It's a company making a laptop with all components easily accessible and replaceable, in ultrabook form factor. They're releasing their schematics and diagrams to the public so the maker community can enhance the laptop with their own customization, and are planning to extend their storefront to support partnerships with really good maker projects. They currently sell replacement parts freely to whoever in their marketplace.
It's a startup and it's a capitalism so it's inherently bad, but god damn have I been wanting a laptop that doesn't have the battery glued down so my grubby mitts can replace it. The whole company is oriented around the rightful belief that planned obsolescence is a fuck and people shouldn't have to throw out thousands of dollars of electronics containing all kinds of poisons every three years.
Save your money, OP. Making a repairable laptop is a realistic and admirable goal, but modularity/upgradability is a scam.
How do you figure?
There have been a few laptops that claimed the CPU would be upgradable, and as far as I know, none delivered. But consider what that would be like even if it goes as planned. A few years from now you spend like 80% of the cost of a new laptop to get a marginally faster CPU and just chuck a perfectly good motherboard and CPU in the trash. When is that going to make sense? It's not like you'll have the option to put a GPU in this thing in the future.
As far as the modules go, they're just USB-C hubs that slot into the case. All they offer now is rearrangable ports, and realistically, what else could they offer?
That's actually something that's been addressed by Framework. They've worked to make the mainboard operable outside of the chassis, so if/when you upgrade, you can still use the old part externally for whatever.
In terms of the modules: they do use USB-C as a parent I/O, but the hubs offer conversion to DisplayPort, HDMI, microSD, and the other USB forms. They're also Thunderbolt capable, with official Thunderbolt support coming once the certification process is complete. That will allow things like external GPUs for people within that niche. I understand that there's also other modules in the works, but as a startup this is their minimum viable product.
Good critique though, helps to see what people outside the Framework & maker community think of this.