Company Profile / Hardware & Right to Repair
Framework Builds the One Laptop You Are Not Supposed to Throw Away
A San Francisco hardware company bet that people would rather turn a screw than buy a new machine. Five years, a 16-inch gaming laptop and a desktop later, the bet is still paying out.
Open almost any modern laptop and you find the same thing: a battery glued to the chassis, memory soldered to the board, a screen sealed behind adhesive, and no obvious way in. That design is a decision. Framework, a San Francisco company started in 2020, is built around the opposite decision. Its laptops open with a single screwdriver that ships in the box. There are QR codes printed inside the case that link to a repair guide for each part. The ports are cards you slide in and out. If the motherboard dies, you can buy a new one and keep everything else - or drop the old one into a $39 case and turn it into a small desktop.
The person behind that decision is Nirav Patel, who spent a decade in consumer electronics at Apple, then Oculus, then Facebook, where he was head of hardware for the VR headset team. He left to build the machine he thought the industry had quietly refused to make. His framing of the problem is blunt: there is a gap between what customers want and what the industry is willing to ship, and that gap is held open by the incentive to sell the next device.
That background matters to how the machines are built. Designing a modular laptop that is still thin, rigid and reliable is harder than designing a sealed one, because every seam, connector and swappable module is a place for tolerances to drift and signals to degrade. Framework's team came out of companies where that kind of mechanical and electrical discipline is the daily job, and it shows in the fact that the modularity is not a gimmick bolted onto a normal laptop but the organizing principle of the design.
"We believe each consumer should have the fundamental right and ability to repair any product they purchase." Nirav Patel, Founder & CEO
The productA laptop sold as a platform, not an object
The core product is the Framework Laptop 13, a 13.5-inch machine that looks conventional and behaves like a kit. Memory, storage, battery, screen, keyboard and mainboard are all user-replaceable. Ports come from swappable Expansion Cards - USB-A, HDMI, DisplayPort, Ethernet, extra storage - so a buyer picks the layout they want and changes it later. The laptop earned a rare perfect 10 out of 10 from iFixit's teardown, which is the closest thing the repair world has to a certification.
Framework has since widened the line rather than replacing it. The Framework Laptop 16, first shown in 2023, added a customizable input deck and something no other laptop maker had shipped: a discrete graphics card built as a removable module, drawing up to 240W over USB-C. In plain terms, you can upgrade the GPU in a laptop. The 2025 version pairs that with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5070, better cooling and Wi-Fi 7. In 2025 the company also introduced the student-focused, convertible Framework Laptop 12, and moved into desktops.
The desktop turnA 4.5-liter box aimed at local AI
The Framework Desktop is a 4.5-liter Mini-ITX machine built around AMD's Ryzen AI Max, configurable with a large pool of unified memory - up to 128GB in the mainstream configuration, and higher at the top end. It is aimed at people who want to run sizeable AI models on their own desk instead of renting a cloud instance. It also fits the company's logic: sell the mainboard on its own, let people build into standard cases, keep the parts in circulation.
Who buys itThe Linux crowd found it first
Framework's earliest and loudest customers are the people the mainstream industry serves last: Linux and open-source users, DIY builders, developers and tinkerers. The company leaned in, working closely with Ubuntu and publishing mainboard schematics, CAD files and open-source firmware. One statistic captures the fit better than any slogan - Framework has reported selling more Ubuntu-configured Laptop 13 Pro units than Windows ones. From that base it has moved outward toward students and toward IT and business buyers who like the idea of a fleet that can be serviced instead of scrapped.
"The biggest impact we can make is generating less waste to begin with by making our products last longer." Nirav Patel
The cultureA company that argues in public
Framework runs more of its work in the open than most hardware makers would consider comfortable. It publishes schematics and CAD files, maintains open-source firmware on GitHub, and hosts a busy community forum where owners trade fixes, mods and complaints in full view of the company. When the community round happened, it was less a marketing stunt than an extension of how the company already behaved - the people in the forum were being asked to put money where their soldering irons were. The trade-off is that Framework has to answer to a crowd that reads teardown reports for fun, and notices immediately when a promise slips.
The problemThe math behind the mission
The company's stated enemy is electronic waste, and the numbers it cites are not subtle: global e-waste rose from about 44 million tonnes in 2014 to roughly 54 million tonnes by 2019. Recycling helps at the margins, but a device recycled once is still a device thrown away. Framework's wager is that the larger lever is longevity - a laptop you upgrade for years beats a laptop you recycle after three. That reframes repair from a grudging obligation into the product itself.
Funding rounds — approximate, USD
The moneyCustomers who became shareholders
Framework has raised roughly $61M in total. After a seed round and an $18M Series A led by Spark Capital, it closed a $17M Series A-1 in April 2024, with Spark again leading and Buckley Ventures, Anzu Partners, Pathbreaker Ventures and Cooler Master joining. The detail that fits the brand: alongside that round, Framework opened a $1M community round and let 100 customers each invest $10,000. The people who repair the product now own a slice of the company that makes it.
The moatOpening the platform on purpose
Most hardware companies guard the insides of their machines. Framework's strategy runs the other way - the openness is the point, and partners build the parts. Cooler Master, which supplies the Laptop 16's thermal system and later invested, sells a case that turns a retired Framework mainboard into a mini PC. DeepComputing shipped a RISC-V mainboard that drops into the Laptop 13 chassis, and MetaComputing offers an ARM64 board for Linux development. The chassis becomes a standard other people can build on, and the company sells the platform rather than defending a sealed box.
Framework's repairability, translated to a simple gauge, looks like this - a full row where competitors typically light only a segment or two:
iFixit repairability: 10 / 10.
The competitionWhere it sits in the market
Framework is small next to Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS and Apple, whose laptops are largely sealed and non-upgradeable. It does not try to beat them on scale or price. It competes on a claim they cannot easily match without redesigning their products and their business models - that you can keep this machine, and change the parts that age instead of the whole thing. In the narrower repairable-device world it sits alongside names like Fairphone, sharing a movement rather than a market.
Where it is headedMore categories, same rule
The recent moves suggest a company expanding by category rather than by churn. The 2025 stretch added the Framework Desktop and the Laptop 12, refreshed the Laptop 16 with current-generation NVIDIA graphics, and pushed the partner mainboard program - RISC-V and ARM64 - further into the open. Each addition follows the same rule the first laptop set: parts stay available, mainboards can be reused, and buying in does not mean signing up to replace the whole thing in three years. The company has said the funding is meant to deepen support for existing customers and extend into new product categories, and the roadmap so far reads that way.
What you can copyThe idea worth stealing
The transferable lesson is not "make things modular." It is that Framework turned its support cost into its product. In most consumer hardware, a customer who opens the device is a warranty problem. Here, the customer who swaps a screen, buys a new Expansion Card or upgrades a mainboard is a repeat sale. Longevity and revenue point the same direction. The condition where it strains is obvious enough: modularity adds cost and bulk, the supply chain is the same Taiwan-centered base everyone else uses, and the whole thing only works if the company keeps shipping parts for machines it sold years ago. So far, five years in, it has.