It's kind of mind boggling to me that they have a tight chassis, AND it meets their buildable/ugpradeable/repairable goals, AND their backwards compatibility is reaching back five years now.

I think a number of people would have expected these to eventually require a trade-off. Especially coming from pc-building land, where we see new non-backwards-compatible CPU and RAM sockets every 6 or so years.

There's a version of this where Frame.work said, "Design tradeoffs mean the 13 Pro is a new platform that is largely not backwards compatible, but don't worry, the 13 series will still get 5+ years of support and parts" and everyone goes "Aw, well, I guess that's reasonable."

I really want to emphasize that it's looking like Framework is creating a laptop with _better_ backwards compatibility and build-ability than a desktop PC.

All this is to say that this is very very impressive!

Even more impressive than going back 5 years is going back all the way to the first version. While I'm a software engineer, I've worked in teams where we shipped hardware, and for a consumer product with lots of constraints including implicit expectations, going against the entire trend of the past 15 years and targeting a hard-to satisfy market segment, they far exceeded what I expected when they announced their first product.

Its backwards compatible to the first version??? How did they do this.

At some point they will still likely have to force that cut-off, but yeah, it's great that they seem to be able to stretch it for longer than most people would have expected.

Unfortunately, we live in a world where most companies pay lip service to their stated value proposition, while racing to the bottom.

Remember "Microsoft loves linux" ?

As in sells a ton in azure. I am pretty sure they still love that.

They could have done a much more minimal version and called it a day. Being able to swap individual components of the chassis into a 5 year old model is, to me, going way above and beyond.

Sadly brand loyalty isn't as valuable as one would think in a world where price and shiny-looking features tend to dominate

Every day feels like a day closer to, if not already at, a day where discerning customers are the minority.

That doesn’t negate how impressive it is

Yes, saying you will do X and then doing X is more impressive than just doing X.

Isn't it sad that we are surrounded by so many broken promises that that is remarkable

Planning is just very hard.

Yes but it's truly impressive to see it. It shows it can be done.

An 11th gen CPU/mobo that came out in 2020 can be dropped straight into this new chassis.

Or the newest display be can be dropped into your 2020 laptop/chassis.

I wish they booted them up in that video. Its one thing being able to plug parts in but its another for them to all work together.

Based on my experience upgrading my FW. There's probably drivers and bios updates needed to do the transfer

Back in 2002 I took the HDD from one PC, put it in a different PC, worked just fine. The worst thing that could happen is that the other one already had another disk so I had to change /etc/fstab to say "hdb" instead of "hda" and vice versa. Didn't take long for that to get fixed by specifying UUIDs and having initramfs sort it out.

IDK why it's not working for you but this should all just work without bothering with any configuration, drivers, or whatever.