We will be releasing specifications and reference designs for the Expansion Card system under a permissive license. We want to make it easy for both other companies and members of the community to develop their own cards and sell them through the Framework Marketplace. That is something we'll be detailing and sharing between now and the time we start shipping out the product. We'll also provide documentation around internal interfaces, though those will be more technically challenging for an individual to be able to build something with.
Hello, glad you're here but I'd urge you to remember that while a minority at HN is highly knowledgeable and technical, hn is an hive-mind opinionated niche and hope that you'd make decisions that widen your reach among general populace so that your firm survives to make money and eventually more such laptops. (Also, hopefully your laptop will play with linux as well as Lenovo's at some point in future).
> For those of you who love to tinker, we’ve also created the Framework Laptop DIY Edition, the only high-end notebook available as a kit of modules that you can customize and assemble yourself, with the ability to choose Windows or install your preferred Linux distribution.
The modularity of a Framework Laptop promises a lot of good. I know there are some workplaces where having wifi working is not permitted. Is this modular enough to have a wired networking plug and not have a wireless wifi ?
This might be a silly question, but it looks like the adapters are just usb-c/thunderbolt devices with a nice case. Is this the case? I'm not knocking it if it is, I personally think it'd be pretty clever, but it means being able to use them in other places (like pretending the storage expansion thing is just a usb-c flash-drive) and it would have interesting implications for making them.
That's correct. That is one of the intended use cases for our Storage Expansion Cards. You can use it on your Framework Laptop, pop it out, plug it into an other machine that supports USB-C, and transfer files at high speed.
Compatibility and upgradability (together with maintainability) is why I stopped using laptops. Your offer sounds interesting, but if it's a platform, instead of a free standard, it's a far cry from the freedom and competition in the stationary PC market. Maybe that's what it takes to move the issue along. I don't know. But that's my knee-jerk reaction.
Actually, yes! We will be offering the chassis by itself. The intent is to make sure that someone can get back into a good state if they drop their laptop down the stairs or something, but there is nothing preventing you from picking one up to use for your own projects (though adapting everything to work with an ARM SBC would be non-trivial).
What makes it non-trivial? I'd love to see a standard laptop frame that all the SBC manufacturers could throw their board in.
I imagine their could be vendor-specific expansion cards for SBC's, like one that is just an HDMI extension which only works with the vendors SBC and doesn't use USB-c. Maybe vendors could implement one "framework" compatible expansion port and provide several of their own expansion cards that only implement SBC features, and plug directly into the SBC instead of generic usb-c.
>We want to make it easy for both other companies and members of the community to develop their own cards and sell them through the Framework Marketplace.
What if they don't want to sell through the Framework Marketplace?
It looks like the laptop supports any kind of expansion card that can be bridged over USB-C. So, it's just a matter of someone developing it for the platform.
