It's never been about safety as much as it has control, serving and protecting only to the benefit of the status quo. Clearview AI, PredPol, Shotspotter, they're all Carolyn Bryant Donham's testimony behind a veneer of technological validity — a shiny black box to dazzle the masses while giving the police yet another excuse to fatally bungle their search warrants. In More than a Glitch, data journalist and New York University Associate Professor of Journalism Dr. Meredith Broussard, explores how and why we thought automating aspects of already racially-skewed legal, banking, and social systems would be a good idea. From facial recognition tech that doesn't work on dark-skinned folks to mortgage approval algorithms that don't work for dark-skinned folks, Broussard points to a dishearteningly broad array of initiatives that done more harm than good, regardless of their intention. In the excerpt below, Dr. Broussard looks at America's technochauavnistic history of predictive policing. 

MIT Press

Excerpted from More than a Glitch: Confronting Race, Gender, and Ability Bias by Meredith Broussard. Reprinted with permission from The MIT Press. Copyright 2023.

Predictive policing comes from the “broken windows” era of policing and is usually credited to William Bratton, former New York City police commissioner and LAPD chief. As NYC police commissioner, Bratton launched CompStat, which is perhaps the best-known example of data-driven policing because it appeared as an antagonist called “Comstat” on season three of HBO’s The Wire. “CompStat, a management model linking crime and enforcement statistics, is multifaceted: it serves as a crime control strategy, a personnel performance and accountability metric, and a resource management tool,” writes sociologist Sarah Brayne in her book Predict and Surveil. “Crime data is collected in real time, then mapped and analyzed in preparation for weekly crime control strategy meetings between police executives and precinct commanders.” CompStat was widely adopted by police forces in major American cities in the 1990s and 2000s. By relying heavily on crime statistics as a performance metric, the CompStat era trained police and bureaucrats to prioritize quantification over accountability. Additionally, the weekly meetings about crime statistics served as rituals of quantification that led the participants to believe in the numbers in a way that created collective solidarity and fostered what organizational behaviorists Melissa Mazmanian and Christine Beckman call “an underlying belief in the objective authority of numbers to motivate action, assess success, and drive continuous organizational growth.” In other words: technochauvinism became the culture inside departments that adopted CompStat and other such systems. Organizational processes and controls became oriented around numbers that were believed to be “objective” and “neutral.” This paved the way for the adoption of AI and computer models to intensify policing—and intensify surveillance and harassment in communities that were already over-policed.

Computer models are only the latest trend in a long history of people imagining that software applied to crime will make us safer. In Black Software, Charlton McIlwain traced the history of police imagining that software equals salvation as far back as the 1960s, the dawn of the computational era. Back then, Thomas J. Watson, Jr., the head of IBM, was trying to popularize computers so more people would buy them. Watson had also committed (financially and existentially) to the War on Poverty declared by President Lyndon Johnson upon his election in 1964. “Watson searched for opportunities to be relevant,” McIlwain writes. “He said he wanted to help address the social ills that plagued society, particularly the plight of America’s urban poor... He didn’t know what he was doing.”6 Watson wanted to sell computers and software, so he offered his company’s computational expertise for an area that he knew nothing about, in order to solve a social problem that he didn’t understand using tools that the social problem experts didn’t understand. He succeeded, and it set up a dynamic between Big Tech and policing that still persists. Software firms like Palantir, Clearview AI, and PredPol create biased targeting software that they label “predictive policing,” as if it were a positive innovation. They convince police departments to spend taxpayer dollars on biased software that ends up making citizens’ lives worse. In the previous chapter, we saw how facial recognition technology leads police to persecute innocent people after a crime has been committed. Predictive policing technology leads police to pursue innocent people before a crime even takes place.

It’s trIcky to write about specific policing software because what Chicago’s police department does is not exactly the same as what LAPD or NYPD does. It is hard to say exactly what is happening in each police agency because the technology is changing constantly and is being deployed in different ways. The exact specifications tend to be buried in vendor contracts. Even if a police department buys software, it is not necessarily being used, nor is it being used in precisely the way it was intended. Context matters, and so does the exact implementation of technology, as well as the people who use it. Consider license plate readers, which are used to collect tolls or to conduct surveillance. Automated license plate readers used by a state transportation authority to automatically collect tolls is probably an acceptable use of AI and automated license plate reader technology—if the data is not stored for a long time. The same license plate reader tech used by police as part of dragnet surveillance, with data stored indefinitely, is problematic.

