Sorry, I realized I’m using my personal jargon in public again. When I said “AI,” I meant this overhyped put-it-in-your-mouse garbage. When I’m talking about the actually useful stuff, I usually call it “ML.”
Of course you have no reason to know that or care. My apologies.
Overhyped AI is going to fail, and it can’t happen soon enough. The Mozilla leadership really needs to pay attention to that reality.
You really didn’t address the sunk cost problem, but honestly I don’t really care anymore. You think what you want.
You’re ignoring everything else I said because you don’t agree with one semantic point of a partial response, so here it is again.
Most of the time, a company can’t afford to just not release a product they worked on. They talked about why it didn’t turn out the way they wanted to in the announcement stream (the laws of physics), but assuming they had already done the investment into the R&D to produce the box, they can’t just decide “never mind.” If they do it too much, they go out of business.
EDIT: also, you said “bit by bit” in your original message. You don’t do things bit by bit if you’re not trying to be sneaky.
…yes? It is?
Sorry. It’s not just marketing if you can buy them.
And that means they should?
Of course not! What do you think I’m arguing for? I’m saying that if they were trying to make some kind of sneaky change, they wouldn’t have taken five minutes to talk about it in their big event.
“Aw sorry, we really tried to make something” doesn’t cut it. If you can’t do it, don’t do it. Simple as.
This ignores the realities of running a company. Once you’ve sunk development dollars into a project, you can’t just walk away from it. You have to recoup your investments somehow, or you just end up hemorrhaging money and go out of business and can’t do anything ever again.
How many products that are antithetical to their entire stated purpose do they need to make before you see that as a red flag?
Well it needs to not be a single component in a product that’s a tiny minority of their business, for one thing.
What exactly can you upgrade iteratively?
At the price point, being able to upgrade memory, storage, and motherboard is unique. And I know you say that it’s the “vast majority” of the cost, but I just bought a Framework 13 last month (I know, great timing) and the mainboard was right around half the total cost. So sure, the most expensive single component, but it means that I can upgrade to a better-performing machine in the future for half the price and not need to junk everything else.
Framework laptops just use USB C dongles for everything.
Correct. But honestly, having the swappable I/O is fantastic; over the last five laptops I’ve owned, I’ve only upgraded because I wanted new capabilities once. For the other four, it’s because a component failed; and in two of them it was a USB port, while in a third it was a charging port. Being able to replace those would have extended the lives of those machines substantially.
fewer vendors to buy a dongle from
Actually, they’re open-source (not proprietary). And since they’re USB-C, you could probably just take out the card and plug a dongle right in there if you really needed to (I have not tried this).
Framework: 999 + 399 = 1398 for two generations of a laptop
I’m planning to hold on to this device for a whole lot longer than two generations. If I can, I’d like to hang on to it for 15-20 years. The laptop I upgraded from was five years old or so (and would still be going strong if it didn’t have a port that was about to die and un-upgradeable RAM and storage), and my desktop is 13 years old and still going strong, so this isn’t terribly unreasonable. I would estimate that I’ll end up pouring about $2000, all told, into this laptop over that time period, likely replacing 3-4 laptop purchases and giving me a better machine during that time period.
that assumes that your display and keyboard held up and didn’t need replacing,
Both of which would be cheaper than a new device. A new display is $150 and a new keyboard is $30. I don’t know about the longevity of each component, but based on the research I did it’s definitely not worse than an off-the-shelf machine.
you liked all the default dongles Framework gave you (which is apparently just four USB C ports… to plug into the four USB C ports on the laptop),
There aren’t any defaults. When you spec out your kit, you choose which cards to purchase. Replacing them costs about $10. (EDIT: The USB-C ones cost $10. The other ones are variously priced between $10-40, and then there are some storage expansions that cost more because they’re basically SSD in the expansion card form factor).
and, most importantly, that Framework didn’t change their form factor
They’ve only done that once since they launched, across six updates to the components. When they made that upgrade, they offered a $90 top cover to bring first gen devices up to second gen specs.
