I feel like they either have zero or infinite value. On pure "which laptop would I pick to do a task" it's almost never going to be a Framework. It's objectively a worse laptop for almost all daily tasks.
The issue is that repairability and upgradability are, unless you regularly break your computer, at most a once a year occurrence. On that day, you have a better laptop with the Framework (maybe). The other 364, you're dealing with new and novel frustrations you haven't had to deal with for over a decade in computing. Is your value system such that, being able to potentially manually replace a broken part is worth dealing with a bad computer the rest of the time?
Just today, I spent 30 minutes just trying to work out how to get my system clock to sync with my hardware clock, and how to get both of them to be accurate, because the Framework's battery management is so abysmal that I have to keep it shut down at all times it's not in active use/charging, and even fully shut down, it'll still so deeply discharge the battery after a week that the bios loses power and unsyncs the hardware clock. It's quite possibly the worst computer I've used in 20 years.
> ..the Framework's battery management is so abysmal that I have to keep it shut down at all times it's not in active use/charging, and even fully shut down, it'll still so deeply discharge the battery after a week that the bios loses power and unsyncs the hardware clock.
I'm not sure, but this sounds like it might be the design flaw that was in the first generation where the RTC battery did not charge via the main battery but from the plugin charger. Louis Rossman mentioned this in a recent video[0].
That seems about right. I'm about to just try to sell this laptop. It's the most I've ever spent on what's probably the worst computing device I've ever had. I could spend most of $1200 replacing all the flawed parts and underperforming parts, but at that point, I'll just buy a computer that works instead.
