Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors. Turning a 1 L/min sink off for the 20 seconds of washing your hands doesn't matter when the farmer down the road is growing row crops in a desert with center-pivot irrigation system.
But other times, like this? It's absolutely a valid approach. If a high-profile open laptop like this can succeed - which is helped at this scale by individual purchases - maybe some bigger players will take notice.
1 L/min is 1 L/min, and it's not a great sacrifice to turn off a faucet when you don't need it. So even if the farmer is not judiciously using water, it doesn't mean you shouldn't.
I wasn't suggesting people shouldn't make that particular 'sacrifice', I suppose the analogy could be better. My point was that individual action may be neither necessary nor sufficient to prevent the bad outcome from happening: agriculture could cause aquifer depletion even if suburban houses used no water at all, while without agricultural use, suburban houses could be incredibly wasteful and the aquifer might be fine.
In this case, the 'bad outcome' is crummy thin-and-light disposable laptops with insufficient numbers of obsolete ports, proprietary drivers, bad thermals, and closed operating systems, and no options for power users who want good laptops. It has felt to me, for a long time, that Apple, Dell, Lenovo, HP etc. have been pressing further in this direction. My 'boycott' of these products is not heard in any of their boardrooms or design committees; the strategy of buying business' discontinued Thinkpads on eBay works for now but does not work long-term.
A successful Framework laptop might make some waves. Somewhere in some conference room, someone will float the proposal that their new mobile workstation should obviously save $0.25 per unit by gluing in the battery, this would be a data point to say that some people who might be making decisions like this would actually like a laptop that includes a screwdriver.
You should take a look at Ahmdal's law. "Every little bit helps" type thinking is a detriment to the fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always. This is a rule of optimisation that can be extended for most other things.
Ahmdal's law lets you calculate the theoretical speedup of a job given how parallelize-able it is. I don't see how that is applicable here.
If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument. But to say that people _shouldn't_ conserve resources just because they aren't the largest consumer of the given resource is ridiculous. Me being conscientious of how much water I waste from my faucet doesn't slow progress in dealing with the larger water wasters. There is no reason not to do it.
> fixing of most problems that should be tackled on the biggest contributing factors first, always
This only applies if you can only fix one factor at a time. That is never the case in real world, complex, societal issues. Society is not a computer science puzzle.
> If the government was spending millions of dollars on ad campaigns to try to get people to use their faucet less, but they were not dealing with wasteful farmers, you may have an argument.
I mean.. that doesn't seem very far off from the truth?
While that is true in the theoretical, it ignores human psychology. For example the Debt Snowball method has been so widely successful for ignoring precisely this black&white pragmatism.
Not an entirely relevant example. The point remains: if you want the market to provide a kind of product you want, you have to cough up the bucks for it.
I think your comment is misleading. What was "encouraged" during the Cape Town water crisis was not "small scale efforts". There were details like forbidding hand-washing in some places (replaced by hand sanitizers), but there were also important changes. For example, they introduced a punitive water price for big consumers.
Like the OP, I think one should analyze the problem before opting for the "obvious" solution. I did so with water a few years ago. IIRC, for individuals the biggest share is for showers, then toilet. These two account for two thirds of standard use.
If you encourage people to turn off the sink more often, you may gain 20%... of 5% of their average water needs, so 1% overall. If they take fewer showers, each with less water, they easily can halve their consumption, so a gain of more than 20% overall.
A water crisis is almost always a case of using slightly more water than is available, so you can usually address one by putting the burden on whichever consumers are least able to fight back, even if they are least responsible for the crisis.
> Sometimes 'funding the change you want to see' is merely to appease your own conscience; some real problems are systemic or caused by other actors.
Sure. But politics of change happens only when an idea spreads. This happens only by changing your own attitudes first, and then trying to advocate it to others in your social circle. The more you believe in an idea, and personify it by adopting it, the easier it is for others to believe you and consider it.
This is what Gandhi once said:
> “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”
(This is what is drummed down to the quote - "Be the change you want to see in this world".)
Gandhi was a brilliant politician and this advise is psychologically quite profound - a lot of pessimism, frustration and anxiety that we experience is because we often focus on things that are beyond our sphere of control.
