I'm sad about the speakers if they are as flat as they said, even more if they are not upgradable parts. MacBook speakers are really good for their purpose and I even consider them to be one of the importants things I trully love on macbooks (with the screen and the touchpad).
Anyway, I'm still looking to buy a Framework laptop soon but I'd love to be able to test one before buying it.
Most modern laptops use DSP to get the speakers to sound the way they do. If you switch that off they have the same ‘flat’ sound described in this review. Wonder if this can be solved in software ?
This is one of those things where Linux is a decade behind everything else because nobody has bothered to solve this problem yet. Yes, most laptops require DSP for the speakers to sound the way they're supposed to, and Linux has no way of handling this. The Windows driver provided by the OEM would normally do this, AIUI.
While you can certainly manually add DSP to your system (PulseEffects, some random JACK or PipeWire flow, etc. - I do exactly this for headphone calibration on my desktop), what we need is a standardized mechanism for storing speaker profiles and having the audio subsystem seamlessly and transparently apply the right EQ and crossover profile for your device (there are usually more than 2 speakers). This is already a thing on e.g. Android, but not desktop Linux.
This is required for MacBooks too. For Asahi Linux, once the underlying sound hardware works, we'll be spending some time working out a sane way to do this; I consider it a mandatory feature in this day and age. And once that's all done, everyone will be able to use it to get proper sound on any laptop as long as they can obtain or make an EQ profile.
For the Macs, our plan is to measure impulse responses of what macOS does (we have the ability to snoop on its hardware accesses, so we can just play a test sound and capture the raw samples going to the speakers) and use them on Linux. This should give identical audio at moderate volumes. I'll have to check whether it also does some kind of compression or volume-dependent EQ worth replicating or emulating too, at higher volumes.
Yes, the terrible sound on my Lenovo x1c is the only driver-related issue I have with this laptop on Linux. In all other aspects it is either same or superior experience compared to Windows.
That's doing it manually; there are a million ways of doing that, but the point is it should be transparent and automated and select the right EQ profile for you based on your hardware.
> For the Macs, our plan is to measure impulse responses of what macOS does (we have the ability to snoop on its hardware accesses, so we can just play a test sound and capture the raw samples going to the speakers)
They do some sort of crosstalk cancellation to make stereo sound better, it'd be interesting to look at those impulse responses and see that happening!
I suspect the confusion is between flat as "linear response across ear bandwidth" and "total lack of depth", eg, the later isn't about being linear, just low quality speakers with very inconsistent frequency response.
Yeah, there's clearly confusion here. The article and GGP are using "flat" to mean "bad". The GP is using it to mean "flat frequency response", i.e. good. Unfortunately, all small speakers sound awful uncorrected; there's no way to make a flat-as-in-good laptop speaker. The question is how would those speakers sound with software DSP for correction, which is standard on other OSes but not Linux.
When I purchased mbp m1 pro I didn't expect the speakers to be that good as most of the mbp reviews were about processor, ports, and screen. I don't think I now need an external music system for indoor listening.
To be fair, it’s not unique to the M1 pro. All macs of the last decade at least have pretty good speakers (for the size, that is). Just what’s needed to don’t need anything else to listen music on the go when you have no other solution or to watch movies in the bed.
Not of the last decade, their speakers have really only been top notch since the 2016 redesign, and even more so starting in 2019 with the 16”. I’ve had a 2012 MacBook, a 2015, 2016, 2019, and now 2021.
When travelling I will always use headset, when hooked to docking it uses my home studio monitor speakers and if I want to listen to watch a movie in the bed or a show in my kitchen it is paired to my Bose bluetooth speaker.
The speakers are replaceable (and therefore upgradeable), but like a sibling comment noted, most of the magic in speakers in portable consumer electronics products comes down to DSPs and smart amps. We started with a CODEC that had built in smart amp and DSP functionality, but weren't able to get the necessary support from the supplier to enable it. It ended up not mattering anyway, because we had to switch to a different CODEC without that functionality due to the global silicon crunch.
This is absolutely something we want to improve in the future. We're actively investigating other audio parts we can use that have better capability, but equally importantly, supply availability and software support.
I run the framework with a i7-1165G7 and Ubuntu+i3wm. I have had this laptop for ~3 weeks now. Battery life for me is running around 5-8 hours with full brightness, music streaming, and somewhat active use. It isn't fantastic but it is pretty reasonable. I haven't conducted any serious measurements but I'd say the battery life is pretty solid (and the screen is pretty bright). (This is all anecdotal though, If you really want serious numbers, I'd wait for some tech reviewer)
Raw CPU perf obviously favours the M1, but if you're a dev, then a laptop that can take up to 64Gb of commodity RAM & as much fast storage as you can cram into it is pretty compelling.
Compiling LLVM eats a lot of memory for instance. 16Gb is not really enough to take full advantage of the number of CPUs in a modern laptop.
Is this a laptop for everyone? Not necessarily, but for certain classes of users it's manna from heaven.
