I’ve had a FrameWork Laptop for a while now. It’s a nice little thing don’t get me wrong. But I haven’t used it in a bit, nor have I have been keeping in up with the company… What happened.

A “Modular” Desktop

So, a couple months ago, FrameWork announced a new desktop product. Interesting. FrameWork has made some crazy modular/repairable laptops, what have they brought to the table here? A non upgradeable desktop.

Yeah, a desktop with non upgradable RAM, and CPU… Excuse me‽ I thought FrameWork was all over upgradable/repairable computers. Why is the RAM soldered to the board… Because the CPU requires it.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I have nothing really against soldered RAM. Hell, I’m typing this on my M1 MacBook Pro, a machine with soldered RAM. But, it’s a laptop, not a desktop.

A number of people are pointing out online, that FrameWork tried to work with AMD, to get socketed RAM working on this CPU. But the CAMM2 connector was messing with the signal integrity. So they had to solder it. I have a solution. Use a different CPU.

So why not. Why not use a CPU that would let FrameWork make a modular product. You know, they’re whole thing? Money AI. But only a little. Their announcement actually showed four of them in a cluster, for heavy AI workloads.

Oh, that modularity I poked at in the heading. You can put two of their IO modules in the front.

What happened to you Framework.