Delay in start of production for Framework Laptop 13 Pro
As we were preparing Framework Laptop 13 Pro for mass production ramp, we discovered two issues, one on the new haptic touchpad and another on the custom display. We’ve since root caused and found solutions for both of these. However, to bring in these updates, we need to delay the start of mass production, which pushes first batch shipments about one month from late June into late July, with some risk of some units in early August. This likely pushes most July batch shipments into August. We plan to catch up to our communicated dates in August, but there is some risk of the last August batches moving into early September. We don’t anticipate the late manufacturing start to cascade further into delays beyond August. We don’t like to delay any product, but we want to ensure Framework Laptop 13 Pro is as robust and reliable as it can be. If the new shipment timing no longer works for you, your pre-order deposit is fully refundable. We’ll continue to keep you up to date as we finalize validation, start production ramp, and begin shipping out batches. In the meantime, we’ll start to ship the new Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Mainboards on time to customers who have pre-ordered those, as well as start to launch some of the modules that don’t contain either the touchpad or display.
Haptic Touchpad production
On the haptic touchpad, our aim from the start has been perfection of the full user experience. The initial feedback we see from hands-on testing at our launch event and at Computex indicates that we’re getting that right. This required tight integration and repeated iteration across the mechanical, electrical, and firmware design. On the firmware especially, we’ve gone through dozens of internal releases fine-tuning the haptic feel and force uniformity and resolving edge cases on touch and click behavior. Throughout development over the last year, we found and resolved a range of firmware bugs and nits to get to complete reliability.
Over the last few months, we found some spurious bugs that triggered rarely on some units that would result in the touchpad resetting itself after repeated clicking. Working with our suppliers Lite-On and Boréas, we found an electrical issue in the PCB design around grounding we believed was the root cause, and pre-emptively released a new PCB spin for fabrication to resolve it. In parallel, we identified firmware changes we believed would also mitigate the issue on the original PCB design. As we started production ramp with the original PCB, we found that modules with the firmware changes were still expressing the failure mode, and at a higher rate than we saw during development builds. Because of that, we are holding production to wait for the new PCB, which will be used for all shipments. We’ve assembled the first samples of these and determined that they do resolve the issue. We’re now completing full validation to ensure there are no other regressions (this includes a range of tests like 200,000 sequential clicks), and started producing mass production quantities pre-emptively to speed up the schedule. The new modules arrive from our haptic touchpad supplier to our final assembly factory in mid-July. We’ve started producing other sub-assemblies in the meantime, so we’ll be able to assemble, test, and output laptops quickly.
Display production
Similarly to the touchpad issue, as we started ramping mass production of the new display, we found a bug that resulted in the panel not initializing on one unit. Our display supplier, CSOT root caused the issue and found that it was an edge case related to some of the initialization parameters. We’ve worked with CSOT on an updated display firmware that is now entering production. We expect the manufacturing and delivery of the updated panels to fit within the schedule of the haptic touchpad module, so this won’t impact our laptop schedule. It does however impact pre-orders of the new display, with shipments now starting in July rather than June.
Mainboard shipments
Finally, as noted earlier, we will be starting shipments of the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro Mainboard with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 on time in June. We generally start shipments of pre-orders at the time that press reviews go live on a new product, so that you can evaluate the review results and decide whether to keep your pre-order. However, Framework Laptop 13 Pro press reviews for the full system will now be in July. This means for the Mainboard in the meantime, you will need to rely on the hands-on write-ups and videos that have gone live to date, along with general reviews of Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors.
One other update we have on the Mainboard is to resolve feedback that we’ve gotten from pre-orderers around LPCAMM2 memory availability. There are very few retail options to buy LPCAMM2 to use with your Mainboard, so if you’d like to adjust an existing Mainboard pre-order to include memory, you can contact our Support team and make the update. Note that if your Mainboard is in a June batch, adding LPCAMM2 to the order now may slightly delay the shipment. In the future, we’ll implement a bundle that will allow Mainboard pre-order customers to select memory alongside their Mainboard pre-order.
We apologize for the delay on Framework Laptop 13 Pro production. The purpose of Pro is to level up the performance, refinement, and robustness of Framework Laptop 13, and we want to make sure that the final product lives up to that. We’ll continue to keep you up to date as we head into the updated mass production schedule, and we’re looking forward to fixing consumer electronics with you.
Framework Team