Submitted 3 weeks ago by lautan@lemmy.ca to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/23/24138475/framework-laptop-product-categories-new
It started with notebooks, but that wasn’t the master plan.
The next product should be a sustainable, not publicly traded company. If investors take majority ownership and IPO, Framework’s perceived mission will evaporate quickly. I sincerely hope Nirav and Co actually give a shit about the repairable product and retain majority shares. If not 👉👌…
Cool. How about a repairable phone with a headphone jack? I’ll be a day one buyer.
How about a repairable phone with a headphone jack?
The Framework 16 notebook doesn’t even have a headphone jack, only a USB-C to jack adapter.
It’s one of the slot in ones though right? so it doesn’t really count - it effectively integrated.
I don’t even use built-in headphone jacks anymore. I use external DACs with 2.5, 4.4 and quarter inch. Good thing for me that I can get an extra port while others can use a headphone jack still.
Lmao.
Modular ports would be great. I’d love to have two USB ports on a phone rather than a USB and headphone jack.
two USB ports
I don’t know if both could provide the same amount of power, and I’d bet – given that laptops don’t – that the phone would only be able to charge off one.
USB ports aren’t perfectly interchangeable today. If they can’t be made to be, I kind of wish that at least USB would have a set of standards for indicating power-in capable ports and ports by wattage capability. Like, reserve one color or symbol or something for one, one for another. Right now, device manufacturers just do whatever and sometimes don’t indicate what is what. I mean, yeah, it’s great that they’re backwards compatible, but when you have ports that don’t all behave the same, it’d be nice for it to be immediately-obvious what they do.
Also, while I’m dreaming, I’d like power-pack and battery capacity to be measured in watt-hours rather than amp-hours, given (a) that voltage isn’t universally the same and (b) that what people care about is about how long something can be run, which depends on power.
I’m pretty sure that a USB hub would work at least on Android, giving you as many ports as you want.
Repairable, open phone, you can load whatever OS you want. A phone that is more akin to a computer than a smartphone. A pinephone, but better.
If you don’t care about 3.5mm a FairPhone comes pretty close to that description.
Why not just use type c headphones?
The 3.5mm thing has always baffled me, it feels like complaining your pc doesn’t have a VGA port, except the thing you connect costs like a fiver
Why not just use type c headphones?
I can think of several good reasons to use 1/8" TRS headphones (though as I point out in a lower comment, specifically for smartphones, space is at an extreme premium and I think that the majority of people probably don’t want to spend the space on an integrated headphones jack; it’d be better to use a small external adapter there):
But for the general case, not on smartphones, places where I have the space to stick a 1/8" TRS port, I am not very enthusiastic about using USB as an audio port.
1/8" TRS is a well-established standard. I mean, pretty much every device can handle it. USB is in a lot of places, but not at the level of USB.
1/8" TRS has been around forever. It’s electrically-compatible with 1/4" TRS, which has been around even longer.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)
The original 1⁄4 inch (6.35 mm) version descends from as early as 1877 in Boston when the first telephone switchboard was installed[9] or 1878, when an early switchboard was used for the first commercial manual telephone exchange[10][11] in New Haven created by George W. Coy.
USB is a young pup and already, physical USB-A ports are being phased out in favor of USB-C ports. I very much doubt that USB-C is going to be around ~150 years down the road the way that TRS is.
USB is a lot more complicated than 1/8" TRS. It’s got sleep states, trees, power consumption negotiation. That’s all room for things to break in interesting ways. I have, for example, a USB hygrometer/thermometer that sporadically triggers kernel errors on my computer when plugged in. I have a mouse that, for some reason, when plugged into a USB hub, uses a lower polling rate if plugged in when the system boots up (albeit not if unplugged and replugged). I have a USB audio DAC/ADC that decided to cut out the other day, for God knows what reason. My last computer’s motherboard had a USB controller that supported a more-limited-than-required-by-protocol-USB tree size and had random devices not work if a sufficient number of devices were plugged in.
Security. Same idea. I’ve got enough attack vectors into my devices as-is. People have definitely attacked bugs in USB stacks before; IIRC, that’s historically been part of how they attacked DRM on some consoles. 1/8" TRS is a dumb protocol, but that makes it safe. Same issue with USB for charging, though at least there you can get a “power-only” cable. You can’t have an “audio-safe-only” cable.