(Gandhi was not the only politician to have this idea. Muhammad, whom the muslims consider their Prophet, also advocated similar ideas in Islam and this is apparent on Islam's dictates on charity. Muslims in my social circle are literally taught that "charity begins at home". Apart from the poor and the needy, they are told to keep a major portion aside and first enquire within the family if anyone is in need of financial help, and then expand their search to include friends and acquaintances. That's socialism and distribution of wealth within a family / social circle, and the effects of that can be much more profound.)
I can't see this succeeding when the laptop I have to assemble myself costs more than a prebuilt laptop with much better specs. I love the idea too, but the price seems a little outrageous.
I have a Purism laptop, over 2 years old now so out of warranty. The USB system had a problem last month. Purism shipped me a new motherboard at cost within a few days. I happily swapped out the old motherboard (a bit fiddly in places, but perfectly straightforward). Laptop is fine, I'm typing this on it now.
I've had problems with Dells before - if it's out of warranty then tough, nothing we can do. I had a screen fail on my 2014 Macbook - luckily in warranty so I got a new screen, but it took a week for them to do it.
And, of course, I can upgrade the memory and/or drive any time I like - they're easily accessible and stock parts that I can buy from anywhere.
I think the trade-off on price for this repairability is well worth it. If I'd bought a Dell instead of a Purism I'd be SOL and looking at the cost of a whole new laptop now.
Yes. And also wouldn't pricing get better over time? I think the GP is funding it knowing full well it's expensive for now - that's the point of taking the risk.
That's the downside of such integrated components. The upside is cheaper manufacturing, cheaper less assembly, less power draw, and less physical space.
> I can't see this succeeding when the laptop I have to assemble myself costs more than a prebuilt laptop with much better specs.
I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP. Or laptops made out of cheap bendy plastic with the latest CPUs.
Ergonomics matter, build quality matters, and for some the ability to adapt and upgrade is also part of the spec.
> I mean, if all that mattered were specs, we would all be running desktops at full desktop-class TDP.
As someone doing just that (I do 99% of my work on my desktop machine), to this day I don't understand folks doing heavy development work on a laptop. If you need portability, remote into a desktop class machine. Sure there are times when you just can't (airplane, or camping in the middle of nowhere, etc) but those times are exceedingly rare.
Those times are less rare than you'd think. I've been in plenty of situations where I've needed to develop something in an environment with sketchy/nonexistent network access. Not to mention that even in ideal conditions you're now maintaining two separate machines instead of one, and not to mention that if you're doing all your development over VNC or RDP or something you're now introducing some rather annoying latency between your fingers and your eyes.
Having done development work by remoting into another machine (specifically, RDPing into a "dev" server to use vendor-specific IDEs/tooling), I can't say it was an even remotely pleasant experience. I would've sooner preferred doing that work directly on my own machine, or at the very least in a VM if a specific OS and configuration is necessary.
A lot of people don't work completely from a terminal, and remote-desktop can be a pretty mixed experience. Also, this way companies don't have to issue each person two different devices (and have IT manage twice as many devices, with two different form-factors).
"Remote into a desktop"? That sounds like a horrible experience to me. I've never understood why anybody would remote control a pc for anything. If you need to code on the road, just code directly on whatever device you were going to use to remote control from. How does remote controlling some other computer make this computer's experience better? You still are stuck with this keyboard, this trackpad, this display, etc.
Based on your comments, you've never had the opportunity/need to do so. I have and I can attest that I would much rather remote into a powerful desktop PC to write code than use a mobile processor.
Maybe the software you build and its dev tooling allows you t to be effective with a mobile processor, but for my needs it's not good enough.
If Framework succeeds, then that upfront cost would eventually pay for itself as you perpetually upgrade the hardware rather than buy an entirely new laptop every time you want e.g. more RAM. Not to mention that as this catches on and Framework finds its footing, I'd fully expect the prices to come down with better economies of scale.
If we look at a maxed out dell xps 13 with ubuntu, the cost is $1,909.00 and I can probably squeak out some additional cost with my business account.
If we look at a maxed out M1 Macbook Air it's $2,049.00 with 2TB of drive space.