As he explicitly points out, the benchmark amounts to cross-compiling for the Intel CPU vs compiling native code for the Mac CPU, so it's not exactly even. I have no dog in this hunt, I don't have an M1 Mac and I don't care, but it felt wrong to let that stand without correction.
>The M1 16gb will run circles around the i7-1185g7
I have an M1 MBP and an 1185g7 based Linux laptop. Single core benchmarks, the i7 comes out slightly ahead. Multi core benchmarks, the M1 comes out slightly ahead. There are no circles being run around in performance - only in battery efficiency. For day to day developer usage, testing things literally side by side, I find absolutely no discernible difference in speed.
The M1 does win for battery life, but the battery still lasts for a full work day in my i7 laptop. Honestly at home I always reach for the Linux laptop, because I don't really need the battery life. But for going out and about away from power, the M1 MBP has advantages. Sadly the software (personally) lets it down, I'd probably use the MBP more if it has better Linux support in the future.
Prolonged compiling tasks will thermally throttle the 1185g7 chip long before the M1.
It will run circles around the 1185g7 compiling large codebases.
Passmarks across hundreds of benches show a 25% single and 40% multithreaded performance boost over the 1185g7.
I’ve got an i9 8/16 laptop chip and the 13” M1 is trading blows with my laptop despite 2-3x the thermal headroom and considerably less cores/threads across all workloads.
The frame.work people are very explicit that they’ve designed the cooling system to permit you to run the CPU fairly hard. It can dump 28W continuously according to https://frame.work/gb/en/blog/the-upgradeable-mainboard.
The i9 Apple laptops were notorious for not having a cooling system that could match the heat output of the CPU & throttling almost instantly.
Modern Intel laptop CPUs are no where near the performance / W of the M1, but they are considerably better than those that Apple stuffed into their laptops a few years ago with inadequate cooling I believe.
That was a firmware issue pre 2019 model that was corrected in a few weeks that got overblown. The throttling problem doesn’t exist anymore.
The only problem with the first generation framework laptop is intel’s quad core CPU because of thermal and power problems associated with their process nodes.
Hex core is really the lowest I will go now for anything over $1000. If this was a Ryzen 5800u, I’d have bought one already.
On my 1185g7 laptop, the browser benchmark Speedometer 2.0 scores 116. On my M1, I get 288. That's a bit more than "slightly ahead". The M1 absolutely smokes Tiger Lake and even Tiger Lake-H.
Sure, but that's expected because ARM essentially has hardware JavaScript acceleration built-in via FJCVTZS[0]. I personally don't find JavaScript specific benchmarks to be a good indicator of general computing power. (Ultimately, I spend little time in a web browser.)
FWIW, Cinebench multi-core benchmark is around 20% faster for me on the M1.
I doubt that instruction is relevant. It comes down to an abundance of microarchitectural resources on the M1. A 12th-gen Intel CPU gets 310 on this benchmark while having no particular accelerators. They just added tons of caches and buffers, like the M1 has.
> I personally don't find JavaScript specific benchmarks to be a good indicator of general computing power.
Many of us spend substantial periods of time writing up the technical documentation in Confluence or use JIRA. Confluence alone loads approximately 22Mb of mangled and compacted JavaScript for each open page in a separate browser tab.
Before M1, Confluence and JIRA were the single most source of a sustained battery drain, irrespective of the browser. On M1 based laptops, the battery impact is so negligible that it can be considered non-existent. How much of this subjected experience can be attributed just to the the ARM 8.3 JavaScript hardware acceleration is an interesting question as the JavaScript browser performance on Intel CPU's has also been affected by Spectre and Meltdown mitigations in the CPU microcode.
LLVM builds eat memory in my experience & end up swapping if you don’t play games with the build system to reduce the parallelism of memory intensive parts of the build.
If you’ve got a VM or two sitting around then obviously that makes things worse.
Is this really common? I mean using a laptop for such compute intensive tasks? I mostly use my macbook air m1 as a client to more powerful machines. I always have a few ssh sessions opened, a few tramp emacs buffers, some browser tab to jupyter notebooks running elsewhere...
I think it is quite common. I develop financial systems, and I compile apps regularly for running tests locally and large parts of the system is running locally using docker compose. This has the benefit of fast iteration for unit and system tests. Of course the tests and deployment is also run by a CI server but that is just for QA purposes so people dont have to remember to run their tests locally and to keep a clean main branch. I cannot imagine how long our feedback loop would be if we had to wait for the CI server for every change, or if we had a common dev server that everyone interacted with through a «dirty» development branch. Basically I think it is just different use cases. My experience with jupyter is that you use it for data analysis which is really more IO bound than cpu bound, also big data is often not possible to keep locally (because of the size and also in europe GDPR)
Note that I didn't necessarily refer to CI servers when talking about remote machines. Sometimes it's just a better specced workstation in the office, sometimes it's my own headless machine learning rig at home. Sure different engineers and different fields have different workflows but I believe it's still easier to build a good workstation from components than finding a laptop that excels in both portability and specs.
