Actually, that frightens me. I know of another powerful, tested, and DIY friendly compact computer: the Raspberry Pi. The Pi got integrated into so many full fledged commercial products that it's lost its availability for hackers.
If the Framework mainboard becomes a Super-Pi, will Framework owners be able to get the spare parts that they were counting on?
We don’t foresee any issues continuing to make parts and modules available, even with increased demand from module re-use projects and products.
In fact, we explicitly encourage this kind of re-use, because it benefits everyone. It’s a great way to absorb a Mainboard that is being upgraded out of a Framework Laptop for example, increasing its value for re-sale and avoiding it turning into e-waste.
The rumor is that the pi is having issues because Broadcom (who actually owns the IP in their chips) is pissed that they built a for profit company on top of IP Broadcom donated intending to be going to a nonprofit. Rumor is that's also why there's no progress on an RPi5, as that would require coordination with Broadcom. That would also explain why the Pico had no problems being stocked, as it contains no Broadcom IP blocks.
I think Framework is probably fine for the foreseeable future.
As a "community" member I have to say it was annoying when they started prioritizing the integrators during the parts shortage. It feels more like a generic dev board supplier now than an educational / maker focused product.
The compute model in particular was a mistake IMO. I'm sure they do great business but their original focus is lost.
My hope is that eventually will get a Raspberry PI (or something similarly well supported at a software level) based on a RISC V processor that doesn't have these IP issues. I guess it might be difficult to do that for things like WiFi though.
If RPi5 has challenges with Broadcom IP licensing, isn't that an opportunity to create a new SBC product line without Broadcom IP, as many FooPi clones have done?
So much about the full RPi is the Broadcom hardware blocks though. If software didn't really care about those, the FooPi clones would have taken off. Turns out a lot of software targeting RPi actually twiddles those hardware blocks directly.
In that case, Broadcom should be happy that their loss-leading IP has created a gigantic market with unfulfilled demand. They can negotiate a volume agreement with two tiers of product: one for hobbyists, one for commercial integrators.
Review existing RPi commercial use cases to identify features for product segmentation enhancement. Price RPi commercial IP the same as other commercial users of Broadcom IP.
It's not Broadcom IP, all the Pi apart Pico are based on Broadcom chips, which indeed may explain why Pico does not seem to be impacted by supply issues, as you point out.
The likelihood is therefore that supply issues are because of Broadcom...
The chips past the BCM2835 have been a collaboration between Broadcom and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, with rpi taking on a larger share of the work as time goes on.
If it helps to validate the system, then it can only make the company and Framework ecosystem stronger. Supply chain issues are they types of problems that Framework would love to have. You can solve those... lack of demand is another issue entirely.
> Although we are sitting on substantial order backlogs from commercial customers, we expect to gradually increase the fraction of our output which we dedicate to single-unit sales next year until we’re back in our pre-pandemic situation. The chip allocations we’ve received for next year mean that by the end of the third quarter, the channel will have recovered to its equilibrium stocking level, with hundreds of thousands of units available at any given time. At that point, we will have spent a little over two years in a low-stock position: a measure of the severity and persistence of the shortages.
They've not been too truthful with the community over their supply chain issues. At the peak they were still making north of 100k units a month. It's just that over 95% of those were being sold in bulk to direct B2B customers whilst they made record profits.
It's been a rough few months to be a pi community member. The 'its totally a supply problem, out of our control' attitude of the company, and then the uncivil outburst of the co-founders wife on the official Pi social accounts didn't do them any favours. That one was made worse by well known and respected former employees chiming in and mentioning that it was how the company was internally probably didn't help.
Yeah they've burned up a lot of goodwill by prioritizing integrators so heavily. Not just work there community but in Broadcom apparently, according to other comments.
On the other hand expressif is eating their low end, the pico was too expensive too late. Perhaps they will make a bigger board too. They're much better at integrating with the community than Broadcom, they hired community members like sprite_tm.
Was the uncivil outburst in question the attacks on people concerned about them hiring a surveillance cop as their "maker in residence", or was there another uncivil outburst I should know about?
This has basically refueled my idea of making a modern version of the IBM PS/2 Model P70. Instead of desktop components I can use parts of a framework pc to skip out on a lot of the horrors of planning custom builds like this.
