Having a BIOS update BRICK the device isnt 'just one issue', they clearly need to do more work to protect devices from this, they can choose what they add but the BIOS needs a safer fallback and recovery process, that much is clear.
Definitley worthy of even an extra $1-2 per laptop if needed.
The user is not guilty of "missing" this if fw never pointed to it when asked directly.
And where is the bios image to use with this anyway? Including the documentation to fix the serial numbers.
The existence of this header changes exactly nothing about the story.
Good story, and surprising that there was so little assistance from the OEM. As an aside, I got to test out Asus crash free BIOS a couple of weeks ago. A strong thunderstorm hit and before I could get to my office a rapid series of deep voltage drops occurred. I shut down my systems and waited out the storm. When I powered my Asus tower back on it failed to POST, automatically restarted, recovered the BIOS (CMOS settings I assume), restarted again and booted Windows. Pretty slick, and instantly removed that cold lump of lead that had formed in my gut.
Asus has their gimmicks but that sounds genuinely cool and well thought out!
I really don't understand how in 2025 a competent company can't implement a trival A/B flash update. Do they depend on some obscure contractor for the firmware and have no power here?
As with many things, "It's complicated" but effectively, yes
Such system firmware is generally provided by AMI / Insyde / Phoenix and similar.
There are a few vendors who decide to go their own way (notably google using a fork of Coreboot for their chromebooks), but it's generally list of vendors that you can count on a single hand.
If it means anything I'm pretty sure AMI provides A/B updates on most products i've used with their stuff.
But that's always been the case. Phoenix and AMI have been the dominant BIOS providers for over 30 years. Both have always provided modular tookits for OEMs to customize their own ROM images, write their own ACPI tables, etc. UEFI gives even more control to the OEMs. If Framework isn't doing that properly, that's on them.
It appears that Framework contracted out the development of their (Insyde-based) firmware to somebody who, to put it mildly, does not treat them as a priority. Either way, Framework’s firmware is really bad, and that’s entirely on Framework; you can look around on the forums for the horror stories in the (open) EC code around power delivery for instance.
As another example of a vendor low-key screwing Framework in a way that I think it’s entirely appropriate to blame Framework themselves for, the first couple 13-inch models could charge off 5V chargers. The newer ones still have the necessary hardware, but whoever they get their power circuitry from cut that bit from the firmware on a newer chip version, and Framework obediently went “welp, guess we don’t have that feature anymore”.
In addition to no longer charging off 5V chargers (their first laptop could literally charge off a USB type A with no USB-PD), on the AMD 7040 I've got ~10% chance every time I plug it in to my dock that it will simply not start charging. Everything else will connect (display, USB) but power won't flow. Resolving that is as simple as unplugging and replugging in my laptop but if I don't notice until I'm in a video conference then it is a problem because my webcam, microphone, and headset are also going over that cable. Oh how I miss the OG 11th gen framework charging.
I heard a lot of talk about porting to coreboot (they even sent some motherboard to some coreboot developers I think). Not sure what is stalling there, but sounds like a priority.
For the EC, I feel like a team of a single developer could arrange something there?
Interestingly, I once saw them posting job for UEFI developer, and FW developer.
They definitely have FW team inhouse, but idk if that team handle the EC too.
Probably they depend on some "obscure" contactor which is one of the ODMs here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_manu... .
Intel / AMD and BIOS vendors simply do not expose their designs to everyone. So you have to go through an ODM to have an Intel chip-based motherboard design. The silicon industry is completely rotten at this point. Framework could simply be too small to get access to secret sauce.
This is not completely true, there is open source implementation of UEFI Spec(EDK 2), Microsoft also has Project MU for uefi.
If you are willing to pay, you can design from scratch everything.
The UEFI spec is open. The way to load Intel ME payload isn't. You need to do it otherwise the Intel CPU is as good as a brick. It will shut down automatically in 30 mins, none of the TPM functions will work, no power management will work.
It is not just payment. Without being "big enough" and guaranteeing some big volumes of CPU sales, Intel won't give you the specs. AFAIK only ODMs and BIOS makers like AMI has the full low-level CPU bootstrap spec.
This is just the CPU. Now add the other peripherals like HDMI controllers. You'd see the problem now.
I own the "original" gen11 Intel Framework 13. This is a company that wasn't able to ship a working RTC battery, a touchpad that would register a click when a physical click happened, a screen hinge that would reliably hold the screen in an upright position, or a USB-A port that wouldn't consume a watt of power when unused. You expect way too much engineering from them.
Heh, I remember the “remove the USB A” debacle when I had my OG.
That thing really hacked me off generally. Coming from a MBP 2016 that sipped power, the battery anxiety was real (especially standby drain), and I spent more time than I’d care to admit tweaking tlp to be still a pretty poor drain.
Then the backlight would only work in certain positions.
Love the dream, but it got sold and replaced by a MBP of 2x the price. 4years later the MBP has been used and abused like a tool, dropped from my car boot while trying to carry it and a child, and is still fresh as a daisy. I worry that FW doesn’t fit into “buy once buy well”
Well, at least I haven't had the backlight issue.
I did eventually tweak it to a very particular state where it had decent idle power use. Of course, it had to be re-tweaked occasionally.
Apart from that laptop, I've only ever used good-gen Thinkpads (and I'm back on one; the Framework now lives on my son's desk). The whole "we ship a screwdriver" gimmick gets old fast if you have to use that screwdriver on a regular basis (_of course_ they couldn't just use Phillips screws).
I still don't understand we are comparing a brand new company's engineering to Apple, who have been making laptops for what, 40 years now? Apple's GPUs used to over heat a fry the laptop. They used to make keyboards that would fully break because of a piece of dust, but they were riveted down so they were irreplaceable. Titanium powerbooks had hinges that would break in a year.
Because this isn’t a charity, I’m not paying to work out a new company’s engineering issues. I feel confident, based on the last few laptops, in spending £2k and having it last as my primary for 5 years or so, and then either still having some resale value, or being repurposed for simpler tasks.
I don’t have the same confidence in FW
And Apple are still unable to master cables that don't fray within a few months of use.
I still don't see how Framework's relative youth compensates my issues.
I also had one of this 11th Gen Intel FW13s, and the RTC battery on mine worked for a short time because they for some reason used some garbage rechargeable one with a 2 yr lifespan instead of the more common not-rechargeable battery that every other PC vendor uses with seemingly 10x the lifespan
Yep. Cheapest one from AliExpress works with no issues for four years now, so I shudder to think where they got the ones they shipped.
I know some higher end gaming motherboards that were targeted towards the overclocking community had two bios chips for exactly this purpose and switching between them was trivial from what I remember. If you overclocked too far, you wouldn't brick your system. It seemed like overkill to me. I'm guessing this is less common than it's worth to fix in software, but then at least continue to give support for the issue.
If you overclocked too far, you could remove the CMOS battery or hold the CLR_CMOS button that these high-end boards probably had.
Two BIOS chips was supposed to protect you from bad BIOS updates or a bad BIOS mod, just like the scenario from TFA.
Original author here, and I agree. When overclocking, the most important feature is probably resetting the CMOS with one easy to reach button.
I was testing ECC previously in https://qt.ax/ecc and was trying to overclock the RAM to induce faults to confirm ECC was fixing them. Since I was using a cheaper board, I had to use keys to short the CLR_CMOS header and that got old really quick... I didn't ultimately succeed in creating a barely stable overclock that generated a ton of ECC errors, but that was a very awful experience.
Having some sort of BIOS recovery is definitely the baseline I'd expect these days, and having two BIOS chips so you can just keep using the device as if nothing had happened is the best solution.
If you need to do that again, maybe try turning the tREFI DRAM timing to the moon? That controls the refresh interval, which is very temperature sensitive. You could configure a marginally stable setting, let it boot, start running `memtester`, and then apply hair dryer directly to DRAM.
Possible they're thinking of certain OC editions of GPUs. Some of them have 2 BIOSes you can switch between with a little slider. Some even 3.
Isn’t that just a gimmick?
I was under the impression that GPU overclocking, overvoltage and fan curve settings were not persistent across reboots.
It's not a gimmick when the serious overclocking people do custom VBIOSes. Similarly for miners. That's when you need the recovery switch if things go wrong.
TIL about custom VBIOSes.
Why don’t the OEMs of GPUs aimed at OCing just ship with a BIOS that exposes more tweaks through software though…
Custom Video Card firmware has been around a long time. It was possible to convert PC video cards to Mac use by flashing them. When I was faffing around with PPC64 Macs (I mean hey I got it for free) I picked up an ATI card on ebay that had been flashed.