The maxed out frame.work costs $1,917.00 with a 100 dollar deposit and that doesn't have a drive in because I don't trust WD with my data. If we add a 2 TB drive the cost is $2,316.00 or $2,416.00 with deposit.
Granted there are some trade offs. Take for instance the frame.work has more memory, but the dell xps has a 4k screen. I don't see any costs savings here and I still have to open this thing up, source a drive and put it all together which means I'm spending additional money on this.
These comparisons are pretty useless because “maxed-out” means different things for each model. Maxed out M1 has a whopping 16 GB RAM, XPS has 32 GB, and Framework has 64 GB.
Never mind that it doesn’t even seem you actually “maxed-out” either because I just made a XPS 13 Developer that costs US$2,459. So now you’re just comparing arbitrarily different specs.
Well, the price of parts of the DIY edition are really comparable to market price.
Price is not that much higher if the promise to be able to keep upgraded is fulfilled, I totally can see this laptop being used (and upgraded) for at least a decade.
There is literally nothing on the market that is equivalent to the PC tower you upgrade through years.
And I truly love that they made the choice to use USB-C instead of proprietary connectors for the modules. It means that if the market really exists, we can hope for third party components.
It might still end up cheaper if you can say, buy less RAM today then upgrade in future when it's cheaper rather than needing to max it out today to future proof because it's soldered on.
So FWIW, I got an XPS 13 9310 at the end of June for $1799 (marked down $200 because of a Costco special) that had an 1185G7, 32GB of RAM, 4K screen, 1TB hard drive. I also configured an almost identical DIY Framework (which will hopefully arrive today) with a bunch of extra modules (Dell just has two USB-C ports and a micro-SD). The drive-out price on the Costco (with tax, which is 10.25% in Seattle) was $1940.38.
The drive out cost on my Framework, which has a better network card, faster RAM (though the Dell RAM is soldered so it is better for battery), an SN850 SSD (I trust WD for the high-end gen4 SSDs), and better port options, was $2032.00. I could have shaved off more than $100 if I chose a different port selection (I got 8 total modules) and didn't get the AC adapter and I could have saved further money if I had chosen the SN759 and the non VPro WiFi adapter (which I probably should have in retrospect)
For $90 extra, I get something repairable, something that that will let me upgrade to 64GB of RAM (32GB is the max on the XPS 13), and something more versatile from a port perspective.
Framework didn't charge tax (that will change, I'm sure as soon as they sell the required amount in various states), but even if we account for that, that would leave us at $2240.38. I'm personally willing to pay a 10% penalty for having something more repairable and sustainable. (Also need to factor in the cost of a Costco membership
That said -- I just checked Dell's website and the Developer Edition with an i7 (1165G7 or 1185G7), 32GB of RAM, a 1TB SSD and 4K screen is $2159.00 before tax. So that's $80 more than my identically configured Framework, but with a lower quality SSD and WiFi adapter. The Dell has a better screen -- though I prefer the 3:2 aspect ratio of the Framework/Surface/Matebook X Pro).
I understand you CAN get a cheaper laptop, but as someone who will be returning the XPS as soon as the Framework arrives (assuming it is half as good as the reviews have been), I'm looking at something that costs the exact same and is also more sustainable.
edited to correct the price different between the XPS with tax and the Framework without. It is $90 difference vs $70.
Don't forget that you'll need a backpack or something to carry it. And you'll have to unzip the carrying case and put the laptop in or pull the laptop out yourself. And you have to unfold or fold the laptop, too.
This is exactly like the Dell or Lenovo. There's no difference at all. This laptop has not innovated in any way or have any features whatsoever that might distinguish it.
/s
If you don't see value for yourself in the obvious differences of this laptop, fine. But why snipe?
I don't care for the Intel board, so I will wait to see if they can produce an interesting Ryzen card. But that doesn't mean that others should wait.
It's awesome work. They deserve a congratulations.
Many companies use essentially slave labour and pass some of "savings" onto customers. Workers here couldn't live on 3rd world salaries. I would be outraged that those companies continue to exploit people.
I'm willing to take the gamble. Sometimes you have to help fund the change you want to see in the world.