Framework won’t be just a laptop company anymore

Anything with over 100WH batteries would need airline approval before you can fly with it. This is why laptop makers rarely exceed this limit.

https://www.faa.gov/hazmat/packsafe/portable-electronic-devices-with-batteries

It does add something by way of weight, but I just can't believe that the entire market out there honestly wants to have shorter laptop battery life over a slightly-heavier laptop. I mean, sure, all else held equal, I'd take a lighter laptop. And there's some size where I don't want a larger battery -- like, I don't want a Tesla Powerwall glued to the underside of my laptop. But at 100Wh, the current airline limit? Hell, yes, I sure as heck would rather have the longer battery lifetime.

And let's even say that someone is completely fine with their existing laptop battery lifetime -- like, they usually use their laptop plugged in, only have short stints away from a plug, like a conference room. Then you still can trade battery capacity for other desirable things. Stick a brighter screen on. Have a higher refresh rate. Have a more-powerful CPU or GPU and the fans to cool it. Have the capacity to drive external USB devices that may slurp power off the laptop's battery. Restrict the maximum-charge level so that the battery's lifetime is extended -- batteries degrade rather more quickly if fully charged, and a number of devices have settings to permit them to be only partially-charged -- without needing to cut into the capacity for a single charge.

I absolutely understand small-battery, budget laptops existing for people who strongly want the price to be at a minimum. Cut RAM down to a bare minimum, put in as little storage as possible, slash the battery to what's tolerable.

I also understand that there are people who are hell-bent on ultra-light laptops, want everything at all possible stripped out. That's fine too.

But surely there are people who don't fall into one of those two camps.

I just can't believe how hard it is to find 100Wh laptops in 2024. And traditionally, that wasn't the case. You could find plenty of laptops with 100Wh batteries. In the past, some laptop vendors let you choose the size of battery you wanted, and some even had dual batteries, one internal and a hot-swappable battery.

I get that USB PD powerbanks can help alleviate some of the problem, and I'm sure that that has to have been the factor causing laptop vendors to start slashing internal battery sizes, but they also aren't the same thing as an actual internal battery. There's no protocol for them to report their charge, so a laptop can't report life remaining. Theoretically, one could have one pretend to be a UPS rather than a battery, and there are various protocols for those, though OSes don't -- well, Linux doesn't, don't know about other OSes -- treat UPSes as another battery, so you're not gonna get software packages incorporating it into their "time remaining" estimate in the dock, and I'm not aware of any USB powerbanks that actually try to use this route. It's another box and cable to lug around, and another port on the laptop tied up.

Here's the internals of the 13 with a 61Wh battery:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/IMG_0054.jpeg

And here's the 16 with an 85Wh battery:

https://images.prismic.io/frameworkmarketplace/0b001897-9e05-406e-8f50-af54ba76a723_Load+up+on+memory+and+storage.jpg?auto=compress,format

Where would a larger battery fit?

The real answer to your question is to wait 3-4 years for battery technology to get about 20% better (given historical trends of 5-8% improvements per year).

It's not wanted by the market obviously. Most only need their laptop to last from the office on the commute

It's one of the slot in ones though right? so it doesn't really count - it effectively integrated.

I don't even use built-in headphone jacks anymore. I use external DACs with 2.5, 4.4 and quarter inch. Good thing for me that I can get an extra port while others can use a headphone jack still.

two USB ports

I don't know if both could provide the same amount of power, and I'd bet -- given that laptops don't -- that the phone would only be able to charge off one.

USB ports aren't perfectly interchangeable today. If they can't be made to be, I kind of wish that at least USB would have a set of standards for indicating power-in capable ports and ports by wattage capability. Like, reserve one color or symbol or something for one, one for another. Right now, device manufacturers just do whatever and sometimes don't indicate what is what. I mean, yeah, it's great that they're backwards compatible, but when you have ports that don't all behave the same, it'd be nice for it to be immediately-obvious what they do.

Also, while I'm dreaming, I'd like power-pack and battery capacity to be listed in watt-hours rather than amp-hours, given (a) that voltage isn't universally the same and (b) that what people care about is about how long something can be run ("I have an N watt device and an M watt-hour battery...").

I'm pretty sure that a USB hub would work at least on Android, giving you as many ports as you want.

If you don't care about 3.5mm a FairPhone comes pretty close to that description.

