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Comment by topaz0 | Hacker News Reader

My memory is more like 20% premium for the practical options that I could find on the market at the time (spring 2024). But ymmv depending what specs you actually care about. If the off the shelf thinkpads or whatever actually match the set of specs you want, then they will be cheaper than the equally-speced framework by a bigger margin. Also worth noting that there have been a lot of sales on the framework end, so that could give different perceptions depending on timing. Oh, and also I'm talking about buying the memory and SSD elsewhere, not as part of the kit. That was a chunk of savings too.

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Digging around with Wayback Machine, a DIY Ryzen 7840 (I wrote 8840 incorrectly earlier) with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows Home, a power adapter, and four basic expansion cards would have been 1768 EUR in 1H 2024.

Instead, I got an ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED with those specs (albeit a slightly bigger better screen) for exactly 1000 EUR in a local shop.

Now, yes, I could remove the Windows cost (ahem), not pay for a charger, and save a little buying RAM and an SSD from elsewhere, but then it's not remotely an apples-to-apples comparison.

But that's exactly the point: removing the charger, windows and buying ram elsewhere is exactly the comparison that makes sense if you have a good charger, don't run windows, and don't mind your ram coming on a different day of the week. Ymmv as I said.

If you want to quibble with words, you're right that I could have hedged more in my original comment, e.g. "cost can be competitive depending what exactly you are looking for". I'm not denying your experience for what you wanted, but for what I wanted, the costs were pretty close.

I’m really not just trying to be argumentative, but it’s more than quibbling with words.

Pirate Windows and using an existing charger saves ~€200. You can shave a little more sourcing your own RAM and SSD but probably not huge amounts, from memory at the time.

So the comparison becomes something like “if you spend your time and energy sourcing multiple components, and don’t mind pirating your OS, and have an old charger to use, you can maybe reduce the premium you pay for a Framework to 30-50%”.

As a Linux user I didn't have to pirate anything, just one more way we are different. I also got one tier down in CPU from the one you considered, not surprised if it was a lower markup for that one. I could probably find the receipts for ram and SSD to prove my numbers make sense for me, but isn't that all profoundly uninteresting?

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