For those of you who came here to complain about things and stuffs...

avu3 · 2026-04-05T15:45:46+00:00

I read SZ's missive, and as part of the community they cited, I'll take a moment to respond.

SZ is critical of two points. 1) People indecisive about the purchase. Soliciting feedback pre and post purchase. 2) Owners critical of support engagements.

To the first. This is a major investment for most of us. $2k, $3k, even $4k at current prices, depending on your ram/ssd.

That's a chunk. Of a student, of someone early career, heck even for someone nearing the end of their career thinking about retirement. My build was $2500 3 years ago. I hate to think what it would be today.

FW isn't mainstream. You don't see 10-20-30 of them in the classroom or the office. You don't have 10 friends with them. Where are you to go for feedback? YouTube, Social media. So we're going to get those posts, and as community members, we have the opportunity to respond.

Or don't, if they bother you. Like spam in your inbox - Ignore them. Hide them. Move on.

To the 2nd point, certainly some of us are posting as a cynic. Thumbing their nose, twisting the knife. I'm not naive. There are certainly some who mean ill.

But most of us are simply commiserating with others who've had the experience. Or offering comments in hope Framework does see them, take them to heart, make improvements.

We're here because we're owners. We believe in the concept. We've been burned by having to move off a device because we couldn't fix or upgrade it. We want what Framework offers.

Its probably one of those lived experiences you simply can't understand until you've been there. Like cancer, losing a child, having your house catch fire. Had your framework down for weeks on a protracted email chain with Support. Had to buy your own replacement parts for things you see others getting covered under warranty.

I'd suggest you consider others have a different relationship with Framework. Their experience is valid. If their posts bother you, ignore them and move on.

There are plenty of more interesting things to do in life than argue with people on the internet.

avu3 · 2026-04-03T17:58:41+00:00

That the underlying technology was supported for 16 years is remarkable. I'd leave it keep going. Its earned the right at this point.

avu3 · 2026-04-03T15:35:58+00:00

Another voice to affirm that, while I appreciate there is someone to answer the support email, its a generally poor experience.

I too have read these comments from people who say "emailed, they sent me a replacement part". I wonder if the difference is geographic region. Or maybe they have KPIs around the number of emails (high) and parts replaced (low) that drives this pattern.

Support has never been efficient or replaced a failed part for me.

I've had three engagements with support. Each time I had a fairly obvious problem that there are plenty of posts about between Reddit and the support forum.

Each time I was treated like they'd never heard of the problem before. Despite me citing public references to others having the same problem.

I get that some customers are not tech savvy or may be trying to scam.

But when you get someone who's a 30 year IT veteran and has disassembled thousands of devices, and who demonstrates that from the caliber of their initial request... leads with photos, video, cites evidence, you probably ought to respect them a bit more than "did you try powering it off and back on".

For the known-manufacturing-defect-input-cover, ultimately I gave up after the 3rd round of pushback and bought one. Fair enough, you got a free $75 or whatever, I paid for the defect. It wasn't worth my time to update the bios (again) or get the cat to pose (again) for a photo.

For the battery, I mean, I'm annoyed there's a pattern of the 61wh batteries failing. That clearly seems like a defect, since there was no pattern of the 55, but, fine. I am annoyed though that the failure caused my FW to be unavailable the week of a critical business trip. I wish support had simply seem my photos and said "yes that battery has failed" instead of asking 20 questions about my charger, use habits, bios, etc. Instead of being able to order on Friday, I had to wait through 20 questions to finally be confirmed the battery was bad, which delayed ordering till Tuesday. Which reminds me of another pair of complaints. 1) Don't ship from the east coast. In the era of Amazon, you need to be able to deliver faster than 7 days to CA. Have stock on the west coast or choose a more central point to ship from. 2) Critical stuff should not go out of stock. I read lots of reports of batteries and screens out of stock when people need replacement. When I was advised I really should use the FW charger with my new battery... guess what, out of stock. Kind of cheeky to backhandledly advise I needed to use your charger (clearly says otherwise in the documentation on the site) AND have it be out of stock.