To my understanding (I've never dug deep into the spec), Display Port is packet-based, and every DP interface should support tunnelling data for other outputs (DP MST for Multi Stream Transport). Does eDP support this? I think a "splitter" could be made to connect two more displays using the same 30-pin eDP connector, but I'd like someone more knowledgeable to confirm this. Some high-resolution panels used to stitch together multiple MST panels, so this sounds likely. Additionally, a diagram in [1] seems to confirm this.
Of course, the video gets away with very little soldering and using only off-the-shelf hardware, which is impressive in itself. I couldn't find any such "eDP splitters" or MST hubs, and you'd still need the iPad screen controllers.
By far my favorite thing about his builds is they are also very actually DIY. Like, basic hand tools are all that's required most of the time and actually affordable parts. So many youtuber "DIY's" are like "today I chucked this into my $10,000 CNC and printed off this part in my $5,000 3D printer, then used this whole-room positional tracking system I had laying around to blah blah blah" or "making this awesome unique table/whatever with just some old wood found in the forrest! And $20,000 in woodworking gear and another $2,000 in resin from today's sponsor. But DIY! Just find an old dead tree!"
No machine shop or specialized training or anything to replicate the Matt's builds.
I assume your first example refers to Stuff Made Here; to be fair, be never presents himself as a DIYer, and on several of his projects explicitly says “you shouldn’t do this at home”!
I'm sorry but if you believe the Framework is barely differentiated from other offerings, you are missing information or you are okay with laptops being wholly disposable and barely repairable.
There is no modern laptop like it where you can keep a chassis and update the thing piecemeal, easily buy parts for it, designed from scratch to be easily repairable and comes by default with a sensible system for choosing your own ports without external dongles hanging from delicate ports.
The market for a three screen laptop is much, much smaller than that and it would probably work better as a third-party accessory to the base Framework. Of course, it wouldn't make much sense because their only chassis has a tiny screen, but if you believe a three laptop production line is economically viable, surely you also can see how a MBP-like 16-inch screen production line is even more viable.
>you are okay with laptops being wholly disposable and barely repairable.
As I said, barely differentiable. Baring that, its as standard as a plastic laptop comes.
I'd personally be more interested in a portable than another laptop. Most laptop's I've owned have not needed repair for their lifetimes, and very seldom have I ever even thought about needing to upgrade my laptops "piecemeal" rather than just upgrading the whole thing together.
If I wanted a 16" MBP I'd buy a 16" MBP. Plus it can run MacOS.
What nobody makes is a portable workstation rather than a laptop. Laptops are great if you want situations where you want to use it on your lap - airplanes, airports, coffee shops, your couch, etc.
No that people are moving to a hybrid in-office/at-home work environment, and companies are going to "hot desk" models I want something maybe a bit heavier than a laptop, that I can easily transport from one desk to another another, and not have to spend a bunch of time hooking it up when I get there.
I'd say it is not that impractical. Sits somewhere between a laptop and an ITX build, self-contained but needing table. I thought that was the most impressive part.
That's why in other languages it's called "notebook computer" or "portable computer". "Laptop" never really made sense. No one ever used laptops on the lap.
That's just a plainly false statement, and there have been several instances where the fact I can use my laptop while travelling has been very important.
He does address this exact concern in the video. He explains that laptops make ergonomic trade offs he isn’t amenable to it, so the whole point was to build a NON laptop.
Well. sure, but obviously still keeping the name "laptop" in the video title is, as always on the good old 'Tube, clickbait.
It's not, uh, intellectually honest to say "here's how to build a triple-screen laptop!" and then follow that up with "oh, btw, don't use laptops, desktop computers are better for you, see?".
All that said, I did enjoy the build and it's really cool to see both Framework parts being used as well as of course 3d printing. Nice.
The current YT title “Triple-Screen Laptop DONE RIGHT” is still defendable, as it means doing the whole concept of 'Triple-Screen Laptop' in a way it is useful. I think the biggest issue is the current title on Hacker News: “DIY triple-screen laptop based on the framework”, as it is clearly not a laptop.
Well, even then I think the title is stretching it: to me the more sensible way to make a triple-screen-laptop-sitting-on-a-desktop is to just connect a normal triple screen setup via a docking station.