Every time the public has become aware of some predictive policing measure, controversy has erupted. Consider the person-based predictive policing enacted by the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office in Florida, which created a watchlist of people it considered future criminals. Tampa Bay Times reporters Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi won a Pulitzer for their story about how the Pasco County Sheriff’s Office generated lists of people it considered likely to break the law. The list was compiled by using data on arrest histories and unspecified intelligence, coupled with arbitrary decisions by police analysts. The sheriff’s department sent deputies to monitor and harass the people on the watchlist. Often, the deputies lacked probable cause, search warrants, or evidence of a crime. In five years, almost 1,000 people were caught up in the systematic harassment labeled “Intelligence-Led Policing.” Notably, a large percentage of the people on the watchlist were BIPOC.

The Pasco program started in 2011, shortly after Chris Nocco took office as sheriff. Nocco came up with the idea to “reform” the department with data-driven initiatives. “For 10 years, nobody really understood how this worked, and the public wasn’t aware of what was going on,” said Bedi, explaining the reporting project.8 The sheriff built a “controversial data-driven approach to policing. He also built a wide circle of powerful friends,” including local and national politicians, who didn’t question his actions.

The harassment didn’t stop there, however. Separately, the Sheriff’s Office created a list of schoolchildren it considered likely to become future criminals. The office gathered data from local schools, including protected information like children’s grades, school attendance records, and child welfare histories. Parents and teachers were not told that children were designated as future criminals, nor did they understand that the students’ private data was being weaponized. The school system’s superintendent initially didn’t realize the police had access to student data, said Kathleen McGrory.

Once the investigation was published, civil liberties groups denounced the intelligence programs. Thirty groups formed a coalition to protest, and four of the targeted people brought lawsuits against the agency. Two bills were proposed to prevent this kind of invasion and misuse in the future. The federal Department of Education opened an investigation into the data sharing between the Sheriff’s Office and the local school district. Fortunately, as a result, police analysts will no longer have access to student grades.

Many people imagine that using more technology will make things “fairer.” This is behind the idea of using machines instead of judges, an idea that surfaces periodically among lawyers and computer scientists. We see it in the adoption of body-worn cameras, an initiative that has been growing since LAPD officers brutally assaulted Rodney King in 1991 and the attack was captured on a home camcorder. There’s an imaginary world where everything is captured on video, there are perfectly fair and objective algorithms that adjudicate what happens in the video feed, facial recognition identifies bad actors, and the heroic police officers go in and save the day and capture the bad guys. This fantasy is taken to its logical conclusion in the film Minority Report, where Tom Cruise plays a police officer who arrests people before they commit crimes, on the recommendation of some teenagers with precognition who are held captive in a swimming pool full of goo. “It’s just like Minority Report,” a police officer marveled to sociologist Sarah Brayne, when the two were discussing Palantir’s policing software.

What makes this situation additionally difficult is the fact that many of the people involved in the chain are not malevolent. For example, my cousin, who is white, was a state police officer for years. He’s wonderful and kind and honest and upstanding and exactly the person I would call on if I were in trouble. He and his family are very dear to me and I to them. I believe in the law, and I believe in law enforcement in the abstract, in the way that many people do when they have the privilege of not interacting with or being targeted by law enforcement or the courts.

But the origins of policing are problematic for Black people like me, and the frequency of egregious abuses by police is out of control in today’s United States. Police technology and machine fairness are the reasons why we need to pause and fix the human system before implementing any kind of digital system in policing.

