It’s easier than ever to make a gaming desktop feel all your own. The same is arguably much less true of gaming laptops, though Framework is one company hoping to expand the horizons of gaming-on-the-go through modular upgrades. However, sometimes even Framework has to call it quits when a design idea simply does not come together.
The low-profile keyboard fiends are gathered here today to pour one out for the One Key Module Developer Program, which was first opened up in December 2025. The initial aim of this was to develop “custom ultra-low-profile keyboards and Input Modules for Framework Laptop 16.” Unfortunately, after three years total of prototyping and taking on developer feedback, Framework has shared that it isn’t able to turn the keyboard module into “a sellable product”.
There’s a few reasons for this, and I doubt number one will shock you: cost. Framework writes, “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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To expand on that lattermost point about hardware complexity, apparently even “the expert DIYers and electronics tinkerers” that collaborated with Framework via the developer program had trouble “reliably assembling the One Key Module into their designs.” Parts of the One Key Module were apparently “too fragile for easy handling,” which is far from ideal in any kind of DIY hardware project.
Though the One Key Module will never see a wider release, Framework has chosen to give away what prototype development modules it still had to those who helped build the thing up to this point. If you fancy having a go at tinkering yourself, Framework has uploaded open source documentation and firmware for its laptops’ input module systems to GitHub. If you’re looking for some inspiration, the company also highlighted some early One Key Module developer designs over on its blog.
Though the module definitely wasn’t my cup of tea, Framework’s transparency definitely is. Most recently, I was pretty impressed by the company’s decision to swim against the tide of the RAMpocalypse by ‘retroactively reducing’ its LPCAMM2 prices. If only more of hardware’s heavy-hitters were as candid with consumers.
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