I had sleep issues. It was the lowest-end G5. I ended up recycling it.
I really like what Framework is trying to do but this story is very hard to ignore. If a failed BIOS update can brick the machine, and the official solution is a CA$500+ motherboard (that's about $350+ USD I belieive), there's still a pretty big gap between being modular and being truly repairable
Not to mention there are no "alternatives" that you can look into to purchase these replacements. You are essentially just locked to purchasing from Framework only
Yeah but this is true for every laptop vendor. Framework is not worse here, and yes, Framework is supposed to be better, but it cannot be better in everything at once. It is already better that you only need to buy a 350USD motherboard instead of a 1200 Euro laptop.
> this is true for every laptop vendor
Are there any reports out there of macbook OTA updates causing laptops to become entirely unbootable with no recovery options (and, in case it actually happened, Apple refusing to fix/replace affected laptops at no extra cost)?
I am yet to hear of it being a thing, and I would love to be proven wrong.
I know at least one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47609716
Having said that, MacBook is a very homogenous machine with minimal choices (which can be a good thing) so testing upgrades patches on them should be fairly easy as compared to other vendors (a good outcome of that thing).
With framework and effectively with other vendors, this is where a lot of problems come from. And the problem is significantly harder.
> a failed BIOS update can brick the machine
As far as I am aware a failed bios/firmware update on any device can cause it to brick, thats why they always come with massive warnings everywhere. I personally do not just do bios updates because some OEM marketing said so. The old saying does me well, "If it aint broke dont fix it"
Some nicer boards have redundant copies of the BIOS so if you fuck up the update, it boots the old one.
Various enterprise boards with BMCs can flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked.
You might even be able to do that with Intel AMT, but I've never had occasion to try.
It's interesting to read this. Because I recently had something similar happened to me and I had mixed feelings like the author here.
I have the original Framework 13, but I have almost changed everything inside of it (motherboard AMD 7840U, wifi 7, ram 96GB, ssd, better hinge, the CNC shell, hdmi dongle v3, APU Fan, speakers v2, webcam v2). I still was using the original battery and it was at 60% health. So, I decided to update to the 61W battery.
After changing the battery, I decided to turn on the battery charge limit to keep the battery at a cool 60% charge to increase its lifespan.
First interesting thing I faced was realizing that Framework has 2 methods for the battery limit implementation. You have to use framework-tools and set it on the ec instead of the standard Kernel module. The kernel allows you to set the min and max, but the ec just allows you to set the max, and it will automatically set max-5 as the min.
But what was more frustrating, was realizing and when it gets to that threshold it constantly discharges 5-9W until it gets to the min and then charges the battery again back to the threshold. So, if you set a threshold it keeps charging that 5% once an hour, instead of parking the battery and waiting for the natural discharge to get to the min (which should be days later, since when you're plugged in the battery is not used for anything, it's like your laptop is off, not sleep, off).
But the good thing is the ec code is open source, I found the code, dug into it, found a bug, fixed it, flashed it, and for the past 2 weeks my battery is working perfectly.
I opened a PR, then found a multi hundred forum post of people talking about something similar with no proper solution, or any fixes in the ec. And my PR has been sitting there with no attention from Framework. Setting a battery threshold is actually worse for your battery because of this bug, but nobody is in a rush to fix it!
So, I'm mad that Framework operates this way, their circuitry, power delivery, and software is flawed (just read the forum thread[1]). On the other hand I'm happy I can see the code, find the bug, and fix it at least for myself! Feels like the hardware version of Linux! If you are technical, you can literally change how your kernel behaves. You can't recommend it to your Mom, but you definitely prefer it to the closed alternatives.
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-battery-flipping-bet...
It's crazy, the last time any PRs got merged was back in January 2024 [0]. Seems it has just become a black hole completely ignored by anyone at framework.
[0] https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/EmbeddedController/pull...
The original from 2021, so 60% health after 5 years? Coupled with how they don't have a bypass sounds to me like they don't have their battery in order. Your linked thread also mentions that it happens at 100% too, which would explain the extreme degradation: leaving it plugged in by default thrashes the battery without a bypass.
The lack of support from Framework is so damning. Nirav has been a fun CEO to watch, but this feels like a huge, huge miss. Can anyone defend this? Why would anyone purchase anything from this company ever again?
I've had Dell XPSs and Lenovo Thinkpads exclusively prior to Framework, and they all died by component failure. Sure, Dell will send a technician to your house and Lenovo has off-shore call centers, but the end result is the same: either buy an eye-wateringly expensive warranty that won't cover most failures or buy a new laptop.
While I'm all for stronger consumer regulation when it comes to this stuff, on balance I prefer the Framework approach here relative to the other options available to me.
Can you really compare failing components to an optional update they sent you an email to encourage you to install that bricks your working laptop? This is 100% their responsibility to test thoroughly before recommending right?
I agree nothing is perfect in the grand scheme, there are always trade offs. But using that as argument against this specific failure being wrong and bad doesn't help IMO. Framework should handle this better, and maybe they still will.
I think all manufacturers generally vet their BIOS updates and that it's probably not possible to stop 100% of all BIOS update failures.
This laptop has been owned for 3 years, so you have to benchmark against other 3-year-old laptops. What percentage of those fail or get bricked in some way? What is the cost of a solution for those failures?
It would be nice if this laptop had a BIOS recovery feature, and perhaps competing laptops have such a thing as well. I've mostly seen that feature with desktop gaming boards, and if it's common with other PC laptops, Framework should implement it.
If an update bricks your MacBook Pro or Lenovo, I imagine the cost and method of repair is exactly the same. These laptops get sent to a service depot or a tech comes out to your house, and they replace the board. Unless you happen to find an extremely nerdy repair shop like a Louis Rossmann situation, the techs don't mess with reflashing BIOS or other board-level stuff like replacing capacitors. It's just not really worth the labor/parts balance. Spending an hour or more on labor will likely cost more than spending 10 minutes on labor and $400 on parts.
Perhaps this looks worse for Framework because you the consumer is seeing how the sausage is made. Framework doesn't have a white glove repair service since the computer is designed to not need one. You're just buying the part yourself and installing it.
This solution doesn't cost more than the competition, and maybe it even costs less. Plus, you might even get an upgraded board out of it, which is unheard of with the competition. But it doesn't feel like "repairability" compared to dropping off your computer at your local certified Dell or Apple tech and picking it back up "repaired."
Right, really what Framework is saying is "we don't have a repair center that tries to re-flash BIOS." Neither do the other manufacturers, it's just too much of an in-the-weeds repair that's not worth their technicians' time.
The fact that the RAM isn't soldered is such a huge benefit here as well. The most recent 7040 series board that sold on eBay with no RAM or SSD included only cost $269. Even if the author decided to just buy that board, that kind of repair cost is unheard of. That's battery service cost territory if you own a MacBook Pro.
Or you can just use the opportunity to upgrade, which a repair from a competitor is not offering.
I disagree with a lot of the assessments the author made:
> First, it is clear that Framework’s BIOS updater is broken, at least on the AMD 7040 series.
This is only true anecdotally. I have installed this exact same BIOS version just fine on my 7040 series unit. It's not broken, works on my machine, my anecdote is worth exactly the same as theirs.
> Secondly, Framework encourages users to perform BIOS updates in their newsletters, and yet if the update results in bricking
Again, anecdotally.
> Thirdly, Framework claims to have made a repairable laptop, and I think my experience and the hoops I had to jump through to flash the BIOS have decidedly shown this not to be the case.
I would definitely welcome a built-in recovery flashing mechanism and more general repairable design within the mainboard. Any improvement is welcome. That said, Framework is already well above industry standard in regard to repairability. There are not many laptops out there with non-soldered RAM and removable WiFi modules.
The trouble here is that they invite this criticism upon themselves by offering repairability as a flagship benefit, but the reality is that it's not very practical for 100% of the computer to avoid every possible pitfall with long-term ownership. Yeah, after 3 years of ownership, X% of laptops get bricked for some kind of reason. This is why extended warranties cost hundreds of dollars regardless of brand. Consumer electronics are just not risk-free purchase transactions.
You also see how the sausage is made because you are doing the repair yourself. If you brick your MacBook Pro and take it to an Apple repair center, they might just be throwing your board in the trash and replacing it, charging you $500, and you get your computer back "repaired." Framework doesn't have a repair center since all repairs that they would perform in a repair center are repairs that you can perform at home, so you get to see how repairs actually work in practice. No computer OEMs and essentially no authorized repair centers hire component-level repair technicians, it's just not a business they want to be in.