The current system of policing in the United States, with the Fraternal Order of Police and the uniforms and so on, began in South Carolina. Specifically, it emerged in the 1700s in Charleston, South Carolina, as a slave patrol. “It was quite literally a professional force of white free people who came together to maintain social control of black, enslaved people living inside the city of Charleston,” said ACLU Policing Policy Director Paige Fernandez in a 2021 podcast. “They came together for the sole purpose of ensuring that enslaved black people did not organize and revolt and push back on slavery. That is the first example of a modern police department in the United States.” In her book Dark Matters: Surveillance of Blackness, scholar Simone Brown connects modern surveillance of Black bodies to chattel slavery via lantern laws, which were eighteenth-century laws in New York City requiring Black or mixed-race people to carry a lantern if out at night unaccompanied by a white person. Scholar Josh Scannell sees lantern laws as the precedent for today’s policy of police using floodlights to illuminate high-crime areas all night long. People who live in heavily policed neighborhoods never get the peaceful cloak of darkness, as floodlights make it artificially light all night long and the loud drone of the generators for the lights makes the neighborhood noisier.

The ACLU’s Fernandez draws a line from slave patrols maintaining control over Black people to the development of police departments to the implementation of Jim Crow–era rules and laws to police enforcing segregation during the civil rights era and inciting violence against peaceful protestors to escalating police violence against Black and Brown people and leading to the Black Lives Matter movement. Fernandez points out that the police tear-gassed and pepper-sprayed peaceful protestors in the summer of 2020, fired rubber bullets at protestors, charged at protestors, and used techniques like kettling to corner protestors into closed spaces where violence could be inflicted more easily.

The statistics paint a grim picture. “Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when Blacks are not attacking or do not have a weapon. George Floyd is an example,” writes sociologist Rashawn Ray in a 2020 Brookings Institute policy brief about police accountability.14 “Black teenagers are 21 times more likely than white teenagers to be killed by police. That’s Tamir Rice and Antwon Rose. A Black person is killed about every 40 hours in the United States. That’s Jonathan Ferrell and Korryn Gaines. One out of every one thousand Black men can expect to be killed by police violence over the life course. This is Tamir Rice and Philando Castile.” When Derek Chauvin, the police officer who killed George Floyd, was found guilty, it was remarkable because police are so rarely held accountable for violence against Black and Brown bodies.

Reform is needed. That reform, however, will not be found in machines.

If you've ever been on a voice call and felt the need to punctuate the conversation with a sad trombone noise, then you just might have found a reason to subscribe to Discord Nitro. Today, the messaging app announced four new features for its paid tier, including a soundboard feature that allows subscribers to send audio-reactions to voice channels. Soundboards will be loaded up with audio files curated by Discord itself or uploaded by the managers of individual communities.

Most of the other new Nitro perks are fairly subtle: Discord is introducing "super reactions" for Nitro subscribers, which will allow certain emoji reactions to chat messages to animate with a little more flourish than the normal icon. Super reactions are limited, too: Nitro subscribers can use five each week, while Nitro Basic and Classic subscribers can only use two. The company is also giving subscribers 5 new themes (Retro Storm, Strawberry Lemonade, Aurora, Sepia and Neon Nights), and the ability to dress up their avatar with limited-time decorations that overlay flowers, hats or mushrooms on top of their user portrait.

Don't have Nitro? Discord says that everyone will be given 2 Super Reactions to try out the new feature, even if they aren't subscribed. Check out the company's blog for a full rundown of the new features.

Sony’s massively successfulGod of War Ragnarök just got a pretty significant upgrade with a New Game+ that is much more than a simple rehash with tougher enemies. This NG+ is packed with features to squeeze more life out of last year’s PS4 and PS5 title. For the uninitiated, a New Game+ is a new adventure that unlocks when you beat the game. In this case, all of your equipment, weapons and skills carry over from your previous save. 

The changes start with several new armor sets that bring unique gameplay mechanics to the table. The Zeus armor increases your magic and spell damage but places you at greater risk for incoming damage. The Spartan Armor, as the name suggests, eliminates all perks and stat boosts, increasing the challenge and leaving no room for error.

Both the Armor of the Black Bear and Ares Armor take the opposite approach, giving players unique perks, like increased defense and an increase in rare item drops. There are also plenty of new customization options for pre-existing armor types if you want to change up your look.

The level cap is increased for both enemies and the player, which is fairly common in an NG+. Any level nine equipment, including weapons and shields, can convert into “Plus” versions with more progression options. Converting equipment also gives you special coins that are used to purchase new Enchantments.

