Hehe, that is just a Chinese company, isn't it? Say bye bye to warranty and support, repairability. I am not saying you shouldn't consider it but describing Framework merely as cool factor is the other extreme.
Hehe, that is just a Chinese company, isn't it? Say bye bye to warranty and support, repairability. I am not saying you shouldn't consider it but describing Framework merely as cool factor is the other extreme.
I've been turned off GMKTek since I was helping a buddy fresh install Windows and found their drivers are on a Google Drive folder they don't pay for which hits its download quota regularly and so you have to go back day after day and play roulette and hope you get in at the right time. And the drivers are literally nowhere else that I could find, even with driver search tools.
For nuance:
- framework only sells to specific countries. Warranty won't even be an issue if you can't buy one in the first place.
- Chinese manufacturers offer support and warranty. In particular GMKTek does[0].
- Repairability will be at best on par with framework, but better than a random western brand. Think HP and their repairability track record.
"just a Chinese company" feels pretty weird as a qualificative in this day and age when Chinese companies are on average ahead of the curve.
[0] https://de.gmktec.com/en/pages/ruckgabe-umtausch
Feels like in terms of warranty, support, repairability, it's not so much that Chinese brands have advanced, but that the west has seriously regressed. Every company now is looking to lock me out of my own hardware, extract as much information about me, extract as much value possible by degrading support and compatibility and whatever else they can...
Maybe when we run out of reasons to buy american or european or japanese they will wake up, but I don't see it.
Doubling down on mediocrity and then protecting it with tariffs is the American way now it seems.
For me as a Canadian, Framework being an American company was always a problem because their shipping and availability to here were actually inferior to overseas suppliers despite being on the same continent (this is frankly often the case because of American business arrogance and blindness to the Canadian market -- things ship faster from Europe than from American suppliers for me, on the whole).
But now with the idiotic trade war talk, it's even worse since I'm likely to be hit by a retalliatory tariff situation.
Some day hopefully all this dollar store economic nationalism will blow over, but in the meantime it's too bad Framework has a good product and isn't European or Asian, because I won't buy it now.
My post is the nuance, and as a buyer/user of GPD, Minisforum, and Xiaomi products I respectfully disagree.
Chinese companies are not on par with Western ones. The QA, safety measures, hazard compliance, warranty, or even proper English (they use an online translator service) isn't there. Cha bu duo is an accurate description of Chinese products.
From the link you send they offer 7 days return policy. In EU you got 2 weeks, legally enforced. Companies like Amazon offer even a month. Then they have a restock fee of 15%. This is AFAIK allowed (if proportional to the damage to the product) but it does not seem proportional. Companies like Amazon don't do this. And Amazon isn't great; they have a lot of cheap Chinese dropshipping brand. Then they often lie in China as well. They claim leather, when you buy it it is fake leather.
Cha bu duo can be good enough if you are on a tight budget, or if the product isn't available otherwise (how I ended up with GPD Pocket 2 back around 2018). But I have personally witnessed how Xiaomi smartphones fucked up a mid sized non-profit who dealt with very sensitive personal details. They went for budget, ended up with a support nightmare, and something which shouldn't be GDPR compliant. Cause yeah, spyware and bloatware is another issue.
Furthermore, Framework sell to Western countries.
> Cha bu duo is an accurate description of Chinese products.
Didn’t realize companies like DJI, BYD, CATL, Insta360, and Anker have a fail fast, fail early mentality.
> proper English (they use an online translator service)
Pet peeve: why should I care ?
People take grammatical errors as some ultimate gotcha and indicator of character flaw. I don't pay for the marketing nor value that they asked 3 translators to double-check each other to have flawless text for the damn first boot guide of a computer.
I see it the same as Framework's shaky YouTube presentations: they couldn't bother hiring a cameraman for their product presentations. What does that say about their computers ? To me absolutely nothing. I'll still buy one if it sounds nice enough.
> 7 days return policy.
It's from delivery.
For comparison, framework offers 30 days, but from shipping. Which means if your laptop takes more than a month to get delivered for whatever reason you virtually have no return window.
https://knowledgebase.frame.work/what-is-the-framework-retur...
> Cha bu duo
I hear you, but this is all relative to a market. There's no maker I can blindly trust whatever the country they operate in, and if we're going for cultural generalizations I'd set Tesla as the poster child of US manufacturers at this moment.
All in all, I get why we should be wary about Chinese makers. It's just the same reason we should be wary of every other makers, including those who'll screw their customer base on any other aspect that won't get picked up by a review (repairability has been one of these. Compatibility, durability, vendor lockin, standard parts etc. are other aspects.
Lenovo is a Chinese company.
I would rather say it's a Chinese conglomerate. E.g. Think.* are said to be designed in the US, Taiwan, and Japan. They are often assembled locally (e.g. my ThinkStation was assembled in Hungary). They have offices in many local markets and can be held accountable for warranty, issues, etc.
I agree with your general point though, 'Chinese' does not mean bad quality, warranty, etc. It's more a property of a bunch of Chinese computer companies selling through AliExpress, Amazon, etc. Their quality and service might improve as they grow.
As an aside, Lenovo are pretty awesome. For ThinkStations, ThinkPads, etc. they have in-depth guides for supported memory configurations, disassembly, repair etc., often with part numbers. Their hardware also works well with fwupdmgr and they provide their own Linux support (like WWAN FCC unlock scripts).
> As an aside, Lenovo are pretty awesome.
These things would be important if they made products that actually work. My T14s Gen 3 AMD simply doesn’t work. Half the time I go to wake it from sleep, the firmware has crashed and I have to hard-reset it. I spent months trying to get Lenovo to fix this. They did replace the motherboard twice (once on-site, once shipped to them) and eventually replaced the entire laptop with a new one. None of this is useful when they can’t make a laptop that doesn’t crash while it sleeps.
Sorry to hear that! I have a T14 (non-s) Gen 5 AMD and everything works great, also suspend-resume. A few years ago I had a Gen 1 AMD and it was certainly much worse. It would resume, but the trackpad or trackpoint would often not come up. But I'm very happy with the Gen 5.
My company provided Dell has the same issue (Intel CPU). Comes and goes a bit with firmware updates.