I'm sure if you took your Framework to an electronics market in China you could get your BIOS flashed by dozens of vendors for $20 while you wait.
Original author here:
> This is only true anecdotally. I have installed this BIOS version just fine on my 7040 series unit. It's not broken, works on my machine, my anecdote is worth exactly the same as theirs.
I linked an entire thread where people have had similar bricking issues with this exact update: https://community.frame.work/t/bios-update-stuck/83416
If it's just me, I would chalk it up to a freak accident, but it's not.
And in the repair thread, you see it's been happening on and off since last year: https://community.frame.work/t/success-in-recovering-from-ba...
This isn't an anecdote at this point, but a pattern. I don't think the BIOS updater is working as intended if every update is like playing Russian roulette.
> That said, Framework is already well above industry standard in this regard. There are not many laptops out there with non-soldered RAM and removable WiFi modules.
Yes, but they are below industry standard for BIOS flashing issues.
> The trouble here is that they invite this criticism upon themselves by offering repairability as a flagship benefit, but the reality is that it's not very practical for 100% of the computer to avoid every possible pitfall with long-term ownership.
The part that upsets me isn't that they aren't warrantying this. The problem is that they promised to make a laptop I can fix myself and provide all the documentation to do it with confidence long after the warranty ends. That's why I bought into the ecosystem in the first place.
Turns out, they claimed to do better and then does all the anti-repair design anyway for BIOS flashing. They didn't even provide any documentation for fixing it myself, which I would have done gladly and then praised them for having documentation.
Right, that's a thread with 38 posts. Only the people who have a bricked system would post to a forum, the rest of them with working systems are not there. The repair thread has 78 posts. Keep in mind, not every post is posted by a unique person (people post multiple replies to the same thread).
Are they below industry standard for BIOS flashing issues? How do you know? Do you have some data to point to? Do vendors like Lenovo or Apple make that information public?
I'm not trying to shill or defend them or anyone else in this industry, and I think they should have a BIOS recovery method built-in like my desktop does.
However, it's important to understand how statistical analysis works for issues like these. As of 2024, reports indicate that Framework has sold a six-figure quantity of laptops. So we have here about 116 posts on the subject of BIOS update failures, 0.1% of sales volume or less.
I realize this napkin math is flawed in itself since we should be isolating to the AMD 7040 series, and we should not assume that every person who has a BIOS flashing issue is posting on the forum, but I think it gives you a very rough idea on why we can't say one way or another whether these issues are common.
If there was a forum post with thousands of anecdotes about this issue, or even better, a class-action lawsuit (law firms will only do this if there's a large enough class to make it worth it), I'd be more inclined to be on your side.
> If you brick your MacBook Pro and take it to an Apple repair center, they might just be throwing your board in the trash and replacing it, charging you $500, and you get your computer back "repaired."
No one bricked their own laptop! They installed an update provided by the people that made the laptop! You bet your ass if installing software provided by apple bricked a macbook pro they would fix it for free. If they didn't it would be equally as unacceptable. Why are you defending a company that is doing the wrong thing? Framework is unequivocally wrong here.
Apple absolutely does not fix bricked systems out of warranty, regardless of cause or fault. Certainly not two years removed from the warranty. They can, in very rare cases, get bricked by failed updates. It’s not totally unheard of.
“Unequivocally wrong” is highly debatable. You may feel that way but I don’t. I’m not defending anyone, I’m just providing a reality check on how things work when you buy a product from anyone.
I think the only thing framework did wrong is fail to provide a BIOS restore fallback function, which my desktop motherboard has, but not every laptop has a feature like this.
For one thing, any conclusion that a BIOS update failure is automatically Framework’s fault is a big jump to conclusions. A BIOS update has a small risk of failure with any device. Find me a motherboard manufacturer who will bail you out outside of the warranty period and I’ll do three cartwheels for you.
So you are saying if your laptop is out of warranty, they are free to do everything they want without any responsibilities ?
Like if this update bricked like thousands of out of warranty laptop, they are still free to go?
This sounds like an extension of my logic beyond my meaning. This implication is that any manufacturer can just brick devices en masse, perhaps even on purpose, with no consequence or recourse, which is not at all what I was saying.
Here's a little story to frame this a little better and help you understand my meaning: My second-to-last MacBook Pro before I quit the Apple platform was the 2016 MacBook Pro with the butterfly keyboard.
That machine had a flawed design that was never 100% fixed, and Apple swept the whole issue under the rug until media pressure intensified. They then made a warranty extension for the keyboards.
The fix did not work 100%. The underlying keyboard design was flawed. I got my MacBook Pro "fixed" under this extended warranty,
The result was a huge class action lawsuit, for which I just received my last check this year. I was not fully compensated or given a refund. What I ended up doing was unloading the laptop much earlier than my normal upgrade cycle to switch to the 2019 16" MacBook Pro (Intel) that no longer possessed this fatal design flaw.
This incident damaged Apple's brand perception with at least one customer, me.
So, I'm not saying there are zero consequences for Framework not making this right. At the same time, every company that makes products draws a line somewhere. A restaurant isn't going to compensate me for a bad meal I had a month ago. Dell isn't going to buy me a new computer because my 7 year old Inspiron is on the fritz even though I expect a device like that to last longer.
If you bring a 2016 MacBook Pro in to Apple to get the keyboard replaced under the keyboard replacement program, Apple will not do it for free. The program has expired. Even though the system cost Apple millions of dollars in a class action suit and the design is fundamentally flawed, Apple will not make it right for their customers indefinitely. They offered a limited time resolution for customers who experienced that issue.
There is not a customer expectation that all the products they buy will last forever or will be indefinitely fixed for free regardless of issue, so in practice it's a balancing act between minimizing your long-term support costs and pissing off your customer base.
To directly answer your question though, a lot of times bricking or severely handicapping products happens and companies are free to go. Ask me what happened to my second generation Google Nest thermostat. Of course, my reaction to that was to throw the thing in the trash and resolve to never buy a piece of Google hardware ever again. But I'm sure thousands of people responded by justifying an upgrade to the latest and greatest and calling that a win because shopping for something new and unboxing a package is a fun dopamine hit.
I don't think that everything I described above is what is happening with Framework in this situation. I don't think there is any indication that failed BIOS flashes are a widespread issue. It seems that the standard rectification for a bad BIOS flash is a replacement board because it is considered a rare occurrence.
Remember that, if you don't want to worry about this or any other hardware failure, you can go ahead and buy a 3-year extended warranty at time of purchase, and that sort of option is available with basically every piece of consumer technology on the market.
I would agree that it would be better for them to be able to service it for a lower cost or maybe have a BIOS recovery function built-in to the hardware, but other than that I don't see anything that deviates very far from standard industry practice and policy.
You've given so much data about why it's reasonable for hardware to fail. I get it. Hardware fails. In the Apple example that keyboard shit was unequivocally WRONG. They eventually admitted that and offered a fix. They handled it poorly. But they did acknowledge it. IT WASN'T AN OPTIONAL SOFTWARE UPDATE EITHER HOLY SHIT.
Also in your example with google..
.. why did you resolve to stop buying Google products? ..
5% of all hardware fails, google can't possibly make things perfect, blah blah fucking blah, same fucking argument applies. They didn't do it on purpose! They can't make all hardware perfect! How dare we expect them to do the right thing?
Because the way they handled that case was WRONG. Framework is WRONG. Apple's keyboard's were horrific and their response sucked but at least they tried to respond and tried to make it right on some level?
Framework have calculated that doing the right thing here is too expensive and they (so far!) aren't doing it. That pisses me off. It should piss you off too. Defending them is wild. They don't care about you. Their behavior is WRONG.
When your laptop dies what would you prefer, to be able to buy the specific broken part easily and replace it yourself or be forced to buy an entire new laptop?
But the problem isn't buying the specific broken part here? I would have gladly replaced the BIOS chip if they made it socketed or something, but what Framework support told me is to throw away the perfectly working CPU and buy a new one because it happened to be soldered to the same board as the BIOS chip with incorrect data.
I expect an optional update to not brick my laptop, and if it does, the company to fully replace it because they own the fact that they fucked up.
Completely unrelated: Yes! I do prefer to be able to replace specific broken parts when they die. That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?
> That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?
It sort-of does. Naturally this situation can be resolved much cheaper with a flasher, but in this situation you absolutely have the option to replace the "broken" motherboard, while still keeping your screen, laptop chassis, battery, ram, SSD, wifi card, expansion cards, sound board, webcam. Another commenter said the board is available on Ebay for $270 which is going to be less than just the ram for a new laptop.
