It's kind of mind boggling to me that they have a tight chassis, AND it meets their buildable/ugpradeable/repairable goals, AND their backwards compatibility is reaching back five years now.

I think a number of people would have expected these to eventually require a trade-off. Especially coming from pc-building land, where we see new non-backwards-compatible CPU and RAM sockets every 6 or so years.

There's a version of this where Frame.work said, "Design tradeoffs mean the 13 Pro is a new platform that is largely not backwards compatible, but don't worry, the 13 series will still get 5+ years of support and parts" and everyone goes "Aw, well, I guess that's reasonable."

I really want to emphasize that it's looking like Framework is creating a laptop with _better_ backwards compatibility and build-ability than a desktop PC.

All this is to say that this is very very impressive!

Unfortunately, we live in a world where most companies pay lip service to their stated value proposition, while racing to the bottom.

They could have done a much more minimal version and called it a day. Being able to swap individual components of the chassis into a 5 year old model is, to me, going way above and beyond.

That doesn’t negate how impressive it is

Yes but it's truly impressive to see it. It shows it can be done.

An 11th gen CPU/mobo that came out in 2020 can be dropped straight into this new chassis.

Or the newest display be can be dropped into your 2020 laptop/chassis.