is a senior editor and founding member of The Verge who covers gadgets, games, and toys. He spent 15 years editing the likes of CNET, Gizmodo, and Engadget.
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Today, Framework announced the second-gen Framework Laptop 16 with two industry firsts: the first Nvidia graphics card upgrade you can perform at home in just a couple minutes, and the first complete 240W laptop charging solution over a USB-C cable.
But the company’s also revealing some intriguing upgrades that didn’t quite make the cut — including an extra-large haptic touchpad a la Apple’s MacBooks, and the company’s first external graphics module (eGPU).
Not everything in the video below is actually coming to market, and some of it won’t be aimed at everyday consumers. Framework CEO Nirav Patel says he’s working to bring the fan-favorite ThinkPad Trackpoint nub to its keyboards, but keeps failing because the team can’t find a short enough nub that it doesn’t poke into the Laptop 16’s screen.
But he says a wide haptic touchpad is genuinely in development, one that won’t need the Framework Laptop 16’s modular spacers to give you a full-width palmrest. And if your main concern is just removing those spacers (I occasionally found the uneven surface annoying in my review), Framework says it’ll release 3D files so you can print your own full-width palmrest for the existing touchpad, in any color you like.
Here’s a look at that 3D-printed one:
You’ll be able to 3D print this deck yourself.
Framework also says an eGPU is actually in development that uses the Framework Laptop 16’s GPU modules, but not as a consumer product. Patel says that would make it too expensive to fulfill the team’s main goal: “We want to make sure there is a pathway to reuse graphics modules coming out of the Framework Laptop 16, so they’re not sitting in a drawer or worse going out into a landfill somewhere.”
So it won’t look like the prototype you see below, but rather something targeted at makers, he says — perhaps we’ll have to 3D print the case for that one ourselves as well.
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