Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You're listening to the Arbery Digital Experiences podcast where strategy meets technology.
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[00:00:18] Speaker B: Welcome to Arbery Digital Experiences. This is episode 21. I'm Tad Reeves, principal architect at Arbery Digital and I'm joined today by Dwayne Hale, CTO at Arbr Digital.
Today we're going to slightly different topic than usual. Usually we're talking all about Adobe Experience Manager. Today we're going to talk about hardware because, and this is not just hardware, but hardware and the subject of sustainability.
And so Dwayne, so I. Do you want to just kick us off right here? Because we're going to, we're so one of.
Sustainability is one of Arbry Digital's core values. I mean, it's Arbery Digital after all. So, and, and so how, how does, how does sustainability and hardware fit into our mission here?
[00:01:04] Speaker A: Yeah, so typically in an organization, you know, sustainability is a big challenge, especially a tech, you know, focused organization because you're often cycling through hardware quite a bit. Most organizations I've been at before, they'll do like a five year retirement plan for most machines and then at the end of that five years, you know, it gets shipped off to an E waste recycler or ends up in some, you know, landfill somewhere, even though that's not typically what happens to it, but it can end up happening.
And so at Arbery Digital, when we were focused on acquiring machines for our developers, our project managers, you know, top to bottom, CEO to interns, we came across a company that took sustainability to a whole new level when it comes to laptops and now desktops. So that company just want to throw that out there. We're not being paid to, you know, review this or anything, but it's a little, little company named Framework and they build modular laptops. So that really kind of segues into the sustainability portion of it. So if you've ever worked you a corporate IT job or even a non corporate IT job in the past, you'll often know that like as we've been progressing, laptops have kind of went from being a computer that you could carry around to being more like the phone in your pocket where all the internal modules, cpu, memory, you know, the hard drive, it's all soldered to one board. And that poses, you know, sustainability issues. Let's say down the road, you know, a project manager leaves the company or, you know, gets a new machine or something along those lines, how do you reuse that machine outside of just handing it to another project manager? With traditional laptops, you can't upgrade. Well, most traditional laptops, you can't actually upgrade the hard drive to a larger size hard drive.
Thinking in terms of, you know, most MacBooks these days, they all have the components soldered onto them. So how. That, that also poses a challenge to the organization of how do you reuse the hardware if for, say, you've got a developer that needs a machine, but you have a project manager that just gave up their slightly underpowered machine. Because most project managers are not going to be developing code or running builds or running virtual machines on their machine. So how, how do you bridge that gap between being sustainable and reusing the hardware versus controlling cost as well? Because you don't want to just run out willy nilly and buy a new machine for this developer when there's the chance you could reuse something that you already have purchased and already have owned. And that's where Framework comes in.
They're fully modular laptops. So things like the memory, the main board and the hard drives are completely replaceable.
Really.
I would say the difficulty in replacing them is not if you can build your own home computer, you can definitely manage with a Framework.
You know, it's, they even ship you the tool to be able to work on the framework.
[00:04:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
Yeah. I would say it's even easier in some cases because, you know, even a desktop PC build can sometimes be a little daunting. I mean, building a Framework laptop is remarkably easy. Like, I would put it to anybody who has even any basic level of physical skill. They're not like a klutz or something like that. Like pretty much anybody could do it. But that also means that a lot of those things that need to be upgraded or changed or something like that could also be done. You could walk somebody through with instructions and say, oh, you needed a, a new, you know, your, your WI FI module burnt out or something like that, which would have been a laptop ending event for a MacBook or for your average Dell or something like that. With this you just can send somebody a WI FI module and say just the instructions are right here. You can totally do it. Just print them out and, and, and you're good to go.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Yeah. And so it's kind of taking the old paradigm of what laptops used to be and bringing it into the future. I remember, you know, my, this might age me a little bit, but I Remember my first laptop I purchased going into college, you could, it had a little door on the bottom. You could add RAM to it. It had a little sliding card on the side. You could change out the, you know, the hard drive if you want it. And then so it's kind of bringing the old back into the new.