(I am not sure if they did for the 16 inch laptops to support the “modular” keyboards).
There’s only been one generation of the 16 inch laptops, and they’ve always had the modular keyboards. The refresh they announced yesterday is just to components, not to chassis.
Every spare dongle or repaired/upgraded part costs money.
Yep, and I’m fine with that because it means that I can spec it out the way I want; I don’t have to pay for I/O that I’ll never use. My old laptop had an SD card reader and a DisplayPort output; I literally never used either. The one I had before it had a SATA connector on the external I/O, and a couple of other pieces of nonsense that I didn’t want or need. Actually, thinking back, I don’t know if I’ve ever owned a laptop (until this one) where I actually used all of the ports.
And I don’t really fault them too much for not letting you actually swap CPUs since that was basically something only the sickest of sickos did
Yeah, I think swappable CPUs on a laptop are a thing of the past. I hope I’m wrong, but I just don’t see it coming back.
I do worry that this just encourages people to hoard parts
I DON’T HAVE A PROBLEM
I CAN STOP WHENEVER I WANT TO
Its called marketing.
They’re actually building those devices. It’s not marketing if you can buy them.
Why wouldn’t they?
Because most companies do. They gloss over the shifts so that they can focus on other stuff.
Why does being clear about why they’ve abandoned their mission excuse anything?
Because it shows that they haven’t. They talked about the work they put into trying to make it modular.
That’s the opposite of what’s happening though.
For this one product, maybe. But again, this was one of the four products they announced yesterday.
One good thing about a phone over a camera is automatic backup. If you have a burner smartphone uploading all of your images to Dropbox (or whatever) as you take them, and then you think your phone is about to get taken, you can wipe it or even destroy it without losing the photos. Not so a camera.
Also, a cheap burner phone is way cheaper than pretty much any standalone camera on the market. It’s hard to find a point and shoot digital camera (or any type of film camera) these days that isn’t super pricey, because they’ve become hobbyist items.
If this is it happening bit by bit, then why is most of the news about them doubling down on their principles? Why did they make clear what they were doing and why, and talk about their work to make it modular, instead of trying to hide it or sweep it under the rug?
This sort of doomerism and slippery slope purity test nonsense is exactly why niche companies that do what people value eventually go under, leaving us with just the awful ones. This isn’t a betrayal of their values. This isn’t the beginning of the end. It’s just a choice they made, and all of the other choices they made confirm that they’re still doing stuff the way they were.
Edit: I’m not saying you have to buy it, or that you shouldn’t make clear to the company you don’t think this comports with what you want them to value. But writing them off forever based on this one product seems so self-defeating.
their pricing means it is basically never worth buying and upgrading versus just buying a new laptop (seriously, run the numbers. You basically save 10 bucks over two generations of shopping at Best Buy).
Maybe so. But the big difference is, you can upgrade iteratively rather than taking the entire hit of a new device all at once. So I can buy all of the individual components of my next laptop a few hundred dollars at a time over the course of a couple of years, and use them as I get them. By the time I’ve ship-of-theseus’d the whole device, I may have spent the same amount of money on that new computer, but I paced it how I wanted it. Then I put all of the old components into an enclosure and now I can use it as a media center or whatever. Plus, if something breaks, I can fix it.
They also announced three other products (one new, two refreshes) which are still being actively developed and are fully-modular devices at low cost. If they’re “throwing away their values,” they’re not doing it very well.
For modularity: There’s also modular front I/O using the existing USB-C cards, and everything they installed uses standard connectors.
Desktops are already that, though. In order for them to distinguish themselves in the industry, they can’t just offer another modular desktop PC. They can’t offer prebuilts, or gaming towers, or small form factor units, or pre-specced you-build kits. They can’t even offer low-cost micro-desktops. All of those markets are saturated.
But they can offer a cheap Mac Studio alternative. Nobody’s cracked that nut yet. And it remains to be seen if this will be it, but it certainly seems like it’s lined up to.
100%. I can’t decide whether I think the organization being dissolved completely is a good idea or not, but I’m at least open to it.