Credit:
Framework
Framework founder and CEO Nirav Patel at a Framework product event in 2023.
Credit:
Framework
As far back as August 2023, Patel has written that the plan is to work with Compal and Insyde to hire dedicated staff to provide better firmware support for Framework laptops. However, the benefits of this arrangement have been slow to reach users.
“[Compal] started recruiting on their side towards the end of last year,” Patel told Ars. “And now, just at the beginning of this year, we’ve been able to get that whole team into place and start onboarding them. And especially after Lunar New Year, which is in early February, that team is now up and running at full speed.”
The goal, Patel says, is to continuously cycle through all of Framework’s actively supported laptops, updating each of them one at a time before looping back around and starting the process over again. Functionality-breaking problems and security fixes will take precedence, while additional features and user requests will be lower-priority.
Patel says the most recent 3.19 BIOS update for the 11th-gen Intel Framework Laptop, released in beta form in August 2023 and formally released this past January, was the first update to benefit from this process. A new 3.05 BIOS update (plus an updated bundle of drivers) for the Ryzen version of the Framework Laptop 13 was posted late last week, and the plan is to test it for a couple of weeks and release it as a stable version if no one discovers major problems with it.
As for the 12th-generation Intel Framework update that had been hung up for so long, Patel said that it was “functionally complete” when we spoke in late March, but that the update was being held back while the team worked on the long-promised Linux-based BIOS updater.
“Actually, today we could go out there and take that beta release that we have and call that the final release for Windows. We want to make sure that we’re not putting our Linux users in a spot where they’re wondering, ‘Where’s Linux, why are we prioritizing Windows?'” Patel told Ars. “So basically, we’re holding on promoting it to what we would call a final release until we can do that… for both Windows and Linux.” (As of this writing, a Linux updater still isn’t available, even though the Windows one has been posted.)
