Blog
Framework!
First Impressions
I'm pumped, not gonna lie. I have had a laptop problem forever, and this feels pretty close to the dream machine. It was really a different experience, to get a "DIY" edition that required assembly. But the assembly was really minor, especially if you've ever built a desktop before. It wasn't in as many pieces as I expected, but I did have to load in the ram/ssd plug in the keyboard and screw the top plate on. The bezel is one of the cooler parts (I picked orange) and it just magnetically attaches. Really nothing difficult involved here at all. Just look at my beautiful new toy.
The keyboard is weird, because I chose the completely transparent, and blank, option. I can touch type but I've never known where any of the number keys were on a traditional keyboard, let alone things like the function row. That will have to be a learning curve, for sure. Otherwise, no issues really. It's still new so maybe some things will turn up, but I'm pretty much just excited at this point. I think this "solves" my laptop addiction in the sense that now I will be able to simply buy a motherboard whenever they come out and swap it back into this shell. I did also just see that there's some sort of event in 2 weeks, I hope they don't completely make this purchase pointless... I'll be happier if I wind up iwth a shell that I can actually reuse for a few generations.
An Extended History
So this is mostly just to outline what kind of freak I am, regarding laptops, because I can barely go a full year without buying one. And, I'm not even good at it. I think every single one of them might have been a bad purchase, lol.
It all started, I'm gonna guess, in like 8th grade. I would work on my grandpa's farm in the summer, for exactly long enough to make the money I needed for whatever toy I wanted to buy. I had my eye on a 15 inch Toshiba laptop that really just sucked all around, but it would load youtube/facebook/skype so I could pretty much do all the things I wanted to on it at the time. I'm betting it cost in the ballpark of 400 bucks, and the day I hit that number I called my mom to come take me off the farm. It got extremely hot and it was big even for a normal sized person, let alone all 5'2" of me. 10/10 loved that machine.
Then I think the next one was when I went off to college. My dad gave me a budget and I did my best to stick around it, a Dell Inspiron, must have been 2014. This one I kinda spent all my budget on specs, so I got more ram and more hard drive space, but this was before SSD prices completely collapsed, so you could get a meaningful storage boost by accepting an HDD instead. I thought that was a good decision but, looking back, I think the Apple fanboys were on to something. SSDs were just so much faster, and dead silent. I still remember being absolutely furious while working on an assignment in freshman year because I was in a silent room, and I just could not escape the HDD's periodic clicking, and that's when the fans weren't running at full blast. This is the only one I will admit I did not love, 7/10 was plenty good enough, but I'm picky.
The summer after freshman year, I got my first real "job". I landed a part time, 29 hour a week (so I wouldn't get health coverage, lol) "internship" where I mostly updated SQL scripts for a company in Tulsa. It was actually great, the work was boring but it was sort of low stakes super easy stuff that got me familiar with some of the tools/concepts even though I had, at this point, exactly no programming experience. Also, Jennifer Sanders worked there, so this counts as the first time I worked with or saw an actually good programmer. She's was awesome. I would do my 29 hours in 3 days, so I could go back to Bartlesville for 5 nights a week. I had nothing to do in Tulsa, and I was also working at QuikTrip on the other four days. I was excited about Windows 10 coming out, because Microsoft seemed to be righting some of the wrongs that I had been living with for a while. Since I had nothing better to do in Tulsa on my nights there, I would run by the Microsoft store almost daily, because they had a new 13 inch Dell XPS on display that I could play with. It really took everything in me not to buy that little laptop, but I resisted... Well I resisted until the start of the semester when they announced a 15 inch version. At this point in time I was still a big screen laptop fan, and this one was going to have an actual NVIDIA GPU in it so I felt it was more appropriate for my engineering work. I didn't turn out needing that at all, and, to be honest, this is somehow my worst set of decisons and my favorite laptop ever at the same time.
The only good decision, was that it came with an SSD, so I would be able to spare myself the insane clicking. However, This was like half the money I made all summer going on one thing, way too much money, and I spec'd it out with the 4k screen. Scaling on laptop screens isn't like perfect right now (at least on linux) but in 2015 it was atrocious almost everywhere. Even when it would scale correctly, we're running a power-hungry CPU, a discrete GPU, and driving a bajillion pixels all in a beautiful, thin (and heavy) XPS frame. I got like an hour and a half on a charge, barely a laptop. But my goodness did it look good. 10/10 no complaints.
That got me through school, marking the longest period since I turned 18 between laptop purchases. Up next was my version of buying a car with my first paycheck. A Huawei matebook. This thing still looks good, tbh, but I just had no reason to buy it. I loved the tiny bezels, I had come around on the 3:2 aspect ratio (tbh probably would like the 4:3 one even more) and just really didn't want to buy a MacBook. This is a theme, I'm not exactly an apple hater, I just always felt like I could get something more fun and probably more useful for less money elsewhere. That argument falls apart if you buy 8 laptops in a row though. Still a good device, 9/10 because we have to be mean to China now.
Around the same time, I wanted a total junker that I could tinker with, so I got a Thinkpad. I bought it used and then did a handful of upgrades to it because that seemed fun. New screen, swapped out the trackpad, and upgraded to an SSD/more RAM. These are also fun 10/10, although I'm under the impression they've fallen off a bit as of late.
A couple years later, I got it in my head that I could replace my desktop, so I tried a Legion 5, from Lenovo. In a literal sense this machine was fine, but it really failed at every goal it could have had, I'm not good at compromising, and have since bought a new desktop and a two new laptops... sooo kinda a waste. 10/10
Then, I got the Amazon offer, and it was enough money that I felt like I could comfortably afford a MacBook, at the same time that MacBooks started to compel me. Like I said, I was never exactly a hater, but I didn't buy the value proposition. Until M1. I like have a Computer Engineering degree (that I haven't really used for anything), and suddenly Apple was the best in the world at this thing I have a somewhat real interest in. And the value proposition flipped on it's head, by the time the M1 Air came out, the best value laptop for almost any normal computer user, was Apple, a like premium-only brand, ludacris. I am going to pour cold water on this a little bit because I still think that *most* of Apple's advantage here is just TSMC getting ahead of Intel, and the fact that Apple monopolizes TSMC's best process. But, like we talked about how shitty x86 was in college all the time, was very cool to see some of that difference proven out. I also made the argument (to myself) that I needed to get used to working with Macs before I started at Amazon, lol, so I landed the M1 MacBook Pro. In a very objective sense, just the best laptop I've ever owned. Faster, better built, nice port selection and I hate OS X or whatever they are calling it these days, but OS competition is really weak, so it might even be "the best". I prefer using Linux, but that's like more a philosophical thing. The DEs have all moved toward this flat, round, idk, childish aesthetic that I really don't appreciate. And the whole "just works" thing is real. Very funny that "working" and "not despising your users (microsoft)" are like enough to make the best OS right now. 10/10, So good my Framework purchase is utterly unjustifiable.
And now the Framework. I think it's got lots of what I liked the most from these other machines, I went with the 2.8k display, which is right on the money for X2 scaling, no worries about fractional scaling in the house of cards that is the modern Linux Desktop. Ideally, repairable and upgradeable. So maybe all I'll ever do is buy more main boards and move my old ones out into some little server cluster or something, the future is bright. The most obvious mistake that I may have made here, is that announcement on the 25th. I may have bought at the absolute worst time, lets see what they come out with lol. Or I'll just be getting an upgrade sooner than I was thinking.