Speaking of new Enchantments, the Engravings and Badge powers let you apply perks and stats typically reserved to a specific armor set to an amulet, so you get all of the benefits without having to actually wear the armor. The system is designed for experimentation to find the best combo for your unique playstyle. Certain enemies like Berserker Souls will also now drop new stat boost enchantments. Finally, there are Burdens, enchantments that apply a negative perk to amp up the challenge.

Endgame bosses have been redesigned, the sparring arena has been expanded with new enemies and there’s even a new black-and-white mode for those looking for a more cinematic experience. The free NG+-focused update is available now, making this a good time to return to ancient Scandinavia and cause some brutal mayhem.

Now that Lenovo has given up on Legion gaming smartphones, it can focus on its primary brand: Motorola. To wit, the company just launched a new flagship that offers some of Legion's gaming cred, the Motorola Edge 40 Pro. Some of the impressive features include a fast 165Hz screen, the latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chipset and extremely fast charging. 

The Edge 40 uses a screen that curves inward, even at the top, for what Moto calls "unparalleled comfort" — though anyone who's ever owned a curved screen phone knows they tend to slip in your hands. It comes with an anti-fingerprint coating on the front and anti-glare glass inlay on the back, with both sides protected by Corning's Gorilla Glass Victus. 

The 6.67-inch FHD+ pOLED display runs at up to a 165Hz refresh rate, making it one of the faster flagship phone displays out there And if it's entertainment you're into, it's also the first Motorola phone with Dolby Vision HDR (and HDR10+) playback, offering a bright and accurate view of HDR movies and games. It also uses Dolby Atmos sound, along with a new feature called Moto Spatial Sound for music, movies and games. It sounds a lot like Apple's spatial audio, offering an immersive surround sound experience.

For demanding games and tasks, the Edge 40 Pro users Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 mobile platform, along with LPDDR5X RAM and UFS 4.0, the fastest RAM and storage currently available. Meanwhile, the 4,600 mAh battery can be charged at up to 125W, letting you fully juice it in 23 minutes, right up there with the best Android phones.

Finally, on the camera front, the Edge 40 Pro has a triple high-res camera system with a 50-megapixel (MP) wide camera that features optical image stabilization (OIS) and phase-detect AF for every pixel. The ultrawide camera is also 50-megapixels, and the third camera is a 12MP 2x telephoto. There's a 60MP selfie pinhole camera up front. Video can be captured in 8K30p, 4K HDR10+ at 30fps, and 4K at up to 60fps. Naturally, it features AI tricks like auto smile capture, Google Lens integration, auto night vision and more. 

Unfortunately, the Motorola Edge 40 pro will only be available in Europe in the coming days and Latin America a little bit later — there's no sign of US availability so far. It starts at €900 in Europe, a reasonable price for such a high-spec phone. 

Netflix released at least one movie a week over the past two years – I challenge you to name them all! – but for 2023, the company is changing course. According to Bloomberg, the streaming giant is restructuring its movie division and releasing fewer movies overall. Despite the sheer number of titles Netflix previously released, only a few had won accolades, attained significant hours of streaming, or had the kind of cultural impact some of the biggest blockbusters had achieved. (According to the company's Top 10 page, its most-watched movies for 2021 and 2022 include Red Notice, Don't Look Up and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.)

Netflix ramped up its film development after studios started building their own streaming services instead of licensing their movies to the company. This restructuring will combine the team working on small projects with a budget of $30 million or less and the unit that produces mid-budget films that cost $30 million to $80 million. There’s also a big-budget arm to its film development unit – likely involved with the aforementioned hits. No word yet on whether the restructuring will affect that part of the business.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Breaking Bard

Testing the limits of today's leading AI chatbots.

Engadget

The generative AI race is on, and the current frontrunners appear to be Google's Bard and Microsoft's Bing AI, which is powered by ChatGPT. But what are the limits to the questions it can answer? We asked Google’s Bard chatbots a series of questions to see which is better at delivering facts, replacing us at our jobs or participating in existential debates. We also looked at their speed, transparency and how likely they were to break if we started to push its buttons And don’t worry, Bing AI got the same treatment.

Continue reading.

Apple wins appeal against UK antitrust probe into its mobile browser

Through a technicality.

