Ohhhhh that's why there was a spate of projects posted last week about building computers based on framework mainboards - submarine marketing for this framework upgrade launch. Figured it was framework behind it somehow, but the fact that it's to promote the 'here are some ways to use your old mainboard once you upgrade' angle makes a ton of sense.
It's somewhat less nefarious than that. Before we announced the availability of a new Mainboard that existing Framework Laptop users can upgrade to, we wanted to make sure that there were interesting ways for people to re-use their old ones. When we sent out hardware to some creators, we told them we would appreciate it if they posted their projects by X date, leading to them clustering just before that date.
But I don't just have my own innate cynicism to go on here! The framedeck project write-up actually contains this disclosure:
As they were preparing this documentation release, they emailed me to see if I'd be interested in a collaboration of sorts. They would provide one of their laptops and some additional modules for me to build something unique with the only condition being that I released the designs for public use.
Which is fine! This is earned media - Framework got some people to make and open source some cool designs. I wasn't sure, last week, why they were doing that now in particular. Now I know why they're pushing that angle, and it makes sense.
And maybe that's because they're bringing the new version to market so they're expecting to have some excess stock of the original motherboard that they need to sell down.