Interesting approach. I have some coleagues that actually remote desktops to their powerful desktop computer. I never did that because I fear all the tiny issues I have to deal with, but they tell me it works quite well. Also just offloading the heavy lifting through ssh or other types of build servers seems super interesting (I think some build systems have built in support for a common server, not sure if it is true, but it could be very helpful if it works well)
Presumably, the people who were using desktop workstations pre-pandemic have started working from home with laptops - but their ways of working and tooling all center around doing things locally.
64GB ram for my lenovo legion was 250EUR, i could not configure a m1 with 64gb for less then 2900EUR
i hate it that they bundled the ram with the m1 max i wanted to order the 64gb ram option but the difference between 32gb pro and 64gb max is 650EUR or more, and i just dont want to pay that to have more RAM.
it cost 250EUR to go from 0GB to 64GB on lenovo, but it cost 650EUR to go from 32GB pro to 64GB max macbook pro 16,
so it is dramatic for me.
Im buying a macbook for 4-5 years.
You want to ignore the difference between DDR4 and DDR5, but the market doesn't ignore it and DDR5 is more expensive (I'm talking about non-Apple memory sticks).
Also, you want to ignore 400 Gb/s provided by Apple's 64Gb memory, but... you know.
I was in the market for a new laptop and right now I just could not find anything that would beat the M1 MacBooks on a CPU-battery-price combination, especially if you're OK 16GB of RAM - it gets a bit more competitive if you're looking at 32GB models, but even if you can compete on CPU and memory you loose hard on battery life.
I just couldn't bring myself to use macOS daily, so I punted the laptop change to next year. I wish Apple would just sell their hardware like anyone else, working with OS vendors to get it supported.
AMD and Intel provide drivers for their components. Realtek provides drivers for their components. Even Nvidia provides Linux drivers for their components, in proprietary form. Several laptop vendors even sell their hardware with Linux preinstalled.
Apple not actively hindering Asahi Linux isn't exactly a great accomplishment. They chose not to write Linux drivers for their platform and that's their choice, but that puts them behind even Nvidia as far as supporting Linux goes.
FWIW, Nvidia actively sabotaged the Nouveau project with the firmware signing story; Apple aren't doing that (their firmware is signed but loaded pre-boot and they provide OS images we can use to set all that up, so it's seamless for Linux).
Great progress on Asahi. What's the firmware situation like in general ? Since firmware won't be redistributable, would users need to periodically 'fetch' it from Apple CDNs or OS images ? Also, in the past broadcom has been quite problematic for wifi. How is it on the new macs ?
There's two classes of firmware: the bits loaded pre OS boot by the OS loader (which runs before our Linux loader), and the bits loaded by Linux. Both classes come from macOS recovery images and our installer takes care of fetching that from Apple's CDN. For the pre-boot firmware, it just gets installed into the Preboot partition the same way it does for macOS, and we don't have to worry about it after that. For the firmware loaded by Linux (current list: WiFi, video decoder), I have a design for a vendor firmware mechanism where the installer copies a tarball to the EFI boot partition, and then distros will have a script that extracts that on first boot or when it changes.
Since Apple do not keep their firmware ABI stable across the board, we'll have specific firmware versions (=specific macOS versions they come from) "blessed" for Linux compatibility. For updates (bugfixes or security issues, chiefly) you'd re-run our installer which will eventually have an "upgrade my firmware please" mode. That would run from recovery mode, same as the original install. All this stuff is per-OS, so it does not affect any adjacent macOS install which will use its own firmware - you can upgrade macOS whenever you want without breaking Linux.
Wifi works fine (modulo some firmware support details that'll get ironed out); people have been doing performance and stability tests and there is no major issue. I've heard stories about bad radio performance on Macs in the past, but those are almost certainly due to using the wrong firmware or config. That's what my patch set fixes: we use all the same firmwares and configs that Apple does, so we get the same results.
> AMD and Intel provide drivers for their components.
ATI/AMD intentionally redesigned their GPU silicon to make it's possible to develop open source drivers without exposing HDCP secrets, and even the open source drivers can use HDCP if they want to.
This is not known very widely, but this is worthy of great praise if you ask me.
I don't think any GPU vendor has ever had HDCP secrets exposed to the OS. That'd be terrible security; you'd need mandatory OS secure boot to keep the keys secret. This is the case for Nvidia, for Apple M1s, etc; the OS never has to touch plaintext HDCP keys, and this has nothing to do with open source drivers.
Can you clarify what you mean exactly? I have a hard time believing AMD ever ran HDCP keys through the Windows kernel.
> I don't think any GPU vendor has ever had HDCP secrets exposed to the OS. That'd be terrible security; you'd need mandatory OS secure boot to keep the keys secret.
Yes, I'd not argue with that, I also never wanted or implied that I shall be able to get said keys from the card.
