Buying one of these Pi knockoffs taught me one thing, software support is the key to raspberry pi’s success.
Whenever I would have a problem, and it was more often than not, I would search for a solution and come across something that worked for rpi that I could try to port across.
Double the hardware spec matters little if you can’t get the software to even compile
Conferences are huge. We’ve done 5 tradeshow demos for our clients in the last 10 months.
I agree with you about the zero sum, once you’ve seen the first hyper personalised email that says they really like your commitment to x, the rest are all the same.
Was just walking past a construction site and heard some of their banter. Didn’t realise the common man could debate the benefits of an LPU over GPGPU so eloquently. One of them even compared SRAM vs DRAM as being like a cheetah vs an injured antelope ;)
I think you’ve brought a really interesting point up. A lot of these laptops are the way they are because miniaturisation. Framework trades that off. But for some, this tradeoff isn’t in the right spot.
The challenge for framework is to build a modern laptop, that doesn’t have these tradeoffs. Which is an impossible challenge, hence why all of the other manufacturers ditched it. (That and repairability being bad for business)
So, a framework laptop, that’s as light, thin and fast as a mbp, while being a comparable price and being able to pull tabs to swap ram. The better their engineering, the closer they get to this and the more customers they can please.
I think what’s lost here is when the framework project was launched, all the companies were moving to SoC designs and reliability was unknown.
Replacing a stick of ram is still much cheaper than buying a whole new MacBook, but these systems seem to be reliable enough that ram failures aren’t front of mind. Same for SSDs.
The current benefit for a Framework is that you can swap out the entire inner/guts without being an expert and everything still works together. Most of the laptops I have provide 2 SO-DIMM slots and a slot for either NVME or SATA for storage.
So for me, there is little value in that in most scenarios. There are a few laptop chassis that I am very fond of and have wished I could "use that chassis with that hardware", but even then I haven't seen Framework chassis designs that give me that impression. I'm not saying they're crappy, but I'm thinking of different types of brushed metal, magnesium alloy stuff, etc.
It makes me wonder who their audience is if they are targeting users that will pay a premium for an upgradable system, but are afraid of modifying the guts of the computer.
Replaceable GPU and CPU is the big draw draw for me. Heck, the config nature of the shop also means I can chop off buying ram and memory instead of haggling with the store, since I have quite a few spare sticks lying around.
On my experience, every time I’ve been in the situation of looking for more capacity because the software requirements have gone up, I’m 1-2 generations of DDR behind and it doesn’t really make sense to do the upgrade anyway.
How often are you actually going to do that though? My desktop from 12 years ago has 16GB of RAM and Apple only just upgraded their base specs to 16GB.
Ok granted my new desktops have 128GB, but that's massive overkill so I can have like 12 VSCode's open. For normal people 16GB has been the sensible amount for at least a decade.
I tend to agree. But some people at least want the option. I would also say only in 2025 has that shifted for me as well. I've been perfectly fine with 16gb of ram for at least a decade, but local LLMs have me wanting for more.
Good logging is critical and actually having the logs turned on in production. No point writing logs if you silence them.
My company now has a log aggregator that scans the logs for errors, when it finds one, creates a Trello card, uses opus to fix the issue and then propose a PR against the card.
These then get reviewed, finished if tweaks are necessary and merged if appropriate.
I know, what’s so special about email? The common thing between your accounts, that the company that has a lot of chat history is allowing you not to change?
They're getting slaughtered by the more focused Anthropic team who decided they will have the best coding model.
Given how bad things have been going recently (5.2 chat bombing and being behind, opus being the code GOAT, G team dominating media, Grok existing and meta / the Chinese dominating opensource), they should niche to the general purpose llm before that's all they're left with by market forces.
I'm still pretty sour they didn't have the vision at the time to build an ecosystem around them and instead went for those building the ecosystem on them.
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