And what that means for an organization is the machines are a lot more sustainable and you get a lot longer useful life out of the machine before you know, it ends up being retired and then you know, sent either to recycling or, or, you know, what we do here at Arbery Digital is we find good causes that we can then donate the machines to because even though they may not be performant enough for a developer or performing enough for a project manager, there are still use cases out there where things like schools or churches or community groups might have a need that they can't go out and purchase a brand new laptop. And thus by us donating them back into the community, they do get a second lifetime even outside of the corporate world.
[00:06:25] Speaker B: But even, even that I think is almost an edge case right now with, with Framework. Because, because like when, when, when Framework first came out it was a little bit of like, okay, this is a, it's a fun business model if this can like if they could keep this up. But I, I, I, I thought that the likelihood that they were actually going to get to their second revision of that was like a little low. I thought it was awesome and I really loved the idea. I was like you know, go guys. But, but when they like, like oh good. Well there's the 12th gen, 12th gen Intel. Okay good. They, they, they, they revved up on their motherboard since then. 13th gen, they came out with an AMD 7000 series. They came out with AMD Ryzen AI 300 series. They've got a, so, so that, that, that framework 13 chassis has now seen what, five upgrade cycles. Yep. They've got, they've got new screens, new new camera module, new keyboard, new, a bunch, a bunch of stuff that they've, that they've done newly. And, and it's been, you can just keep that thing going. It's, I mean it's a really solid chassis. You know, it's, it's as solid as, as any MacBook in terms of a chassis. Like I don't, I don't, I don't see it as inferior to, to a MacBook chassis. And it's all aluminum, super light, super portable. You know what I mean? And, and you can, but you can, you can take a 13 inch chassis. Like it, it's a, it's a, it's a machine that. Let's just say you gave one of these things to an intern and then next thing you know you've got an AM developer and you, that person's going to need to put a couple VMs on it and they've got RAM and CPU needs.
You're not buying an entirely new laptop. All you gotta do is just throw, maybe you just gotta throw some more RAM at it and, and it's good to go. You can put 96 gig of RAM and a 13 inch chassis. You put a 4 terabyte drive into a 13 inch chassis. It's a beast.
So I get things that. The amount of additional lifespan that you can get out of one of those is amazing.
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Yeah. What really struck me with the revisions that they've been bringing out is that they fundamentally haven't changed the chassis, if at all. And like you said, you could still, if you really wanted to buy just the main board separately, let's say you want to upgrade to the latest and greatest AMD or Intel cpu, you could buy the mainboard separately, reuse your components as long as you know they're compatible with the new mainboard and be able to, you know, essentially have a brand new laptop but still reuse 90 to 95% of the original laptop that you purchased.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: That's right. That's right. I think, I think they, I mean they had done little, little things like whatever. They found that they wanted the hinge mechanism to be a little nicer and so they upgraded the hinge mechanism a little bit. But yeah, that, the, the basic stuff is still the same. They've got, they've, and they've had amazing deals too on, on refurb ones which. That's the other thing too about buying a refurb laptop is I've always had my kind of qualms about buying a refurb laptop where the warranty period's almost already expired and you're like, is this, how much life is this thing going to have before? It's just another one on my notebook shelf, which I kind of wanted to, I wanted to have my Stacko laptops here for, for this podcast because I've got a stack of old laptops which are, which I just, whatever. One of them's got a cracked screen, can't do anything with it, but it's got a soldered on SSD that I can't do anything with. I mean, I could put it, you know, a drill Press through it or something like that. But I'm like, okay, good, maybe I'll find something to do with it. Goes in the shelf. I've got, I've just, I've got like six laptops that are all sitting there. I'm like what am I going to do with this thing? I can't, I don't want to throw it away. I haven't brought myself to throw it away yet. Or I got to do the work to dispose of it. So it's just sitting there. But a lot of them just have like one flaw. Like if the CPU was a little bit faster, if I could stick a little bit more RAM in it, it'd be good if the screen wasn't busted, it'd be good if the touchpad wasn't busted, if the battery hadn't ballooned a little bit. Like even battery issues aren't an ending, a laptop ending event. With this you just, you just get into, you just order one online and you just put it in yourself. You don't even need to take it to a service center which that to me it's brilliant.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it is brilliant. And what that translates for to us here at Arbery is that we can actually get longer lifespan out of the laptop before we end up retiring it. Circling back to, you know, the five year. Most organizations I've been at typically do a five year lifetime on all their hardware, laptops especially.
