This was so critical for us at Oculus as we tried to build a VR headset for the masses. So even in those early days, how do you get from "this is a thing I should do" to "there is a company I should build here?"Ī lot of it really comes down to finding the right audience and building the right product. And at least as far as I can tell, it has never, ever, ever gone well. I think a lot of people have had that thought before. There must be a way to align the incentives to make longevity actually work. And so the genesis of Framework was really that it can't possibly be that this is the right thing to do. That's true! And it felt like it was very clearly not something that was going to fix itself. Even though these are the most advanced, expensive outputs of civilization, we're treating them like they're a pair of sneakers, or a pair of jeans that kind of wear through and that goes out into the trash.Įven worse, in some cases! People keep jeans longer than they keep their phones. It was really the decreasing level of consumer ownership, and the increasing behavior of treating products as disposable. And across that time that I just really consistently saw a trend in the consumer electronics industry that was pretty worrying. So I've been in consumer electronics for about a decade across Apple, and then part of the founding team of Oculus, going into Facebook. Tell me how you got started working on Framework. Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
You can hear our full conversation on the latest episode of the Source Code podcast, or by clicking on the player above. Patel joined the Source Code Podcast to discuss the journey of making the Framework Laptop, how the industry is changing thanks to right-to-repair laws and a societal turn toward conservation, the challenges faced by Framework and other companies making modular and upgradeable devices and what phones should learn from jeans. From the processor to the keyboard to the memory to the battery, Framework's laptop is a vision for a future that gives users more control over their gadgets, and gives longer life to the gadgets themselves.
Except for the fact that you can take it apart, practically piece by piece, and repair or upgrade nearly everything inside.
The Framework Laptop, the company's first product, is a $999, 13.5-inch clamshell that looks and feels a lot like, well, every other laptop on the market. But when he founded his own company, Framework, he picked a decidedly more mature (and maybe less exciting) product to focus on: PCs. Nirav Patel spent a long time building cutting-edge hardware, both at Apple and at Oculus.