> When your laptop dies
I assume you have when in italics to show this is a “when, not if” scenario.
Some anecdotal evidence for you:
I’ve been buying used laptops of a certain brand for almost 20 years. I buy when they are 2-3-4 years old, keep them for 3-4-5 and then sell. Usual buy price is around $1000, sell around $300.
I tote them around the world. Writing, light dev, photo and video editing. Thousands of hours of use, plenty at +40C in the dust.
I’ve never had a single failure of any part, selling the laptops 100% functional. I’ll let you figure out the brand.
That means you've purchased about 10 laptops at most during that 20 year timespan.
If, hypothetically, laptops have a 2% failure rate by age 5, that means you had an 81% chance of never encountering a dead laptop. With these hypothetical numbers, your experience is not extraordinary or indicative of an incredibly reliable brand.
The other thing that skews statistics in your favor is that you would have never bought a for-parts laptop. I.e., you buy a 3-year old laptop, which has a survivorship bias because it is currently working at time of purchase. You wouldn't actually buy one of the ones that broke between years 0-3 [1] and hasn't been repaired yet. Even if the failure rate by 5 years is much higher than 2%, your probability of experiencing a failure is still higher than if you had bought the computer new and kept it for 5 years (compared to buying a working system at 3 years old and selling it at 5 years old).
We can't actually guess your preferred brand because it's likely that 100% of consumer laptop brands last 5 years have a single-digit percentage failure rate.
The 3-year extended warranty for a Framework 13 costs $139 and the cheapest pre-built configuration costs $988. The warranty cost scales with part selection (e.g., configure the system to max it out at over $5000 and the warranty cost is now $259)
The industry average gross margin ((revenue - COGS)/revenue) is 40%
I'll take a "typical" configuration of the mid-tier AMD CPU, 1TB storage, and 16GB of RAM, pre-built cost is $1774.00 (no OS). 3-year warranty cost is $209.
We can assume the raw cost of the laptop hardware is approximately $1060, although that's without any consideration to operating overhead, shipping, etc.
That means if Framework's complete replacement failure rate at 3 years is higher than the ballpark of 10-20%, that extended warranty loses money.
That's a pretty high failure rate, but we have to also recall that extended warranties have about a 50-70% profit margin across the electronics industry.
I think our napkin math here generally aligns with the idea that the amount of consumer electronics that fail within 3-5 years or so is somewhere in the single digit percentage range.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
after a decade of buying that same laptop for a hundred bucks 10 years after retail release ... I have a similar experience where so far none have died of their own accord ...
The 16 I have clears the low low bar gaming laptops have set.
My previous laptop was an ASUS G14 and it didn't even take two years for huge problems to appear - particularly throttling.
Also the very last firmware update absolutely destroyed power management, making it idle at a crazy 20W.
The keyboard in my Framework is weak and I had to replace it, but other components are doing well.
To be fair, I've bought things for more that promised zero support, but at least you know what you're getting into with that. Bad support is just plain bad.
> Can anyone defend this? Why would anyone purchase anything from this company ever again?
I mean, if you want my personal reason - I assume any company warranty is barely worth the paper it's printed on - I'm very hesitant to do a bios update ever, only to address specific issues. So yea, I'd buy another framework (currently have a 12, and I love it despite the many flaws)
I opened this thread to see if he was active in it. Disappointed that I haven't seen him in here.
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.
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.
10 minutes at most on a MacBook to swap the ports. €20 for the part. How many times in the lifespan of the laptop does the average person do that?
https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Air+13-Inch+Late+2020+U...
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.
You can take the old mainboard and slot it into a cheap case and run it like a slim pc.
Here's the thing: this argument you are making has made the assumption that Framework laptops are a huge compromise versus just buying a regular laptop. This line of thought assumes we are giving up something to get modularity and repairability, and that value proposition doesn't make sense compared to selling your used laptop and buying a new one from a traditional manufacturer.
This argument is flawed for two major reasons:
1. You can do perform the exact same non-modular ownership experience with a Framework laptop. It's just a regular laptop. You don't have to use the modularity or repairability at all. You can treat it like any other laptop and sell it when you're done and buy a new one.
2. Framework systems are getting increasingly competitive over time. The 13 Pro is quite competitive in its field and is one of the best options in its size/price/use case category. What other Panther Lake laptop is offering a drastically superior value? I'm looking for a portable system with long battery life (Intel Panther Lake) that is primarily for text work and coding while being capable of decent gaming on the side (Nothing crazy, the X7 Panther Lake chip gives me enough GPU usage for my needs). I did a ton of research and basically narrowed down my list to the ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition and the ASUS Zephyrus G14. Last I checked the ThinkPad was roughly 10% cheaper with an equivalent spec, the OLED screen is lower PPI and worse for text work, the battery lasts 5 hours shorter performing office productivity tasks (Just Josh's testing methodology), and the webcam is/was broken in Linux. The 15" screen is almost exactly as tall but it's wider, I call that neutral to negative for backpackability (3:2 screen ratio is lovely). On the plus side, the ThinkPad does push more power to the CPU/GPU, improving overall performance compared to the Framework. The ASUS Zephyrus is only in the same price category if I buy the 2025 model which has more compromises compared to the current model, especially for non-gaming battery life (no Panther Lake). Even if I open up my wallet to buy the 2026 model, I am missing out on things like a haptic trackpad, and of course, if we think Framework's support/repair experience is lacking, we don't even want to talk about ASUS RMA horror stories.
Other Panther Lake options with the X7 356H:
HP Omnibook 7 16, $1419: too big, off-center keyboard with numpad (don't like), low PPI display.
Acer Swift 16 AI, $1549: too big, off-center keyboard w/numpad, 16GB soldered RAM, non-premium chassis, no charge port on the right side, loud fans
LG Gram Pro 16, $2999: more expensive than the Framework 13 Pro with same specs
ASUS ExpertBook Ultra 14, $3599: more expensive than the Framework 13 Pro with same specs
Of course, Framework's other systems like the 12, 16, and base 13 are not really as competitive as the 13 Pro in my mind, but still, I think there's this whole vibe like Framework buyers are really giving up a lot of basic laptop things and paying way more to get modularity. This was much more true 5 years ago, not so much today now that Framework has been selling in higher volumes and refining their designs over the years.
To add to point #1, the depreciation rate on framework systems seems quite low compared to competition when I check eBay, since any model you buy is compatible with all the parts and upgrades. There’s much lower buyer risk with a 5 year old framework than there is with a 5 year old Dell.
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.
This is more of a happy coincidence than a guaranteed upgrade path, though.
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.
Your link doesn't really work right, but note that light bulbs are not at all planned obsolescence. It's been known for a long time that making the filament temperature of an incandescent bulb hotter makes it brighter, more efficient, and whiter, but also burn out faster, due to the tungsten sublimating. Anybody can make a super-long-lasting bulb that is really dim, inefficient, and dull just by making the filament temperature lower. Nobody will ever buy one to actually light their home, because it sucks compared to the competition, but it can run for a crazy long time in a museum or something. And the useless museum bulb will cause a bazillion news and blog articles to be written in support of a mostly-false narrative that we don't make things to last.
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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.
That's true. On the other hand, it's trivially easy to salvage and transplant a screen from another Fairphone. There's still people selling FP2 parts in the forums.
> The average person is not willing to pay twice as much for a repairable phone.
It doesn't need to cost twice as much - https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-pulse?sku=286947218 . It however does require legislation to make manufacturers comply. A good example is the minimum 2/3 year warranty mandate in EU (depending on the country) - https://www.eccnet.eu/consumer-rights/what-are-my-consumer-r...
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
It's a complete overstatement. The USB-C ports are still soldered onto the motherboard and their parts supply chain is shit.
I don't trust iFixit's quite frank "press handjob" because they're giving higher repairability rankings for that junk compared to Apple who have replaceable ports and a good supply chain available to the end user. Also they were all over selling battery kits for Pixel phones which are a complete pain to replace the batteries in compared to an iPhone.
Not that Apple are the bastion of repairability, just their claims are less insane than both Lenovo's and iFixit's.
The 2026 ThinkPads have their USB-C ports on a separate modules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD_pz2t1FXA
That's a very recent change then.
But only 3 in stock and 3x the price of the Apple ones. Good luck!
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.
It’s a €20 / 5 minute fix on the MacBook to swap out the USB daughterboard. The solution framework uses takes up a lot of space and doesn’t really help you if you short out the port or drop the laptop on its side.