AMD/ATI back in the day said that, they have intentionally coupled video decoders, related logic and HDCP to same IP block for performance and silicon real-estate reasons, but in order to keep their promises about open drivers and accessible hardware, starting with (then) next generation silicon, they'll move all HDCP stuff to another IP. In turn, they will allow unfettered access to all GPU including 3D and video related features sans HDCP. However, with that architecture, even open drivers can use HDCP related hardware and functions without compromising the security and licensing around it, as a result allowing identical experience and freedom (from a developer standpoint) regardless of the driver used.
I still don't really understand how this is relevant for the drivers. Even if HDCP is part of another IP block, that doesn't mean open drivers can't use it. That's just an implementation detail. You can use HDCP on any platform the same way the proprietary drivers would (if you implement the right knobs to control it). Do you have a reference with more detail?
Ultimately the open driver should always be able to do all the same things the closed driver does and get the same result. If there are any secrets in the closed driver that "can't" be exposed, that's a security flaw in the design.
In their previous setup, as per their word, it was impossible to access video decoders and related machinery without exposing some HDCP stuff, incl. the key related storage and other secret stuff.
So, they were unable to provide the access they wanted to provide (for video decoders, at least), on the previous (then current) architecture.
That's... very weird. What would that expose? If you can read the keys at all from the OS, directly or indirectly, that's a security flaw. AFAIK AMD GPUs have supported video decode on Linux across all generations, so what was unavailable?
Considering the history of ATI with video, and how they enabled GL shaders to work with video acceleration, post processing and effects before anyone was able to dream this thing (Readeon 8500 was able to use shaders to post-process and apply effects to the video), I think their silicon layout was very convoluted and unconventional for today's standards.
Considering HDCP came later, it might have just been slapped as a side module and some of their math magic might be offloaded to GPU even. I remember having old ATI drivers having a very cinematic look when video was accelerated by the GPU itself (it was surreally beautiful), but they had to throw all this machinery out from the driver when they started to modernize their stack (and they broke video playback for months due to not supporting proper overlay formats).
Similarly, I think closed source drivers were programming some of the cards during initialization, because I remember they're talking about moving all this init step to the BIOS itself, and opening some doors on the BIOS to tweak the card during the init (clocks, fans, temp reads, etc. IIRC) for allowing OS and open drivers to play nicer and with less effort with the cards in the long run.
The details are hazy, because these transitions were made almost a decade ago if not longer. However, while NVIDIA was playing the deaf, and Intel was just starting to provide good open drivers for their IGPs, AMDs move as a prime GPU vendor brought a lot of good light to them.
If you want, I can try to dig the history and create a timeline for you, but it might not be an immediate endeavor.
Oh, I know that AMD has done a lot to help out the open ecosystem (and even interop with the closed parts - heck, I got their closed AMDGPU-PRO Linux drivers to work on the PS4 without any patches, even though that's not a GPU variant offered elsewhere, because the amdgpu userspace/kernel interface is just so well designed). I recommend AMD for Linux users; lately, they've been doing good work while Intel drivers bitrot, especially on older hardware.
I'm just quite confused as to how HDCP factors into all that. HDCP really is just a hardware block that's part of the video output which you enable or disable; there is a bunch of nonsense associated with PAVP and other such stuff on Windows, but none of that should really matter to Linux, nor should whatever way HDCP is implemented affect other features of the open drivers. AMD certainly do deserve credit for their work on Linux support, I just find your specific HDCP story quite strange :-)
I'd agree if we were talking about desktop machines, which are basically a box around a GPU, CPU, and some networking. The situation there is infinitely better than on the M1 Mac Mini.
But if I go and buy a random Windows _laptop_ and try to slap Linux on it, I might have all sorts of issues with the trackpad, webcam, fingerprint sensors, never mind sleep/wake.
That's why Linux laptop vendors are a thing and deserve our praise (just like the companies you've mentioned)! All I'm saying is that Apple is hardly the only company left that doesn't actively support Linux.
But it is not all about GPUs. Broadcom is notoriously bad on many items and is used a lot for wifi and BLE and webcams, as is that touch pad vendor whose name I forgot that is in many laptops.
I installed Linux on a 2015 MBP recently and there is no real way to get the webcam working.
> Apple doesn't provide Linux drivers for their components, but neither does "anyone else", sadly.
?!?!
There are vendor-provided Linux drivers for pretty much everything?
Everything in Intel and AMD CPUs are supported in mainline. nVidia provides Linux drivers.
I don't have a clear view about how many devices nowadays are reverse-engineered, and how many are provided by someone with datasheet (it happens quite often that mainline drivers are not provided by vendor directly, but by a third party that got access to datasheet), but it really feels like most vendors do work with OS vendors to get their hardware supported, and that Apple is totally an exception in the hardware world.
Apple has requested and obtained semi-custom hardware from vendors before. Their Boradcom wireless cards (around 2006-2012 IIRC) are almost produced only for them, and getting it run on Linux was a long endeavor.
Also, like Java, they have maintained their own nVidia drivers up to a certain point.
Today that gap is smaller since HW manufacturers are more open about their firmwares and drivers, and Linux is more widely adopted.