USB sticks the DAC on the headphones. Why? Headphones don’t last that long; they’re disposable items. Put the non-disposable bits where they won’t die. A DAC can last pretty much forever. I have gone through many headphones over the years. I have never had a sound card or on-motherboard DAC die. I have two USB-to-1/8"-TRS DAC/ADCs sitting on the shelf by my desk. They’ll probably be perfectly good twenty years from now.
Sampling rate issues. Can’t come up on TRS, because the DAC/ADC is on the device side. One of my USB DACs (this intended for professional audio) only supports a fixed sampling rate, the one at which it does internal processing; that makes sense, as a pro doesn’t want to have some device introducing resampling into their audio chain. Another, consumer one, can’t support a sampling rate as high as the professional one; it relies on the computer to figure out and do resampling if resampling has to happen above that rate. If I have a pair of 1/8" TRS headphones, they work everywhere. It doesn’t matter whether whether they’re new or old or intended for the professional market or consumer market. Plug 'em in, they work.
I have one audio output device – a pair of elderly Logitech USB speakers, not headphones – that has an integrated DAC. For some reason, the engineers who did that appear to have decided to make the volume control on that linear in electrical power rather than in perceptual loudness, which means that the vast majority of the volume scale does very little and there’s a tiny range that has a large impact. I don’t want to deal with that kind of craziness on some cheap pair of headphones.
Latency. 1/8" TRS devices normally – unless you’re intentionally building something into the system – have zero latency, because the DAC on the device is directly electrically driving the membrane on the speaker. Every time one sticks higher-level protocols in, it’s an opportunity for some bright-eyed engineer to start cramming more shit into the pipeline that adds latency. TVs are a great example of this – they used to have no latency, and then someone figured out that they could show ads and do other processing on the feed and that that’d be easier if they had a buffer of some video frames, and so they started inducing latency, unlike a computer monitor. Now you have “gaming modes” on TVs that try to mitigate the problem which had never originally been an actual issue with dumb TVs.
There’s an entirely-separate world of audio software and hardware for professionals who want to do real-time audio processing (on Linux, JACK; I have a USB ADC and some audio cards that permit direct passthrough of input audio to output) to try to avoid all the points in the pipeline that various consumer audio devices and software have inserted latency.
That doesn’t matter for some uses, like an MP3 player. It’s not the end of the world for a phone call. But it’s really obnoxious for some uses. With 1/8" TRS, I have no latency. With USB, I have God-knows-what latency.
There are only three decent reasons that I can see to use USB for the general case:
It provides power. Some people want active noise cancellation on their headsets. If you want to do ANC, you’re gonna need power one way or another. 1/8" TRS doesn’t have a standard for that (with XLR, for condenser mics, there’s a 48 volt phantom power convention that was added, but TRS doesn’t have it). AFAICT, devices that do this with a 1/8" TRS interface either rely on a second USB wire for power or use batteries.
When initially plugging in a 1/8" TRS plug, one shorts connectors and it can make a loud noise on the speaker membrane. Not an issue with USB, because the speaker membrane isn’t in that pipeline.
1/8" TRS doesn’t specify a single impedance everywhere. You can get very-high-impedance headphones that a DAC with limited output power can’t drive at a reasonable volume, even with the volume all the way up. That isn’t usually an issue for most people, but USB avoids the issue.
Just replace my perfectly good $200 headphones that work in my (old) phone, my Switch, my 3DS, my laptop, my iPod, and my work phone.
It’s so simple!
Seriously, even if you don’t use it, why are you so against others having the choice? The headphone hack was the standard for decades for a reason. If my phone is low on power, I’d like to be able to charge it without disconnecting my music/podcasts…
At the time, there weren’t really many good options for replacement devices.
Using the charging port means listening to music and charging at the same time wasn’t possible.
Now we have split-cable dongles for power banks, and we have wireless charging when possible. It’s better but it’s not great; both have downsides, and accessories are more $.
Do they make type C headphones with a powerbank in them? Do I want a lithium battery that large on my head?
There aren’t many upsides for the consumer or the environment. Still seems to me like this isn’t even a lateral move. Internal components have gotten smaller and more efficient since, so that space could be reclaimed. I really don’t need my phone to be that thin, a phono jack next to the charging port would be just fine. The only real downside might be waterproofing but if you can make it work for the type C port…
A Framework phone with 2 modular Framework sockets would be amazing. I don’t care if it’s thick. Make it repairable and support Linux Phone OSes like postmarketOS and I would absolutely buy it.
I kind of wonder how viable it’d be to make a product that consists of:
A strong smartphone case, with structurally-strong “dock” connector at the bottom.