I kind of wonder how viable it'd be to make a product that consists of:

• A strong smartphone case, with structurally-strong "dock" connector at the bottom.

• A "dock" -- maybe in a couple different sizes -- that links to this, has a pass-through USB-C hub, and adds stuff like a headphones jack. Maybe stick an integrated powerbank into any free space.

Smartphones don't have standard dimensions at all, resulting in a zillion cases out there, but having the case with a standard "dock" attachment as a separate part would mean that you don't have to build a million variations on the dock.

There are existing "put the smartphone in a dock" products, but they're aimed at putting the phone on a desk, using it like a laptop. I dunno if there's something comparable for just holding it. I haven't seen anything like that.

From a purely-electrical standpoint, USB-C permits for a lot of devices to be added. But physically, on a smartphone, that means carrying other boxes. A "dock" that just extends the height of the phone would avoid that.

If the only thing you want is a headphones jack on a smartphone, I'd probably just get a small USB-C-to-1/8"-TRS adapter and leave it attached to the headphones; they can be pretty small.

Why not just use type c headphones?

I can think of several good reasons to use 1/8" TRS headphones (though as I point out in a lower comment, specifically for smartphones, space is at an extreme premium and I think that the majority of people probably don't want to spend the space on an integrated headphones jack; it'd be better to use a small external adapter there):

But for the general case, not on smartphones, places where I have the space to stick a 1/8" TRS port, I am not very enthusiastic about using USB as an audio port.

• 1/8" TRS is a well-established standard. I mean, pretty much every device can handle it. USB for audio is in a number of places, but not even close to the level of 1/8" TRS.

• 1/8" TRS has been around forever. It's electrically-compatible with 1/4" TRS, which has been around even longer.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phone_connector_(audio)

  The original 1⁄4 inch (6.35 mm) version descends from as early as 1877 in Boston when the first telephone switchboard was installed[9] or 1878, when an early switchboard was used for the first commercial manual telephone exchange[10][11] in New Haven created by George W. Coy.

  USB is a young pup and already, physical USB-A ports are being phased out in favor of USB-C ports. I very much doubt that USB-C is going to be around ~150 years down the road the way that TRS has been. I can use a pair of headphones from the 1970s just fine with the latest device, and I can use an elderly radio from the 1970s with a new pair of headphones.

• USB is a lot more complicated than 1/8" TRS. It's got sleep states, trees, power consumption negotiation. That's all room for things to break in interesting ways. I have, for example, a USB hygrometer/thermometer that sporadically triggers kernel errors on my computer when plugged in. I have a mouse that, for some reason, when plugged into a USB hub, uses a lower polling rate if plugged in when the system boots up (albeit not if unplugged and replugged). I have a USB audio DAC/ADC that decided to cut out the other day, for God knows what reason, until it was restarted. My last computer's motherboard had a USB controller that supported a more-limited-than-required-by-protocol-USB tree size and had random devices not work if a sufficient number of devices were plugged in. None of this exists with 1/8" TRS.

• Security. Same idea. I've got enough attack vectors into my devices as-is. People have definitely attacked bugs in USB stacks before; IIRC, that's historically been part of how they attacked DRM on some consoles. 1/8" TRS is a dumb protocol, but that makes it safe. Same issue with USB for charging, though at least there you can get a "power-only" cable. You can't have an "audio-only" cable.

• USB sticks the DAC on the headphones. Why? Headphones don't last that long; they're disposable items. Put the non-disposable bits where they won't die. A DAC can last pretty much forever. I have gone through many headphones over the years. I have never had a sound card or on-motherboard DAC or dedicated DAC die. The closest I came was once ripping the 1/8" TRS output on a DAC loose, which I could solder back into place. I have two USB-to-1/8"-TRS DAC/ADCs sitting on the shelf by my desk. They'll probably be perfectly good twenty years from now.

• Sampling rate issues. Can't come up on TRS, because the DAC/ADC is on the device side. One of my USB DACs (this intended for professional audio) only supports a fixed sampling rate, the one at which it does internal processing; that makes sense, as a pro doesn't want to have some device introducing resampling into their audio chain. Another, consumer one, can't support a sampling rate as high as the professional one; it relies on the computer to figure out and do resampling if resampling has to happen above that rate. You can have software that doesn't work with a given pair of USB headphones because it doesn't like the headphone DAC's supported sampling rates; I've seen that before. If I have a pair of 1/8" TRS headphones, they work everywhere. It doesn't matter whether whether they're new or old or intended for the professional market or consumer market. Plug 'em in, they work.

