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Framework Laptops

Here’s a good review from someone with hands on experience who has similar tastes in laptops to myself.

Some positives:

Some negatives:

Overall… it’s okay. I’m not really blown away by it but I don’t hate it either.

The Modular Ports Aren’t Great

TL;DR: While the modular port idea is cool, the level of I/O available for the Framework is not any better than most contemporary laptops and they don’t live up to the purpose they’re marketed for (eliminating dongles). In a lot of relatively common usecases, they don’t eliminate the need for a separate dongle or docking station with even more ports. I’d much rather have way more, denser I/O on a replaceable circuit board (which would also allow repair and upgrading) in the Framework than these expansion ports, or have a combination of the two solutions. Keeping one or two of these expansion slots and at the same time having a collection of a USB-A port, two USB-C ports, and a display connector just built into the laptop is a level of I/O sure to garner a lot of praise while keeping the aspects that are good about the expansion slots.

While at first the idea of modular ports seems really cool and compelling, I would liken it more to a gimmick than a useful feature compared to the alternative. The big issue with these ports is that you’re not only paying a sizeable amount of extra money for what are essentially recessed, single-purpose USB-C dongles ($12 a piece for USB-A and C, $25 for display connectors or SD card, $51 for ethernet (prices in CAD)), you’re also quite limited in terms of the number of slots available.

There are only 4 available expansion slots on the Framework. One of them must be USB-C if you wish to charge so that leaves 3 choices. Many will then choose one HDMI or DisplayPort to be able to hook the laptop up to an external monitor or projector and the final 2 might be another USB-C to be able to charge on the other side of the laptop and a USB-A to be able to plug in some peripheral, USB stick, or external drive. So, that’s likely 2 USB-C, 1 USB-A, and one HDMI/DisplayPort. Not a lot of I/O for $61 CAD (roughly $46 USD) worth of single-use dongles.

That’s not even considering the 250GB or 1TB storage cards, where you lose a whole port of I/O when they’re plugged in. Also, if you use them like regular USB thumb drives, then a regular USB thumb drive is going to be way more convenient since you won’t have to fiddle with a latch on the bottom of the laptop just to disconnect the drive.

Then there’s the argument that these ports allow for upgrading existing ports or changing to a new port standard. If you can upgrade an older SD card slot to one that supports faster speeds, that’s way better than having an old and now less useful SD card slot built into the computer. This is definitely an advantage of the modular ports and why I don’t want to see them completely disappear but, at the same time, an increase in speed also needs to come with a motherboard that supports it: if the Framework has 4 recessed USB-C ports that are all USB4 20Gbps, you’re limited to that no matter the speed supported by a new port. For example, HDMI 2.0 has a maximum bandwidth of 18Gbps, but HDMI 2.1 has a maximum bandwidth of 48Gbps; it doesn’t matter if your HDMI expansion card theoretically supports a resolution of 8K 120Hz if the laptop simply cannot push enough bandwidth through the port to do that.

Although a motherboard + expansion card upgrade is still preferable to throwing out the laptop entirely when you need to upgrade, there’s also no reason that we can’t also have built-in, denser I/O. Ports don’t need to be upgraded every couple of years or even every decade; existing USB speeds and display standards are fast enough for the majority of uses these days and for the foreseeable future.

These modular ports also just end up being much more inconvenient compared to an all-in-one dongle which might have 2 USB-A 5Gbps ports, 2 USB-C ports, HDMI, and a card reader in one, combined, less expensive package that’s not much larger than two of the Framework expansion cards put together (Here’s an example on Amazon). If you want to switch up your ports instead of just picking a loadout and sticking with it, you end up with a lot of these expansion cards that you have to carry with you or throw in a drawer at your desk. It’s way less convenient to carry around a box of the Framework expansion cards to be able to reconfigure your ports on the fly when you can just carry around a single dongle that has all the extra ports you might need, even if you don’t use some of the ports on that dongle. Not to mention the cost of all the extra Framework expansion cards compared to the cost of that one dongle.

So, yes, you’re not going to have a dongle hanging off your laptop with the built-in, swappable ports, but that doesn’t matter if the I/O in the laptop is too limited anyways because there simply aren’t enough ports for what you need. If you want to “dock” your Framework and turn it into a workstation with two monitors, a wired keyboard, and an external drive, you’re still going to need a dongle because there won’t be any ports left to charge your laptop. If we had enough ports on our laptops in the first place, we wouldn’t need dongles at all. Framework didn’t solve this, they just said they did.