Two years ago, the last time Framework had an event in San Francisco, California, the highlight was the Framework Laptop 16 — a laptop promising the “holy grail” of upgradable graphics cards, and easily one of the most ambitious laptops ever made.

But today, the Framework Laptop 16 got little mention at its new event, which focused on the new, similarly gamer-oriented Framework Desktop instead. While the Desktop and Framework’s original 13-inch laptop both got the latest AMD processors today, we don’t yet know if or when the Framework Laptop 16 might leap forward too.

The only mention of Framework’s flagship laptop was a new “One Key Module” that will experimentally be available for the Framework community to build their own electromechanical keyboards, should they choose to, that would be thin enough to fit in the Laptop 16’s extremely thin Input Module bay. (You can see how the Input Modules work in my video here.)

While Framework did finally ship its promised M.2 adapter bay in December, which will let you stick extra SSDs or other peripherals into a Framework Laptop 16 instead of a discrete graphics card, my big question is: is the promising but somewhat problematic laptop a dead end, or will it get new mainboards and new chips in the future?

I tracked down Framework CEO Nirav Patel at the event today, and he wouldn’t say much, but he was clear on one thing: “We’re nowhere near done with Framework Laptop 16.”

I pushed my luck, asking: Is today the day he can assure us that the Laptop 16 will eventually see at least one GPU upgrade or snap-on secondary battery?

“Today is not that day,” he told me.

I want to see Framework succeed, and perhaps it’s too early to begin to wonder otherwise — it was still shipping preordered batches of the Laptop 16 to buyers through the middle of last year.

But we’ve pushed the company pretty hard on the GPU in the past specifically because it’s a thing rivals have tried and failed at before — Dell/Alienware even got sued over the failed promise of the Alienware Area-51m, which never bothered to ship a second generation of its supposedly upgradable GPUs.

Framework has resisted our pushes so far, stopping short of confirming it in our 2023 story: here’s his exact language at the time. It’d be nice if Framework could assure buyers that the upgrades are absolutely coming. But personally, there’s more than a few things about that laptop I’d like to change, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Framework was doing a bit of a rethink even if it does deliver.

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