Hardware Highlight: Frame.Work

If you haven't heard of the issues these past 5-10 years regarding the right to repair (or lack thereof), it's a massive problem which effects many industries. Many farmers are effected by this because companies like John Deere refuse to allow people who buy their products to repair them. That's right - they purchased and now own something that they are not allowed to repair without going through a dealer. This is costing people insane sums of money, and really speaks to the fact that many of the things we buy, we don't actually own. Many car manufacturers have been lobbying for years to remove the consumer's ability to do software upgrades to their ECU (computer in modern cars) for the sake of performance or efficiency.

This issue is also very present in  computing, companies have been found (more as the years progress) to solder hard drives (or SSDs), RAM, and other parts directly to the main board (allegedly very prevalent in Apple laptops). This prevents a consumer from replacing the parts without fear of damaging the main board and bricking their $1000+ devices and is contributing heavily to "throw away culture" and wasting precious metals (which are used in computer manufacturing). Companies like System76 are actively combating this nonsense in Colorado and across the United States, and this is becoming more popular and is becoming a focus of new companies. A new company called Framework has emerged and they are bringing with them a completely modular laptop which allows consumers not only to fix their own systems, they are even offering a DIY version where you can build your own laptop! Nothing is out of bounds on this thing either! You can replace the main board, RAM, hard drives, the keyboard, the bezel, the screen, and they even offer modular adapters that plug in and out of the laptop so you can switch the types of ports you have available at-will. Don't need an HDMI and need an extra USB-C port today? Swap it. Need an HDMI port for tomorrow's project? Swap it. Everything can be swapped, and everything can be fixed. This laptop, this company, is giving the power back to the people and Nottingham Nerds will be first on the list for one of these laptops! We need to support companies like this, especially since they are working with many major Linux distributions to ensure everything works as expected!