I would get a little bit of joy if a duo user noticed the effort I put into making my app work well on their device. Why put effort into anything? Your take is bordering dangerously on cynicism. :)
I don’t know what spectrum you’re on, but attacking an argument and attacking a person are two wildly different things. There’s nothing pedantic about that.
I apologize, but I don't find the syntactic rules of this site to be well thought out. "Your comments are stupid" and "You are stupid" carry the same meaning.
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
As near as I can tell, I was in fact right. I just didn't follow the laws of HN communication to express it, on a thread where the person I replied to didn't follow it either.
It would have been more appropriate to pile on with the others above.
Presumably they are a trillion dollar company because they know the precise size of phones that will sell to the most people. Hacker News is full of the 100 people (me included!) that love small phones but the general public LOVES their gigantic horrible loud phones :)
We are talking about how wide the phone is when folded. The company doesn’t know yet what exactly the market wants here, given it’s a new form factor for the apple audience
Would be SO sick! I feel like there is such a big appetite for it and people would do the free labor to support it. I wonder what keeps it in this horrible purgatory of install hell.
This aur package [1] works well for me. Unfortunately the new maintainer removed the automatic download and you need to manually download the zip via the form on Blackmagic's website (however not even the email is validated).
You're missing the point entirely. You're opting in and enjoying it, great! Do you really believe you chose to opt in? The author is saying that opting out is extremely painful and that THAT is wrong. We should all get to choose if we want to walk around with a smart phone or not. It's now basically required to invest in a privacy destroying device that makes huge corporations that much richer to function in society.
You don't understand why someone would complain about that?
Yes, in that I am of free enough will to choose not to use something or do my homework before making purchases. I'm also not saying that you shouldn't be able to walk around without a smartphone, but choices, like speech, aren't without consequence. If you want to pay for something at a location that only takes cash, but you won't carry cash because it's easily stolen or lost, that doesn't mean they have to accommodate you, it means you're not eating their food. Should they take card? Sure, and you should be able to walk around cashless, but the same choice you get to make, they do as well.
I've run into bizarre situations where smartphones were required. Went to Royale in Boston, and it's bad enough I have to use an app to pay for tickets, but at least I knew that ahead of time and accepted it. But then they wanted me to install another app to use the coat check when I got inside. How would one anticipate the latter ahead of time? Complete lunacy.
Ultimately I declined to use the app and hid my coat under a chair lol and I will not return to the venue.
Turning this around a bit: Businesses should be required to accept cash. We shouldn't need to have a relationship with a bank just to buy food or gas or what have you.
You missed out the parts about "extremely painful" and "basically required", as well as "privacy destroying" and "makes huge corporations that much richer".
So, for the analogy, let's say lots and lots of businesses and public utilities are cash only, and carrying the cash exploits you for Google's profit somehow. Or we could stick to the idea that carrying cash is a theft risk, but let's say the businesses are indirectly in cahoots with the pickpockets through a chain of corruption and that's why everybody requires you to carry cash and be vulnerable.
You can choose not to do it, and your choice is not without consequences that are morally wrong, and you'd be right to complain about that. Otherwise if "not without consequence" implies that you shouldn't complain, then you're offering a viewpoint of it being a dog-eat-dog world, and that's just the way it is, if you resist you'll suffer and you're a fool, so take the easy path and don't worry about the morality. Resignation.
My smart phone is essentially bricked, allowing only text and voice. I have not in the least found it "extremely painful" or "basically required" to have phone connectivity as I only use my laptop for connected activity.
I realize, however, that having both a phone and a home computer may be a privilege that others may not share. That's the rub. Users with only phones for connectivity are made more vulnerable by an exploitative digital system. In that, the author is correct. It's a terrible ecosystem and it begs legislative intervention but I haven't a clue how that is to be accomplished.
Forgejo is pretty neat. Their CI story is sad because it's based on act and it lacks features like GH Apps so service accounts are not possible (using a user account as service is barf).
I self-host it and its pretty easy to have uptime higher than github when you have 3 users total.
"Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge"
That says absolutely nothing. The "What is Forgejo?" question is unanswered and instead you get a lot of words about their values, their inclusivity, etc. And the next thing in the docs is how to install it. It's ridiculous.