A “dock” – maybe in a couple different sizes – that links to this, has a pass-through USB-C hub, and adds stuff like a headphones jack.
Smartphones don’t have standard dimensions at all, resulting in a zillion cases out there, but having the case with a standard “dock” attachment as a separate part would mean that you don’t have to build a million variations on the dock.
While I personally like having a headphones jack and would be quite happier with a larger smartphone with a larger battery and headphones jack, a lot of people do care a lot about size. I’ve seen women in particular complaining about the fact that their clothing often has limited or small pockets, and large smartphones don’t play well with that.
The headphones jack was never-designed to be incredibly space efficient.
That means smartphones have extremely limited space. Plus, if you want it to be modular – which is how Framework permits for the option to have a headphones jack on their laptops – you need even more space if you want to maintain structural strength of the phone.
I think that the best bet, if you carry headphones with 1/8" TRS plug, is to just leave a USB-C adapter plugged into the end:
This is minimalist, optimizes for size:
This has a passthrough port, so that it doesn’t tie up your USB-C port:
This has both a headphones and microphone port:
This has a headset jack, if you use a headset with integrated microphone:
I’d love to see them make other devices. But I want the company to actually be viable and entrenched before they spread themselves even more thinly.
They’re already having trouble releasing firmware and driver updates in a timely manner, especially for Windows users who can’t rely on driver updates packaged in the kernel.
But man I can think of a few cool Framework devices that I’d be into buying…
i see it as giving their industrial engineers something to do.
when you have to design a chasis for reusability and backwards/fowards compatibility, you dont really have the flexibility to make that many changes. instead of just letting them sit there, its better for them to start designing other things in the meantime.
Surely they are aiming for a repairable and modular smartphone eventually. That’s going to be super hard to do. My guess is their next form factor will be a tablet.
Any Linux phone is DOA for the foreseeable future because of the cellular radios.
You can get laptops that have 5G radios that you can use for data with Linux.
As I understand it, there’s no support for voice/SMSes at the radio level, but in theory, if you were willing to tolerate it and your cell service provider offers support, you could do WiFi calling.
Could also get service from a random other VoIP provider, use that over the data connection.
I think that a larger downside is that Android software is designed for a touch screen and low power usage across the board, and GNU/Linux software generally isn’t.
We can say that for any kind of drivers needed to run a mobile phone.\ Manufacturers of components are less and less providing any documentation, just throw a binary blob and say “put it in your Android build”.
They didn’t say Linux phone though, it could still be android with a custom ROM.
Eh, Pinephone and Librem 5 made it work, but there’s still a fair amount of software limitations here, and I didn’t think Framework should be a software company. But the radios themselves probably aren’t the blocker you make them out to be.
Tablet is almost free, just don’t have a hinge and have a touchscreen. Release as Chromebook, it will run Android applications
Chromebook makes sense. They could also do full on Linux. Star labs has a tablet coming out, so they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel for software (I assume, I haven’t tried touchscreen Linux).
i just cant escape the headphone jack jihadists even in this thread
We won’t rest until every washing machine has 2.5, 3.5, 4.4 and 6.35 jack sockets by default.
I swear I’ll start a startup producing 32.35 fleshlights
If it doesn’t have both balanced and unbalanced jacks I swear there’s going to be blood.
Good.
Are you talking about people who think the headphone jack should be taken away?
I’d kill for a 2-in-1 framework with a detachable keep board and pen
Dm me i’ll tell you the possible locations and id of the target the 2-in-1 framework laptop will be mailed to you after the kill is confirmed .
Not quite the same thing, but you can get external touchscreens for laptops, which might fit the bill, depending upon what you want to do with it.
Arm machines that are repairable to compete with Apple would be very cool in my opinion. Maybe team up with an integrator like sys76. Could be very cool. I’d personally line up to buy.
Would love it if they just had a shell that takes single board PCs
You can run the mainboard outside of the chais in an external enclosure.
Pine64 has a laptop that’s essentially that. The SBC inside could pretty easily be swapped.
I was thinking about ARM at one point, but you’ve got a couple of major drawbacks.
Most ARM devices are SoC, and where they get some of their cost and power savings. That’s kinda the opposite of modular.
