For example, their part to upgrade to an Ryzen HX 370 costs $1050.[0]
You can find a brand new laptop with an Ryzen HX 370, 3k 120hz OLED display, 32GB of RAM, 1TB drive for $1050 on sale.[0]
Framework sell their 16" laptop with the RTX 5070 for $2,449.00. Meanwhile, you can get the same CPU, display, GPU for half the price at $1200 on sale.[2]
Upgrading the main board is the last thing on my list for considering framework.
Being able to easily make small swaps like ports/batteries/RAM/etc is a much bigger value prop, along with supporting the growth of an ecosystem that still doesn’t have enough scale to get pricing down.
If you don’t value any of that, then yeah, don’t buy a framework. But to say it “makes no sense” is a bit grandiose.
Emphasizing this, the biggest pain point for me with previous laptops I've used isn't battery or performance decreasing. It's the little bits that really hurt: A broken hinge, a dying keyboard, or a broken charging port.
I'm lucky that the keyboard incident happened on a recent enough dell that parts weren't the hardest to find, though I basically had to disassemble the entire laptop and rebuild it on a new keyboard.
The broken charging port happened on an older laptop and I couldn't find any reasonable options to repair or replace the piece.
And for the hinge, a replacement hinge itself wasn't impossible to find, but finding the correct parts around it that it broke when it tore itself out of the frame (including the display) took so many purchases and returns that I was worried amazon would take action on my account.
I put a lot of value in the fact that any minor issue I may encounter will remain a minor issue. Also I appreciate the fact that if I do upgrade my framework I can put the old mainboard into a standalone case and have a relatively low power desktop to use for whatever I think up.
For those exact specs the Asus you linked seems like a great deal but it also looks like it has soldered ram which could limit the useful lifespan (the FW13 has two so-dimms and officially supports up to 96 GiB of ram but on forums people have been using the new 64 GiB dimms to get 128 GiB working fine).
The linked gigabyte seems like maybe a good deal as well but that's also not the Ryzen 9, it's a 7. Some people (mine included) also have strong opinions on the look/quality of the case and their preferences might lean more towards FW than the linked gigabyte's glowing green look.
For example, their part to upgrade to an Ryzen HX 370 costs $1050.[0]
You can find a brand new laptop with an Ryzen HX 370, 3k 120hz OLED display, 32GB of RAM, 1TB drive for $1050 on sale.[0]
Framework sell their 16" laptop with the RTX 5070 for $2,449.00. Meanwhile, you can get the same CPU, display, GPU for half the price at $1200 on sale.[2]
[0]https://frame.work/products/laptop16-mainboard-amd-ai300?v=F...
[1]https://slickdeals.net/f/18576667-asus-vivobook-s-15-15-6-3k...
[2]https://slickdeals.net/f/18592141-gigabyte-aero-x16-16-qhd-1...
Being able to easily make small swaps like ports/batteries/RAM/etc is a much bigger value prop, along with supporting the growth of an ecosystem that still doesn’t have enough scale to get pricing down.
If you don’t value any of that, then yeah, don’t buy a framework. But to say it “makes no sense” is a bit grandiose.
I'm lucky that the keyboard incident happened on a recent enough dell that parts weren't the hardest to find, though I basically had to disassemble the entire laptop and rebuild it on a new keyboard. The broken charging port happened on an older laptop and I couldn't find any reasonable options to repair or replace the piece. And for the hinge, a replacement hinge itself wasn't impossible to find, but finding the correct parts around it that it broke when it tore itself out of the frame (including the display) took so many purchases and returns that I was worried amazon would take action on my account.
I put a lot of value in the fact that any minor issue I may encounter will remain a minor issue. Also I appreciate the fact that if I do upgrade my framework I can put the old mainboard into a standalone case and have a relatively low power desktop to use for whatever I think up.
The linked gigabyte seems like maybe a good deal as well but that's also not the Ryzen 9, it's a 7. Some people (mine included) also have strong opinions on the look/quality of the case and their preferences might lean more towards FW than the linked gigabyte's glowing green look.