About 10 years ago I worked for a medical device company and we used thixo parts for a portable ultrasound system (think chunky laptop form factor). In my first few weeks, I had a proto part that needed a rework, so I chucked the thixomolded part into the bandsaw to chop it up, before the shop manager chewed me out for almost setting the shop on fire (who let this clueless engineer into my shop...etc etc). Magnesium dust is stupid flammable and burns incredibly fast and hot.

There were only a handful of vendors in the world at that time that had the capability to mold the size of parts we needed, it's a vastly different process to casting other metals, in part due to the hazards of the material itself. Warning to all overly ambitious framework owners: careful if you decide to chop or drill into that case!

Unfortunately maker-spaces (the only kinds of places where you could get cheap access to good 3+ axis CNC mills) seem to have gone out of fashion. CNC mills in general cost about 5 digits just for the machine, and usually that again for the tooling.

I think the closest one can get to learning some DFM without working on a machine would be watching machinists on YouTube. Back in the day NYC CNC was great, but I think they post more hype content these days.

I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I spent a decent amount of time designing for and then fabricating stuff on CNC machines over the last couple years. To my knowledge, operations are cheap while setups are expensive: if you can design a part around a fixed orientation in a machine, it saves a lot of operator time.

You are effectively asking for a disclosure of shop secrets. Even in cases of completely no-name factories, there will be so much of clever things nobody would put on a paper.

One factory owner went nuts when we were going with inspection for a client in 2009, just because we clicked seemingly innocuous looking jig which was putting threaded inserts into mould. It later came out that nobody else anywhere had anything like that, and most factories rely on laborious process of manually putting inserts into the mould.

There is so many unobvious things which 99% of people without actual manufacturing experience routinely overlook in ubiquitous items around us.

I once been openning up dozens of laptop samples, and one in 100, from a noname factory had seemingly no ribs in its bottom cover, and seemingly nothing restraining it flexing, and sliding. Then, after days of hair pulling, the secret cracked.. nuts, and screws inside were not meeting orcompletely, but were suspended with preloaded fasteners, which used those few free millimetres of free travel for it.

Really looking forward to using linux as my main laptop os again.

They've already outdone every other laptop manufacturer: you can swap a new 13th gen system board into an original 11th gen Framework.

My friend's wife has a Framework, and she suffered a liquid spill which reached the system board. He ordered parts, did the swap, and she's back in action for less than half the cost of a new laptop. If it were Dell or Lenovo, you'd be trying your luck with used eBay parts. The housing would have ~20 tiny plastic clips that you break one or two of every time you open it up. (Or adhesive, ugh.) It's just a sketchier proposition.

Today it seems that a decent computer (~$1000k) will simply just run most things perfectly fine for around 5-7 years, after which all the main bus and peripheral tech will have moved on. It's easier to junk that system and buy another one almost from scratch. The main benefit I can think of for still buying your own parts and putting it together (or having somebody put it together) is price/performance /customizability still leads. I was able to retire (give to my wife) an 8 year old desktop which is still perfectly fine for her needs, and buy an all new system, but thread what I wanted through a budget by ultra-specifying specific parts. I couldn't find a pre-built that was close, even after I just paid Microcenter to put it all together for me. This also turned out to be a good idea as they were able to on-the-spot substitute a few pieces based on compatibility and inventory.

For a mainboard upgrade, it might make sense if two generations ahead is seriously better. For example, 13th gen i5 is outperforming the 12th gen i7. The i5 mainboard costs 450$ and the i7 1000$, so if you can wait for two new generations it would be worth it.

My last upgrade was RAM to 64GB, before that the GPU (RX 470 to RX 6600), before that, the mainboard and CPU from some ancient Intel i3 to Ryzen 5 3600. And between all those upgrades, more and more SSDs were added.

And it is in a 7.5l SFF case.

If that doesn't help, I'd recommend reviewing some of the resources:

* Framework Forum Linux battery life tuning thread (300+ messages) https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...