“Software forge” is an established[1] term by this point: a piece of software providing a full set of features for collaborative development, usually at least code hosting with a web interface, tickets, and webpage hosting, and these days often also code review and integrated CI or at least the possibility of integrating CI. It’s admittedly squishy but in the same way “IDE” is squishy, which is to say it’s still well-defined enough to be useful.
> a package of FLOSsoftware that you could run on the cloud of your choice that offers most of what GitHub does (niceties on top of Git) without the centralization.
The lack of support from Framework is so damning. Nirav has been a fun CEO to watch, but this feels like a huge, huge miss. Can anyone defend this? Why would anyone purchase anything from this company ever again?
I've had Dell XPSs and Lenovo Thinkpads exclusively prior to Framework, and they all died by component failure. Sure, Dell will send a technician to your house and Lenovo has off-shore call centers, but the end result is the same: either buy an eye-wateringly expensive warranty that won't cover most failures or buy a new laptop.
While I'm all for stronger consumer regulation when it comes to this stuff, on balance I prefer the Framework approach here relative to the other options available to me.
Can you really compare failing components to an optional update they sent you an email to encourage you to install that bricks your working laptop? This is 100% their responsibility to test thoroughly before recommending right?
I agree nothing is perfect in the grand scheme, there are always trade offs. But using that as argument against this specific failure being wrong and bad doesn't help IMO. Framework should handle this better, and maybe they still will.
I think all manufacturers generally vet their BIOS updates and that it's probably not possible to stop 100% of all BIOS update failures.
This laptop has been owned for 3 years, so you have to benchmark against other 3-year-old laptops. What percentage of those fail or get bricked in some way? What is the cost of a solution for those failures?
It would be nice if this laptop had a BIOS recovery feature, and perhaps competing laptops have such a thing as well. I've mostly seen that feature with desktop gaming boards, and if it's common with other PC laptops, Framework should implement it.
If an update bricks your MacBook Pro or Lenovo, I imagine the cost and method of repair is exactly the same. These laptops get sent to a service depot or a tech comes out to your house, and they replace the board. Unless you happen to find an extremely nerdy repair shop like a Louis Rossmann situation, the techs don't mess with reflashing BIOS or other board-level stuff like replacing capacitors. It's just not really worth the labor/parts balance. Spending an hour or more on labor will likely cost more than spending 10 minutes on labor and $400 on parts.
Perhaps this looks worse for Framework because you the consumer is seeing how the sausage is made. Framework doesn't have a white glove repair service since the computer is designed to not need one. You're just buying the part yourself and installing it.
This solution doesn't cost more than the competition, and maybe it even costs less. Plus, you might even get an upgraded board out of it, which is unheard of with the competition. But it doesn't feel like "repairability" compared to dropping off your computer at your local certified Dell or Apple tech and picking it back up "repaired."
Right, really what Framework is saying is "we don't have a repair center that tries to re-flash BIOS." Neither do the other manufacturers, it's just too much of an in-the-weeds repair that's not worth their technicians' time.
The fact that the RAM isn't soldered is such a huge benefit here as well. The most recent 7040 series board that sold on eBay with no RAM or SSD included only cost $269. Even if the author decided to just buy that board, that kind of repair cost is unheard of. That's battery service cost territory if you own a MacBook Pro.
Or you can just use the opportunity to upgrade, which a repair from a competitor is not offering.
I disagree with a lot of the assessments the author made:
> First, it is clear that Framework’s BIOS updater is broken, at least on the AMD 7040 series.
This is only true anecdotally. I have installed this exact same BIOS version just fine on my 7040 series unit. It's not broken, works on my machine, my anecdote is worth exactly the same as theirs.
> Secondly, Framework encourages users to perform BIOS updates in their newsletters, and yet if the update results in bricking
Again, anecdotally.
> Thirdly, Framework claims to have made a repairable laptop, and I think my experience and the hoops I had to jump through to flash the BIOS have decidedly shown this not to be the case.
I would definitely welcome a built-in recovery flashing mechanism and more general repairable design within the mainboard. Any improvement is welcome. That said, Framework is already well above industry standard in regard to repairability. There are not many laptops out there with non-soldered RAM and removable WiFi modules.
