Hey! Love the entire concept behind it. That being said, for mass-adoption and a large parts "ecosystem", do you guys anticipate you'll be able to get the initial price for the laptop down in the future with either cheaper casing materials or after recouping the initial R&D cost for the custom motherboard design and such?
It's totally understandable that the first product from a rather small company would demand some sort of higher price, your initial investment into R&D and product design & manufacturing must've been huge! But is this something we can expect to get a bit better in the future?
The base price for a new system will likely stay in this range, barring future lower-end mainboards like one using an ARM SoC. However, one thing that will help on cost of entry in the future is refurbished and used Framework Laptops. Since the product is easy to repair and upgrade, we want to foster a healthy secondary market.
We don't want anyone to put an old Framework Laptop that they are not using into a drawer and forget about it. We want to get them to list it on the Framework Marketplace to find another happy user.
If you ever do start doing bringup of an Arm SoC, drop me an email (in my profile) - I work on an internal BSP team at Arm and would be happy to (unofficially) assist
Some idea about considering other option as well. Would be great to buy your motherboard (original with some adapter or completely differently designed) that would fit into old macbooks or thinkpads - this way people could reuse case, keyboard, touchpad and maybe even battery or screen.
It's totally understandable that the first product from a rather small company would demand some sort of higher price, your initial investment into R&D and product design & manufacturing must've been huge! But is this something we can expect to get a bit better in the future?