tl;dr: finally have a desktop at home after a couple decades
I've only had personal laptops now, for the longest time. There was a mac mini for a few years, I think I handed it off to someone after disuse.
With all the local AI model hype, I thought I'd "get my hands dirty" and also just experiment again, and ... needed "my own box" for this.
Now the right time to do this was a year ago, before the memory price madness, but, going with the assumption that things aren't getting better anytime soon, decided to get what I can now.
My first choice was the Mac Studio Ultra. My second choice was the Mac Mini Pro. Each of them had their price skyrocket and then become simply unavailable. That's when I came across the Framework Desktop. Having heard of folks using their laptops in the past and being generally satisfied, I configured and ordered one.
Which, btw, is quite satisfying, they make it easy to do this. They also have a handy assembly guide, which can vary a bit based on which one you got, so this one is my account of doing it ... also, I'm going to use this as "the first entry" in a list of "stuff I did with my new desktop" (time permitting 🤞)
So, this is the post on what came in the box, what I did with it, up to the point where I turned it on.
What ships
No plastic anywhere. Every box is printed cardboard with the part name on the front and a QR code to the guide, and the inner trays are die-cut so each thing sits in a hole shaped like itself. The panel insert had a sort of pattern cut into it.
The screwdriver ships with the machine, which I thought was a nice touch, and very on-brand for Framework.
The build
Drive first. . Peel the liner off the thermal pad, seat it at an angle, one screw. That's the step.
Then the panels. The side glass comes off and goes back on without tools once you know which corner to start from, which I learned by starting from the wrong corner.
The front is a grid of tiles you arrange yourself. I didn't pick any ... though now I wish I had 😑
There's no memory step in this build. The RAM is soldered, chosen at order time, so what you buy is what you have (purists will be offended, but this is really an AMD Strix Halo requirement).
First boot
We couldn't detect an operating system or bootable drive.
Fair enough, will share more on this later.