> Apple has requested and obtained semi-custom hardware from vendors before. Their Boradcom wireless cards (around 2006-2012 IIRC) are almost produced only for them, and getting it run on Linux was a long endeavor.
I just sent in a patch series to Linux a few days ago to get all custom Broadcom cards for T2 and M1 Macs working (~2017-present), with the right firmware selection logic. Took a week or so to develop and test on both ARM64 and x86. (There was some prior art but certainly nothing that would've taken more than a few more weeks to work out from scratch; besides, I found a Broadcom source dump for Android that contained most of the interesting knowledge excluding the Apple-only bits, since some of it is relevant to newer non-Apple chips too).
Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
I remember many people have bruised themselves by banging their heads to their peripherals and desks while trying to reverse these BCM chips and trying to make them work with Linux, however back in the day BCM was hostile towards Linux, and NDIS_wrapper was a thing...
OTOH, kudos for all the hard work you're doing on the kernel. Maybe one day I'd have enough spare time to work on that marvelous beast.
> Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
> I remember many people have bruised themselves by banging their heads to their peripherals and desks while trying to reverse these BCM chips and trying to make them work with Linux, however back in the day BCM was hostile towards Linux, and NDIS_wrapper was a thing...
The b43 days were definitely special, and that was a full from scratch reverse engineered driver plus open firmware, which is a crazy accomplishment. These days though, we just accept that we're going to have to run vendor firmware, either because there's signing involved or because it's a huge amount of work to attempt to reverse engineer and reimplement that bit. Firmwares have grown from dozens of kilobytes to megabytes and it's just not viable to rewrite all that any more, if it's even possible.
OTOH, we also have better tools for and experience reverse engineering now than we did back then. Ghidra has made "proper" disassembly and decompilation accessible to anyone, and we can run proprietary OSes in VMs to study how they interact with hardware.
> As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
Well, it doesn't happen that often outside of closed platforms (i.e. needing an exploit to do anything) and Nvidia ;-)
Apple still maintains their own Java internally. Very minor tweaks and with their own CA since they self sign certain internally starting 2-3 years ago.
I am aware that for GPUs specifically, the driver situation on Linux is pretty good (minus the Nvidia/Wayland friction). But a laptop is more than just a GPU and a CPU.
When I was shopping around a few years ago, the fingerprint reader even on Dell's Linux-focused developer laptops was dead. I liked the Razer Blade, but many components didn't support Linux; looks like the trackpad on some models still doesn't work.
If "any vendor" actively supported Linux, we wouldn't need companies like Framework or system76 that pick compatible components. I'm not saying that Apple is particularly helpful, just that they're hardly alone in not caring about Linux.
People unfamiliar with computer history beyond the past decade are downvoting you.
Apple may not contribute much more than a bare platform with M1, but that isn't unusual in the scope of computer history. What's important is that they are not actively enforcing exclusivity or deterring the attempt. They've even shown tacit support in recent EFI patches by making changes that preserve the current mechanism other OSes can be loaded.
While M1s definitely win in the efficiency category, the added efficiency is really not that useful for most people on a day to day basis.
Cellphones have moved away from replaceable batteries specifically because of fast charge. Most phones with 20 watt charging will reach ~50% battery in 30 mins, so even with battery degradation, you really don't notice the effect in day to day life.
Same thing with laptops, there really are very few situations where you don't have access to a charging port for ~6-8 hours.
Given that, Id personally rather take the hit on efficiency in return for way better compatibility, ability to run a full linux natively , and not deal with all the extra crap that Apple throws in the M1. And, If I really care about longevity, a second battery is easily an option for laptops like Frameworks.
On my 2019 work machine (MBP) all filesystem operations were slow. On my 2021 one they aren't. Same specs, same OS. Maybe there's some bug in the filesystem? Not sure if you can fix by clean-reinstalling or if it's tied to the hardware.
If you don't have a stable internet connection, that could be the reason - macOS sends a hash of every executable to Apple's servers before it is opened[0]. This caused a major issue at the end of 2020, when these servers stopped working and all macs stopped working unless disconnected from the internet[1].
macOS has also been updated so that syspolicyd bypasses VPNs and system firewalls like Little Snitch[2], so you can't easily block these connections now.
Your own links show that likely isn't parent's issue. It only sends a hash on the first run of an executable. I'm not saying the problem you're talking about isn't a problem or concerning, but it's very likely not the problem they're talking about.
I hate when people say "mine works," but here's an `ls` of my homedir showing it's not universally slow. I currently have an absolute garbage network connection.
> ls -G 0.00s user 0.00s system 64% cpu 0.010 total
There are also many, many other reasons it could be; some macOS specific and others that aren't--most importantly what they're seeing isn't universal. macOS often ships with very old GPL2 tools that can cause various problems (many people brew install updated GPL3 versions), people often have configurations that can slow down `ls` by multiple factors (colors, sorting, etc can each cause multiple queries to disk or require the listing to complete before displaying output), customizations causing a slow prompt, a slow or corrupt disk, listing a slow network drive, etc.