• I have one wired audio-emitting device -- a pair of elderly Logitech USB speakers, not headphones -- that has an integrated DAC. For some reason, the engineers who did that appear to have decided to make the volume control on that linear in electrical power rather than in perceptual loudness, which means that the vast majority of the volume scale does very little and there's a tiny range that has a large impact. I don't want to deal with that kind of craziness on some cheap pair of headphones.

• Latency. 1/8" TRS devices normally -- unless you're intentionally building something into the system -- have zero latency, because the DAC on the device is directly electrically driving the membrane on the speaker. Every time one sticks higher-level protocols in, it's an opportunity for some bright-eyed, bushy-tailed engineer to start cramming more shit into the pipeline that adds latency. TVs are a great example of this -- they used to have no latency, and then someone figured out that they could show ads and do other processing on the feed and that that'd be easier if they had a buffer of some video frames, and so they started inducing latency, unlike a computer monitor. Now you have "gaming modes" on TVs that try to mitigate the problem which had never originally been an actual issue with dumb TVs.

  There's an entirely-separate world of audio software and hardware for professionals who want to do real-time audio processing (on Linux, JACK; I have a USB ADC and some audio cards that permit direct passthrough of input audio to output) to try to avoid all the points in the pipeline that various consumer audio devices and software have inserted latency.

  That doesn't matter for some uses, like an MP3 player. It's not the end of the world for a phone call. But it's really obnoxious for some uses. With 1/8" TRS, I have no latency. With USB, I have God-knows-what latency.

• Durability. 1/8" TRS is more-rugged than USB-C. I've damaged both before by pulling on cables at right angles, but micro-USB, mini-USB, and USB-C are more-fragile. That being said, I will give USB this: the damage tends to be worse on the cable side, as the plug is flimsy and will tend to give out before the socket on the device, whereas with TRS you can more-readily mess up the device. I would be open to the idea that having a standard magnetic breakaway connector would be more sane than either 1/8" TRS or any existing USB standard.

There are only three decent reasons that I can see to use USB headphones for the general case (like, not the extreme-space-constraint situation that smartphones see):

• It provides power. Some people want active noise cancellation on their headsets. If you want to do ANC, you're gonna need power one way or another. 1/8" TRS doesn't have a standard for that (with XLR, for condenser mics, there's a 48 volt phantom power convention that was added, but TRS doesn't have it). AFAICT, devices that do this with a 1/8" TRS interface either rely on a second USB wire for power or use batteries.

• When initially plugging in a 1/8" TRS plug, one shorts connectors and it can make a loud noise on the speaker membrane. Not an issue with USB, because the speaker membrane isn't in that pipeline.

• 1/8" TRS doesn't specify a single impedance everywhere. You can get very-high-impedance headphones that a DAC with limited output power can't drive at a reasonable volume, even with the volume all the way up. That isn't usually an issue for most people, but USB avoids the issue.

EDIT: Apparently I lied on the phantom power argument for using USB; according to WP, there are 1/8" TRS devices that do take phantom power (or something comparable; sounds like it's not, strictly-speaking, "phantom power"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_power

Plug-in-power (PiP) is the low-current 3–5 V supply provided at the microphone jack of some consumer equipment, such as portable recorders and computer sound cards. It is also defined in IEC 61938.[16] It is unlike phantom power since it is an unbalanced interface with a low voltage (around +5 volts) connected to the signal conductor with return through the sleeve; the DC power is in common with the audio signal from the microphone. A capacitor is used to block the DC from subsequent audio frequency circuits. It is often used for powering electret microphones, which will not function without power. It is suitable only for powering microphones specifically designed for use with this type of power supply. Damage may result if these microphones are connected to true (48 V) phantom power through a 3.5 mm to XLR adapter that connects the XLR shield to the 3.5 mm sleeve.[17] Plug-in-power is covered by Japanese standard CP-1203A:2007.[18]

Just replace my perfectly good $200 headphones that work in my (old) phone, my Switch, my 3DS, my laptop, my iPod, and my work phone.