As far as I can tell, Apple doesn't sell the daughterboards so you have to go spelunking for salvaged parts with your macbook. I can get all my first-party brand-new replacement parts at https://frame.work/marketplace .
It is available as a first party repair part for €16.20 via https://selfservicerepair.eu/
Apple part number is 923-03553
Also available third party via various retailers.
Ah I didn't know Apple put their repair parts under a different domain. I stand corrected!
Everyone is familiar with Framework modules, Framework is a sacred cow on HN.
It is a non-feature that results in a net loss of physical space for ports owing to their gargantuan size.
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.
> You've never moved your laptop without realizing it is still plugged in?
No.
This damage usually happens by tripping over the cord, which results in the laptop falling on the floor, so a USB-C port is the least of your worries.
There's a reason Apple went back to MagSafe.
But in that situation, you know the damage _wont_ be to the USB ports on the motherboard. The motherboard is screwed to the case, and the expansion cards are locked to the case, so they won't move relative to each other. You expansion card might get damaged by the initial tripping over the cord, and some other parts might get damaged from the fall, but you can trivially buy first-party replacement parts for anything you broke. MagSafe would be nice, but the expansion cards are doing their job to protect the motherboard.
If you drop a framework on its side the impact on the dongles will push them onto the board. Plastic flexes. There isn’t any shock absorbing happening. I don’t see any strain relieve on those dongles.
Perhaps framework can learn from Apple here.
Strain relief would be nice, but framework has been shipping laptops for 5 years. Has this hypothetical happened to anyone? It sounds unlikely to me.
Apple solved this with a $1 internal flex-circuit vs a fist-sized external module.
That specific issue, but they didn't get the other benefit of expansion cards: being able to "change" the ports on your laptop without needing some external dongle. Also, your fists must be tiny.
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?
99.9% to 100% feedback over 10,000 transactions has done the trick for me. EZ.
People would buy refurbs a lot more if they were more noticeable/marketed. People “want” whatever electronics are on the shelf in front of them when it’s time to buy, if we’re talking general public now (I wasn’t trying to).
The main firms refurbing are also selling new, and so aren’t in a rush to eat their own lunch.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The entire USB-C situation with the Frameworks (I have both the original gen 11 and the AMD 7040) is a massive train wreck. They have clearly given up on fixing it. Only some of my ports work, and not reliably. Th EC controller is a bug fest. If you don't believe me, check their forums. I wish I could get back all the hours I spent debugging this, to no avail.
I'm lucky that I had no USBC issues with mine I guess. Unlike my ryzen desktop that hard locks when resuming from suspend sometimes when it goes to enumerate the USB devices. If I time a key press right I can get it to continue some times, but if I miss the window it just shuts down entirely.
AMD has had several USB based issues on their 500 series chipsets, x570 etc. so part of me wonders how much of these problems are on the vendor vs the integrator.
If you're on Linux you might be able to use a combination of modprobe + udev + systemd unit files to hardcode a solution.
Either you hardcode your keyboard and mouse absolutely into kernel parameters, or you make two systemd unit files: one that runs with before suspend and one that runs 'before' resume.
You make the before suspend unit file manually temporarily disable USB enumeration. And the before resume unit file enables it again.
This trick at least works with Gigabyte Aorus 5XX motherboards that have an infamous suspend bug, where any used PCIe SSD slot would prevent the system from properly suspending and you have to disable the slot temporarily.
Also, always check the NixOS repo for stuff like this. In some ways it has started to rival or even surpass the Arch wiki for finding workarounds for hardware quirks.
My support experience has been quite similar. Lots of required evidence, slow responses, and then just links to buy replacement parts in the store.
The kicker is that the things they were telling me to buy didn't even fix the problem. My fingerprint reader was very flakey, and after replacing it and all cabling connected to it, it still didn't work.
They then told me to buy a whole new input cover which was the wrong solution again. The issue was the touchpad, which routes the signal for the fingerprint sensor through its circuit board.
They also encouraged me heavily to update the BIOS and firmware of everything aggressively before really digging into any of the kernel messages I was seeing.
All that said, it's really hard to complain that for $50 and some waiting I was easily able to fix the problem.
Compared to replacing the battery on a MacBook pro which took me 5hrs and required complete disassembly of the chassis sans fans it was a dream.
Here's to hoping that framework does better, they do seem to take well to community feedback.
Thanks for posting this. IT comes along at a perfect time for me. I am investigating linux laptops for one of my children, still in college. I have been looking for machines that come out of the box with linux and Framework was up there on the list. Others include Dell, Lenovo, ASUS, and Tuxedo.
I like the apparent upgrade ease of the Framework since I have a pile of old laptops, tablets and netbooks dating to late 1990's already. If I can find one that is long-term upgradable then that is a big plus.
I had almost convinced myself that Framework is the way to go with their hot-swappable ports and easily replaced internals.
I found Tuxedo not long ago. They seem to be a valid competitor in that space. I know they're a German company but I think they ship to the boondocks in Texas.
I read that BIOS recovery procedure and was reminded of all the times I had to flash and then recover on desktops or laptops and how much fun it wasn't. The fact that Framework treats you like a second-class citizen after the warranty expires is very valuable information in a case where your problem is caused by their recommended procedure. The hack of their partner company feels so relevant today when companies can still leave PII open in public datasets and suffer no consequences.
I will more strongly consider Dell and Tuxedo. I have long experience with Dell workstations and have found that even though a lot of their components like Mobos are proprietary formats requiring a Dell part to repair, that those parts are identifiable and generally available thru Dell or eBay.
I don't know enough about Tuxedo so if anyone has experience I would appreciate some insight. The use case for us is typical document authoring, programming in python with maybe Jupyter notebooks, complicated spreadsheets, photo documentation of field sites, and GIS work maintaining project map resources using ArcGIS most likely. Gaming is probably another option but it is not necessary for it to run top games though it does need decent graphics.
I also managed to brick a motherboard, though mine was a Supermicro, by missing a line in the README that tells you to move some hardware jumpers on the board before applying the flash. I found one jumper, but the other one was in another corner of the board, and the README says "if you have both, move both", so I thought I just had a board with only one jumper.
Notably, the flash process itself does not check for the positions of the jumpers and exit, or anything like that, it just proceeds merrily along, and renders the board unbootable. I've been around with Flashrom a dozen times and can't figure out the right sequence of flash-this-rerun-that to recover the thing. (It's an X9DR3, if anyone here has hints.)
So I wish I could be mad at Framework, but only the tiniest bit. It's sadly common.
My understanding is that you can usually flash the BIOS from the BMC even if the BIOS is fucked, though it's a paid feature upgrade (though I think someone might have cracked the algorithm on older boards).
At least, it has been the case on several boards of mine, including an X10SDV which bricked itself, as far as I can tell, just from bad luck somehow.
I tried the BMC route, it didn't help.
As far as I can tell, the jumper dance was to enable the main BIOS to use the Management Engine controller to perform some other part of the flash, which would ordinarily be locked out with the jumpers in their normal position. But now that it's tried and failed, it won't try again, maybe?
I'm on my third mainboard trying to combat what seems to be an AMD platform issue that causes random freeze-then-reset events. It doesn't just affect Framework. If you search AMD Data Fabric Sync Flood you'll find a lot of discussion across various forums. The open Framework issue is: https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/SoftwareFirmwareIssueTr...
I keep on having issues with my WD SN850 dropping offline and coming back R/O but it still fails to produce any reads and my system still crashes. I've applied all the pcie power management fixes on the kernel command line and still having problems. That sounds similar to what you describe. It starts off with vscode disappearing, then UI locks, and then it dumps me to a virtual console spitting kernel errors for a bit.
The nvme drive itself reports no media errors so I really do think it's a system side problem with the pcie controllers...
Was seriously considering getting a Framework to replace my aging ASUS. Upgrade- and repair-ability were my main motivations.
But now I'm reconsidering. Not standing behind their own BIOS update is pretty horrible.
I like my framework, but I do wonder if the repairability angle is overstated if you're already used to fixing normal laptops. Yes, Framework's parts are easier to find, and the laptops are easier to open, but it's not like doing any of the typical repairs - keyboard, screen, touchpad, battery - are impossibly difficult on those other guys.
Used thinkpads and the glut of EBay parts for them reach about 85% of what Framework does for me, and at half the price. But it's a different experience.
Framework does seem like better build quality than most laptops I've had, but I'm used to cheap crappy ones.
