Framework Kills One Key Module Customizable Laptop Keyboard Program

Framework's One Key Module is a project that Framework announced when it launched the Laptop 16 2nd-gen with the goal of creating an ecosystem for developers to design their own keyboard layouts that tinkerers could put together from parts and schematics, or that could be turned into commercial products. Unfortunately, Framework has just announced that it would be ending the One Key Module program, citing manufacturing complexity and yield issues for the cessation.

First, despite heroic efforts from our engineering and supply chain team members along with their counterparts at our partner Lite-On, we weren't able to bring material and assembly costs along with manufacturing yield to a place where the product economics worked. The per-key costs resulted in breakeven pricing too high to reasonably enable high volume sales, and neither we nor our suppliers can take on the overhead of manufacturing a product of this complexity at low volumes.

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