The VPN bypass was very quickly removed from macOS over a year ago [1]. So it would only be relevant if they were using a very old version of Big Sur.
I'll jump in here and say that it probably _is_ notarization. The issues arrise when osx thinks it can get a connection to ocsp but actually because of real world consequences it can't. This can cause a delay of upto 5 seconds while it times out.
Some specific examples,
No internet connection: instant fail over
Blocked OCSP firewall or whatever: instant fail over
Slow internet but still able to reach: slow start: 1+ seconds
Bad internet, not able to reach: 3-5 second delay waiting
Normal internet, OSCP reachable: <1 second delay
Disabled trustd: Nothing will start, single user mode and trustd restore required
I've experienced all of these and is one of the reasons I have a shiney new Framework laptop sitting waiting to be migrated over to.
Also the "only on first run" also isn't true. It periodically checks for certificate revocation (as it should) and therefore will cause issues at sporadic intervals.
And the kicker of course is that all this is via plain ol' http, so everyone knows what developer's programs you're starting via the hash.
My 2019 (intel) work MBP is painfully slow and stuttery compared to my personal (M1) laptop. I wonder if it's partly the fault of the software that my company has pre-loaded on there.
i really think it's the monitoring software that is installed. the thing is, i complained to internal support and they said "i was the only one complaining" so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's just not set up the way I want, with things like focus follows mouse, and it's harder to customize than Linux with a good window manager. I also prefer how Linux package management works; that it's an integral part of the system rather than something bolted on. I do like the screen and keyboard on the Mac, with the exception of the lack of volume buttons.
I also like the open nature of Linux. It's fun to be able to look into the source code for pretty much anything.
Genuine question: what are you doing at work that would make Linux more desirable? Unless you write applications for Linux, I'm have a hard time thinking of a niche that would make Linux better.
I do recognize that you could also just like Linux more from a usability perspective, which is your opinion to hold!
IMHO it's a bit troublesome that it ships with a 1165G7, while competition available during the same time (e.g. T14 gen 2) is already on a noticable faster ryzen 5000 (through also stuck at only 16GiB of RAM).
I understand that upgrading the CPU is not yet quit viable at this point in time for framework but still, it noticable lacks behind the competition when it comes to CPU perf for many (all) tasks.
And things will only get harder with the Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs coming late this year (on the German marked maybe only early next year).
And similar is true for the competition from newer Intel processors.
Edit
This kinda has me stuck, 16GiB of RAM isn't enough, but the additional perf of the newer CPU is well wanted, but then USB ports being non easily repairable on a T14 is a problem to as I somehow tend to brake them. And only 2 USB-C ports on the T14 are a proble, too.
Yeah the AMD APU laptops are absolutely amazing. Be ready though, their Linux support is quite possibly the worst I have ever experienced in almost 30 years of using Linux. I'm typing this right now on a first gen Ryzen APU laptop (Raven Ridge) and it took more than three years for enough kernel bugs to be fixed that plain old Ubuntu LTS wouldn't constantly crash or hard lockup randomly. There were straight up silicon bugs and major sleep state issues that had to be sorted out and worked around with this early generation of chips. It's finally a great machine but it really soured me on the quality of AMD GPU code in the kernel--apparently it is a huge black box even to folks like Linus and can be quite the bug farm.
Be ready though, their Linux support is quite possibly the worst I have ever experienced in almost 30 years of using Linux.
So it's not just me :)
I bought a Ryzen APU since everybody kept telling me that AMD GPUs where the best when it came to Linux support, and it has been a massive pain. It finally runs almost stable using the latest Pop_OS, but it has been a not fun journey to get here.
So the problem with AMD and Framework is that the Framework uses Thunderbolt4 as the basis for it's expansion ports. Something that AMD doesn't natively come with.Not to say that it couldn't happen but I'm guessing 12th gen intel before AMD
Looks like they will have USB4 though, maybe just no Thunderbolt 4 certification yet? As far as I understand, frame.work is capable of TB3, but just not certified (yet?)
To add - AMD will have to support it on their mobile processors, so it will be a while. As far as I understand, AMD's current desktop CPUs do not support it, and the support will probably have to start on the desktop.
Are you sure? The adapters are all covered by USB-C and its DP alt mode. Even the storage expansion cards are attached via USB and not PCIe. No Thunderbolt required.
Yep it works well. As is usual with linux, it took a frustrating day or two to set up but I now play Steam windows games with Proton on NixOS using an NVidia eGPU. I'm using X, not wayland though, but it works both on external displays and on the Framework's "internal" display.
I went ahead and had mine shipped to a forwarder in the US, who then shipped it to me. Depends on how much in a hurry you are and whether you can find a forwarder you trust.
Yes, UK, France, & Germany since 17 Dec. I noticed because I was checking every day - bit surprised then to only get the email (I'd also subscribed for updates/let me know when available) yesterday (4 Jan).
