The joys of building your own computer

I've been interested in the Framework laptop for a while. I used to build towers, and my favorite part was always reusing parts. The lifecycle was always similar, and, like a Mobius strip, after you built the first one, you could enter the cycle at most any step.

  1. Learn new socket types.
  2. Buy a motherboard and processor.
  3. Reuse your old tower and, hopefully, PSU
  4. Reuse your old hard drive (and optical drive!)
  5. See if you can reuse RAM from last time.
  6. See if integrated graphics are better than recycling your old video card.

If you look closely, you could often, ignoring gaming for now, have a "new" tower for the price of a motherboard and processor because the parts were interchangeable. Increasingly, you'd get a boost for gaming too -- integrated graphics seemed to outpace reasonably priced previous-gen GPUs the last few I bought.

And you could push other upgrades until you felt like paying for them. You could, indpendently of the rest of the box...

  1. Upgrade your video card.
  2. Add RAM.
  3. Upgrade your PSU.

And those investments usually meant your next "mobo & proc" refresh would be that much better.

I do as much of this as I can with laptops. I've upgraded optical drives, RAM, SSDs, even an output port for my PowerBook 150.

But things are getting progressively worse. I was able to upgrade the SSD on my last MacBook Air, but I can upgrade nothing on my M1 now. My latest Thinkpad is an E series in part because the top-of-the-line T had one stick of soldered RAM.

Framework laptop: The price of entry is too darned high

Then I ran into the Framework laptop, which is, minus that the CPU is soldered permanently to the motherboard and there's no dedicated GPU, nearly as modular as those towers I built.

It's cool, but the price of entry is insane, unfortunately. The current price of entry is $1049 with an i5-1240P.

You can DIY for $819... sorta. The DIY model...

  • Doesn't have Windows ($139)
  • Doesn't have memory ($40 to match prebuilt)
  • Doesn't have an SSD ($59 for closest match to prebuilt)
  • Doesn't have a power adapter (doesn't seem to come with prebuilt either?)
  • No "expansion cards" ($36 to match prebuild)

That means to get the same as the prebuilt you've spending $1093. That's $44 more for the privilege of building it yourself.

Worse, there are no creative ways to get in cheaper.

  • There's a refurbished previous gen for $599 listed, but it hasn't been in stock since I've been keeping track.
  • There's a refurb prev gen with i7-1165G7 for $799 -- but for $20 you get a much better box: MUCH faster processor, stronger backplate, and all new components. That's a deal you gotta take.
  • You can put together the parts separately from the marketplace for a "true DIY", but ordering the parts yourself still runs $882 even with a prev gen i5. Again, horrible price vs. new DIY.
    • Insult to injury, you can't get the trackpad or battery this way yet.

Ugh.

I did check for people selling old mainboards, as the previous gen i5 is still an overpriced $350 on Framework's site, but didn't turn up anything. Makes me wonder how many folks have purchased and how many of those have upgraded. I would've expected some supply of used mainboards. If you could bag one for $200, maybe we're making some progress, but there's nothing there or on eBay.

Long-term isn't much better

But now compare your next upgrade. Can we board the tower's Mobius strip of infinite upgrades?

Unfortunately the cheapest 12th gen Intel chip mainboard from Framework is $449. Looks like we've got an issue.

Compare that price to new gaming laptop deals, which aren't perfect dev laptops, but aren't bad either. Here are two deals currently live from SlickDeals:

And both of those have real graphics options. That's bad in that it usually means, as they're gaming laptops, you can't charge via USB-C, the batteries aren't great, maybe the webcam is crap, and the keyboards aren't top notch.

But each of those are hundreds less than a Framework without memory or an SSD. That is, if we pretend that our second round of owning a Framework only runs $450, we're just barely breaking even with buying two gaming laptops. We have to go two rounds of upgrades just to argue we've come out ahead.

That doesn't sound horrible, but at least the extra gaming laptops would give us (potentially) two more RAM sticks and SSDs to reuse down the line -- and/or a used computer we could resell.

Framework is great, reduces ewaste, and would be cheaper to repair if something died, but the Framework simply is not a cost-effective option for your latest-gen laptop, even looking long-term.

Ugh. I want to encourage what they're doing, and feel like I oughta put my money where my mouth is, but, to date, I just can't.

Ways that I'm trying to talk myself into getting one anyway:

  1. Better webcam
  2. Better keyboard (right?)
  3. Better Linux support
  4. Easily replaceable battery once it dies

That's all I got. So far, still not enough. The Framework laptop tax is too high.

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