On the other hand, you do seem to find more cases of multiple people doing things like the linked bios update procedure on framework.
I had a very different experience with the Framework team. The battery died (within the warranty period), I reached out to them, they asked some questions, then sent me a brand new one.
Very satisfied with my Framework laptop and the customer support. I can't imagine buying another laptop.
Replacing a battery that failed under warranty should be a baseline expectation.
Not "terrible" obviously, but a slight negative that the battery failed under warranty and a slight positive that they honored their published warranty.
This reply seems like a non-sequitor and does not respond to GPs concern. How would you feel if a BIOS update outside of warranty bricked your motherboard? I am sure you would not say the same.
I was responding to the person casting doubts on whether he/she should buy a Framework laptop by providing my own experience as a very happy customer. I still think he/she should go for a Framework.
As for BIOS updates outside warranty, I think it's always been risky for all brands. Maybe I'm wrong.
I don't think "non-sequitor" applies here.
I had good experience within warranty period, but there was still some funky-ness with a non-posting board... I do sometimes wonder if it was a bios corruption - It died after running the battery 100% to zero...
That being said, I think the particular bios-chip is a design flaw that they should communicate about and fix for future boards... Probably a teething issue thing, but they should fix it. Either a usable replaceable chip so they can just send out a fix, or the fallback bios chip....
Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.
That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.
> Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix.
What I found from my research while writing the post is that both Dell and HP have BIOS recovery options without having to open the laptop at all, so that's not quite true. I think there's more Framework could have done here to make this a much less painful experience.
From what I can tell, HP's non-invasive BIOS recovery options are very model-dependent, and even models which do allegedly support recovery reportedly refuse to boot into recovery mode for some folks.
But yes, Dell is the outlier that has me saying “likely” instead of “definitely” above; they've had orders of magnitude more time and money than Framework has to throw at BIOS development, and it shows. I agree with you that Framework should be making a priority of getting their BIOSes to that level; I'm also willing to extend them some grace given the company's age and resources.
> For three years, the laptop has served me well, until Framework suggested via newsletter to install the latest BIOS update, version 3.20, with a bunch of security fixes. Unfortunately, the system hung and displayed a corrupt image on the screen, signifying a failed BIOS flash.
> Naturally, I reached out to Framework support, who told me to unplug the laptop, let the battery drain, and power it back on again afterwards, hoping the laptop would recover by itself. Unfortunately, it never did, and after giving Framework a bunch of information, they informed me that since my 1-year warranty has expired, I have no option but to purchase a new Framework motherboard, which will cost at least CA$500.
This is very disappointing.
I am furious. We have recovery-bootloaders in devices with $10 bill of materials. Its not rocket science!I sympathise with both parties. As customers, things like these really do test our patience. I wanted to support Jolla / Sailfish and purchased their phone but dealing with the bugs in the OS, for years, even as I was using it as my main phone, was sometimes exasperating, if not down right frustrating. At the same time, it was also disheartening to see Jolla make wrong business decisions, and struggle to stay alive as a business. Sad to see Framework struggling with their products too. It is difficult to not be angry at a company you want to support but are also pissed at because you are not getting your money's worth.
I recommend people who have a soldering iron to start experimenting with enameled wire. It's easily sourced from any random coil/inductor/switching transformer/broken speaker even. Dip the tip of the wire in some flux and keep it on the tip of the iron for a bit so enamel clears away and tins the wire.
This way you can solder the thin wires in crammed places, don't have to stress about them shorting out anything they touch, easily routable and they don't put stress on the solder joint, like a regular thicker wire would.
Working with this type of wire made things easier for me in these sorts of situations. And it's perfectly adequate for signal (withing reason, if not very high speed), and even some power, few mA needed for these kinds of chips is no issue.
Tip: if you already have Raspberry Pi, your can skip purchasing CH347.
RPi has SPI pins and is supported by flashrom.
Original author here. I have a Raspberry Pi, but I still recommend the CH347 instead of the Pi since it's $5 on AliExpress and you can buy it at the same time as the pogo pins probe, which you need. The advantage of the CH347 is that you don't need to fiddle around with the pinout and risk frying the chip if you screw up. You can just plug the probe in (via the level shifter) and you are good to go.
Also, if you are doing the Raspberry Pi, you'd still need the level shifter since the Pi is a 3.3 V device.
I had considered buying a Framework laptop.
This systemic lack of support for the product for two problems of their own making, both the original design flaw of inadequate recovery from a broken BIOS and producing a bad BIOS for some models and actually encouraging its installation, is more than alarming.
My primary concern about Framework was if they would survive so they were capable of following up on their goal of modular upgrades. That was a risk that I was willing to take.
However, that a company that targets a market segment of fairly sophisticated technologists would fail this badly on _both_ engineering and customer support is a deal killer.
Framework is not even on the shopping radar now for me.
My framework was sitting in a drawer for two years and now will not turn on no matter how long I charge it. I assume there’s a dead coin cell in there somewhere or something that needs changed but it’s pretty disappointing.
IIRC the only Frameworks that have a coin cell in them are the 13-inch 11th-gen Intel ones (i.e. the OG model), and it should be right there staring you in the face as you lift the keyboard. There’s indeed a known design flaw[1] around that cell in that it the laptop isn’t wired to drain its own actual battery instead; an email to support or a look on the forums should allow you to sort things out.
[1] https://guides.frame.work/Guide/RTC+Battery+Substitution+on+...
I looked at the shared link. The laptop manuf is recommending that people solder a wire between two points to eliminate a coin battery from the motherboard. Wild.
Yup, I had to do that to get mine to work. It is a good thing that I am more experienced then the average bear when it comes to soldering. When it was **ed, I could still get it to boot with an AC adapter plugged in, so you can try that.
Thanks, will try that.
This happened to my old framework. After a while of troubleshooting, I removed the battery and it will now boot reliably while plugged in. The replacement batteries aren't terribly expensive, so I'll probably buy a new one soon.
My old crappy HP laptop boots with a battery pulled out.
I've got the same situation. Not impressed.
I bought a Framework 13 in 2021. I was so stoked. I used it for 5 years, and of those 5 years only 1 was heavy use. I had to replace the battery and the input cover. I never had to do that before. I never had a laptop I wasn't able to use for 5 years so the repairability was actually not that much better for me. I gave up on Framework because after 5 years they still didn't give a crap about terrible battery performance on Linux distros.
I was using a Macbook Pro before. Went back to a Macbook Pro again. I don't want a Mac. I just can't find anything else remotely worth my money.
From reading online, linux battery seems to be a-lot better on the new intel board, and also if you configure linux with sleep to hibernate, you get really good behavioral performance. My experience is that the sleep states really drain the battery since the low power mode is not _that_ low power, at least with the ram I have.
For context I have a 13th gen intel with the old battery and only get ~4hrs of battery life, but generally go a week or 2 between full shutdowns, since I hibernate all the time. I can close the lid, throw it in my backpack, not use it for the weekend, and when I open it it is ready to go, not having lost charge.
I generally have a better experience than when I was on windows.
Don't bother with the motherboard, the new BIOS is worse. I have two that just randomly shut off whenever they feel like it. I just bought a thinkpad instead, shrug.
After months of waiting on preorder (in which time I could've cancelled it), my Framework 16 finally arrived just yesterday, so this is a very unfortunately timed article for me.
Mine is using the AI 300 chip and is presumably on the latest bios so this specifically wouldn't be a problem for me, but it doesn't fill me with future confidence either, though I suppose if you look hard enough you can find similar stories about any manufacturer
I know that firmware (and software in general) has bugs. But I wonder why modern firmware for UEFI has to be so complex, that it needs updates on a regular basis. It would be nice to have a dead-simple hardware-initialisation system that doesn't need regular updates and that only has very limited attack surface.
The bootloader part of UEFI FW is quite straightforward. It requires updates due to vulnerabilities found in it and also to update certificates.
However modern FW of PC clones don't only contain a bootloader and a "simple" hardware initializer. Modern laptops have tens of sensors, power measuring parts, power controllers, completely remote management (Intel ME / AMD PSP), embedded controller code for fingerprint, embedded controller code for keyboard etc.
Companies ship a new product line every single year. This churn causes nothing but shitty FW to be developed. Moreover the component manufacturers also slightly change things every single year. That's why sleep sucks with PCs. That's why Fn shortcuts don't always work correctly. That's why batteries drain.
Everything is fixed in the 6 months to a year following the launch in PC industry. Then they start to work on the new model and only supply security updates.
That is the dream isn't it? But there's no such thing since even a simple one that requires no updates would have some sort of vulnerability that needs an update, and the cycle continues.