3 years later that same laptop is on eBay for $500 with almost perfect Linux compatibility though. It’s tough to beat used thinkpads on eBay. I never buy my personal laptops new.
But most of these are meaningless if you don't work full days on the run. Most of us sits in an office with a big monitor and a mouse and keyboard most of the time.
And I don't get the "better productivity" talk either. During the most productive period of my life (by a huge margin, now I understand) I only had a $200 laptop. It was literally sold as "the cheapest laptop you will ever find".
(I give you the noise though, I hate fan noise)
Edit: do hinges ever break? Unless you sit on it, I have never seen this happen even with the cheapest laptops.
Whether you can get away with a cheap laptop really depends on what you’re doing.
Like for someone who works in Photoshop/Illustrator/Sketch/Figma even a little will need a great screen and almost without exception you’re not going to be getting that in a $200 laptop. This admittedly can be worked around with a “cheap” $300 IPS external monitor, but at that point you’re spending more on the monitor than your laptop which feels upside-down. (I know this from experience — at one point I had to do PS work on a $500 Gateway laptop and it was miserable because a quarter of the document’s details weren’t even visible).
Or if you’re compiling code a lot, you’re going to want more oomph than a $200 laptop can provide, because otherwise you’re going to be twiddling your thumbs and getting distracted and breaking flow waiting for code to compile. For me this is particularly impactful, and any reduction in compile times is easily felt.
As for hinges, on even a number of “mid tier” laptops, they tend to get loose and wobbly over time. I’ve seen a number of IdeaPads owned by friends and family suffer this fate.
You can still do a lot of great work and have decent screen by just focusing on second hand stuff. I never bought a personnal laptop as new and right now my main laptop is one I bought from my previous company when leaving. The bonus is usually once you get them they are already fully supported and stable on Linux.
It only costed me 375 euros. It is not a high end model, but a mid range (Lenovo E580) from a few years ago that was specced with the fastest i7 cpu and with as many ram (32GB) as supported. It is not Macbook M1 whatever fast/nice but for me it is still pretty much current. I cringe when people say they cannot work with 1080p screen but the reality is you are perefectly comfortable on them as long as you don't know better. This is something I have learned with different domains, not just computing but also sport equipment, music hardware. You don't necessarily miss the new tech until you tried it and you are not necessarily less productive, comfortable, creative or competitive on older tech, only expectations changes. But once you tested the new drug sure it is hard to come back.
I won’t argue that there’s high value in used machines. I will say that I probably wouldn’t buy a used consumer grade laptop… their specs are often mediocre even when new and their build quality often doesn’t hold up to the rigors of time. I would only give used business and workstation laptops serious consideration.
Personal anecdote: at one point in the early 2010s I was cash strapped and needed a reasonably capable machine. First I tried that $500 Gateway I mentioned, which was terrible to use across almost all dimensions. I ended up returning that machine and instead putting it toward a used Dell Precision M4400 workstation laptop, which was expensive when it was new in 2008 but I got it along with a bunch of accessories off of Craigslist for $350. That thing was immensely better than the cheap 4 years newer Gateway in every way, and much much more usable for work. That machine held out for me for several years until I could afford something better.
As far as screens go, resolution is less important to me than panel quality. I’ll take a 1280x800 screen with decent color performance over a 1920x1080 screen with garbage color. In the case of the cheap Gateway, the screen’s unusability had more to do with it being a terrible bottom of the barrel TN display than it having a 1366x768 resolution. While the Precision’s panel was higher rez (1920x1200) it also handled color much much better which is what made the difference for me.
I was very surprised after I bought a nice big monitor and great mouse that I ignored them most of the time, so now I just work off the laptop, it works best for me, which I never would have guessed in my desktop years
That said, I've been very productive with a creaky noisy cheap lenovo with ubuntu so in my case it's not just about productivity but also comfort
Re: do hinges ever break?
they tend to, when you use the laptop 10 hours per day
That's terrible ergonomics and you will grow a hunch. One day you will notice in the mirror and your consequent attempts to straighten your neck will fail. Laptops are such a legacy format, we only endure because we're denied power-/useful tablets, which would be much more flexible ergonomics-wise.
- not just a great touchpad, literally the best one in the game undisputed
- all day battery life. And not PC laptops that claim 14 hours of battery but see 5 in reality, I’m talking actually 14 hours of battery in real world use.
As someone who shifts between 3 different desks (home, main office, project office) and sometimes as to go and see clients, having a laptop is pretty necessary. However once I plug my laptop into its docking station connected to my monitors, keyboard, mouse etc. I really don't notice much of a difference between a laptop and desktop.
But I agree that working all day on a laptop in laptop mode is right out.
I have desktops at home and at office that i keep partially in sync (my home desktop is also for gaming (steam linux), no need for that in office).
I have a laptop for those rare cases when I need to work where i am not at either of those locations.
With so capable phones in pocket, I rarely find myself needing to pull out a laptop to the point that I don't think I'd buy replacement if this one broke.