I would argue that the name laptop is the idea of a portable computer setup. If the suggestion is that a laptop is something that is designed to work in your lap, I would argue that laptops aren't designed to work in your lap. If the argument is the form factor (folding, keyboard, screen, mouse), then sure, fine. You can call iPads laptops.
Whether or not they are intentionally designed to be used in a lap, it is a fact a laptop from toshiba will be usable when put onto your lap.
You could argue that something "truly" designed for lapwork would better deserve the name laptop, but it's just weird to say that something completely unusable in your lap should be called a laptop.
Do you remember what laptops were like? The title of "laptop" itself was a lie. You could not put a burning hot 12lb electronic on your lap and it was proven to lower fertility in men. Only recently has this changed.
Obviously he can build want he wants to the specifications he wants and even call it what he wants but if the purpose was to not build a laptop because he doesn’t like the form factor of a laptop why call it a laptop? It just doesn’t make sense.
I can understand it insofar that my first association with the word "laptop" is the portable computer with integrated keyboard that mostly sits on my desk. This build isn't too far from that.
I suppose I can understand it from the perspective, and that is probably the majority of the time a laptop is in use, but I also associate a laptop with a self contained unit that has all the required input devices and requires no additional setup to be usable. Flip it open on a bed, anywhere, in a second, including your lap.
I have a ton of general purpose computers that can be set up on a desk but are otherwise wildly impractical some place like an airplane, or in any kind of moving vehicle.
It is kind of why I still am married to having a traditional laptop instead of just using my iPad with a keyboard case for example. It just gets more fiddly. I’d take my steam deck with me to somewhere I’d be able to set up with for non-gaming use but I’d never try to use it as a regular computer on a plane or even in a coffee shop killing time between appointments or whatever.
We don’t do portables/luggable as terminology anymore but that is where it breaks for me.
I appreciate you offering that perspective though.
I thought it wasn't an effort to make a NON laptop, but rather to try to redefine what a laptop should be. Instead of having small computers that we can use while it is sitting on our laps, we should have a portable computer that is more comfortable to use.
Take the part of the laptop that's good (the portability) and adapt it to be something that is even better.
We can quibble with if this is a "true" laptop later...
> Instead of having small computers that we can use while it is sitting on our laps, we should have a portable computer that is more comfortable to use.
Yes, but the laptop form factor is the only thing that has any hope of working in the space granted to someone sitting on a train. And "use it while travelling" feels like a fairly important use case for the "mobile computer" niche.
That's not a laptop, but portable (desktop) all-in-one computer.
Laptops should have keyboard and everything in one portable package, this is unusable without external keyboard and doesn't have built-in keyboard, thus it's NOT laptop.
And I don't care what he says in video, title is clickbait.
Not sure its a laptop at this point. All attempts to a multi-screened laptop seem to fail spectacularly and end up far too heavy for the brackets, causing it to flop down.
This is directly addressed multiple times in the video. At the start and at the end. I find it amazing you watched the video and then decided to post this odd comment.
My only complaint / concern is how "wasted" the I/O potential of the FW board is. It has an incredible total of 4 USB4™ ports, each of those can do 40 Gbit/s bi-directional of USB/DP/PCIe. Lots of potential: eGPU, fast external storage, fast networking, docking solutions, ...
Here, two of these ports are used for the side displays, one for a 4-port USB-A hub, and one is apparently exposed to the outside via some right-angle adapter, intended as power input.
Even tho the "power input" could probably be used for a dock or similar, just one USB-C and 4 USB-A is a bit lame for I/O.
Maybe they could've tried to power both side displays from one port by using a dual-DP hub to have one more exposable USB-C port; and/or replace the 4xUSB-A hub with a dock with more features - ethernet, video out and an SD card reader would be useful
I feel this technique could be really useful. As a developer, I am okay to carry a box instead of a laptop as this would enhance the productivity. I was actually thinking of buying the 14" screen from lenovo. This concept reminds me of Kavad which is a box with multiple fold used for story telling.
maybe using a laptop with a docking setup on each workplace would be ideal. Just set up a nice ergonomic workstation, connecting all the peripherals to a dock, and when you come to work there, just plug in the laptop to the dock and start working.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw