Conman-level of statement, from the same person that said he would be "worried" if his engineers were not spending an amount of token comparable to their salary.
I believe it was disproved, but regardless, there is a lot between accepting an hypothesis and possibly valid and building a conspiracy around it. I don't about this case, but this conspiracy typically degenerate in anti-science behaviours, perosonal attacks (on researchers or just chiense people) and similar nice things.
The ridiculous things I was asked to do, and observed other people doing, all because "one day we will gave thousands of clients" while at the same time struggling to push out just a few units.
I will just stop here.
No hates for macs, but your typical cli/tui software devoper is concerned about making their software run on almost anything with an actual os. As soon as I see references to specific operating systems or platform specific libraries my bullshit meter goes off.
I was expecting an article about methology and tooling to develop guis, got an apple fan telling stories about ai use.
I only see a bunch of references to swift (very much not portable), but I did skip the Q/A style section. I see he mentions portability, but still no mention of actual portable frameworks.
The word "macOS, "apple" or "swift" appears ~7 times each. No mention to any other GUI framework other than ...a link to the bloomberg terminal website?
I would find the title less misleading if it was "I like swift".
Let say someone, as windows or linux user, clicks on this article claiming he/she should stop "doing TUIs", what take away message should he get from it? "GUIs just looks nice but sucks you have no swiftui"? Personally, I was expecting a developer's angle on GUI programming.
>But remember: I’m not really building applications for other people to use. I’m building them for me.
What's the point then? What's the point of writing an entire argument proselytizing towards application developers and ending with saying you're only talking about applications you're writing for yourself?
My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
A modular gpu using a new standard that is form-factor specific for only a specific model?
Matte panel released a few months after the first 13.5 model was released with glossy panel as only option?
It sounds a bit fishy to me. But maybe I'm just a bit too cynical .
I see your point, but what i'm talking about is the company generating a strong incentive to people to buy upgrades or replacements.
This whole submission is about a user going extra length to recover a perfectly functioning main board (with price between 400 and 800 eur depending on model) after an official update went wrong and was suggested to buy a new one.
Mind that I am planning to buy one as well, so I don't have a bias against it. But those suspicious "features" pulled me away from the 16" model for example.
"Bricked" is a bad term for system without a proper software/firmware update path. A LOT could have been done here to improve "repairability" (with quotes, because this is a software issue on a perfectly fine mainboard).
A/B updates automatically recovering the bios is case of failed update, recovery from usb in case that somehow fails as well (InsydeH2O call it "crisis mode" I think).
Lenovo support both. Dell too afaik.
This is very much realistic to have, and I would expect it from a decent product.
A computer without this feature is pretty much designed to fail more easily.
If for some very weird reason framework was unable to offer this, then at very least they could have placed a header on the board with flashing instructions on the website, instead of advising to buy new hardware.
I mean, sure, I agree it would be ideal if BIOS updates literally couldn’t fail - I meant to ask what they could have done to resolve this situation now.
But yes, lack of an USB bios recovery path is a pretty terrible design fault, and I’m surprised that they haven’t improved this by now.
ah, you mean after the accident. Well for starter I would acknowledge the issue (thing that according to the liked thread did not happen, maybe it did not affect enough customers?).
Then they should either provide an official recovery guide instead of letting customers figure it out themself on the forum (I can see various pictures of people hooking clips to the flash chip and wondering want to flash exactly), or repair it pro-bono since it's a job that probably take ~10 mins for affected customer and it's an issue caused by a design flaw.
> My conspiracy theory is that selling parts is pretty much their main business case.
I think this is absolutely what you sell to investors. For it to be attractive to consumers though (and thus attractive to investors, since people actually need to buy the thing), there has to be a balance. They haven't even managed to conjure up a market for third party expansion cards, which feels like the lowest of hanging fruit.
At the moment they are living on borrowed time and good will from the tech / hippie community who want to be more sustainable and customizable. I think they have likely lost me at this point. I don't know how close they are to losing everybody else.
