Checking on my Investment in Person - Framework Laptop Factory Tour

product shortages have become an unavoidable fact of life and whether it's toilet paper or Playstation 5S it raises the question if you don't have enough stock why don't you just build more of them except in this case I'm not just mad about waiting six months for my AMD framework laptop I've got a significant personal investment riding on the answer to that question and since I happened

to be in the neighborhood anyway I think it's time to pay them a little visit and find out what the heck is going on this says it's a Bicycle Club did I just get played no like any design firm framework works with manufacturing Partners to build their products and I am so excited to be here today compound is one of the largest odm laptop manufacturers in

the world and they were gracious enough to allow us on the production floor on extremely short notice to shed some light on how laptop production works for a small startup partner like framework and to shed some light on our sponsor cable mod it's like a mod for your cables because that is exactly what it is upgrade your GPU Cable Management with our 12 volt high power

angled adapters learn more at the end of the video the Journey Begins in the Board Room and I mean that in more ways than one when we arrived framework was literally in the middle of a meeting to negotiate an increase in production capacity but as you guys are about to see Partnerships are hard work and this process isn't as simple as sure let's just build some

more who's going to be responsible for paying for the new line who's going to get cut to make room on the production floor and where are all the extra materials going to come from assuming they can answer all of those questions framework will be adding more lines like the ones I'm standing on right now this spot looks good can we add more here what yeah obviously

it's not as simple as Conjuring more production lines let's take a look at why there are two different types of lines we'll be looking at today this side is a sub-assembly line where framework pre-builds the assemblies that will be used to integrate into finished machines and we've got something really exciting to show you here this is currently running a dvt-1 or design verification one run of

track pads for the upcoming framework laptop 16. now I showed you that machine already but the one you saw on the channel was a very early sample with components from the stage before called EVT or engineering validation stage that one would have cost tens of thousands of dollars to build which come to think of it explains why narab was so squirrely about me handling it anyway

the reason it costs so much is because there's practically no tooling which is the fixtures molds and equipment that are needed to enable mass production so nearly every piece of that machine was hand built by engineers and specialist contractors due to the cost you would typically build only a few dozen main boards and a handful of enclosures at that stage coming back to DVT though mass

production tooling is used to ramp things up significantly and right now they're in the process of building hundreds of pre-production framework laptop 16s now these are still very expensive several times the cost of a production unit due to the expensive engineering labor and the immature production processes but this is so important because it helps identify areas where both quality and efficiency can be improved for example

now and what you guys got to understand here is nothing about this processes by accident it might seem like it's putting screws in random locations but every part of the manufacturing process is agonized over to make it as reliable and efficient as possible with that said I mean it's not the screwdriver I would have built you can find that one at lttstore.com in all seriousness this

saves them from needing different processes and production lines for DIY and pre-built and it increases quality assurance we're going to take a look at that later first what's this pile I'm sitting on here the main store room isn't a high security area on another floor I'm not allowed to show you that but this is still thousands of dollars worth of components for the day's production they

get carted here then over to the kidding stations where all of the components for each machine like the screen assembly and the motherboard are serialized and organized into a tray that follows the laptop down the assembly line to keep everything within Arm's Reach for the workers the reasons for this serialization are twofold first is traceability let's say your customers start to report a string of SSD

failures if you have that information it can be the difference between the SSD manufacturer footing the bill for their faulty product or you having to swallow that pill yourself because they blame your process second because of their modular design framework has a lot of skus for their size that means that compared to say an apple who might have a permanent assembly line for each product framework

needs to be agile and this way they can swap their assembly lines between products as needed look at all the motherboards and now things really get going the first step is to install the thermal assembly on the motherboard then take the entire thing and put it into the bottom housing they use a special ionizing fan to reduce ESD since the main board is right there and

you really don't want that dying and then at the next station they screw in the SSD and add RAM all of the processes are outlined on these sop or standard operating procedure sheets that are hung at each individual station next the main board and Battery get screwed into place then right behind me the entire LCD assembly which already includes the hinge is screwed in and plugged

in there's a couple of things that are noteworthy here first of all this jig is kind of cool during the DVT stage they determined that this was exactly the optimal angle for this installation and there's all kinds of little details like that that we're going to see throughout the line and second you'll probably note that all of the workers are wearing ESD ankle straps but actually

wearing them unlike what I used to say in all of my PC build videos where I was not actually wearing them something that didn't get caught in DVT for the framework laptop 13 is the little bracket that holds the antennas onto the Wi-Fi card and there's a reason for that you see trained operators have no problem with picky installations like the old one used to be

but customers had a heck of a time with it so they redesigned the bracket to hold the antennas onto the Wi-Fi card then installed together rather than have it so you have to hold the whole thing together and screw it down hey there we go next comes the input cover so this varies wildly depending on which keyboard you get what is it nine languages now more