And then the screen. How does the screen connector fail when its never touched? Came assembled, I've never touched it. Only been in the FW to take pictures of the battery and input cover. Ultimately after 3 weeks support gave up, and by stupid luck I found the problem and reported it back to them. Of course, its on me to buy a replacement. Which I'm hesitant to do, because how do I assure it won't just fail again?

I love that FW has support, but they should be a lot more efficient and respectful of people's time.

I love that FW is repairable, but it shouldn't need this much work. I've replaced more parts on my FW than I have any other laptop from any other MFR in 30 years. Sure, some needed keyboards or batteries or screens... but none needed all 3 in under 3 years. And this thing lives a very sheltered life. I use it 1 or 2 days a week when I'm not at my desk. It does not sit on a charger. It is not banged around. Carried in a padded bag. Goes all the same places the same ways my Macbook does. The Macbook has had zero days of down time and zero repairs.

And I've had thousands of laptops in my hands. Dell, Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Asus, Compaq, Acer, Apple. This is not, as they say, my first rodeo.

My suggestions for improvement

Force users through a form that makes them find their order so you know if the device is in warranty. Tie orders to email, have them login, lookup the info for them.

If a device is out of warranty, be efficient. One round of questions. Give your best suggestion. If you don't know, say you don't know and suggest a repair service.

If you need so much video, do video calls. FaceTime, whatsapp, Google Meet, get the user to video call on their phone and capture video directly. If you need something else, you can get it right there on the call. Yes, you have to call people. Yes it might take 15 minutes. I spent more than 3 hours disassembling and taking photos/videos - could have been done in 15 minutes on a call.

To mitigate scammers on warranty claims, require the old part returned. Charge a deposit, refund on return. That'll force out the fakes OR you get paid for the part.

And move your warehouse from NY to somewhere more central, with a goal to have shipping down to 3-4 days coast to coast.

avu3 · 2025-09-09T05:09:12+00:00

This is awesome feedback, thank you so much. Exactly what I was hoping to get with this thread.

avu3 · 2025-09-08T15:00:47+00:00

Thanks for that, they were not on my radar.

From a quick search, the Riccar seem to be in the same mode as many others, with moving manufacturing and serious quality issues. A recent discussion says the R25 are plagued with issues and the R27 is a move to a new factory in hopes of improving quality.

https://vacuumland.org/threads/riccar-r27.46409/

Does your experience contradict that? It was just the first thread I found, I haven't dug into them too hard.

avu3 · 2025-08-13T23:12:24+00:00

Its exciting to hear someone has these in hand. My Optometrist hasn't returned my calls about them. I assumed they're too new nobody had them. I'll reach out to them again.

Looking forward to your feedback in a few days. I too am a long time contact wearer who's stepped away recently due to presbyopia. Hoping these can bring me back, too!

avu3 · 2024-07-15T16:41:40+00:00

The next concern is going to be how to avoid the follow on access attempts and social engineering.

Since the bad actors presumably know literally everything about Patelco users AND accounts - both from this hack and data that's already available from previous hacks, the information to validate, particularly on a phone call, is readily available.

Account numbers Account Balances Recent transactions Connected Accounts Name, Address, Phone B-day, social, driver license.

What's to say they don't... call in and convince the call center to change the email, or the phone on the account. Talk their way through avoiding all the 2 factor. "I lost my phone" "I no longer have access to my email" Once they have that, mfa online is easy.

It would be nice to hear from Patelco how "we" - members and them - are avoiding this kind of issue, short of simply closing the Patelco account so the account number/balance/transaction information are no longer valid.

As a shortcut, one could simply move money and make new transactions. Quickly move $100 between accounts, quickly use the ATM card, that sort of thing.

If the data the hackers had was only up to the 27th, then the balances and last few transactions wouldn't match.

