I revived a bricked Framework laptop with $20 of tools

I had the same thing happen to me with my Thinkpad Nano, and researching how to fix this made me realize pc manufacturer really don't care.

PC bricked from BIOS update are still ultra common.

I uploaded a dump of the flash [1] in the bad state and they somehow analyzed it and made a fix.

Great for others I guess, but I'm still mindblown that the regular path would have been that this perfectly working laptop to this day become ewaste.

Being an embedded dev, I don't understand why there isn't a special USB-C protocol to recover bios over SDU/CC pins. Or some DFU mode you can boot into.

[1] https://github.com/fwupd/firmware-lenovo/issues/484

> Framework chose to not provide a header for flashing the BIOS, which, when combined with issue #3, forced the use of pogo pins.

Op probably missed https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/FrameworkDebugger#jspi. Though, the connector is not populated for cost reasons.

Otherwise, I agree with the author, this is a pain.

A bit off-topic, but kind of relevant. I firmly believe that if installing custom firmware voids the warranty of a device, installing official updates should extend the warranty.

I'm tired of sloppy updates or change of behavior that mess with how I use MY device.

At this point, I'm convinced Google is doing this on purpose. My Google TV has become slow since the Gemini update, which I wasn't asked if I wanted it. My pixel battery life gets worse with every update, etc.

I agree with their conclusion.

I somewhat regret buying my framework laptop at this stage, because the answer to every fault is "buy a new component, from framework".

I'm not sure I blame them for this really, but there is no competitive market of parts (or really any market at all), which means that the reality is that you're just locking your money to them. They also often have stock issues, so woe betide you if your component fails at the wrong time.

It's very hard to predict costs here, but framework laptops do seem to fail more than other brands, and their laptops do tend to be more expensive. In comparison to MacBooks I've used over the years, which other than screen delaminating, have been faultless, at least.

I really don't understand how in 2025 a competent company can't implement a trival A/B flash update. Do they depend on some obscure contractor for the firmware and have no power here?

I also managed to brick a motherboard, though mine was a Supermicro, by missing a line in the README that tells you to move some hardware jumpers on the board before applying the flash. I found one jumper, but the other one was in another corner of the board, and the README says "if you have both, move both", so I thought I just had a board with only one jumper.

Notably, the flash process itself does not check for the positions of the jumpers and exit, or anything like that, it just proceeds merrily along, and renders the board unbootable. I've been around with Flashrom a dozen times and can't figure out the right sequence of flash-this-rerun-that to recover the thing. (It's an X9DR3, if anyone here has hints.)

So I wish I could be mad at Framework, but only the tiniest bit. It's sadly common.

It's interesting to read this. Because I recently had something similar happened to me and I had mixed feelings like the author here.

I have the original Framework 13, but I have almost changed everything inside of it (motherboard AMD 7840U, wifi 7, ram 96GB, ssd, better hinge, the CNC shell, hdmi dongle v3, APU Fan, speakers v2, webcam v2). I still was using the original battery and it was at 60% health. So, I decided to update to the 61W battery.

After changing the battery, I decided to turn on the battery charge limit to keep the battery at a cool 60% charge to increase its lifespan.

First interesting thing I faced was realizing that Framework has 2 methods for the battery limit implementation. You have to use framework-tools and set it on the ec instead of the standard Kernel module. The kernel allows you to set the min and max, but the ec just allows you to set the max, and it will automatically set max-5 as the min.

But what was more frustrating, was realizing and when it gets to that threshold it constantly discharges 5-9W until it gets to the min and then charges the battery again back to the threshold. So, if you set a threshold it keeps charging that 5% once an hour, instead of parking the battery and waiting for the natural discharge to get to the min (which should be days later, since when you're plugged in the battery is not used for anything, it's like your laptop is off, not sleep, off).

But the good thing is the ec code is open source, I found the code, dug in […]