more than nine languages so we have nine countries that we're in but there's actually more languages than countries and we have a few of the keyboards available for countries we're going to be shipping in soon so it's literally we're adding a few new keyboards every quarter at this point anywho there's this fancy acrylic fixture that helps ensure that the screws and the driver are straight and

to help prevent the screwdriver from accidentally scratching any of the metal Parts this might seem a little bit confusing because we put the keyboard on the top then we flip it over to screw it in but that's how the framework laptop works and that's basically it finished laptops so then why is there still so much ahead of us on the assembly line ah quality control starting

with stru or what they would call in-process Quality Control this is a visual QA station where they'll find things like oh where'd it go this one come on Andy see this little guy right here they'll use a DOT gauge on that to determine whether it should be considered a pass and is acceptable to send to a customer or whether it's a fail which raises some interesting

questions given that framework is positioning themselves as an environmentally conscious brand does it really make sense to throw this whole assembly away over that tiny dot it's a tough question to answer because obviously they don't want to do that but from a customer standpoint do you want to be the one with the blemish or the one with the scratch I asked them if they've considered doing

something like a like a fail book where there's you know little scratches and you get a slight discount and they said yeah they'd love to be able to take pictures and price and list those things in the future but for now this kind of thing is pretty rare and the better approach is to improve the process and handling to ensure they get as little waste as

possible then it's time for software I have no idea if this song is going to get us dnca but apparently they do a media test on it um but not until the test program has been loaded on the laptops using these cool test harness like type c dongles that I mean because they're framework laptops end up sticking into the laptop under the side there then we

move into the function tests where everything type c wireless Bluetooth every Hardware function of the laptop gets tested and their software will check the serial number of the laptop and ensure that all the correct things are inside it now they're ready to ship right nope just kidding first they go into these fancy little protective padded bags and then they go into burn in land where they'll

sit for anywhere from 10 to 12 hours at the beginning of production and then maybe four to six hours after you've shipped thousands and thousands of units and you have a pretty good idea of what you're working with also at this stage they get the latest firmware flashed and the OS loaded including the latest drivers then we move to the funniest station this only applies to

DIY Frameworks but they take everything that all the people over there just did and undo it Yep they're taking them apart so that you can build it yourself at home cool now because they're doing DIY production right now this next stage wouldn't happen because um it wouldn't have a keyboard but this is the AIO test or automatic Optical inspection test to ensure that the keyboard is

in the right language for the order and maybe more importantly that there are no errors in the legend I asked about this and yes the step of verifying that the legend is correct does exist because there have been times when it wasn't and the reality of it is that you can't have the operator check to make sure all the keys are in the right place because

even if they did speak the language I mean it would be an easy thing to miss there are a few more stations that the machines pass through before shipping they wipe down the screen add certification labels and that sort of stuff but I actually think this nondescript green rack is a little bit more interesting framework targets a first run yield of in the high High 90

percent range but obviously High 90 would still mean that a few percent of the units are coming off the line not in a shippable state that's what you're looking at right here but these will be inspected and assuming that they pass individually will go back into the line giving framework what they say is a nearly 100 overall yield which is pretty awesome that Target is really

well aligned with Frameworks philosophy though not all of them are necessarily anything to do with sustainability for example they were willing to tell us that this line currently targets anywhere from 35 to 50 units per hour that means what about 35 to 40 seconds per station or something like that man that is really cool and it can be scaled this is just one line it could

be two lines or a hundred lines I mean a girl can dream right they won't tell me exactly how many lines they have because then I could pretty much calculate the revenue on my phone which for some reason I'm not allowed to know even though I'm an investor I guess that makes perfect sense anyway it's time for us to do something really fun now nirav and

I are going to be picking five random framework laptops off of the line here and we're going to be signing them if you get one and you send us a picture how on Earth are they going to do that you know what we're gonna have details in the description we are going to send you a framework shirt and an LTT screwdriver wait why am I doing

a screwdriver that costs so much more the shirts are sure really high quality heavyweight cotton all right fine let's do it and I can just sign them anywhere right yeah screen battery any of the sensitive components feel free yeah okay how about here these are DIYs right yeah they're all DIYs that could go to any of the countries we're shipping in no keyboard already Associated all

right so it's going to be completely random guys it's kind of ironic that you guys don't ship in Taiwan where you're producing these things we are opening ordering soon really actually specifically for that reason I mean Taiwan is an important market for PCs but also it's ridiculous set we're building them here and not selling yeah okay cool good job I think the last thing is to

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of fun colors to match the theme of your build well check out cable mod at the link below if you guys enjoyed this video you might enjoy the one where I build a framework laptop on the computex show floor under the watchful eye of nirav who says I did a great job without the instructions I I did say about it I don't think I don't think

I did now