Apple won an appeal against an investigation launched by the UK’s antitrust watchdog last fall. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) opened a full probe into Apple and Google in November. At the time, the regulator said that many UK businesses felt restricted by the “stranglehold” the two tech giants had on mobile browsing. The probe also sought to determine if Apple was restricting the cloud gaming market through its App Store rules. The company said the CMA should have opened the probe at the same time it first published its report on mobile ecosystems last June. The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT), the court that oversees CMA cases, agreed with Apple, saying the regulator gave notice of its investigation too late.

Continue reading.

Court rules Elon Musk broke federal labor law with 2018 tweet

Tesla has also been ordered to rehire a worker that it illegally fired.

According to a federal appeals court, Elon Musk broke US labor law in 2018 when he tweeted that Tesla factory workers would forgo stock options if they chose to unionize. In May 2018, a Twitter user asked Musk about his union stance. “Nothing stopping Tesla team at our car plant from voting union. Could do so tmrw if they wanted,” he tweeted in response. “But why pay union dues & give up stock options for nothing? Our safety record is 2X better than when plant was UAW & everybody already gets healthcare.” Tesla has argued the tweet was Musk’s way of pointing out that workers at other automakers don’t receive stock options. The court ordered Musk to delete the tweet. As of the writing of this article, the tweet is still there.

Continue reading.

Amazon has begun displaying a warning about frequently returned items as the company tightens its belt in response to shaky finances and an uncertain economy. Industry-wide e-commerce returns skyrocketed during pandemic lockdowns. Although they’ve declined, they’re still well above pre-pandemic numbers.

The retailer’s new badge reads, “Frequently returned item: Check the product details and customer reviews to learn more about this item.” However, it doesn’t appear visible to everyone (my Amazon account doesn’t show it when viewing the record player and dresses that The Informationreported on). That may suggest Amazon is deploying a gradual rollout or a limited test. In addition, the tagged products all appear to be from third-party vendors fulfilled by Amazon.

Amazon / The Verge

Product returns and exchanges are a convenience businesses use to help customers shop confidently, but they can also be expensive. Return-related costs include shipping, processing the returned inventory and other miscellaneous expenses. The company likely hopes the label will nudge sellers to modify their listings or products, as a prominent alert could seriously damage an item’s sales. Of course, retailers factor returns into their pricing, but with rates higher than usual as companies cut spending (Amazon has announced layoffs for 27,000 employees this year), it makes sense it would crack down.

Some sellers have said their customers return items at a higher clip on Amazon than when bought from other outlets, a discrepancy they chalk up to Amazon’s easy checkout process and fast Prime shipping. The retailer has already passed on some of the extra expenses to vendors, as it raised fees for “Fulfilled by Amazon” sellers earlier this year.

“We’re currently showing return rate information on some product detail pages to help our customers make more informed purchase decisions,” Amazon spokesperson Betsy Harden confirmed to The Information this week. It isn’t the first time Amazon has highlighted sales data publicly: The company recently began displaying a badge showing how many sales a product made (for example, “100K+ bought in past month”).

In December, the National Retail Foundation (NRF) reported that online return rates rose to 18 percent in 2020 — when customers tallied $428 billion in returned merchandise — from a mere 8.1 percent in 2019. They only dropped slightly to 16.5 percent last year. Unfortunately, bogus returns are another concern: The NRF says retailers lose $10.40 to return fraud for every $100 in returned merchandise.

Google is making it easier for people with reading challenges, such as dyslexia, to be able to make out articles and text posts online. The tech giant has launched "reader mode" for Chrome, which takes a site's primary content and puts it into the sidebar to reduce clutter and distractions. Users will also be able to change the text's typeface, font size and spacing, as well as its color and background color, to find the combination that works best for them. 

Reader mode is but one of the new features and updates Google has rolled out for education users. Another new feature for Google Classroom gives educators the ability to add interactive questions to YouTube videos. That will allow students to answer them and get immediate feedback, giving teachers an insight on how well they understand the subject matter. 

Google is also giving teachers a way to share practice sets with other verified educators in their domain, so that they can expand the availability of materials their students have access to. For particularly difficult mathematical and scientific concepts, for instance, more examples mean more opportunity to better understand them. The company has released a new web player for Screencast on Chrome OS, as well, allowing users to watch casts in any browser on any platform. Plus, it has expanded language options for Screencast closed captions and for practice sets. 