And here at Arbery we're shooting for a seven, possibly eight year. I'm going to try to go eight personally and see if I can make it that long without having to scrap the entire laptop and get, you know, order something new in.
And so that really does increase the la. The laptop's useful lifetime at the organization.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I agree.
There's a couple other things though too that I think are, are, are worthy of mention.
One of those is that so, so a lot of us are engineers at heart and, and, and you, and especially these, these like ops focused folks like us have a lot of hands on with the gear that make up the Internet. And as you bring somebody new on like somebody, somebody straight out of college, one of the things that I found with a lot of the, a lot of college folks these days is they're not getting a lot of computer basics right. They might have, they might be great at Python, they might be fabulous JavaScript developers, but the amount of actual like good. Can you tell me what the difference is? You know, like what's what. Could you point out where the CPU is in, in a In a, in a modern system, could you point out like, do you know how to install ram? Like, do you know what it looks like? You know, things like that they might not even have familiarity with the parts of a computer and I think that even just getting folks they could. Here's, here's a computer. It's a little bit, you know, kind of an IKEA type of it. Like it. You can have a computer just got to go build it and you know, and just get, get, get folks like good. Here's, here's the thing that you're going to be working on here. You know, you know, touch it. It's a. Okay to touch this thing. You know, obviously don't you know, scuff your feet on the floor and then touch your RAM or something like that. But you can, you can teach folks the basics of, of what is even in a computer and, and therefore give, give them a little bit more control over this machine that they're driving on a daily basis.
[00:12:32] Speaker A: Right. And given that Arbery Digital is a remote focused organization, you know, that also empowers the people developers in the field. Anybody like you said with a bit of, you know, can you turn a screwdriver, can you follow a YouTube video?
They can actually do field repairs on their own and they don't have to, you know, for instance, closest Apple Mac or Apple Store to me is about two hours away, hour and a half. And if I have an Apple, something goes wrong with it. Now I'm not bashing Apple. I mean we use that here at Arbor as well. I have to drive two hours to fix the part or fix the machine. Whereas if something goes wrong with my framework, I can drive half hour away to a Staples or whoever sells, you know, memory modules or MVME modules and I could break one of those up, pop it in and be right back on the road.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, I agree.
And another item though too is that so we got. So Linux compatibility is another big, another big deal. Like the fact that, that, because a lot of, a lot of laptops these days too is like we, you do a lot of stuff where you might want to have a server running or something like that. The fact that these are all completely Linux compatible out of the box and don't really require anything. You can, you can just. And you. And that's the other thing too is, is that there's such a, such a like hardware nerd community around these machines right now that even if you, let's see, you've got, you got a framework 13 and you got to go. And so you, you decided to upgrade the motherboard to, for, for a better cpu. And, and then so you've got an old motherboard, old RAM and old storage.