I think what expansion cards third parties are extremely niche (SDR) or have much better alternatives (to me, and I suspect most others If they thought about it, the 10gbE cards. Get a dock or two for the presumably limited locations you have 10gb infra and the need for it).
What most others have realised is that devices fit the 99% with USB-C, A and HDMI. Or, increasingly, just USB-C as everyone who needs one has a fleet of cheap dongles to provide just the right IO.
I mean, sure? Every other laptop company's main business is to sell laptops, so if you want those features or often time even a repair, you have to buy a whole new laptop. If you're Apple, you might need to buy a new laptop for a memory upgrade.
I really don't understand how in 2025 a competent company can't implement a trival A/B flash update. Do they depend on some obscure contractor for the firmware and have no power here?
As with many things, "It's complicated" but effectively, yes
Such system firmware is generally provided by AMI / Insyde / Phoenix and similar.
There are a few vendors who decide to go their own way (notably google using a fork of Coreboot for their chromebooks), but it's generally list of vendors that you can count on a single hand.
If it means anything I'm pretty sure AMI provides A/B updates on most products i've used with their stuff.
But that's always been the case. Phoenix and AMI have been the dominant BIOS providers for over 30 years. Both have always provided modular tookits for OEMs to customize their own ROM images, write their own ACPI tables, etc. UEFI gives even more control to the OEMs. If Framework isn't doing that properly, that's on them.
It appears that Framework contracted out the development of their (Insyde-based) firmware to somebody who, to put it mildly, does not treat them as a priority. Either way, Framework’s firmware is really bad, and that’s entirely on Framework; you can look around on the forums for the horror stories in the (open) EC code around power delivery for instance.
As another example of a vendor low-key screwing Framework in a way that I think it’s entirely appropriate to blame Framework themselves for, the first couple 13-inch models could charge off 5V chargers. The newer ones still have the necessary hardware, but whoever they get their power circuitry from cut that bit from the firmware on a newer chip version, and Framework obediently went “welp, guess we don’t have that feature anymore”.
In addition to no longer charging off 5V chargers (their first laptop could literally charge off a USB type A with no USB-PD), on the AMD 7040 I've got ~10% chance every time I plug it in to my dock that it will simply not start charging. Everything else will connect (display, USB) but power won't flow. Resolving that is as simple as unplugging and replugging in my laptop but if I don't notice until I'm in a video conference then it is a problem because my webcam, microphone, and headset are also going over that cable. Oh how I miss the OG 11th gen framework charging.
I heard a lot of talk about porting to coreboot (they even sent some motherboard to some coreboot developers I think).
Not sure what is stalling there, but sounds like a priority.
For the EC, I feel like a team of a single developer could arrange something there?
Intel / AMD and BIOS vendors simply do not expose their designs to everyone. So you have to go through an ODM to have an Intel chip-based motherboard design. The silicon industry is completely rotten at this point. Framework could simply be too small to get access to secret sauce.
The UEFI spec is open. The way to load Intel ME payload isn't. You need to do it otherwise the Intel CPU is as good as a brick. It will shut down automatically in 30 mins, none of the TPM functions will work, no power management will work.
It is not just payment. Without being "big enough" and guaranteeing some big volumes of CPU sales, Intel won't give you the specs. AFAIK only ODMs and BIOS makers like AMI has the full low-level CPU bootstrap spec.
This is just the CPU. Now add the other peripherals like HDMI controllers. You'd see the problem now.
I own the "original" gen11 Intel Framework 13. This is a company that wasn't able to ship a working RTC battery, a touchpad that would register a click when a physical click happened, a screen hinge that would reliably hold the screen in an upright position, or a USB-A port that wouldn't consume a watt of power when unused. You expect way too much engineering from them.
Heh, I remember the “remove the USB A” debacle when I had my OG.
That thing really hacked me off generally. Coming from a MBP 2016 that sipped power, the battery anxiety was real (especially standby drain), and I spent more time than I’d care to admit tweaking tlp to be still a pretty poor drain.
