I wish them the best, but if they can't compete with a MacBook Air on price despite Apple's huge profit margins, then maybe it's just not meant to be. People used to talk about paying the "Apple tax," but how many people are willing to pay the "Linux tax?" Mac OS is a similar Unix with the usual tools, and you can rent a VPS if you need Linux on an x86 sometimes. An MBA with an M4 will last 5+ years with a battery swap, and still probably perform better than whatever Framework releases in 2030.
I guess I'm not the target customer for this. I can see myself tinkering with a desktop, but I'd rather just have a laptop that runs fast and long enough, and stands up to abuse for 3-5 years.
Yes, Apple screws you on SSDs, so that 2 TB adds a lot. If you need it, and don't want an external SSD (2 TB costs $150), the Framework is cheaper with a slower CPU. Maxing internal storage on a Mac laptop is a bad idea if cost matters to you.
EDIT: I haven't felt the need to spec a programming laptop like that. 16/512 feels fast enough, and 32/512 would have room to bloat... er, I mean grow. But I don't use a local LLM, and I don't know whether the difference between a heavily-quantized thing that fits in 16 GB and whatever you can fit in 48 is significant versus the ones running on absurd data center CPUs.
I guess I'm not the target customer for this. I can see myself tinkering with a desktop, but I'd rather just have a laptop that runs fast and long enough, and stands up to abuse for 3-5 years.