They there are folks that are selling like even cooler master selling cases to go and just stick that motherboard in. So now you have yourself a whatever quad CPU, 11th gen intel or whatever it was that your old machine was server, little itty bitty server machine that you could go and turn it into a router or turn it into a NAS server or turn it into whatever you want to do and you know, run any flavor of Linux you want on it because it is already running out of the box.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Yep. And that also plays into the fact that you know, if you're, if you're an organization where you're running a network operations center or you're running digital signage throughout your headquarters or your offices, you could actually repurpose that machine as a digital signage machine. Even, even if let's say like a project manager couldn't use it because it's too slow for them or you know, an intern couldn't use it because it' not performing enough for the activities that they're doing on it, it still gives that machine a longer lifespan by becoming something that you know, just shows network statistics or shows, you know, elevator pitch as you're coming into the organization's building. As to here's what we do and it really does expand the, not only the use cases for the hardware itself but the lifetime of the hardware which then plays back into the sustainability because it's keeping it out of, you know, an E waste recycler or out of the landfill and it just gives a longer lifespan to the hardware overall.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean it makes you, makes you wish they do something like this for phones. But, but I don't know, I don't know how, how, how close that is on the horizon because I mean just, just some things that are, are, I mean it is just annoying that the, the, the non repairability of so many modern devices that the fact that really like you get one thing that's amiss with it and you, and, and it, you have to chuck it in the trash. I mean my wife, who's, who, who is who most of the work that we've done around here, all this window trim and all this kind of stuff. I mean she's a woodworker and so she's used to just making stuff and fixing stuff and, and whenever I say oh sorry honey, you're, you know, we're just gonna have to get you a new laptop because your, because your screen just went on the fritz. And one of those ones that in, in our, in my laptop graveyard is hers. And with it, it's got a little crack on the screen. Screen stopped working and then now it's, now it's toast. So I'm like, you gotta, I know. She's like, can't you replace the screen? I'm like, I mean I could, I could order one from HP and it's gonna be, whatever, it's gonna be $1600 to get this thing here and like, why would. Like it. And then I have to take the entire thing apart because. And it's sixteen hundred dollars because you have to replace the entire lid of the laptop. There's no such thing as replacing the screen. If you watch some of the. So the, the framework 12 that just came out is a touchscreen framework that is main.
You can, you can actually use or replace the touch screen on that thing. It was the most beautiful thing. I think I made an audible noise that I probably shouldn't have when I, when I watched that video. I'm like, oh my goodness gracious. You can just sit there and if you crack the screen, you could just replace the screen and just stick it back on. So an itty bitty form factor touchscreen device that, that you can replace all the bits on.
[00:17:22] Speaker A: Right? And that's, that's not even common with any other touchscreen tablet or small form factor PC on the market. You have to have specialized tools, you know, plungers, suction cups, specialized glue to try to get the screen out of it. And then you could even damage the device trying to replace the screen yourself. Whereas Framework makes them more approachable to the average, well, the average person that has, you know, like I said, can you turn a screwdriver, can you follow a, you know, instruction manual or a YouTube video on how to replace it? And it really does make it. It also reinforces the idea of the ownership of the device. Right? Because I could see where some folks are like, oh, it's a throwaway. You know, I'm not really too worried about, you know, if I drop my laptop or if this. And when it's replaceable and you can actually get in there and make upgrades or replace broken components. That's when you start to, you know, really take ownership of the device because you feel like, hey, I, I can actually fix this myself. I don't have to just throw it away and start over. I can get this back up and running and you know, be off to the races again.
[00:18:32] Speaker B: Oh totally. And, and, and, and, and not have little, you know, single use case things be a thing that, that, that totally deep 60 from being able to use the device anymore. Like at my last company I had a, I had a developer machine and I had a new, so something new came out on an AEM world and I needed to run multiple VMs concurrently and I was testing some stuff out. I'm like, I need more storage. And so the I, and, and there was no way to upgrade the storage on my machine. They're like good, well we're just going to have to give you a different machine. So they had to ship me a whole and then the only way they could do that was ship me a 17 inch Dell Precision laptop. This, this absolutely. This thing was like £9. It was ridiculous. That was just so I could get more RAM and a little bit more storage.
[00:19:19] Speaker A: Right. And then that kind of plays into the concept that Framework has of these pluggable expansion modules. Now they all run on, you know, some generation of USB C.
But in that particular use case, let's say, you know, one of our developers is having to process a bunch of images for a customer or just a bunch of assets in general and they're using their laptop as a go between.
You know, you could order one of those expansion modules, plug it right into the laptop and be up and running and not have to wait for a laptop to come into you.
You know, deal with the issue of it being a 17 inch brick. And you know, it's far cheaper to do that than to order a whole nother laptop. Or even if you think about the effort and man hours that goes into the IT department to prep that machine, image it, send it to you and then process your machine. When you send, you know, the one that doesn't have enough space back, you're, you're getting some pretty decent cost savings that right then and there.
