But the company’s also revealing some intriguing upgrades that didn’t quite make the cut — including an extra-large haptic touchpad a la Apple’s MacBooks (with no physical click), and the company’s first external graphics module (eGPU).
Not everything in the video below is actually coming to market, and some of it won’t be aimed at everyday consumers. Framework CEO Nirav Patel says he’s working to bring the fan-favorite ThinkPad Trackpoint nub to its keyboards, but keeps failing because the team can’t find a short enough nub that it doesn’t poke into the Laptop 16’s screen.
But he says a wide haptic touchpad is genuinely in development, one that won’t need the Framework Laptop 16’s modular spacers to give you a full-width palmrest. And if your main concern is just removing those spacers (I occasionally found the uneven surface annoying in my review), Framework says it’ll release 3D files so you can print your own full-width palmrest for the existing touchpad, in any color you like.
Here’s a look at that 3D-printed one:
Framework also says an eGPU is actually in development that uses the Framework Laptop 16’s GPU modules, but not as a consumer product. Patel says that would make it too expensive to fulfill the team’s main goal: “We want to make sure there is a pathway to reuse graphics modules coming out of the Framework Laptop 16, so they’re not sitting in a drawer or worse going out into a landfill somewhere.”
So it won’t look like the prototype you see below, but rather something targeted at makers, he says — perhaps we’ll have to 3D print the case for that one ourselves as well.
Patel also says Framework’s One Key Modules for building your own custom keyboards are still in development — “we’re working hard to bring up the manufacturing yield so we can make it available at a reasonable price” — and expects he’ll be able to offer 64GB RAM modules before long. A transparent bezel for the Framework Laptop 16 didn’t make the cut because it turned out too brittle, though the team’s still looking for polycarbonate or resin blends that’d work better.
As for why it’s shipping a new Nvidia RTX 5070 graphics module with just 8GB of RAM, Patel says in a Q&A that’s how much is available with a mobile 5070, and that’s how much could fit into the current design, which only has space for four memory packages on the front.
While they could have gone with a more powerful GPU, “we’d have to grow the thickness of the graphics module by putting them on both sides of the board,” which would increase the thickness of the graphics bay, which would increase the thickness of the laptop, among other adjustments.
“For this generation, 5070 8GB is it,” says Patel.
