Perhaps for you, but I very much care about my laptop's size and especially it's weight, as I carry it around on a daily basis.
Repairing or upgrading it aren't really of interest to me, as I wouldn't be able to aquire the parts where I typically live anyway. And performance and cooling have already been more than good enough for me in most laptops for the last decade.
Thinner devices need more solid enforcement to stay stiff. My Thinkpad X60s weighs the same as a Macbook Air and it's infinitely more upgradable.
Also they not only solder DRAM, now they solder keyboards so that you cannot replace it easily. My garbage keyboard broke after just 2 years of using and I had to solder ~100 plastic pins to replace it (and the replacement keyboard turned out to be not of a great quality).
If you want the battery life improvements, bear in mind that there is a hard limit on how large a battery you are allowed to fly with, so low power components are important.
Could it be that thin laptops are largely an excuse to provide a need to solder RAM; which in turn encourages consumption through obsolescence?
Not to mention how often I long for my MBA11 with the tapered body which almost made it feel like it was floating in my lap when working from the couch.
Unfortunately, not many people making those claims _actually_ want them by revealed preferences. They overwhelmingly want the lower price laptops with similar performance specs.
I like and support what Framework offers. But when I last bought a laptop (a couple of years ago now) the FW13 was almost double the price of a similarly-specc’d and thinner/lighter Asus. (From €1000 to ~€18-1900).
I’d probably pay a ~40% premium for FW, all else being equal, but 80-90% is just too much: it just doesn’t make sense to whatever value-assessment algorithms I’ve developed over time.
and you'd be one of the higher ones.
But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).
Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
I personally do think they're doing a good job of course, but i do also wonder the long term viability because their customers are so niche.
I used to use an 11" as my daily driver (and that was before retina-resolutions were a thing). It wasn't ideal, but it was fine for development work.