Then the backlight would only work in certain positions.
Love the dream, but it got sold and replaced by a MBP of 2x the price. 4years later the MBP has been used and abused like a tool, dropped from my car boot while trying to carry it and a child, and is still fresh as a daisy. I worry that FW doesn’t fit into “buy once buy well”
I did eventually tweak it to a very particular state where it had decent idle power use. Of course, it had to be re-tweaked occasionally.
Apart from that laptop, I've only ever used good-gen Thinkpads (and I'm back on one; the Framework now lives on my son's desk). The whole "we ship a screwdriver" gimmick gets old fast if you have to use that screwdriver on a regular basis (_of course_ they couldn't just use Phillips screws).
I still don't understand we are comparing a brand new company's engineering to Apple, who have been making laptops for what, 40 years now? Apple's GPUs used to over heat a fry the laptop. They used to make keyboards that would fully break because of a piece of dust, but they were riveted down so they were irreplaceable. Titanium powerbooks had hinges that would break in a year.
Because this isn’t a charity, I’m not paying to work out a new company’s engineering issues. I feel confident, based on the last few laptops, in spending £2k and having it last as my primary for 5 years or so, and then either still having some resale value, or being repurposed for simpler tasks.
I also had one of this 11th Gen Intel FW13s, and the RTC battery on mine worked for a short time because they for some reason used some garbage rechargeable one with a 2 yr lifespan instead of the more common not-rechargeable battery that every other PC vendor uses with seemingly 10x the lifespan
I know some higher end gaming motherboards that were targeted towards the overclocking community had two bios chips for exactly this purpose and switching between them was trivial from what I remember. If you overclocked too far, you wouldn't brick your system. It seemed like overkill to me. I'm guessing this is less common than it's worth to fix in software, but then at least continue to give support for the issue.
Original author here, and I agree. When overclocking, the most important feature is probably resetting the CMOS with one easy to reach button.
I was testing ECC previously in https://qt.ax/ecc and was trying to overclock the RAM to induce faults to confirm ECC was fixing them. Since I was using a cheaper board, I had to use keys to short the CLR_CMOS header and that got old really quick... I didn't ultimately succeed in creating a barely stable overclock that generated a ton of ECC errors, but that was a very awful experience.
Having some sort of BIOS recovery is definitely the baseline I'd expect these days, and having two BIOS chips so you can just keep using the device as if nothing had happened is the best solution.
If you need to do that again, maybe try turning the tREFI DRAM timing to the moon? That controls the refresh interval, which is very temperature sensitive. You could configure a marginally stable setting, let it boot, start running `memtester`, and then apply hair dryer directly to DRAM.
It's not a gimmick when the serious overclocking people do custom VBIOSes. Similarly for miners. That's when you need the recovery switch if things go wrong.
Custom Video Card firmware has been around a long time. It was possible to convert PC video cards to Mac use by flashing them. When I was faffing around with PPC64 Macs (I mean hey I got it for free) I picked up an ATI card on ebay that had been flashed.
I had sleep issues. It was the lowest-end G5. I ended up recycling it.
Just keep in mind that PLA isn’t safe for sex toys (though you can wrap them with condoms or similar of course). What works well is to 3d print a mold for silicon
Every populist party works that way, by promising very "sensible" thing. They work like an echo chamber for trendy political ideas.
Whether or not they are actually capable or even plan do any of that it's a different matter.
Typically, they only end up being a coverup for political extremism.
In then other cases they fumble and somehow mess up the situation even more.
Conversely, the "serious" political parties work by claiming all sensible reforms are in one way or another impossible and sitting on their behinds for the duration of their terms. See Mamdani for an example of a "populist" who somehow managed to push through many sensible, "impossible", "extremist" policies without too much effort.
More than half of IPOs fall below their price in the first year and AFAIK it’s something like more than half underperforming market over the first five.
Basically an IPO is a bad bet for a five year position. But SPCX is especially bad.
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