Classes using Meet for online lectures will also find a new and useful feature: Hand raise gesture detection powered by AI. Apparently, when a student raises a hand in real life, the video conferencing app can now automatically activate its Hand Raise icon. In addition, two teachers can now also manage slides concurrently on Meet and co-present lectures together. Google has been growing and improving its education-related tools for years, though it has perhaps kicked things up a notch after schools shut down during the pandemic. It released a slew of updates to make virtual classrooms more usable since then, and it looks like it hasn't forgotten online-based education even though schools have mostly gone back to in-person learning. 

Apple's long-expected Martin Scorsese movie has a release date — for theaters, that is. The company has revealed that Killers of the Flower Moon will get a wide theatrical release on October 20th following a "limited" run starting October 6th. The company hasn't said when the film will be available to Apple TV+ users, but the streaming launch will come after the theater exclusivity period ends. This is Apple's first movie to get a widescale big-screen debut before going online.

Killers of the Flower Moon is an adaptation of David Grann's namesake book. It covers the fledgling FBI's investigation of murders of Osage Nation members in the early 1920s after the tribe won rights to oil profits on its land. Scorsese both directed the movie and co-wrote it alongside Eric Roth (of Dune and Mank fame). The cast includes more than a few big-name stars and Scorsese favorites, including Robert DeNiro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Lily Gladstone.

Scorsese struck a multi-year deal with Apple in spring 2020 that covered both movie and television projects. While the exact terms aren't clear, Killers reportedly has a budget topping $180 million. The pact came just months after Netflix's Scorsese film, The Irishman, received a massive audience but failed to win any Oscars.

The strategy of releasing a movie in theaters first isn't new. Industry awards like the Oscars frequently require movies to show in theaters before they qualify, and it's no secret that streaming giants like Apple, Amazon and Netflix chase after these awards for the publicity they bring. Apple's CODA was the first streamer to win a Best Picture Oscar, for instance. The scope of this premiere is new to Apple, though, and the company is clearly willing to spend on A-list talent to potentially clinch some statuettes and boost its credibility in Hollywood.

If you've been waiting to purchase Microsoft 365 Family, now might be the right time. Amazon is offering a 12-month subscription for $100, down from $150 — plus a $50 Amazon gift card. Basically, you save $50 and get another $50 in spending money, not so bad. 

Your purchase includes all the usual Microsoft programs — Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook etc. — and 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage for easy sharing of photos and files across your devices.

Microsoft 365 is available to download immediately for up to six family members on PCs or Macs. The Amazon gift card, on the other hand, will arrive in the mail. It has no expiration date so as long as you don't lose the little card somewhere, you can hold onto it for a while (or spend it right away, no judgement here). 

If you choose to buy the family package, do yourself a favor and set a calendar reminder for just under a year from now. The subscription will auto-renew annually and there's nothing worse than finding out through a credit card statement. If you love it, great. If not, you'll have the option to cancel. 

This deal isn't completely new as Amazon offered the same one-day discount at the end of January. If you regretted skipping it then, here's your chance. But, you have to think fast, this deal is literally here today, gone tomorrow. 

If there was a question hovering over Framework’s much-lauded modular laptop, it was for how long the company would keep supporting it. After all, companies talk a good game about being green and sustainable at launch, only to abandon those plans a year or two later. Now, we’re three chip generations deep, and today we’re getting new mainboards carrying Intel’s 13th generation Core CPUs. Even better, users will soon have the option to ditch Intel in favor of AMD’s rival products, both for new machines and to upgrade in all of the models already shipped. It’s a remarkable sign of confidence in its platform, and a signal to users that Framework is in this business, with this chassis, for the long haul.

Intel’s 13th generation Core CPUs were first announced at CES in January and Framework is rolling them out along with a number of other updates to its laptop. Since it sells (or sold) only one model of laptop, these changes will appear in the product from now on. And these annual updates are designed to address the criticisms that some users have had with the hardware thus far. That includes a new hinge that’s been redesigned to be more rigid compared to the ones found in units up until now. And, more importantly, a new, bigger 61Wh battery with a slew of firmware updates that should increase the laptop’s runtime by between 20 and 30 percent depending on how intense your workload is.