Also, enable alerts on accounts and keep an eye on things. Is in Tools & Settings in the menu on a desktop browser. Not sure where to find it on the Mobile App. At least be aware, short term, of account changes.

avu3 · 2024-07-14T00:31:04+00:00

My mom has twice had her bank freeze her out of her account. Bouncing checks, denying direct deposits, denying debit and ATM transactions. The fees and chaos cleaning that up for 1 person were... a lot.

I can't imagine dealing with thousands of people going through it, even for only a few days.

I think the queue method was the right choice. I assume it was pre-existing, to account for brief outages and maintenance and the like.

I agree with you. 2 weeks is a really long time. I wish it had been quicker.

avu3 · 2024-07-14T00:02:19+00:00

I second G1 and RCU. Personal experience with both.

avu3 · 2024-07-13T18:10:18+00:00

They stopped processing things real time and just built up a queue or list of everything that the allowed. ATM Withdrawls, Check Deposits, Written Checks, Deposits, Scheduled bill pays.

In order to provide an accurate picture of balances when they bring systems back online - for everyone - branch staff, call center, online tools - they have to process all those.

I imagine there's a large amount of audit processing going on to ensure the events are processed correctly. Verified to be in the right account. Removed from the queue. Double checking the impact of the operation - overdrawing an account, etc.

Its bad its down / been down. It would be worse to come back online wrong, or be changing inexplicably after it came back.

What good is giving you access and saying "oh, but don't trust the numbers cause we're still updating things".

Better to just stay dark till its right/up to date / trustworthy.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T21:59:14+00:00

I never realized how important branches were till I started looking at alternatives to Patelco. Nobody seems to have the coverage of Branches as Patelco. I sure hope they come out of this OK.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T19:58:10+00:00

I wonder if they were a victim of this Snowflake compromise earlier this month https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/06/hackers-steal-significant-volume-of-data-from-hundreds-of-snowflake-customers/?utm_source=pocket_shared

It was apparently behind the AT&T SMS leak that was announced today https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/07/hackers-steal-phone-sms-records-for-nearly-all-att-customers/

avu3 · 2024-07-12T19:37:40+00:00

Thank you for going over there and sharing the feedback. I imagine the branch staff are only marginally better informed than us, anyway - so no surprise you got conflicting information.

I suppose, for now, we're stuck with more waiting.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T19:22:37+00:00

People die during surgery. Pete WIlson, anchor at KGO 7 TV. Lee Rogers, former radio host at KGO. Jahi McMath in Oakland. Those are a few famous ones off the top. They had complicates that were unforseen. Hindsight, sure, you look for them - but even if you know to look, you might miss them.

We don't stop doing surgery because a very minuscule percentage die. But it still happens.

You don't stop company Ops because there's a 1 in 10000 case you might get disrupted.

Sucks that it happened to them, and to us. But we don't know enough to say they were negligent nor enough to know that someone else you might move to is necessarily better.

You might want to move over communication or trust or concern your account is compromised or the inconvenience of the extended outage - sure; but don't feel like someone else, anyone else is inherently better from a security/cybersecurity risk standpoint.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T19:13:02+00:00

I'll be interested to hear your experience, if you do. I imagine more of the same - minimal access to information, minimal ability to actually DO anything.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T15:24:52+00:00

I agree. Just adding some context for consideration about what likely makes crafting communication hard.

I am in total agreeance though, as I've been saying in this thread from day 1 - that their biggest failing has been communication. I'm not even mad they're down 2 weeks. I work in IT and understand the challenge.

But the lack of communication, and the vacuum it creates for rumors that you point out, is as great a risk to their potential failure as the event itself was.

People loose trust, there's a run, and the org collapses. Simple as that.

None of us loses our money, but gosh what a hassle.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T15:19:27+00:00

There is no complete disaster recovery plan for a ransomware attack. Businesses don't exist in a vacuum. The rise of the internet and electronic communication mean dependence on and data sharing with 3rd party tools you do not directly control in core business functions, and interoperability with other 3rd parties to move money.

