In theory this sounds good but in practice I'm not convinced there's a lot of value in the extension aspect.
My desktop is 11 years old. It's an i5 3.2ghz quad core, 16 GB of memory, SSD machine that I built from individual parts for ~$850 in 2014. It has been running 24/7 since then. It handles 4k and 1440p dual monitors without issues for all of my programming / video editing needs. The only thing it doesn't do is run modern games.
I only say all of that because I've never upgraded individual parts on it. Every X years I build a new machine that lasts. I've been doing that for around 20 years now. The only thing I replaced once (not this machine) was a PSU that got nuked by lightning and not having a surge protector.
Personally if I were going the laptop route I'd much rather get something 80% as fast as the framework but at half the price (or less). There's a ton of laptops in the $600 range that crush my desktop in specs. Things like a Ryzen 7 7730U (16 threads @ 4.5ghz) with 32 GB of memory, 1 TB+ SSD, reasonable display / ports etc..
I've been using my framework 13 for a while now and it's been a great laptop - part of what pushed me over was their mission of making devices lives longer, my hope is and was that maybe the vote of confidence they survive long enough to build up to a model the Apple fans here would want or at least not complain about.
How has the build quality stood up so far? My concern with these has always been that laptops do generally get banged up a bit when travelling around, and if half of it is snap fit and designed to detach instead of being all glued together like typically, then it has a higher likelihood of falling apart when you really don't want it to.
Might still be worth it if they keep producing spare parts for a decade or more, every single time my laptop's battery goes dead it's a after the manufacturer has stopped production of that model entirely and it becomes impossible to buy a new one lol.
I have a Framework 16 which is probably even easier to deconstruct than the Framework 13. It's been back and forth across the continent a number of times.
It's very firmly put together. The thought had never crossed my mind that I needed to worry about parts coming off of it. E.g., the screen bezel is inside the laptop when it's closed, pretty firmly set inside the top lid so it wouldn't catch on anything anyway, and has some decently strong magnets given it's a tiny piece of light plastic.
And if something happens that _would_ take the bezel off, in all likelihood it would just snap right back into place. Since it's designed to come off, it should come off relatively cleanly rather than breaking where it was glued, snapping off some tiny plastic clips, etc that would render it destroyed.
If anything I'm _less_ delicate with this than other electronics. Not that I want to plan on burning money, but knowing that something as extreme as "I managed to shatter the screen" is a ~$300 part and probably 15 minutes of my time to fix rather than "buy a whole new laptop" definitely takes some of the anxiety away. A new touchpad or keyboard are like $50 and 30 seconds to replace. A destroyed USB-C port is $8 and 15 seconds.
It's been good. I'm not the most abusive laptop owner, I don't travel a ton, but I dropped it off a barstool onto hard tile and it survived. My nephews ran around with it arguing and fighting for longer than most electronics survive before I noticed my laptop was the carrot on the stick causing the trouble, they didn't manage to snap the screen backward or crack anything. As far as just chucking it in a bag or in the passenger seat of my car and going about my day, it's been excellent.
I kind of have this desire to replace some pieces on it just to do it because that's the thing, but I haven't had a genuine upgrade need yet. They did do an upgraded model recently and I was excited to see if I wanted to I could just buy the new guts and go. Hopefully that's still the case the next upgrade cycle when I'll likely bite :D
I'm not sure that will ever happen. I own a Framework 16 (and am pretty happy with it), because I value repairability a lot. But the level of repairability and modularity that Framework is targeting comes with tradeoffs. This is simply the reality. Size, build quality/sturdiness, thermals, and more are going to take a hit when you have the extreme level of repairability and modularity. Framework laptops are probably never going to be the right solution for every kind of customer. And Macs are probably close the furthest thing on the opposite of the spectrum. Every choice is designed to tweak the design, aesthetics, battery life, etc. almost always at the expense of repairability. Someone who likes the part of the pareto frontier that Macs operate on is almost definitionally never going to be a Framework fan.
For me, they are great, and I plan to continue to support them. But not everyone is interested in the tradeoffs inherent in their philosophy, and that's also fine.
Yeah that's all true, I certainly don't need them to ever get to that point, but if they do it'll be because people bought into the mission first. Be the change and all that.