* anarcat's Framework Battery Life and Power management testing: https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/framework-12th-gen/#battery...

* I also did a long review covering different ways of optimizing CPU performance, evaluating idle and near idle power consumption, various power-testing (including writing a suspend battery logging tool that people may find useful, etc): https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...

Solutions include not caring, buying a mac, or buying windows and using WSL.

Most laptops with high brightness monitors would leave you with about 2-3 hours of battery life... many laptops can hit 300-400 nits, some even more.

sRGB and BT709 declare the brightness of SDR white as 100 nits, and 100-120 is considered acceptable.

The rest of what you say sounds like your Ubuntu is misconfigured, which is common with Ubuntu installs. The fix is usually either changing a few files in /etc, or installing an entirely different distro that isn't user hostile.

I really love the machine otherwise, but I can't say I haven't considered just getting a Macbook Air (especially now that they have the 15").

It's an interesting material, it's very stiff and light, usually with a dark gray color and a sort of chalkboard-like texture.

Related:

* Testing of WE43/Elektron 21 vs AZ91, ZE41: https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/2010Conference/files/Magnesium_U...

* Final FAA evaluation of flammability of various magnesium alloys (for aircraft use): https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/pdf/ar11-13.pdf

* The Wikipedia is a pretty good overview of a bunch of the material properties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_alloy

For context btw, ignition temp (in furnace) for magnesium alloys is around 600C, which a house fire can reach: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...

It’s surprisingly hard to ignite! As your link explains it took them a bit haha.

Magnesium is pretty safe.

It has similar properties to aluminum but it can be cast, making it a material of choice as a more premium alternative to plastic.

A Dell XPS that comes with a lose trackpad, massive coil whine, batteries that drain when plugged in and so on?

Or an LG Gram Pro (more expensive than Framework) that isn't sold outside of the US and maybe some Asian countries where the only thing you can upgrade is the SSD?

Or maybe some Apple laptop?

I personally feel the price of a Framework is fair, even if it is 2500 USD (or more). Not necessarily because Framework is great (I would prefer 17"), but more because the alternatives are worse or don't exist.

I believe Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple, still sleeps 6 workers to an apartment.

Apple is giving me a Macbook Pro with solid hardware for an equivalent amount of money that I can always count on for everything I do, and still set it for ~40% of the value 5+ years later.

[0] https://frame.work/products/microsd-expansion-card

If you're not an EE, the only things you can buy 3rd party are RAM, SSD, and Wi-Fi modules. Which you can do the same for Thinkpads.

That said -- I do appreciate that partial upgrades are possible with Frame.work. I own one and when I upgrade the motherboard, even though I can only buy a motherboard upgrade from them, I won't be upgrading the case, display, and other things that don't need upgrades.

There are ARM CPUs available, but they are mostly for servers or very low end devices, there's not a lot in the pro laptop market, and even if a low-end server chip could be repurposed, I don't know if the brand recognition would work, customers know AMD and Intel and what they're getting in terms of performance at different specs. That all works differently with ARM.

And then on the software side, Windows support seems... partial? Linux support is much better, but selling a laptop with only Linux as an option is a big step down in available market, and even Linux struggles with compatibility sometimes.

Apple's ARM chips are the only mainstream laptop/desktop class chips, but that's a completely distinct software and hardware ecosystem that neither Framework nor anyone else have access to.

Are PCIe cards just dongles in another form factor? Is it a question of how much of the peripheral's surface area is visible from the outside? Or is it the difficulty of insertion/removal that separates expansion cards from dongles?

For me it's the dangling that makes the dongle a dongle.

If that's not your point, then what is your point? My issue with dongle-based connections is generally 2 fold: dongles are an awkward thing to have/carry around and having dongle-based connectors usually means you only have 1-2 connectors total. Neither of those issues applies in this case, so to whatever extent they can be considered dongles, they also aren't a problem in my mind.

Most people buying them will likely use their own RAM, storage and OS anyway.

And either way, you'd ostensibly want to make sure your computer is supposed to work once you assemble it yourself.