This is the largest batch of review units we’ve ever shipped, and we expect more reviews to trickle in over the next week. For context on our press units, many companies ramp into production, manufacture a large quantity to fill retail channels, and cherry pick some golden units from that as review samples. For us, because we’re entirely direct to consumer, our ramp is extremely fast, and units go to customer hands immediately. That means to get press units out weeks ahead of time to provide a sufficiently long review period, we send out production-intent qualification units. The “intent” part of that is that these are usually functionally identical to what ships to consumers.
With Framework Laptop 16 though, the product is complex enough that we identified issues during manufacturing qualification that we’ve since fixed. Changes and improvements we’ve made on all customer systems include resolving some instances of audible electrical noise in the Mainboard and the Graphics Module, reducing sliding friction on the Touchpad Module, optimizing the thermal resistance of the CPU heatsink, making improvements to the liquid metal application process, fixing a couple of instances where a firmware bug could result in a blue screen on Windows, resolving an issue where the left or right speaker channel could be attenuated in Windows, improving the fan control algorithm on the Graphics Module, and a number of smaller fit and finish refinements related to the Bezel and Input Modules. In retrospect, we would have loved to get these improvements into the units we sent to reviewers, but it's most important that our customers have a system that works smoothly.
Framework Laptop 16 has the largest set of pre-orders we’ve ever had on a product, and we doubled our factory capacity in the second half of 2023 in preparation to work through this as quickly as possible. We’re happy to share that we’ve started mass production manufacturing this week, with the first units leaving the factory before the end of January. These will go directly to our fulfillment warehouse in Taiwan and then out to Batch 1 customers. Pre-orders are still open, and we expect to fulfill all current batches before the end of the first half of this year.
Framework Laptop 16 resourcesWhether or not you’ve ordered a Framework Laptop 16, you can now also get your eyes on the setup guides and documentation around the product. We’ve launched a
centralized resources page that has links out to all the information and tools you need. This includes beta web and desktop utilities for Windows and Linux for configuring Input Modules like the LED Matrix. We’re trying something new with our step-by-step Quick Start guides as well. Since many of the modular interfaces on Framework Laptop 16 are pretty novel (for example, the hot swappable input devices), the guides have short videos for each step alongside the written instructions. Let us know what you think!
