I’m so out of touch with electronic prices. All my shit are either bought used or given to me as hand me downs. So when I see laptops going for $1000+ and it looks like the end user is just a pencil pusher punching numbers into excel, I get a bit of whiplash

I bought a 13 recently and I love it. There's really only a slight premium when you look at comparable laptops in terms of size/weight, screen quality, etc... but that premium is exactly why it's feasible. They can sell laptops for $600 because they know you're going to buy a brand new one in a few years. With Framework you can replace whatever you need to so long term maintenance becomes less expensive.

Keep in mind 2000s laptops were super thick and very annoying to disassemble.

Something like nvidia mxm for cpu and gpu would be pretty pog.

But yea the premium on Framework stuff right now compared to less repairable laptops is too high. Maybe with increased production they could get better like how Fairphone did.

Old Fairphones were super mid and costly. Now it's got decent socs and Oled displays. Though you can still see some enshittificiation seeping through with removal of headphone jack to sell their own earbuds. Still, pretty alright.

I agree, they are way too expensive to be even considered as a laptop. Generally for me, laptops should be $600 or less, and 600 is a generous limit. I don't feel comfortable carrying such an expensive machine around with me. I read a quote from a framework laptop video that framework doesn't produce the best laptops in the market, but they are the best laptop producers. Maybe that's true, but it's going to be a good couple of years (probably a decade) before these machines get to a comfortable consumer price range.

It's also a large part of my complaint against manufacturers like System76 and Tuxedo whose laptops also suffer from being way too expensive.

Framework's laptop design revolves around this modularity and advertises it as such.

However, other laptop manufacturers have done this somewhat. I have an HP pavilion laptop that I motherboard swapped because the original one had some issues, so I replaced it with an 8th gen i7 motherboard. It was a noticable improvement over the 7th gen i5 motherboard that it came with originally, but it ran really hot. (yes I had the correct cooler, it just ran really hot even with the i5 and I couldn't get it to undervolt).

That laptop used a lot of ribbon cables and subboards. Even the power button and charger were on seperate boards which was nice. Even the newer pavilions use that layout. I plan on upgrading my current pavilion laptop to an Ryzen 7 5825u board as the current i5 is not really working out for me. It's cheaper than buying a new laptop.

I do really like what framework is doing and I do plan on purchasing one of the 16 in models once I get a decent job and when my laptop either breaks and I cannot fix it or I need something faster.

Edit: ideally a desktop would be better for my usecase but due to my current living conditions and requirements of a device, a decently powerful laptop that isn't super heavy is a better choice

There are Clevo laptops (I think Clevo basically manufactures stuff that is whitelabel and sold by someone else) that have card slots for GPUs, but I think they're not a standard form factor. That's most likely what you'd find instead of a socket, less because of space concerns (because the GPU has a bunch of required hardware that has to go somewhere either way and the port is not that big by comparison), and more for reducing latency for the memory. Look up a picture of an A100/H100 SXM, that's essentially as space efficient as a socketable GPU can get. And those use HBM which is currently way too expensive and hard to manufacture to go in any consumer GPU, so there needs to be space for the VRAM which takes up nearly as much space as all of that power infrastructure.