Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @Khrys@mamot.fr (French speaking)
The gist of the issue raised by OP is that framework sponsors and promotes projects lead by known toxic and racists people (DHH among them).
I agree with the point made by the OP :
The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.
I’m disappointed in framework’s answer so far
This is unfortunate for sure. I want to give them a few days to respond for real, it’s always possible they just didn’t know about the issues here, but even in that thread they’re brushing it off as though it doesn’t matter. I’m not really sure what they get out of donating to these projects other than potential PR, anyway.
On a personal level I’ve recommended their laptops to people who have later bought them, and I was even looking at buying one myself to replace my aging macbook, but I don’t think I can do that anymore while this is unaddressed.
I wonder a bit about how this leaves framework as a company, too. They were always the brand people went to because of their stance on the politics of repairability and environmentalism. If they don’t have the politics on their side anymore, their laptops aren’t a great value proposition compared to other laptops. Sure, you can upgrade a framework, but if it costs twice as much as a similar laptop you’d have to upgrade the internals twice before you’ve saved any money.
I think it’s more about repair ability than it is about upgrading. At some point you’re going to end up with hardware that needs a different motherboard and then you might as well just replace the whole thing. There really isn’t anything that can be done about that.
To be honest I kind of think framework go a bit far on the modularity of the device, it’s a nice to have but really I’d be perfectly fine with a laptop that just has a replaceable keyboard, screen and battery, as those pretty much exclusively tend to be the parts that go wrong. Hell you could strip it down even further and just have an easily replaceable battery and it would probably be fine for 90% of people.
Hell no, I love that I can just upgrade to a better Mainboard in a couple years
Why would I also ditch all the other components because of a CPU change?
I mean, there’s no real reason laptops shouldn’t like any desktop computer with parts that can be swapped out. Maybe when laptops were first coming on the market with a difficult form factor to work with, but it’s been long enough that modularity should be easy and the default.
If you can swap out tiny little SIM cards in a phone, you should be able to slot in standardized, smaller form-factor components like RAM, SSDs, etc.
And by the way, people can and do swap out motherboards all the time for desktops. There is no good reason to need to buy all new components all the time.