The new and upgraded Framework Laptop

Ohhhhh that's why there was a spate of projects posted last week about building computers based on framework mainboards - submarine marketing for this framework upgrade launch. Figured it was framework behind it somehow, but the fact that it's to promote the 'here are some ways to use your old mainboard once you upgrade' angle makes a ton of sense.

Yeah - whenever somebody makes a good thing and people use it in cool ways, that's submarine marketing for that thing.

Sure, it's entirely a coincidence that both https://github.com/brickbots/framedeck/ and https://github.com/penk/MainboardTerminal published 10 days ago, and they're both referenced in this framework announcement. Convenient for Framework that those two projects came out right before their upgrade launch!

But I don't just have my own innate cynicism to go on here! The framedeck project write-up actually contains this disclosure:

   As they were preparing this documentation release, they emailed me to see if I'd be interested in a collaboration of sorts. They would provide one of their laptops and some additional modules for me to build something unique with the only condition being that I released the designs for public use.

Which is fine! This is earned media - Framework got some people to make and open source some cool designs. I wasn't sure, last week, why they were doing that now in particular. Now I know why they're pushing that angle, and it makes sense.

Goodness, people are touchy.