The trouble here is that they invite this criticism upon themselves by offering repairability as a flagship benefit, but the reality is that it's not very practical for 100% of the computer to avoid every possible pitfall with long-term ownership. Yeah, after 3 years of ownership, X% of laptops get bricked for some kind of reason. This is why extended warranties cost hundreds of dollars regardless of brand. Consumer electronics are just not risk-free purchase transactions.
You also see how the sausage is made because you are doing the repair yourself. If you brick your MacBook Pro and take it to an Apple repair center, they might just be throwing your board in the trash and replacing it, charging you $500, and you get your computer back "repaired." Framework doesn't have a repair center since all repairs that they would perform in a repair center are repairs that you can perform at home, so you get to see how repairs actually work in practice. No computer OEMs and essentially no authorized repair centers hire component-level repair technicians, it's just not a business they want to be in.
I'm sure if you took your Framework to an electronics market in China you could get your BIOS flashed by dozens of vendors for $20 while you wait.
> This is only true anecdotally. I have installed this BIOS version just fine on my 7040 series unit. It's not broken, works on my machine, my anecdote is worth exactly the same as theirs.
This isn't an anecdote at this point, but a pattern. I don't think the BIOS updater is working as intended if every update is like playing Russian roulette.
> That said, Framework is already well above industry standard in this regard. There are not many laptops out there with non-soldered RAM and removable WiFi modules.
Yes, but they are below industry standard for BIOS flashing issues.
> The trouble here is that they invite this criticism upon themselves by offering repairability as a flagship benefit, but the reality is that it's not very practical for 100% of the computer to avoid every possible pitfall with long-term ownership.
The part that upsets me isn't that they aren't warrantying this. The problem is that they promised to make a laptop I can fix myself and provide all the documentation to do it with confidence long after the warranty ends. That's why I bought into the ecosystem in the first place.
Turns out, they claimed to do better and then does all the anti-repair design anyway for BIOS flashing. They didn't even provide any documentation for fixing it myself, which I would have done gladly and then praised them for having documentation.
Right, that's a thread with 38 posts. Only the people who have a bricked system would post to a forum, the rest of them with working systems are not there. The repair thread has 78 posts. Keep in mind, not every post is posted by a unique person (people post multiple replies to the same thread).
Are they below industry standard for BIOS flashing issues? How do you know? Do you have some data to point to? Do vendors like Lenovo or Apple make that information public?
I'm not trying to shill or defend them or anyone else in this industry, and I think they should have a BIOS recovery method built-in like my desktop does.
However, it's important to understand how statistical analysis works for issues like these. As of 2024, reports indicate that Framework has sold a six-figure quantity of laptops. So we have here about 116 posts on the subject of BIOS update failures, 0.1% of sales volume or less.
I realize this napkin math is flawed in itself since we should be isolating to the AMD 7040 series, and we should not assume that every person who has a BIOS flashing issue is posting on the forum, but I think it gives you a very rough idea on why we can't say one way or another whether these issues are common.
If there was a forum post with thousands of anecdotes about this issue, or even better, a class-action lawsuit (law firms will only do this if there's a large enough class to make it worth it), I'd be more inclined to be on your side.
> If you brick your MacBook Pro and take it to an Apple repair center, they might just be throwing your board in the trash and replacing it, charging you $500, and you get your computer back "repaired."
No one bricked their own laptop! They installed an update provided by the people that made the laptop! You bet your ass if installing software provided by apple bricked a macbook pro they would fix it for free. If they didn't it would be equally as unacceptable. Why are you defending a company that is doing the wrong thing? Framework is unequivocally wrong here.
Apple absolutely does not fix bricked systems out of warranty, regardless of cause or fault. Certainly not two years removed from the warranty. They can, in very rare cases, get bricked by failed updates. It’s not totally unheard of.
“Unequivocally wrong” is highly debatable. You may feel that way but I don’t. I’m not defending anyone, I’m just providing a reality check on how things work when you buy a product from anyone.
I think the only thing framework did wrong is fail to provide a BIOS restore fallback function, which my desktop motherboard has, but not every laptop has a feature like this.
For one thing, any conclusion that a BIOS update failure is automatically Framework’s fault is a big jump to conclusions. A BIOS update has a small risk of failure with any device. Find me a motherboard manufacturer who will bail you out outside of the warranty period and I’ll do three cartwheels for you.