[00:20:19] Speaker B: That's right, that's right. Never mind the fact that so the storage in, in any of these have been M2 and it's been M2 for a long time. It's probably going to be M2 for a while, right?
What I found too is, is what's odd is it even works in the Windows world these days. It used to be that you couldn't take a Windows installation from one machine and put it in another. Cause it would say oh and it would barf at you and say that you've got a different computer. I've now done this on two occasions. Where the motherboard changed and I've got an, got a new machine. I took the SSD from one machine and then went and shoved it into the other machine and then I was back up and running and I didn't have to go and reinstall everything spec. And it works especially well on Linux, but, but it even works on, on Windows to an extent. So. But that, that saves you from the, the, from the multi. Days of lost developer production, of resetting up your machine. Because everybody knows that when you get a new laptop, you don't just get a new laptop and then you're running. Everybody knows that new laptop week means you've lost like three to four days.
Yeah, yeah.
[00:21:22] Speaker A: All the tools that you previously had, your build tools, you know, not so much the IDE per se, because that can be, you know, if an IT department is pretty slick, they can go ahead and have a developer image, but it starts to get into the weeds of how many images are you going to have. Depending on, you know, what kind of work your developers are doing, it can become a little unwieldy to have a bunch of images with, you know, Brew installed or trying to think of some toolings here that, you know, the Google Cloud cli, it was not cli.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Multiple different VPN clients for different customers and so forth. I mean, it can go really deep in terms of how many things you have to set back up. Like right now, I could tell you if I, if I had to go and redo my laptop from scratch, it would, that would, that would end my week pretty much. I wouldn't be doing any customer work for a little bit. So it's nice to have that as an option too. I think that is just another piece of it.
[00:22:21] Speaker A: Yeah. And touching on the extension or expansion cards, this was something that me and you were talking about earlier in the week. Imagine that you take a framework 13 that a project manager was previously using and they only had it configured for, let's say USB AAC and an HDMI port and maybe another USB A. And then you're going to send that framework to a developer and they're like, hey, I want to run it on my desk with two monitors. Instead of having to go and buy a, or pull a different machine out of inventory that actually has two video outputs, or the flip side of that is purchasing some sort of dock device that will then multiplex, you know, your monitors to two different monitors. You could just go into your pile of expansion cards, pop up, you know, HDMI in there and out the door, you Go.
[00:23:11] Speaker B: That's right.
That's right. I mean, even some of those, I mean, I don't know if you price those Dell docking stations too. Like, those are, some of those are not particularly cheap. Right. They're like 400 bucks just for one of those things. So. And that's just to get you a couple of these ports that you want. So to just have that. Just which are the ones that you want? Okay, you want these ones? Oh, do you want these ones for this trip? So that way you don't even have to take a station or dongles and stuff like that along with you. It's, it is, it is nice.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And I could see it being really useful for, you know, consultants that go on site to a customer and you know, that customer may have HDMI available to you if you're doing a presentation where they might have, hey, we only have DisplayPort at, you know, this location. So are you going to pack up a bunch of, you know, conversion modules to, you know, take your HDMI to DisplayPort or would you much rather prefer to take a handful of these little, you know, they're almost a half a business card in terms of physical size and you can just pack those with you and be ready when you get on site to the customer to be able to interface with whatever it is that they have there.
If, especially if you're giving architectural presentations or logic, you know, diagrams of how software works to a particular customer, you could just pack up your extensions and take them with extent expansion modules and take them with you versus having to carry around this, you know, bundle of cords and different module, you know, connect connectors and modules that don't really, they don't pack easily. They take up a lot of space.
It just kind of seems bulky where, you know, with the modules, you can put one in your shirt pocket and take it with you. It's not that. It's not necessarily, you know, cumbersome to travel with that.
[00:25:00] Speaker B: Yeah, And I think it's, I, I mean, I think it's just the whole idea of making it cool to, to not have to always get an entirely new laptop, to just, to just kind of make it kind of. I mean, it's, to me, it's almost like, it's a little bit like.