ARM running ARM binaries can be more-power-efficient than x86 running x86 binaries. An ARM platform can run x86 binaries via x86 emulation, but then your power benefits go away (probably get worse power efficiency). For Windows, I assume that there’s some form of OS-level emulation, but you’ve got a lot of binary software out there. For Linux, if you’re using all open-source software that can be rebuilt for ARM, and assuming that you have ARM driver support, then you could maybe run only ARM binaries. But if you want to, for example, use Steam, then you are going to be using binary-only x86 software. Now, okay, that depends a lot on your use case, but that may be a real drawback if you play games on the thing.
googles
old.reddit.com/…/you_can_now_run_steam_games_with…
That also sounds kind of like compatibility is still limited – they’re saying that some ARM platforms can’t do 32-bit x86 binaries, at least two years ago. Dunno if that’s still an issue.
I mean, what is the difference between the current SoC and the soldered CPU? Sure you can save on upgrading RAM, but then what else? Especially if the SoC has PCIe. They can make a daughter board for the SoC to make it simpler to upgrade if they want, alà pi compute module.
I don’t see what’s non-modular about ARM. Most of the stuff that’s user-serviceable on a Framework laptop would be serviceable with ARM:
The only difference is RAM, and theoretically they could design a socketable SOC to reuse existing boards (not sure what happened to Project Skybridge). The only difference is RAM, at least for the user, and I really don’t think that’ll be a deal-breaker. Modern x86 chips are already essentially SOCs anyway…
As long as the company itself doesn’t become greedy and doesn’t change it’s mission & vision i always support it
I’m waiting for them to offer a chassis to convert their laptop parts into USFF PCs. Reusing old parts after an upgrade is pretty attractive. I think they mentioned this a while back, I’ve been waiting for it to happen.
Didn’t cooler master come out with one a little while ago?
Ah, I guess they did - thanks!
I thought they already offered 3d print models, you can just print out and presto?
Tomorrow, it wants to be a consumer electronics company, period.
Patel won’t say — I only get the barest hints, no matter how many different ways I ask.
I want one with an e-ink display. That way I can swap out the e-ink display when I need to for a proper display. That wouldn’t work on a normal laptop but should work for their uniquely modular design.
I don’t know if it will work for your use case, but you can attach an external eInk display to any laptop or desktop.
Stuff like:
Or
I don’t know how well eInk would work for most tasks, though. I mean, sure, it’s great for reading documents, and you can do so outside on a sunny day. But most PC software isn’t designed to work well with a slow refresh rate.
The battery life savings on an e-reader with an eInk display compared to an LED or LCD screen can be very large, but then the software is designed for it.
If I were only gonna read documents, I think I’d lean towards just loading them onto an eInk e-reader. That just takes, what, a fraction of a minute? Then all the software is designed around the screen’s characteristics.
I want to use it programming so I don’t get eye strain from staring at a screen all day, and the display is mostly white text on a black background anyway.
Obviously I invert that on an e-ink display. Any reason it’s white on black is to reduce the amount of white light that I get blasted with. When you’re programming most of the screen is blank because each individual line of code isn’t really that long in most cases it’ll be shorter than in English sentence.
Please let it be a smart TV.
I’m sure a Framework phone is at least an idea for them to produce. Definitely an extremely difficult challenge. It would be nice if it allowed for removable RAM, but it could be hard due to SODIMM being relatively large or due to RAM being put on SOCs. I imagine it shouldn’t be too much to ask for removable storage at least, given how small NVME drives can get. Upgradable SOC/motherboard is a must.
I’m curious to see where they go next. A lot of modern consumer electronics have repairability and upgradeability problems, but I also wouldn’t expect they’d be able to crack into the phone market as easily as the laptop market, so presumably there’s some more niche target they have.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
That’s one of the biggest reasons it just raised another $18 million in funding — it wants to expand beyond the laptop into “additional product categories.”
Framework CEO Nirav Patel tells me that has always been the plan and that the company originally had other viable ideas beyond laptops, too.
Framework might choose an “equally difficult” category or might instead try something “a bit smaller and simpler to execute, streamlined now that we have all this infrastructure.”
(Patel recently suggested to Jason Carman that Framework might adapt its marketing to reach more everyday audiences.)
The company’s $9 million seed round paid for the original 13-inch laptop design, which has carried on for three generations of components.
Today, Framework has about 50 employees, and it plans to expand to 60 before the end of the year, with “a bit of additional team growth” in 2025.
The original article contains 653 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
It would be nice if they partnered with fairphone.
cool - but if their product lines are modular and they try to break out of their niche market. whats to stop someone with a lot more capital from snapping them up (Dell, Lenovo, etc)?
