Don't Buy a Framework Laptop. (from a framework laptop owner)

Framework have long been considered "one of the good ones" in the computing space, and their marketing does a really good job of promoting themselves as ethical, reliable, wanting to do right by their customers and making devices intended to last forever. This is far from the truth. As somebody who has actually owned framework hardware (an Ryzen 7640U framework laptop 13) it can tell you: this is a bad company, making bad products, and you should not waste your money on them.

Reason 1. Framework devices are built cheaply

Framework devices, especially for the price, have extremely poor build quality across the board. This one's laptop 13 has a wobbly hinge. all framework 13 laptops have wobbly hinges. (and yes, this is one from after they reworked the hinge because of how wobbly it was, as this problem used to be even worse). If it holds the laptop in certain ways, it actuates the touchpad click. Multiple keys stick occasionally. All of these are minor annoyances, and things it would expect on like, an entry level machine. This laptop cost it £850, despite the fact it supplied its own RAM and storage. To buy it at this spec directly from framework would have cost it over £1000. That's flagship money, for a device that is built like a chromebook. No joke: It has genuinely had better built £200 chromebooks.

Reason 2: Framework devices are unreliable

In the time this one has had its framework 13, it has had multiple issues that have rendered the device entirely inoperable, or massively impeded its functionality. It is not uncommon for framework laptops to just refuse to boot, and require you to disconnect and reconnect the battery to make them work again (this has happened twice to this one's machine in about a year). The USB module system is, honestly, awful, and has lead to this one believing that it had a broken USB port for most of the time it owned the device, when actually it was a broken USB "module" (the dongles that they made holes in the laptop for).

It wanted to get an idea of how common issues were with framework machines, to see if it just had bad luck, so it put out a quick poll on fedi of other framework owners. 44% said that they have had to repair or return their device at least once. Again, this is a company making flagship laptops, sold for upwards of £1000.

Reason 3: Framework's customer support is really, really bad

For background: This one had been having its framework 13 laptop randomly freeze, no matter what OS it was running, for months, and finally decided to contact support about it after isolating every possible thing it could itself and finding that it couldn't repair it itself. Support proceeded to subject it to what it can only describe as an interrogation, asking it to run many, many tests itself, for details including the brand and model of every single USB device it has ever plugged into the machine, to burn weird software to USB keys to run tests for them that it then had to interpret the results of and return, etc etc. It took it weeks of talking to support and running test after test, including ones that rendered its device inoperable during the test, things that needed to open the device to determine, etc. Before support would even offer it anything. This included having to buy new USB devices in order to burn various images to them to collect various bits of data to send to support.

This is, again, not an isolated incident. Multiple respondants to that fedi poll unprompted mentioned finding their customer support highly demanding and mentioned them essentially making the consumer run all the tests and do all the diagnostics themselves that are their job.

This style of customer support may be helpful if you are, say, an expert in all things computing and just need guidance about what to poke to apply your computer-wizard knowledge. But as a consumer, this is extremely unacceptable, at multiple times it felt like it was being grilled to find anything other than the laptop that was at fault, that it was being expected to have expert knowledge of things it has no knowledge of at all, and being made to literally purchase new supporting hardware in order to run diagnostics on its own before they would accept an RMA.

Reason 4: Framework donate money to open fascists

This one is not going to labour this point as this kind of thing is very much an individual ethics thing, but it will link to evidence for you to make your own decision. Framework donates money to projects run by open members of the far right. This might be something you are fine with, but worth flagging.

Anyway, hopefully this was vaguely useful to help you make a tech decision.