This sounds like an extension of my logic beyond my meaning. This implication is that any manufacturer can just brick devices en masse, perhaps even on purpose, with no consequence or recourse, which is not at all what I was saying.
Here's a little story to frame this a little better and help you understand my meaning: My second-to-last MacBook Pro before I quit the Apple platform was the 2016 MacBook Pro with the butterfly keyboard.
That machine had a flawed design that was never 100% fixed, and Apple swept the whole issue under the rug until media pressure intensified. They then made a warranty extension for the keyboards.
The fix did not work 100%. The underlying keyboard design was flawed. I got my MacBook Pro "fixed" under this extended warranty,
The result was a huge class action lawsuit, for which I just received my last check this year. I was not fully compensated or given a refund. What I ended up doing was unloading the laptop much earlier than my normal upgrade cycle to switch to the 2019 16" MacBook Pro (Intel) that no longer possessed this fatal design flaw.
This incident damaged Apple's brand perception with at least one customer, me.
So, I'm not saying there are zero consequences for Framework not making this right. At the same time, every company that makes products draws a line somewhere. A restaurant isn't going to compensate me for a bad meal I had a month ago. Dell isn't going to buy me a new computer because my 7 year old Inspiron is on the fritz even though I expect a device like that to last longer.
If you bring a 2016 MacBook Pro in to Apple to get the keyboard replaced under the keyboard replacement program, Apple will not do it for free. The program has expired. Even though the system cost Apple millions of dollars in a class action suit and the design is fundamentally flawed, Apple will not make it right for their customers indefinitely. They offered a limited time resolution for customers who experienced that issue.
There is not a customer expectation that all the products they buy will last forever or will be indefinitely fixed for free regardless of issue, so in practice it's a balancing act between minimizing your long-term support costs and pissing off your customer base.
To directly answer your question though, a lot of times bricking or severely handicapping products happens and companies are free to go. Ask me what happened to my second generation Google Nest thermostat. Of course, my reaction to that was to throw the thing in the trash and resolve to never buy a piece of Google hardware ever again. But I'm sure thousands of people responded by justifying an upgrade to the latest and greatest and calling that a win because shopping for something new and unboxing a package is a fun dopamine hit.
I don't think that everything I described above is what is happening with Framework in this situation. I don't think there is any indication that failed BIOS flashes are a widespread issue. It seems that the standard rectification for a bad BIOS flash is a replacement board because it is considered a rare occurrence.
Remember that, if you don't want to worry about this or any other hardware failure, you can go ahead and buy a 3-year extended warranty at time of purchase, and that sort of option is available with basically every piece of consumer technology on the market.
I would agree that it would be better for them to be able to service it for a lower cost or maybe have a BIOS recovery function built-in to the hardware, but other than that I don't see anything that deviates very far from standard industry practice and policy.
You've given so much data about why it's reasonable for hardware to fail. I get it. Hardware fails. In the Apple example that keyboard shit was unequivocally WRONG. They eventually admitted that and offered a fix. They handled it poorly. But they did acknowledge it. IT WASN'T AN OPTIONAL SOFTWARE UPDATE EITHER HOLY SHIT.
Also in your example with google..
.. why did you resolve to stop buying Google products? ..
5% of all hardware fails, google can't possibly make things perfect, blah blah fucking blah, same fucking argument applies. They didn't do it on purpose! They can't make all hardware perfect! How dare we expect them to do the right thing?
Because the way they handled that case was WRONG. Framework is WRONG. Apple's keyboard's were horrific and their response sucked but at least they tried to respond and tried to make it right on some level?
Framework have calculated that doing the right thing here is too expensive and they (so far!) aren't doing it. That pisses me off. It should piss you off too. Defending them is wild. They don't care about you. Their behavior is WRONG.
When your laptop dies what would you prefer, to be able to buy the specific broken part easily and replace it yourself or be forced to buy an entire new laptop?
But the problem isn't buying the specific broken part here? I would have gladly replaced the BIOS chip if they made it socketed or something, but what Framework support told me is to throw away the perfectly working CPU and buy a new one because it happened to be soldered to the same board as the BIOS chip with incorrect data.
I expect an optional update to not brick my laptop, and if it does, the company to fully replace it because they own the fact that they fucked up.
Completely unrelated: Yes! I do prefer to be able to replace specific broken parts when they die. That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?
