They’d arguably stopped some time ago. I have a Thinkpad T490s, and a fair chunk of that isn’t upgradeable without swapping a fair bit of the body.
The keyboard, for example, is a permanent part of the chassis. Replacing out requires you to swap the entire shell out.
The Ethernet port is some proprietary gubbins, because Lenovo wanted to be funny, and use the same protocols and pinouts as regular Ethernet, but used a special physical connector.
Half the RAM is also permanently soldered into the motherboard as well, so you can’t properly upgrade that either.
Laptops for consumers have never been good, the reason thinkpads are reliable are because they are sold to businesses (with extensive service warranties)
Lenovo won’t make any nice, repariable thinkpads any time in the near future. Framework is the best we have.
They’d arguably stopped some time ago. I have a Thinkpad T490s, and a fair chunk of that isn’t upgradeable without swapping a fair bit of the body.
The keyboard, for example, is a permanent part of the chassis. Replacing out requires you to swap the entire shell out.
The Ethernet port is some proprietary gubbins, because Lenovo wanted to be funny, and use the same protocols and pinouts as regular Ethernet, but used a special physical connector.
Half the RAM is also permanently soldered into the motherboard as well, so you can’t properly upgrade that either.
Laptops for consumers have never been good, the reason thinkpads are reliable are because they are sold to businesses (with extensive service warranties)
There are better linux laptops for less. No need to send tour money to the US.
The price was never the reason to buy a framework in the first place. None of the cheaper alternatuves are as performant and as repairable
P16 Gen 3 comes closer to that