I agree. But we could still try to have a smaller hardware initialisation system. And if there is the occasional need to patch a security vulnerability, then that patch is probably a lot more straightforward.
UEFI is it’s own OS, but Apple went back to minimal firmware.
SeaBIOS on a Coreboot laptop is pretty minimal. Paltry CPU speeds on anything that supports it nowadays, but fun for a beater system.
Coreboot looks promising. Do you know why the CPU speeds are so bad? And do they get better once the main operating system starts up?
Not a hardware engineer so feel free to fact-check all of this.
My understanding is Coreboot is a minimum-viable firmware implementation to get your hardware initialized ... and not much else.
Once Coreboot is ready you then use "Payloads".
Payloads can be as varied as booting into Linux directly, GRUB directly, or a whole UEFI/BIOS implementation.
SeaBIOS is a whole FOSS BIOS implementation (commonly used for emulators like QEMU) and is somewhat tractable according to my prior research (~50k lines of C).
My comment about CPU support is due to modern systems using UEFI - the payload for that is TianoCore EDK2. It's quite large (900k+ lines) and while it has much more eyes on it, if minimalism is what you're looking for I doubt it would qualify.
That leaves you with systems from before ~2013 or so - assuming you can even flash Coreboot to them, which only supports a handful of systems.
I suppose you could just jump into Linux though. Perhaps it's silly to do anything else.
Regular updates are not always because of bugs but to support new hardware. Or security fixes.
If the update is only for supporting new hardware, then there is usually no benefit to the user. They already have a machine that is supported by a previous firmware version. Only in those cases where a user upgrades the hardware there might be a benefit.
Why can't the BIOS/UEFI offer some basic initialisation functionality and then the OS (Linux, Windows, ...) does a more advanced initialisation? Why does it have to be so complicated?
While the author didn't go this route, I've wondered for a while if the angled style WSON-8 clips worked:
https://www.printables.com/model/89693-wson-8-program-clips
Great write up. This is a frustrating issue and I would have expected Framework to better. Most people can't flash a BIOS chip, they would be up a creek. Even as someone who writes software, flashing a BIOS chip would be outside of the realm of things I'm comfortable doing.
Only semi related but I would like to give MSI credit here, a few years ago I was dealing with a bad graphics card and as part of diagnosing it I tried to update the BIOS. I botched it and bricked the mobo (which to be fair was under warranty so a different case to this). I called MSI and RMA'd the motherboard even though it was my fault. Still using the replacement Z-97 PC mate today.
I've had some rough moments with my Framework 13, but overall I appreciate it because when something like this happens you have a way out other than binning the entire laptop. I agree with the author that Framework should have a better answer than buying a new motherboard, /but/ at least you can buy a new motherboard and move all the components over. Realistically, any >$1000 computing device should have the ability to boot BIOS from USB to provide a fallback if the BIOS is damaged, this is pretty standard on most high-end motherboards, and I think its a fair expectation from Framework. Hopefully they will see this thread on HN and make changes to the product in the future to improve this.
I have the same AMD 7040 Framework laptop and just had the keyboard fault explained in this thread where the "-", "0", and "P" keys stop working: https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-framework13-keyboard...
While it's nice to know that I can buy a $100 replacement keyboard (I'm about 6 months out of warranty) it's also frustrating that Framework wouldn't own up to what is obviously a manufacturing failure.
I have a framework 13 for. Actually the same model as OP (AMD 7040 series). I have never been as conflicted on a laptop as this one. I do love many things about it : The whole expansion card system is awesome. It does feel a bit redundant with a simple usb-c hub that do the usual network, hdmi, usb-a, but being able to set it on the side that fit my current setup is much appreciated. I love the form factor and the screen ratio also. The linux support have been very good for me. And being able to open it up with just one tool and have detailed repair manual is amazing.
But on that last point, it's also the first laptop in a while that I had to get into to fix something. The webcam never worked. That's not a linux issue, it's just that my fw13 is a hand me down from a previous colleague who I believe borked the webcam installation. But I don't use the webcam, so I never cared. On the other hand, when I first got it, the cpu fan was emitting a constant high pitch whine. After some research I wasn't the only one affected, and the support had me do a lot of steps before sending a replacement part (which was very easy to install, but the problem should not have been there in the first place). I also had some random crashes that I was never able to debug. The mic is very meh also. I never use it in anycase with my setup but still.
But at the same time, I don't see myself switching to another laptop. Despite all, this is still the laptop that felt the most "right" to me. I do believe that Framework has to seriously step up their support and QA game. But it does feel like it's a company that is "suffering from success". They got big investment, lots of publicities in some circle and so I feel like they have to produce and sell way more computer than the rest of the business can reasonably handle. I hope it's a “necessary evil” for them to get enough customers and revenue to start being able to attract more investment and being able to invest more in the “quality” side of the biz.
EDIT: I should say, being in the E.U make it so that I have an automatic 2 year guarantee, so I didn't have to experience the whole "just buy new parts lmao"
Honestly, this is why I like Dutch consumer law. Dutch law states that the guarantee duration is dependent on the expected lifespan of a product. Continued official BIOS support is evidence that the device remains within its supported lifetime and also dutch law treats defective or incomplete updates as non-conformity. Therefore, in this situation it would be framework fault and the device would also be within warranty.
The Australia consumer laws are also famously strong. One question: That Dutch law is not zero-cost. Does Framework Laptop charger higher prices compared to the US due to this consumer protection laws? My point: We can presume that Dutch buyers will make more (valid/accepted) warranty claims than those in the United States (with comparatively much weaker consumer laws).
Yeah, the ACL is fantastic. I have an AMD Framework 13 that had a fan bearing fail, which caused the fan to scream and spin up/down erratically. I had a long back-and-forth with Framwework support where they told me what I already knew (the fan bearing failed and the fan needed replacing) and that it was out of warranty (yeah nah, not in Australia). As soon as I mentioned the consumer guarantees under the ACL, I was invited to remove the SSD and ship the unit to their service centre for a fix.
The machine has been fine since and I still really like it.
Legendary story. Thank you to share. Another win for ACL! BTW: Loved this part: "yeah nah".
It helped that Apple had a page for their statutory warranty in AU, so I could point to the sticker price of both machines and say "look, Apple acknowledges the consumer guarantee for at least 24 months after purchase and possibly longer, and I have paid a similar amount of money for a Framework".
https://www.apple.com/legal/warranty/docs/statutory_warranty... (Page 2):
> Without limiting consumers rights, Apple will provide its own remedies equivalent to those remedies in the consumer guarantee provisions of the Australian Consumer Law at any time within 24 months of the date of purchase. For the avoidance of doubt, Apple acknowledges that the Australian Consumer Law may provide for remedies beyond 24 months for a number of its products.
> Still, I was very disappointed that Framework chose to entrust sensitive information to a third-party who obviously couldn’t keep the data safe.
Then you're going to be very disappointed a lot. When HIBP first came out, I worried over each incident. These days, breaches of non-payment data are so common that I don't even bother to sign up for notifications.
When it comes to PII, we live in a de facto panopticon.
This was the only point I disagreed with the author on. They used metabase, a tool for their internal employees to manage the business and review their data. It's not some crazy 3rd party marketing tool or something, it's an internal BI tool that had a zero day. More zero days are coming.
> there was no recovery mechanism short of externally programming the BIOS chip. This was shocking on a product advertised as “repairable.”
Sounds pretty repairable to me, sorry that you're not used to using a chip flasher.
I had a similar story with Framework support.
I've bought 12th gen i7 FW, and after about a year, a fan bearing had failed. Despite originally sending me a laptop through a freight forwarder (FF), they both refused to send me a replacement fan for free, and to sell me one to FF address.
I had to use other means to buy myself a new fan (It is not sold separately from the heatsink), paying around 50 bucks for it.
After another year my motherboard stopped working completely. Framework refused support besides the post light interpretation, did not give any schematics, and outright ignored emails from my company with requests for schematics. Autopsy shown that CPU just freaking cracked in the middle.
I've got a replacement 12th gen i5 from a friend of mine, and not 3-4 months later it met pretty much the same fate, except it looks a tad bit more alive (no visible damage to the crystal, no blown mosfets, no nothing). I cannot diagnose power circuitry without spending time to reverse engineer it, and no local shops would accept it.
At this point, given that you don't have any documentation nor parts available in most of the world, FW is generally less repairable than a macbook. For macbooks you can at least buy docs at Vinafix (and for most other laptops too), and chineese replacement parts pretty much anywhere.
