My nephew just graduated high school, and wants a laptop. When he decides what computer to buy, price (or more precisely, value) is the most important attribute.
Apple's MacBook Neo upended the 'value laptop' equation—Apple's not supposed to be both the cheapest option and the best value... but it seems like that's squarely where the Neo landed for the good-but-cheap laptop category.
My nephew is also my godson, and to kick off his computing journey, I thought I'd let him choose from a Framework 12 I bought to test, or the MacBook Neo I bought a couple months ago to use around the studio.
All the laptops I’ve owned have lasted more than 5 years, and two of them are more than 10 years old. Unless you really need some new hardware just to be able to run something, I don’t think it’s hard to keep a laptop for at least 5 years, especially if the battery is replaceable. And in that case, it’s not really a good enough justification anymore to spend that much for a Framework.
Repairs though. Our 2010 laptop had the enter key die. Thankfully back then parts were still somewhat user repairable.
I bought a new keyboard for $18 on AliExpress, and just had to remelt the plastic heat stakes to pop out the old keyboard and drop in the new one. Took maybe 2 hours with disassembly steps and reassembly.
Current laptops often just get tossed out, but with a framework you can swap keyboards in 15 minutes.
That is completely fair. For the way I use my laptop I need fairly current hardware, but if you do not, the premium price might not make sense for you.
Speaking of needing new hardware, do you think it’s still worth it when it ends up becoming a Ship of Theseus thing where you replace a different part every couple of years? Would that still end up being cheaper vs buying a new laptop with all the newest specs in 8-10 years?
Reasonably I don’t think that’s how most people are going to upgrade the laptop.
You’ll swap out the GPU and the CPU but I suspect the rest of the hardware will stay the same.
Is there much of a resale market to recuperate some of the costs on modules you replace? I could see slower depreciation being part of an economic justification, but only if there’s a robust second hand parts market.
Its a great question, I was able to find this on the Framework site: https://community.frame.work/c/community-market/202
It depends what you’re doing with it. If you just browse in the web and editing the odd word document then you can get away with quite old specs.
If you’re trying to do something quite processor intensive after about 5 years you’ll probably are going to have to upgrade. At least with a framework that’s actually possible.