Framing Element

Over the years, I don’t think there’s a laptop I longingly looked at more without buying than the Google Pixelbook.

Dating to 2017, the machine combined a very thin aesthetic with a clever use of materials—aluminum and glass, and a rubbery material on the wrist rests. It was not meant to be a fast machine, but it was very much a looker, with a very distinctive look that holds up nearly a decade later.

And it got good, not great, reviews.

But it had problems that kept it from being perfect. The bezels were a little wide. There was an extreme lack of ports—just two USB-C plugs and a headphone jack. Over time, the wrist rests got grimy, almost universally so. But the worst sin of all was the price. The device’s starting price was $999, easily putting it out of the hands of the average Chromebook user.

When the pandemic hit two and a half years later, Google’s folly with the Pixelbook became clear: It had produced a device for an audience that barely existed—the high-end Chromebook user. Meanwhile, actual low-end Chromebook users were not well-served by the market confusion created by the ancient Chromebooks that were glutting up Amazon.

But the Pixelbook was still an icon of what good computing could look like. On some days, I still head over to eBay to gawk at this device, which still retains its charm, even with the sweat-soaked wrist rests ruining the aesthetic. Google never made another model like it, leaving it up to brands like Samsung to pick up the slack, but they never quite nailed what made the Pixelbook special—a distinctive look combined with an easy-to-carry interface.

This week, I found myself thinking about the Pixelbook again when I saw what Framework had cooked up at its media event. Most of the excitement went towards the Framework Desktop, an attempt to build a mini PC around a really fast, memory-packed system-on-chip at a time when local LLMs have made RAM-packed SoCs a hot commodity.

But my eyes found themselves much more excited about the Framework Laptop 12, a 2-in-1 device, seemingly built for students, but absolutely feeling like they’re built for the average person, too. Not going to lie, I think it could replace my aging iPad Pro.

To be clear, it is not the Pixelbook, but it feels like the kind of system the Pixelbook could have been had Google let the team iterate on that impressive original model. What if, instead of being asked to produce a tablet and a traditional laptop next, Google just kept making new versions of the original 2-in-1? Assuredly, they would have gotten to making something that looks like this, eschewing the glass and rubber in the original Pixelbook for something plasticky. This model would have also been much cheaper.

But one can imagine that Google was caught between a rock and a hard place with the Pixelbook. Simply put, it could not come up with a cheaper device along the lines of the Pixel 8a smartphone without eating directly into the lunch of its partners. Ironically, that saddled it with a high-end market that doesn’t really exist for Chromebooks.

The Framework 12 faces no such diplomacy challenges. (Though the Framework Desktop, which eschews Framework’s defining RAM-upgrade feature to meet the needs of a dynamite SoC, did.) The machine, price yet to be announced, presents a version of the cheap laptop that is both fun but also repairable, complete with upgradeable RAM and storage.

It’s not quite as good as a full-fat Framework machine, to be clear—it uses just single-channel memory, for one thing, and the screen is relatively low-resolution. But if they can get it below $600, it could be a game-changer for the low-end computing market that hasn’t perhaps been seen since the days of the iBook. (That device was so good that people were willing to stampede to get one.)

A lot of PC manufacturers focus on just making computers to hit a price point. Framework, by building this machine, has taken it upon itself to re-introduce a lane that has long been forgotten: The cheap computer that is worth more than the sum of its parts. In some ways, the Chromebook was supposed to be this device. But in others, it falls short due to a lack of repairability.

The Pixelbook, somewhat infamously, was a very non-upgradeable device, with the entire mainboard included on a single thin slab of silicon that is complicated to access.

Last time I wrote about Framework, I complained that the Framework 16 did not match where the market actually was at, comparing it to an infamous scene in The Simpsons where Homer designed a car. I still kind of feel that way about that device, but I feel like the Framework 12 could actually win a lot of new converts to its mission. Stuff like swappable GPUs and keyboard replacements may win over the enthusiasts, but I could see myself talking loved ones currently slogging away on Chromebooks into moving over to this thing.

Google could have done this. Apple could have done this. Hell, any of the cheap laptop makers currently on the market could have done this. Framework appears to have actually done it—complete with a “one more thing”-style announcement.

My hopes are high it lives up to the launch.