Framework is a private company so they need to agree to be bought. I don’t know enough about the leadership to be able to say the likelihood of accepting an offer, but it’s not just a thing that automatically happens because Dell has a lot of money.
Money talks.
When the owners of a private company are offered millions more than they’ll likely make over the nest ten years, the odds of selling are very high.
Look at all the software devs that gets bought.
Also, Dell buying someone doesn’t mean that the product stops being made. Dell bought Alienware and still makes devices for that market segment under the Alienware brand.
Nothing, but it’d still be a win for the consumer because then we’d have repairable/customizable laptops across the board?
We’ve also seen other brands aren’t interested in it because it’s harder to make smaller/thinner laptops when they need to be customizable. Also they make more money from having people throw out their old laptops and buying a new one.
If Dell or Lenovo or similar would actually make modular laptops, that’d also solve my problem.
The modularity makes it easier for them to grow slowly and incrementally. Slow and manageable growth is the key for a business to not overextend themselves to the point they get snapped up by the competition
This nonsense company is too expensive for regular people
Yeah I had hoped they would aim for a bigger market reach
This is my issue with Fairphone too. I love the idea and execution and I understand those things cause the product to be more expensive but twice the price to comparable products is just too steep for me.
What’s your price point?
Do they offer touchscreens for the laptops yet? I’ve been waiting for that to get one, I won’t get a laptop without it.
I have a MacBook for work. Can’t wait to have a Framework as a personal computer.
tal@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Before they do that, I kind of wish that they’d be a laptop company that makes laptops that have 100 Wh batteries.
fuckwit_mcbumcrumble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
I don’t understand why companies keep putting such small batteries in laptops. Especially in the 16" laptop, anything less than 90 is just not acceptable in something that actually costs real money and isn’t an ultra thin device. Cheap garbage? Fine. You get what you pay for. Starting at $1700 pre built? No.
mansfield@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Anything with over 100WH batteries would need airline approval before you can fly with it. This is why laptop makers rarely exceed this limit.
faa.gov/…/portable-electronic-devices-with-batter…
tal@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
It does add something by way of weight, but I just can’t believe that the entire market out there honestly wants to have shorter laptop battery life over a slightly-heavier laptop. I mean, sure, all else held equal, I’d take a lighter laptop. And there’s some size where I don’t want a larger battery – like, I don’t want a Tesla Powerwall glued to the underside of my laptop. But at 100Wh, the current airline limit? Hell, yes, I sure as heck would rather have the longer battery lifetime.
And let’s even say that someone is completely fine with their existing laptop battery lifetime – like, they only ever use their laptop plugged in, or for short stints away from a plug, like a conference room. Then you still can trade battery capacity for other desirable things. Stick a brighter screen on. Have a more-powerful CPU or GPU and the fans to drive it. Have the capacity to drive external USB devices that may slurp power off the laptop’s battery. Restrict the maximum-charge level so that the battery’s lifetime is extended – batteries degrade rather more quickly if fully charged, and a number of devices have settings to permit them to be only partially-charged – without needing to cut into the capacity for a single charge.
I absolutely understand small-battery, budget laptops existing. Cut RAM down to a bare minimum, put in as little storage as possible, slash the battery to what’s tolerable.
I also understand that there are people who are hell-bent on ultra-light laptops, want everything at all possible stripped out. That’s fine too.
But I just can’t believe how hard it is to find 100Wh laptops in 2024. And traditionally, that wasn’t the case. You could find plenty of laptops with 100Wh batteries. Some laptop vendors let you choose the size of battery you wanted, and some even had dual batteries, one internal and a hot-swappable battery.
I get that USB PD powerbanks can help alleviate some of the problem, and I’m sure that that has to have been the factor causing laptop vendors to start slashing internal battery sizes, but they also aren’t the same thing. There’s no protocol for them to report their charge, so a laptop can’t report life remaining (note that theoretically, one could have one pretend to be a UPS rather than a battery, and there are various protocols for those, though OSes don’t – well, Linux doesn’t, don’t know about other OSes – treat UPSes as another battery. It’s another box and cable and port tied up.
Evotech@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
It’s not wanted by the market obviously. Most only need their laptop to last from the office on the commute
frezik@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Here’s the internals of the 13 with a 61Wh battery:
cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/…/IMG_0054.jpeg
And here’s the 16 with an 85Wh battery:
…prismic.io/…/0b001897-9e05-406e-8f50-af54ba76a72…
Where would a larger battery fit?