> That sure doesn't apply to this situation though does it?
It sort-of does. Naturally this situation can be resolved much cheaper with a flasher, but in this situation you absolutely have the option to replace the "broken" motherboard, while still keeping your screen, laptop chassis, battery, ram, SSD, wifi card, expansion cards, sound board, webcam. Another commenter said the board is available on Ebay for $270 which is going to be less than just the ram for a new laptop.
I assume you have when in italics to show this is a “when, not if” scenario.
Some anecdotal evidence for you:
I’ve been buying used laptops of a certain brand for almost 20 years. I buy when they are 2-3-4 years old, keep them for 3-4-5 and then sell. Usual buy price is around $1000, sell around $300.
I tote them around the world. Writing, light dev, photo and video editing. Thousands of hours of use, plenty at +40C in the dust.
I’ve never had a single failure of any part, selling the laptops 100% functional. I’ll let you figure out the brand.
That means you've purchased about 10 laptops at most during that 20 year timespan.
If, hypothetically, laptops have a 2% failure rate by age 5, that means you had an 81% chance of never encountering a dead laptop. With these hypothetical numbers, your experience is not extraordinary or indicative of an incredibly reliable brand.
The other thing that skews statistics in your favor is that you would have never bought a for-parts laptop. I.e., you buy a 3-year old laptop, which has a survivorship bias because it is currently working at time of purchase. You wouldn't actually buy one of the ones that broke between years 0-3 [1] and hasn't been repaired yet. Even if the failure rate by 5 years is much higher than 2%, your probability of experiencing a failure is still higher than if you had bought the computer new and kept it for 5 years (compared to buying a working system at 3 years old and selling it at 5 years old).
We can't actually guess your preferred brand because it's likely that 100% of consumer laptop brands last 5 years have a single-digit percentage failure rate.
The 3-year extended warranty for a Framework 13 costs $139 and the cheapest pre-built configuration costs $988. The warranty cost scales with part selection (e.g., configure the system to max it out at over $5000 and the warranty cost is now $259)
The industry average gross margin ((revenue - COGS)/revenue) is 40%
I'll take a "typical" configuration of the mid-tier AMD CPU, 1TB storage, and 16GB of RAM, pre-built cost is $1774.00 (no OS). 3-year warranty cost is $209.
We can assume the raw cost of the laptop hardware is approximately $1060, although that's without any consideration to operating overhead, shipping, etc.
That means if Framework's complete replacement failure rate at 3 years is higher than the ballpark of 10-20%, that extended warranty loses money.
That's a pretty high failure rate, but we have to also recall that extended warranties have about a 50-70% profit margin across the electronics industry.
I think our napkin math here generally aligns with the idea that the amount of consumer electronics that fail within 3-5 years or so is somewhere in the single digit percentage range.
after a decade of buying that same laptop for a hundred bucks 10 years after retail release ... I have a similar experience where so far none have died of their own accord ...
To be fair, I've bought things for more that promised zero support, but at least you know what you're getting into with that. Bad support is just plain bad.
> Can anyone defend this? Why would anyone purchase anything from this company ever again?
I mean, if you want my personal reason - I assume any company warranty is barely worth the paper it's printed on - I'm very hesitant to do a bios update ever, only to address specific issues. So yea, I'd buy another framework (currently have a 12, and I love it despite the many flaws)
> If looking at screens makes you car sick, you might want to try the iPhone dots. Or – stop me if this sounds crazy – you could just put your phone down and enjoy the ride.
It's difficult to enjoy the ride with motion sickness. So yes, it does sound crazy, most likely written by someone who isn't affected by motion sickness.
My experience is that it helps with being able to look at screens, but not that it is better than not looking at screens while riding. I needed to occasionally leave the screen and close my eyes or look outside (depending position in the vehicle) for a bit to calm down. But otherwise I cannot look at screens on rides for more than a few minutes, so it is better in this sense.
So yeah, as somebody with (moderate) motion sickness, this advise resonates with me to some extent.
It's not for general motion sickness. Most people only experience motion sickness when they're moving but their eyes aren't seeing any movement, such as looking down at a something. That type can be prevented by simply putting down the phone/book/whathaveyou, and looking out the window. I said prevented, not cured, because once it sets in, no amount of looking out the window will cure it.
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