It's so simple!

Seriously, even if you don't use it, why are you so against others having the choice? The headphone *jack was the standard for decades for a reason. If my phone is low on power, I'd like to be able to charge it without disconnecting my music/podcasts...

At the time, there weren’t really many good options for replacement devices.

Using the charging port means listening to music and charging at the same time wasn’t possible.

Now we have split-cable dongles for power banks, and we have wireless charging when possible. It’s better but it’s not great; both have downsides, and accessories are more $.

Do they make type C headphones with a powerbank in them? Do I want a lithium battery that large on my head?

There aren’t many upsides for the consumer or the environment. Still seems to me like this isn’t even a lateral move. Internal components have gotten smaller and more efficient since, so that space could be reclaimed. I really don’t need my phone to be that thin, a phono jack next to the charging port would be just fine. The only real downside might be waterproofing but if you can make it work for the type C port…

You can get laptops that have 5G radios that you can use for data with Linux.

As I understand it, there's no support for voice/SMSes at the radio level, but in theory, if you were willing to tolerate it and your cell service provider offers support, you could do WiFi calling.

Could also get service from a random other VoIP provider, use that over the data connection.

Probably not as battery-efficient, requires more of the stack to be awake to be listening for incoming calls.

I think that a larger downside is that Android software is designed for a touch screen and low power usage and low data usage across the board, and GNU/Linux software generally isn't.

We can say that for any kind of drivers needed to run a mobile phone.\ Manufacturers of components are less and less providing any documentation, just throw a binary blob and say "put it in your Android build".

They didn't say Linux phone though, it could still be android with a custom ROM.

Eh, Pinephone and Librem 5 made it work, but there's still a fair amount of software limitations here, and I didn't think Framework should be a software company. But the radios themselves probably aren't the blocker you make them out to be.

Why Chromebook?

Chromebook makes sense. They could also do full on Linux. Star labs has a tablet coming out, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel for software (I assume, I haven't tried touchscreen Linux).

https://us.starlabs.systems/products/starlite

You can run the mainboard outside of the chais in an external enclosure.

Pine64 has a laptop that's essentially that. The SBC inside could pretty easily be swapped.

I mean, what is the difference between the current SoC and the soldered CPU? Sure you can save on upgrading RAM, but then what else? Especially if the SoC has PCIe. They can make a daughter board for the SoC to make it simpler to upgrade if they want, alà pi compute module.

I don't see what's non-modular about ARM. Most of the stuff that's user-serviceable on a Framework laptop would be serviceable with ARM:

• ports are all USB-C
• drives are NVMe, SATA, or PCIe - Pine64 has boards with each (IIRC)
• GPU is PCIe - again, Pine64 has that on their RockPro64

The only difference is RAM, and theoretically they could design a socketable SOC to reuse existing boards (not sure what happened to Project Skybridge). The only difference is RAM, at least for the user, and I really don't think that'll be a deal-breaker. Modern x86 chips are already essentially SOCs anyway...

Kinky.

I swear I'll start a startup producing 32.35 fleshlights

If it doesn't have both balanced and unbalanced jacks I swear there's going to be blood.

Ah, I guess they did - thanks!

I want to use it programming so I don't get eye strain from staring at a screen all day, and the display is mostly white text on a black background anyway.

Obviously I invert that on an e-ink display. It's white on black is to reduce the amount of white light that I get blasted with. When you're programming most of the screen is blank because each individual line of code isn't really that long in most cases it'll be shorter than in English sentence.

Money talks.

When the owners of a private company are offered millions more than they'll likely make over the nest ten years, the odds of selling are very high.

Look at all the software devs that gets bought.

Also, Dell buying someone doesn't mean that the product stops being made. Dell bought Alienware and still makes devices for that market segment under the Alienware brand, including laptops. Lenovo bought the Thinkpad laptop line from IBM and still makes those.

More likely not.

Microsoft is well known for buying software companies to shut them down.

Foldershare was a product in 2005 that enabled you to share windows folders across the internet just like sharing across a LAN. MS bought them.

Same with Ubiboot - it enabled you to move a windows install from one machine to any other hardware - on boot it would reconfigure the drivers. Worked brilliantly.

I've used countless products over the years which no longer exist after they were acquired by MS. Things which don't even exist within MS offerings. Clearly bought to be shut down.