Author here. I am not even sure how much damage I can actually claim given that I spent $20 on tools to fix the laptop. If I bought a new board, I might be able to claim that, but filing small claims over $20 is likely not worth anyone's time.
The important thing here is awareness and helping anyone affected, not trying to get Framework fined for a tiny sum.
You're right, for you, since you had the ability to do the repair yourself (although Framework shouldn't have made you invest the time and effort it took to repair this on your own). The legal route would still be a good way to go for others who were forced to buy a new board though. Hopefully your site helps people avoid the time and trouble of going to court or the costs of a replacement.
People doing what you've done, documenting the problem you had and the steps you took to fix it, are what make the internet great. You also get bonus points for having that information well formatted/presented and accessible. Even without JS the page displays nicely, images included. Thank you for that! I may never need the information for myself, but I'm grateful that you took the time to put it out there.
Thanks for linking the documentation! To be clear, when I wrote "header", I meant something with a connector that can be easily used for this purpose. Soldering on the connector is probably more difficult than the pogo pins that I used.
I also can't help but notice the linked connector is less than $1 in bulk on DigiKey and probably cheaper if ordered at Framework's scale.
Sure, but this is just one issue. How many potential $0.78 connectors exist? If one in 1000 customers has a need for a connector, and there are 40 different potential failure modes where a $0.78 connector would make recovery easier, is that worth the extra $30 per laptop?
I checked the pictures of my board, and there are 3 unpopulated headers that I can see. There's also the unpopulated BIOS chip socket, which is similarly cheap. I think I would pay the extra $3 per laptop for better repairability, which is Framework's entire sales pitch anyway.
Moving to sockets adds risk of the socket failing too. But this particular instance of not using an SOIC-8, for which test clips are readily available, seems pretty unfriendly.
I imagine there's a way to program the flash from a header or connector, or maybe it was programmed before being assembled onto the PCB.
Having a BIOS update BRICK the device isnt 'just one issue', they clearly need to do more work to protect devices from this, they can choose what they add but the BIOS needs a safer fallback and recovery process, that much is clear.
Definitley worthy of even an extra $1-2 per laptop if needed.
> Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix.
What I found from my research while writing the post is that both Dell and HP have BIOS recovery options without having to open the laptop at all, so that's not quite true. I think there's more Framework could have done here to make this a much less painful experience.
From what I can tell, HP's non-invasive BIOS recovery options are very model-dependent, and even models which do allegedly support recovery reportedly refuse to boot into recovery mode for some folks.
But yes, Dell is the outlier that has me saying “likely” instead of “definitely” above; they've had orders of magnitude more time and money than Framework has to throw at BIOS development, and it shows. I agree with you that Framework should be making a priority of getting their BIOSes to that level; I'm also willing to extend them some grace given the company's age and resources.
Original author here. I have a Raspberry Pi, but I still recommend the CH347 instead of the Pi since it's $5 on AliExpress and you can buy it at the same time as the pogo pins probe, which you need. The advantage of the CH347 is that you don't need to fiddle around with the pinout and risk frying the chip if you screw up. You can just plug the probe in (via the level shifter) and you are good to go.
Also, if you are doing the Raspberry Pi, you'd still need the level shifter since the Pi is a 3.3 V device.
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.
> 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.
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.
> I would bet that this story of a failed BIOS update reaches the support anytime soon and they provide a repair guide or maybe a replaceable BIOS chip. Stories like this are somehow sad but at least they help to improve.
Original author here. I like your optimism, but I've linked multiple threads on their forums with people doing the same problem going back over a year. I also pieced together most of the stuff from people doing external flashing on the forums. Still, no official guides, no changes as far as I can tell. This post is the most detail repair guide available right now.
If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
Thank you for making this guide. The knowledge in it can be transferred to other Brands, too.
> I like your optimism, but...
Well, I'm not saying framework is perfect. The Hardware is expensive, inferior to bigger brands and, as you stated, support is worse. The repairability promise is hardly relevant as long as you're keeping your notebook > 5 years taking good care of it like most people. The switchable ports are a nice gimmick but not a total game changer. However, I really hope they succeed while keeping most of their promises and not actively preventing repair like e.g. Apple.
> If something happens after this, it would be because this post got to the top of HN and they have to respond to save face.
That's the way it goes. As long as only few people raise their hand, nothing changes. That's why I'm thankful you kept going... Now it is likely you actually changed something for the better
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.
> BGP is the protocol that gives the Internet its shape, and you can’t directly speak it yourself.
It's actually surprisingly easy to get an ASN for yourself and speak BGP. If you find building something like this tool interesting, you should give it a try. I wrote an introduction of sorts earlier (https://qt.ax/asn) if that interests you.
The important thing here is awareness and helping anyone affected, not trying to get Framework fined for a tiny sum.