The focus on addressing user complaints stretches to the display cover, which will now be matte as opposed to glossy. Similarly, Framework will now incorporate the 80dB louder speakers it offered in its Chromebook to some of its mainline laptops. All of these innovations will, as per Framework’s usual commitment to supporting its existing users, will also be able to buy as standalone parts. And, as I outlined last year, even someone with next-to-no aptitude for upgrading computer parts can make these fixes with relatively little fuss. Customers can now select their display bezel color and keyboard options at the buying stage, saving them from having to double purchase.

The other change that we’ll need to address is that this machine has been rechristened as the Framework Laptop 13. That’s because it’s now sitting alongside the company’s new 16-inch gaming machine, which was announced today.

I asked founder Nirav Patel if there wasn’t a temptation, since we’re now three generations in, to start messing with the chassis. “We plan to stick with it, we haven’t seen anything that makes us want to change it,” he said, “it’s really just being able to upgrade those modules.” He said that one of the key pillars of feedback he’s received is that users “actually just want stability” in their purchases rather than a constant stream of new hardware. He added that Framework’s pledge to keep supporting the same laptop chassis for so long is a good signal to would-be buyers that they’re investing in a “stable ecosystem.”

Framework has promised price parity between Intel and AMD’s mainboards, which will offer a Ryzen 7040 in either a Ryzen 5 or Ryzen 7 flavor. Pre-orders will open at the same time for both, although it’s thought that the AMD version might ship a little later. Framework will open pre-orders to users looking for a new machine and just the new mainboards at the same time. Those in the latter camp, who want to ditch Intel in their existing Framework 13 for AMD, will also need to buy new RAM and a new WiFi card. The one other downside for would-be switchers is that, as Patel explains, “the port configuration is different in terms of what the expansion cards actually support.” This is because the Intel boards universally support Thunderbolt 4, while the AMD model offers two USB 4.0, one USB 3.2 plus DisplayPort, and one vanilla USB 3.2 port.

There will be some changes and tweaks depending on which model you opt for, since the different chip options mean different default builds. For instance, the new Intel models will get the louder speakers, while the AMD units do not, although those quieter speakers have been tuned for better performance. Similarly, the base models with Core i5 and Ryzen 5 will keep the older 55Wh battery, while the i7 and Ryzen 7 options will get the newer 61Wh option. As such, you might want to examine the pre-order pages in more detail to make sure you know what you’re getting.

As users upgrade their existing laptops with new mainboards, Framework is acutely aware there will be a raft of functional boards potentially left unused. Rather than create a new stream of e-waste, the company has so far worked to support 3D-printed cases and hobby projects. “We released these open-source design files where people could 3D-print their own case,” said Patel, “but most people don’t have 3D printers.” Which is why Framework has teamed up with PC case maker CoolerMaster to produce the first official standalone case for its mainboards.

The case is a similar thickness to the laptop deck at present, and is designed so a user can “take that mainboard, drop it in, and [they] now have this nice simple little second PC,” said Patel. It will also accommodate the same expansion cards as the Framework Laptop 13, and all the user needs to provide is a USB-C power supply of 45W or higher. It includes both its own stand and the option to VESA mount the machine, tucking it neatly behind whatever display you choose to connect it to. It’ll be affordable, too, as it’ll cost just $39 when it launches later in Spring.

Patel also expects plenty of Framework owners to upgrade their batteries for the new and improved model. He explained that the company is demonstrating “a proof of concept that turns the [first-generation Framework laptop] battery into a USB-C power bank that can power any device, including a laptop.”And you might expect that this, too, will get refined and polished by Framework’s committed community into something that plenty of people can experiment with.

On that subject, the company is also announcing support for Fedora 38 and Ubuntu 22.04 Linux, both of which will work “fantastically out of the box” for both AMD and Intel models. Manjaro XFCE 22.0 and Mint 21.1 are also at an advanced stage of support, and the company says both are “working great” on the new hardware.

The pre-built base model configurations of both Intel and AMD versions of the Framework Laptop 13 (2023) with Windows 11 will cost $1,049 before build-to-order upgrades. All units can be pre-ordered from today for the usual $100 deposit, with shipments for both expected to start at some point in May. In addition, Framework also announced that it would begin shipping to Belgium, Italy, Spain and Taiwan later in the year.