Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix. That the replacement process entails swapping (and potentially upgrading, as I did in this exact situation with my FW16) just the motherboard instead of the entire laptop is a strict improvement.

That said, I agree with the article that a company like Framework with an ostensible mission of maximal repairability can and should at minimum provide header pins to reflash the firmware instead of requiring a bunch of adapters. Ideal would be an internal USB-C port that presents the flashed firmware as a file on a FAT filesystem that you can copy to backup or overwrite to restore/upgrade, like what the Raspberry Pi Pico does. Either approach would entail pennies of added cost per board, at most; it wouldn't take very many prevented warranty claims for that investment to pay off.

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quantum5 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Any other laptop is going to have the same risk of a failed BIOS flash, and will likely require the same degree of manual intervention to fix.

What I found from my research while writing the post is that both Dell and HP have BIOS recovery options without having to open the laptop at all, so that's not quite true. I think there's more Framework could have done here to make this a much less painful experience.

	▲	yellowapple 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		From what I can tell, HP's non-invasive BIOS recovery options are very model-dependent, and even models which do allegedly support recovery reportedly refuse to boot into recovery mode for some folks. But yes, Dell is the outlier that has me saying “likely” instead of “definitely” above; they've had orders of magnitude more time and money than Framework has to throw at BIOS development, and it shows. I agree with you that Framework should be making a priority of getting their BIOSes to that level; I'm also willing to extend them some grace given the company's age and resources.