So, like I, I do a lot of mountain biking, right. And, and it's, and some, some people like get all excited about New Bike Day, but for me it's things like New Brakes day or, you know, New Derailleur Day that also gets me excited. I'm like, oh well, I'll get to notice this one neat thing about this and be able to have my bike for, for, for a really long time.
Because I think, I think that just, just be. And I think that also the whole idea that that framework has kind of championed, I see it, I see it kind of popping up around the market a little bit more these days. It's not so. Because for, for a little while, Apple was kind of swaying everybody's opinion. And again, I'm. We're not hating on Apple at all. I mean, they make some of the most beautiful devices ever, but some of the design decisions of, of sacrificing everything on the altar of thinness is, is as is. That's a decision I don't necessarily agree with. Like, I was a big fan of their old school, like their, their, their old school G5 cases and stuff like that. Like, I don't know if you ever used one of those, but I used to work in a design shop that had a whole ton of those. That was one of the most beautiful cases that was ever made ever.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: And yeah, all aluminum cheese grater, buddy, that was great.
[00:26:30] Speaker B: But yeah, but the fact that you're buying an appliance these days, that is simply when any portion of that appliance breaks, there's nothing you can do besides get a new appliance, which is a great profit model. But it's not, it's just, it's. It, it's sad otherwise. And the, the purported benefit of being thin, like, I can't remember the last time I was typing on my laptop and saying, I love this thing. I just wish it was thinner.
[00:27:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's never really even traveling with it. I've never been, you know, I've never been like, this thing is too, you know, cumbersome.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: And that going back to your point, you know, I used MacBook Pro in three, two different organizations over the course of, you know, better part of 10 years. So I, I did come from that background of, you know, I'm a developer or I'm an ops person. I'm going to use a MacBook because it provides, you know, a terminal and some Unix tools, Linux like tools.
But never once was I like, man, I really wish this screen was just a little bit thinner. And you know, I really wish this, you know, MacBook Pro was just, you know, a couple millimeters smaller. And it's, it was actually refreshing switching to the framework. And then I personally, you know, switched to Linux because that's the world we live in for most of our customers, they run some version of Linux. So it really made sense to just go ahead and make the jump and you know, use the operating system that is most like what my customer gear is going to be like.
[00:28:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that is that. And that is the thing too in our. Not, I mean, not everybody's like that. And there's, and there's some of our team even that, that just, they're, they're very used to the, the Mac world and, and they've got all their setup on that and we'll, we'll, we'll accommodate and say, good, good, you want a Mac, you can have a Mac. But, and, and, and how, how do you, how do you recommend handling things like that for folks that are, that, that do want to be in that Mac world? What, what, what, what's the direction that you've been leading?
[00:28:39] Speaker A: So at Arbery, we, we tend to trend towards buying refurbished Macs just because you can get them at a little bit cheaper price and that, you know, again, it's more sustainable than just purchasing one outright. And they're not typically too far behind what the current offering is. Especially, you know, you can sometimes get basically what is current generation and it had, you know, a cracked screen and it got sent back to Apple and replaced and you can get it, you know, $500 to $600 off what the normal cost of a MacBook would be. And you're essentially reusing something that was already sold once and was already built once. You know, we had that discussion recently about the, just the sheer amount of resources that go into building laptops and the energy usage that goes in at the factories that build them. It just makes sense to try to get something that's been, you know, refurbished by Apple especially because I don't know if you've ever bought a refurbished Apple product, but they are pretty much the top tier of refurbished products.
I've had some other, you know, vendors where you get a refurbished laptop and it's kind of like you said, you know, it's at the, towards the end of the warranty and you're like, is this, you know, is this a chance I'm willing to take? And with, you know, the Apple refurbished hardware, it is very much the top of the tier when it comes to refurbished.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but still, I think, I think that the, the, the, the goal that, that I would hope that companies would ascribe to is is this, this whole, that, that being able to not just treat these things that we are going to use, we're going to Keep using this form factor for a while. So to be able to have this be repairable is, is huge. To, to, to make it just not just a, a, a disposable object that you're just going to buy a new one every three years or something like that that you're just kind of just renting the device that you're using because you never really own it because like you, you, you brought this up too is like, like actually owning the device that you like. Really, you know, it is, it is yours. I mean that's the other thing. I, I saw this comic, this great comic book the other day. It was, and it was basically just somebody saying, well, the great thing about a framework is that, that you don't have to, you don't have to leave behind all of the stickers that you put on the lid when you, when you need a new gear.