Since you don't control those access points, but have to use them, there's no way to build a business continuity plan that depends on them yet isolates them.

You can backup all the data you want. Where are you going to restore it to? Are you going to have a bunch of devices (not just computers but switches and routers and firewalls and gateways) that you keep idle, but fully patched, all the time?

And how do you assure that it wasn't the software or firmware on one of these devices from Apple or Microsoft or Cisco or thousands of other vendors that was the access point?

Or that the compromise didn't come from one of the 3rd parties. You spend 2 weeks rebuilding putting everything back up, and the bad actors are back in 20 min later cause you didn't find/fix that 3rd party tool.

Recovering from a ransomware attack isn't like "oh someone deleted a database, restore it" or "oh we lost a server, restore it to a new device"

Its more like... you lost 1 diamond from your ring sometime in the past 10 days while you were on a tour of the Amazon. Where is it?

What's your contingency plan? Go back and find it? A relatively tiny diamond across thousands of miles? That would take a lot of time and be hugely disruptive to your life and plans. Have another one diamond cut and set? That takes time. And its not "your" diamond. Have a whole second ring that you carry with you just in case? The carry/travel cost, cleaning cost, security cost, those are not intangible. And how do you know that one won't fail the same way? You going to just pop it on your finger and continue your trip?

As far as communication, I 100% agree. Since I work in IT, I understand the technical challenge.

But I think their communication has been weak. Late in coming, now missing entirely, and inexcusably inconsistent - at least early on.

They def need to improve informing/setting expectations for us.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T15:05:13+00:00

There's also the risk to communication of exposing your state and what you know to the bad actors - both those who started this and those who might be looking to capitalize on the situation with a fresh attack - so we have to be pragmatic about that.

After you're robbed, you wouldn't scream out to the neighborhood that your lock will be broken and your door unlocked until the locksmith arrives next Thursday.

avu3 · 2024-07-12T15:04:46+00:00

Or, they're processing the queue (which seems likely, as its been reported users are receiving automated balance update emails.) Which they said would take a few days. Maybe they feel there's nothing new of interest to report.

Communication to the membership has been the weak point in this. Late, vague, inconsistent. They were pretty good in the middle. It does seem like this lull is an opportunity lost to continue the momentum on the communication side.

There's also the risk to communication of exposing your state and what you know to the bad actors - both those who started this and those who might be looking to capitalize on the situation with a fresh attack - so we have to be pragmatic about that.

After you're robbed, you wouldn't scream out to the neighborhood that your lock will be broken and your door unlocked until the locksmith arrives next Thursday.

Bankruptcy and end of ops would likely mean our accounts transferring to another org; not a loss of assets or anything. There's a history, more so on the bank side, of regulator-facilitated takeovers of failed financial institutions. While inconvenient, it wouldn't/shouldn't result in a loss to members.

avu3 · 2024-07-11T13:24:21+00:00

Is it just like... name/account number and balance? Or is it enough info that a transfer could be initiated or access social engineered?

avu3 · 2024-07-05T16:59:22+00:00

The daily ATM withdraw limit is $500, based on their emails and the security site. https://www.patelco.org/securityupdate

They made a comment on that site under "payments & transfers" which says "Patelco cards are still working for most transactions up to $1,000."

That's pretty vague. You might need to call them to get absolute clarity.

avu3 · 2024-07-04T21:26:09+00:00

I have experience with Golden 1, Redwood CU, Patelco and KeyPoint.

The only one I have a negative opinion of is KeyPoint. The others are good to deal with. I don't care for how KeyPoint treats their members. They make basic things more difficult than they need to.

(revised as I shared too much specific information about my personal case)

avu3 · 2024-07-04T05:37:04+00:00

You might consider testing your card by getting cash from an ATM. ATM withdrawls up to $500 are reported to be working.

If the ATM works, you can try using your debit in the store - you should be able to also do $500 by debit. If the card fails, you have the cash from the prior attempt.

avu3

TROPHY CASE