Framework’s Laptop 13 Pro looked and felt fantastic when the company showed it off in April. Unfortunately, a pair of manufacturing issues has delayed first shipments by about a month, pushing delivery out closer to the end of summer.
Problems with the Laptop 13 Pro’s stellar display, one of the things I was most impressed with in our Laptop 13 Pro hands-on time, has pushed the first shipments from late June to late July, Framework said Wednesday. Some units will now ship in early August. The delay will not affect shipments of Framework’s modular Mainboards, which now include the Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) processor inside.
All Laptop 13 Pro orders are fully refundable, Framework said.
To its credit, Framework has been and continues to be the most open, communicative laptop vendor in the industry, by far. Framework typically issues blog posts explaining its problems (and successes) in sourcing components and shipping products, so this new update isn’t unusual. As unfortunate as the issues are, they haven’t affected pricing — a problem that has plagued the industry with the ongoing shortages of memory and SSD storage.
“As we were preparing Framework Laptop 13 Pro for mass production ramp, we discovered two issues, one on the new haptic touchpad and another on the custom display,” Framework said via email to customers who pre-ordered the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. “We’ve since root caused and found solutions for both of these.”
Framework said that the company had been involved in tests of the touchpad throughout the development process, tweaking the haptic feel and the uniformity of the force feedback until it satisfied Framework. Unfortunately, errors crept into the process.
“Over the last few months, we found some spurious bugs that triggered rarely on some units that would result in the touchpad resetting itself after repeated clicking,” Framework said. “Working with our suppliers Lite-On and Boréas, we found an electrical issue in the PCB design around grounding we believed was the root cause, and pre-emptively released a new PCB spin for fabrication to resolve it. In parallel, we identified firmware changes we believed would also mitigate the issue on the original PCB design.”
They didn’t, and the failures multiplied.
“Because of that, we are holding production to wait for the new PCB, which will be used for all shipments,” Framework said. “We’ve assembled the first samples of these and determined that they do resolve the issue.”
Likewise, Framework also discovered a bug where the display would not initialize. The company said that its supplier, CSOT, unearthed the issue and is releasing updated firmware.
The two delays will not affect shipments of the Mainboard, basically a modular motherboard that can be used to upgrade older Framework systems. Those will continue to ship on time, though Framework noted that it would be offering the option to add replaceable LPCAMM memory to the Mainboard order. Customers have few options to buy LPCAMM memory at retail, Framework said, so the company is offering to take on that burden itself.
It’s an obvious disappointment to those who hoped to buy (and for us, test) Framework’s latest Laptop 13 Pro. But still, there’s a silver lining: If LPCAMM memory is the upgradable memory of the future for laptops, customers are going to want to buy it from somewhere. Framework taking on that burden should ease the minds of its customers.
Author: Mark Hachman
Source: PCWorld
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