I mean you could literally just put the new guts in and keep all your stickers on the laptop. So.
[00:31:06] Speaker A: Yep.
And so yeah, the framework does have a lot of positives especially for a corporate organization because you know, you're going to have some cost savings over something like a MacBook or, or even, you know, comparable Dell for that matter.
But then you have that sustainability and the longevity of the device that really makes an impact to an IT department's bottom line because you can get more years of useful life out of it for a lower cost. Well, when lower cost is relative. When I mean lower cost is, you know, you, to your point earlier, if you give, you know, intern a framework with 8 gigs of RAM and you know, a terabyte drive and then later they convert to a full time developer or you know, you hire a full time developer, you can just order in more memory. You don't have to order in a whole new, you know, machine. And that, that alone, you know, can save 15, well, let's say conservatively like $1200 for a whole new machine that you might have to otherwise buy for that developer. Because you know, you can't reconfigure the Dell that you're the HP or whatever brand it is. You can't actually go in and add more memory to it.
[00:32:26] Speaker B: That's true. And that's the thing too. You go, you go down Newegg and you just start looking at stuff and there's, there are a ton of different, it's not just an Apple thing, there's a ton of different vendors right now that have, have done the same thing in terms of sacrificing everything on the altar of thick of thinness and, and have soldered or selling you a brand new laptop with 8 gigs of soldered on memory non expandable which I think should be, you know, illegal and against the Geneva Convention or something like that because it's, it's like that, that, that laptop, even though it technically will run Chrome right now, it, it, how much life does it, is it going to have before it is unusable?
[00:33:11] Speaker A: Yeah, Chrome would be basically all it can run depending on how many tabs you have open.
[00:33:18] Speaker B: It's essentially a disposable device that is probably going to have less than a one year usable lifespan before you're swearing at it.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: Well, cool. Good. Well, I mean we, we can, we can probably talk hardware all day, but I think that, that we covered the main points of, of hardware of why we feel so strongly about this.
Thanks for, thanks for coming on there, Dwayne.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: Yeah. And one last note for the Windows users out there. I know we talked a lot about Linux and Mac OS frameworks are compatible with Windows 11.
So for instance, we had an intern come in. He never really was a big Mac guy, sort of curious about Linux but never had used it before. And he's like hey, I'm fine with Windows 11. If you guys can get something that runs Windows 11, that'd be fine for me. So we ordered him one in with Windows 11 not pre installed of course we had to install it and actually you can get them where they're pre, you know, right out of the box ready to run. Yeah, but we typically, right. We typically order the DIY kit because it's a little bit cheaper. Not much. I mean 50 bucks, maybe 100 bucks maybe. But you know, we, we build them on site and then hand it out to the interns.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, which, which that totally, I mean these days too I, I got into Linux entirely because of my loathing for the, for the balmer and Gates led Microsoft. That was entirely why I learned Linux in the first place.
And then since then, you know, Nadella's, Nadella's leadership has been fabulous. At Microsoft there's, there's a lot of things to like about things that they're doing.
And I think that Windows Terminal and Windows subsystem for Linux are like basically the best things that have happened to Microsoft. The best single programs that they have created in recent memory. I mean they make anything just in the Linux world pretty much doable on a, on a, on a Windows machine. Yep.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: Well, cool.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: Good. And I think we'll, we'll cut it there.
Curious about everybody else's feedback. I wonder if we have a single other listener, too, who is. Who is a. Who's a. Who's a framework user, but we'd love to hear from you.
[00:35:26] Speaker A: Yeah. If not, maybe we pique their interest in sustainability and electronics.
[00:35:32] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
All right, Cool. Good. Well, then, we'll talk to you guys all soon.
[00:35:37] Speaker A: Yep. Have a good one.