I don't really care what they are telling about «waa waa cant release schematicc nda» or «scammers use ff u will die using it». System76 doesn't care about FF, and provides warranty replacements. They could have tried to renegotiate NDA terms for older boards, or outright let someone leak them; they could have remembered their Coreboot promises; they could have done lot more to actually make something that doesn't just look repairable and hackable.
Instead, they've spent their money to make a nice to use, yet unfixable piece of trash currently lying in my closet and waiting for some cheap board to show up on aftermarket.
So, heed my warning. As good as their promise sounds, you better off supporting someone who actually cares about the mission of repairability, and not just doing whatever poser shitshow they are doing.
It's a shame Framework don't offer support for component-level repairs, but sadly neither do other laptop manufacturers, if you don't count leaked resources. They could certainly do better, but I wouldn't see it as a reason to switch to e.g. ThinkPads.
Anyone else bothered by the author’s constant return to whining about how Framework did not do enough for this specific repair? Each time I found myself thinking “ok, rant over, now on to the interesting technical bits” only for the rant to resume a few paragraphs later.
No. I feel it's at least 50% of the story because FW themselves make so much hay about it. They aren't just failing at something, they are failing at the single differentiator that they charge more money for. their one and only selling point and value proposition.
It deserves to be laid out and reiterated, and it's the author's choice what they want to talk about, and they want to talk about FW as much as the technical incidentia.
If you just want to learn how to flash an isp chip, there are surely countless sources.
The non-zero chance of a BIOS update bricking my computer is why I NEVER do them to a machine that's out of warranty, unless I'm experiencing some problem that a BIOS update is _well documented_ to actually fix.
I pre-ordered the very first Framework 13. I was so excited that I loaned it to Level1Techs to make a video of it, and at one point early on it also failed - everyone I communicated with had their name printed on that motherboard, all the way up to the CEO.
I was hugely disappointed when the CMOS battery completely died and the only solutions were: "Don't leave it unplugged or put in a new battery every n months". (Btw the battery holder was a very fragile piece of plastic).
I also pre-ordered the Framework 16 willing to give them the benefit of the doubt - growing company, first product, etc.
In general I like Framework, but this is unacceptable. Get your act together.
My standard for repairable is Schiit Audio. I've had 3-4 things from them (out of like 12 I own) die in various ways, some their faults, some mine. In every instance, I've sent it back to them, and received the same unit back a few weeks later with a new component of whatever failed. Sometimes at my cost, sometimes at theirs. And they do everything in the US too - I'm shipping it to Texas and they are employing someone in Texas to solder on new parts.
Get your act together Framework. This is against the spirit of your mission. No one cares about warranty periods. Buy a new board should be an absolute last resort.
good writeup. a similar approached once saved my bacon when my laptop got bricked during the covid supply chain fiasco.
the programmer, especially with crocodile clips, can be used for other laptops with bios chips of the size. however, it is always nice to have info from someone else who has previously done this. while it took a lot of digging for the specific laptop i had, at least with framework we hope to see more high-quality writeup like this.
Spending $20 and a few hours to save a whole mainboard is a win. Posts like this are why right to repair actually works in practice.
If the motherboard has so many parts that could fail independently, and each part is small money, then maybe the motherboard should also become modular?
So did anyone actually figure out what the issue was?
$20 of tools, and a lifetime of skills. In this case, cheap has quite a few prerequisites.
I apparently have a very uncommon viewpoint on this, given the flavor of the comments.
I won't try and say that this situation is totally fine, or ideal, or anything close to it, but I think that in order for us to know how to feel, we need one very important piece of information that is missing: was the actual BIOS update itself bad in some way, or was this just the kind of error that happens sometimes, especially as hardware ages.
If it was the former, then this becomes quite bad: Framework released (even if they were not the ones who made it) a software update that bricked someones computer, and it is incumbent upon them to fix it, even out of warranty.
If it's the latter, then, I'm sorry, but that's the kind of thing that happens sometimes. Yes, having dual bios chips or some other way to recover from a failed flash would be nice, but I don't know the engineering trade offs to make that happen. Lots of desktop motherboards have it, where space is not at a premium, but do any laptop motherboards have it? My guess is that, at the bare minimum, it's much much less frequent.
I think that, in the latter situation, the main thing that I would like to have seen from a company like Framework, with their ethos, is to provide the pogo pin reflashing tool (at a reasonable price), along with the necessary instructions and files, either for the user, or for a local, inexpensive computer repair shop (depending on the users preference). So even in the latter situation, I do think that Frameworks support is lacking here. This seems like the kind of thing that, with the proper tools (which seem cheap) and instructions and files, that this wouldn't actually be that hard, especially for the type of consumer that would buy an upgradeable, modular laptop.
But, in the case that the BIOS itself was not bad/caused the bricking, then I think the rhetoric around this is overblown. I'm not sure that any laptop I've ever had before has ever told me that I needed a bios update (aka: provided that level of support post purchase).
Again, if the BIOS was in fact bad, and caused the brick (and no, a thread of people who experienced the problem is not enough to conclude this), then that's a very different situation, and the level of failure exceeds even what is described here. And even if it wasn't bad, I don't think think that "buy a new mainboard" is the appropriate service response when "buy these $20 dollars of parts and tools, and follow this guide" would likely have solved the problem.
But, as I understand it, BIOS updates are always somewhat dangerous. If Framework is on the hook for every time a BIOS goes bad outside of warranty even in situations where nothing they did directly caused the issue, then what they will do is just stop offering BIOS updates outside the warranty window. We can hold two ideas in our heads at once: Are they completely and perfectly living up to their ideals? I think that the answer here is obviously, even in the least bad case, no they are not. But are they providing better service than other laptop manufacturers? I think that as long as the BIOS file wasn't bad, the answer is yes. No laptop manufacturer would have offered to fix this out of warranty if they even provided continued BIOS updates, and for most manufacturers, their answer would have been "buy an entire new computer", and your only alternative would be third party resellers or used parts on ebay to get a new motherboard.
-edit- After doing a bit more research, BIOS recovery paths in laptops, while not universal or as common as in desktops, are also not exactly rare, and not having one, in a company with Frameworks ethos and stance, is worse than I initially assumed.
I think that, even if this isn't due to a bad BIOS or updater (which, again, would make them, in my opinion, liable for fixing it), then this is a very significant oversight, and the fact that they don't provide the support necessary to route around it (reasonably priced tools and clear, well written instructions) is even worse.
While I've had issues doing bios updates on my Framework, it's been more due to the fact that my main drive has too small of an EFI partition to update with the main drive in the laptop (who knows why it takes so much space to update the firmware in the first place).
That said, with another drive (and a larger EFI partition), I've been able to do 4 or 5 different bios updates on my AMD 7040 Framework 13.
this is disappointing. I need a new machine soon but I am not interested in Framework if they are going to play the usual games.
Is thinkpad really it? I wasn't wildly excited about that one either.
FWIW I bricked a ThinkPad motherboard not that long ago by toggling the wrong BIOS options. Wasn't even a BIOS update (although ironically that would've fixed it), just toggling setting in the F2 Setup Menu. The target configuration was supported, but apparently there was a BIOS bug where if you toggled two different settings without rebooting inbetween, it bricked the motherboard (technically people online found some solutions that involved resoldering chips on the mobo but that's a little outside of my comfort zone). I believe it was Quiet Boot and... some sort of Thunderbolt controller mode? But I don't remember exactly.
Exciting tools are often dangerous.
This problem was not the natural result of "exiting". There is no reason FW couldn't supply a recovery method. That's not "hey that's life on the bleeding edge!" For that matter, the whole product isn't bleeding edge since years ago anyway.
Someone else noticed that there is actually a (unpopulated) header for flashing, which avoids the janky pogo pin thing even unpopulated. Why didn't fw point him at it when explicitly asked? And even if they had, where is the firmware image to use with it? They have it, so there is nothing about the "exiting" nature of the product that stops them from saying something more helpful than "throw the motherboard away".
What’s this have to do with my T420 and T480 being great, despite not having consumer “looks”.
the conclusion section is a pretty damning and disappointing read.
i'm realizing that framework's marketing swayed my opinion a lot more than i thought. i was seriously considering a framework laptop when my current one dies, but i'll probably just end up going with a thinkpad again, as the level of serviceability seems a lot closer to equal than i was lead to believe, and apparently there is no "feel good" advantage of buying framework.
Now we fully understand the sustainable business model of Framework.
Disappointing to read. I think I'll just keep buying used laptops and throwing Linux on them.
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