mft_

If you're deliberately creating additional inconvenience to potential customers to handle your own resource/scaling issues... that's a 'you problem', and you need to figure out a better way to run things, or customers will just run to competitors who've already done so.

Seconded.

Although everyone’s experience varies a little - for me, the prep is quite miserable, not because of the obvious, but because I feel very dehydrated/hung over for hours during it. Conversely, a friend who has relatively regular colonoscopies doesn’t share this at all.

(It doesn’t change your point, but amusingly) I’m 97% sure I caught my first COVID infection from… the admin/consenting clinic visit prior to a colonoscopy. :)

You’re too kind. I think it’s just that “Tesla” generates clicks, whatever the real underlying topic.

100%. Let people play and —most importantly— invest time and effort in the platform without friction.

Rational people act according to the incentives they’re provided. If that incentive is “follow these new instructions/directives or you’ll lose your job” (or worse?) it takes an especially principled person to object.

Appending the ‘big’ from e.g. Big Tobacco/Pharma/Sugar to unlikely things is one of my favourite occasional jokes. I especially appreciate the double joke with Big Bird :)

I’m really not just trying to be argumentative, but it’s more than quibbling with words.

Pirate Windows and using an existing charger saves ~€200. You can shave a little more sourcing your own RAM and SSD but probably not huge amounts, from memory at the time.

So the comparison becomes something like “if you spend your time and energy sourcing multiple components, and don’t mind pirating your OS, and have an old charger to use, you can maybe reduce the premium you pay for a Framework to 30-50%”.

Digging around with Wayback Machine, a DIY Ryzen 7840 (I wrote 8840 incorrectly earlier) with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows Home, a power adapter, and four basic expansion cards would have been 1768 EUR in 1H 2024.

Instead, I got an ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED with those specs (albeit a slightly bigger better screen) for exactly 1000 EUR in a local shop.

Now, yes, I could remove the Windows cost (ahem), not pay for a charger, and save a little buying RAM and an SSD from elsewhere, but then it's not remotely an apples-to-apples comparison.

Regarding public transport route design, I've long wondered how much efficiency current routes in a given country might be leaving on the table.

As in: if one collected sufficient anonymised travel data to offer a reliable understanding of the population's travel needs, and given the fixed constraints of the existing road and rail network, and the existing number of buses and trains, how much more efficient could the network be by varying routes, timings, stops, and interactions?

Imagine if such a dataset was made available, and a prize offered for the best solution.

The challenge could also be extended to explore optimal areas for investment in additional infrastructure - a wider road here, a new roundabout or branch line there.

Same. It rankles when I have to - usually because of some sort of antiquated approach to bureaucracy, like contracts or CDAs that demand a wet signature (despite then accepting an emailed poor quality scan of said wet signature).

Very good point. I wonder whether the communication would work with rows of connected keys, only joined to other rows at one end? You could then just create simple connection blocks for different row offsets.

> which is pretty competitive when you diy

I'm pretty sure my memory is correct, and for a DIY Ryzen 8840/16GB/1TB it was roughly an 80-90% premium, which I'd not describe as competitive.

> But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).

> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.

If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective, but I'm more in the MBAs-are-ruining-the-world camp, and I hate it.

A few points:

- I suspect that private buyers of laptops rarely have strong loyalty to a single brand, so Asus et al can't assume a long chain of purchases over time - they have to continue to compete on price and specs. Framework can probably assume stronger brand loyalty than every other manufacturer out there, based on a) if you've paid their hefty premium, you're really into what they're offering, and b) you've paid the high price of entry for the promise of lower-cost upgrades down the line, which you can only get from Framework. So Framework can probably assume a longer guaranteed income from each customer than any other manufacturer, even if the actual value decreases over time (due to lower cost of upgrades vs. full systems). However, if the upgrades are profitable as individual items, they still win.

- I'd prefer to see Framework sell computers and components at the lowest possible price they can while still being a viable business, with the margin of those items each justifying their existence individually. I appreciate that their economies of scale are different to larger manufacturers and their designs may be more expensive to deliver - this would be covered by a (modest) premium.

- Ultimately, I'd characterise the business model you described as "we'll f*k you on entry, and you might claw back some value over time". I'd rather aim for "we'll sell you a good product for a reasonable price today, and then delight you with the bonus of upgradability later on".

- I wonder whether their issue might actually be scale of manufacturing: that they can't deliver enough systems quickly/reliably enough to compete for a broader market (which would require lower margins to attract more price-sensitive customers) thereby driving them to target a more limited market of nerds who love the repairability concept, and also price higher per system to make the numbers work?

I think the previous poster is wrong. In typical understanding of industry roles, a ‘sales guy’ doesn’t typically work hands-on with product development. Some variations of ‘marketing’ roles do indeed work on developing new products, so this might be less inaccurate.

But in reality, Jobs was probably unique in that he blended a combination of multiple roles - sales/marketing, product designer/manager, strategist/visionary, and had the muscle being CEO to impose his will accordingly.

The trope of “he didn’t really do anything as it was the engineers who did the real work” is one trotted out time and time again, by (presumably) grumpy engineers. And it misses the point that, yes, Apple (or Next, or SpaceX) wouldn’t have delivered their exceptional products without the hard work of the engineers, but they also wouldn’t have delivered them in the same way (or at all) without Jobs (or Musk) and what they offered, either.