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Comment by dfdz | Hacker News Reader

I really like the idea of the Framework laptop, but at the same time it is hard to imagine the time scales involved

My personal experience is that a thinkpad laptop lasts 6 years if you replace the keyboard and battery. I am sure that the same is true for other brands.

After 6 years, my old laptop started having other issues with the screen, and ssd. Everything about the laptop was out of date, low resolution screen, comparatively slow processor, bad webcam, not a lot of memory, keyboard started having issues. So it made sense to buy a new laptop.

I am having trouble imaging how things would be different with a Framework laptop. What is the imagined life span of this laptop?

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> After 6 years, my old laptop starting having other issues with the screen, and ssd. Everything about the laptop was out of date, low resolution screen, comparatively slow processor, bad webcam, not a lot of memory, keyboard started having issues. So it make sense to buy a new laptop.

These are all things you can upgrade or replace as time goes on, instead of waiting 6 years or less to replace them all.

Right now, if you want to upgrade even just the memory in many laptops, you need to buy a whole separate machine to do so. I have a laptop that's about 6 years old. A couple of years after first buying it, I would have benefited from a RAM upgrade and not much else. I didn't do the upgrade because I didn't want to buy another machine just for more memory. I would have had a better experience during those 6 years if I had a Framework laptop that I could upgrade the memory in after only 2 years.

That is a good point, which I did not think about.

I definitely could believe that the life span of a Framework laptop could be slightly longer (say 8-9 years) and that adding some incremental upgrades could make it a better overall experience

I've been at the point for the last 8 years where I replace my daily driver about every 9 months. That said if I had to I could probably go 2 years before I'd start having real problems with whatever I'm currently using. The idea of just keeping the same framework and just upgrading the mainboard, etc, every 12 months or so sounds pretty awesome.

YMMV quite a bit depending on OS, usage, etc. I have a 6 yr old Thinkpad (which btw was gonna replace with a framework and didn’t).

It’s plugged in 99% of time, so battery health is not a problem. I think it lasts 2 hours now. I’ve nodded the charging port to USB-C so I can keep it running on an external battery in rare occasions when I need to.

It has 16GB of RAM which is still plenty on Linux and with the kind of apps I run and my dev setup. But when time comes that I need more, I’m gonna trade some CPU cycles and compress the memory and get maybe several more GBs out of it. SSD is infinitely upgradable as it’s a 2.5” drive, so is the WiFi and it also has a M2 slot which I can use for another SSD or a LTE modem.

Linux support is perfect. With cheap cloud computing, I don’t think I’ll update the laptop for next several years.

I have plenty of ThinkPads and agree with almost everything.

The WiFi is a problem though, because Lenovo whitelists only certain cards in the BIOS and will not boot if you upgrade the card. There are tools to disable this but YMMV.

The T450 series got rid of that, and they are just turning 6 years old. He may have one of those.

Many people (think kids, parents with toddlers, etc.) damage their screen or keyboardb or trackpad and all of those are replaceable for a fairly low price and without tons of glue, etc. I dont have the link handy but search for the framework marketplace for prices.

I've been using a 2015 macbook pro for 6 years or more now. Still works great, to be honest it works so well I actually can't justify upgrading to a framework laptop running Linux.

Maybe when Apple abandons it for macOS upgrades in a year or two I'll give up on it.

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