> I hope framework lives up to its promise, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

That's already happened? I started with an 11th gen Intel tigerlake laptop with DDR4 memory and a glossy screen. I upgraded to the AMD 7040 with DDR5 memory when I destroyed my Intel board with a soldering iron, skipping the Intel 12th gen iteration in between and the AMD AI 300 generation after the 7040.

I upgraded my screen from the glossy to the matte screen, I skipped the 120hz rounded corner screen, and now I'm likely upgrading to the new screen released for the FW13 pro. I upgraded my wifi card to a card supporting wifi 7 and my SSD to a 2TB SSD.

I upgraded my hinges from the original 3.5kg to the 4.0kg hinges. I upgraded my top cover from the original to the CNC version.

So far all of these upgrades have been completely interchangeable. I could have done any combination of those upgrades (with the exception that the ram had to be upgraded at the same time as the motherboard because the ram slots are on the motherboard).

At this point, the only original parts remaining in my laptop are the battery, the bezel, and the metal clip that goes over the wifi card antenna connectors. My laptop is literally the ship of theseus, something that has not been possible in laptops before framework.

Based on these announcements, most of the new framework 13 pro upgrades are also completely interchangeable, the one exception being the bigger battery and the bottom cover need to be upgraded together but I could upgrade the input cover without upgrading the bottom cover and battery if I wanted.

Personally, I'm planning on taking my existing AMD 7040 board and dropping it into a completely new framework 13 pro chassis because I've already invested in 96GB of ram for this board. Since I'm going to get the whole pro chassis, I'll sadly have to replace my original 55Wh battery, but they can pry my bezel and metal wifi antenna clip from my cold dead hands!

My thinkpad doesn't even have upgradable RAM. And it's from 2017, not even a new trend. I think that's bare minimum for considering a laptop to be modular or even upgradeable.

What promise are they not living up to?

You can absolutely take newer parts and put them in older models currently. You can find people in comment threads about framework on HN about doing it already. A day or two ago I saw a guy talking about swapping out his touchpad