I use a desktop into which I SSH or RDP from my laptop. Giving my flexibility and performance. But I still have an extra monitor in my office and home which I almost always use.
For my personal machine, I’m fine with a desktop because it’s unlikely I’ll need that power portably, and if I ever do I can set things up to remote into my personal desktop with my personal laptop.
For my work machine, a laptop is preferred because then I can do my work anywhere without fuss even without an internet connection.
Besides, with an M1 Pro, plugging my work laptop into the Thunderbolt hub at my desk provides a near-desktop experience for the overwhelming majority of its usage. For day to day work the difference between my M1 Pro laptop and 5950X desktop isn’t staggering enough to justify giving up portability.
I think it depends what kind of work you do and if you travel a lot. Pre/post pandemia are also different for a lot of people. A lot of people are now working 100% at home in a dedicated office and could only use a desktop while they used to move from meeting to meeting with their laptop prior to the pandemic. Others were travelling a lot from conf to conf and customers. Some still do a lot of customers on site work. There are many use-cases.
Anyway a laptop becomes a desktop by plugging it's usb-c port to your docking station so there is very little downside appart from being subject to throttling when doing heavy cpu stuff to using one instead of a desktop. Which not everybody is subject too, mostly only people compiling stuff on their laptop.
I personnally spend most of my time in my office at home with dual screen but I like to move to the living room when attending conferences, in my rooftop when it is not to sunny or in the kitchen to have a chat with my gf while grabbing a tea when she is at home and I am waiting for a job/whatever to complete so a laptop is still nice to have even when working 100% from home.
I live in a country where the average salary is $20k and the M1 MacBook Air STARTS at $1330. Devs here still often use MacBooks or similarly priced higher-end machines. So yeah, good laptops are worth it even in much poorer countries.
I'm self employed. The laptop is my main "tool". If I was in construction this would be comparable to a van load of power tools and then some.
I spend more time using it than any other tool I have.
It's also a taxable expense.
So for me the £2000+ I paid for my laptop to max it out to the extreme is money well spent.
Did I mention it's a taxable expense?
If you purchased your laptops with a credit card you should check to see if you have accidental damage protection.
My credit card has that and I've used it to replace a phone with a cracked screen. It was literally a 5 minute phone call to make the claim and all of my money was refunded the next day.
Ah well I had AppleCare+ on both, replaced the first one then bought the current one a year later when the M1 came out because I wanted the battery life for travel. The $3500 computer I sold for a surprisingly large loss even though it was basically in mint condition after Apple replaced everything – turns out that although Apple product resale value is pretty high, the 2nd hand market for a $3500 computer is pretty small. Lesson learned.
I have a ten year old X220 with an SSD upgrade.... I don't have to wait for anything really, either. Don't get me wrong, I know there is a difference, but... is it a 2000$ difference?
This is about snappiness only, I have no trouble finding workloads stressing this old i5 (e.g. 2k/4k videos), where an M1 would fly through. Personally, I just think snappiness alone is a bit forced argument to spent 2k$.
Build quality is probably night and day. An old thinkpad is going to be clunky and made of cheap plastic. A modern $2000 ultra book is going to be slim and made of metal or other high quality materials, it will be pleasant to type on, to look at, and it will have a reasonable trackpad size by modern standards.
When this is your main tool, it’s much more pleasant to use something with a nice build quality.
In terms of durability, the 10 year old ThinkPad will exceed just about any modern laptop. Size/weight is different story though. Just depends on priorities.
Thinkpads typically have magnesium cases, not plastic, and the older models have rollcages so they can take a beating like no other. I have an m1 air and while it feels sturdy, I have no doubt that X220 can withstand much more abuse than my macbook. Also, I have no doubt the X220 is more pleasant to type on, because older thinkpads have keyboards that have no equal in the laptop space. I would say my macbook has a satisfactory keyboard, but it is clearly a step down from the T series thinkpad it replaced. Still though, the macbook is for me overall the better package than any thinkpad that was in my budget range.
Keyboard is unmatched indeed, but my nipple mechanic is worn now and the trackpad is atrocious. I am not defending this machine, it is 10 years old, the CPU is a major limitation now. I bought it refurbished for 240€ in 2015, so I had a "single use" laptop for a trip... Became my main machine for years to follow. The low price point is one of the best features, as I am not constantly worried about it. Also the original spill resistance saved my ass two times. Oh yeah and SSD and RAM upgrade took me literally 5 minutes. Ridiculous. Almost disappointing as a DIY project.
Tho, I suspect it will perform much, much better cleaned, repaired and thermal-paste reapplied. But I wont open it, as long as I have no alternative set up.
(Also M1 + Linux, would be a no-brainer for me - best bang for the buck right now. I just fucking hate Apple OSs and the ecosystem. Oh and the keyboard too - feels as pleasant an ATM's number pad... Following Asahi closely, still.)
Wow, that seems like a steal for 240€. If you don’t mind me asking, why do you need a single use laptop to travel? Also regarding the MacBook keyboards, they’ve completely redesigned them. They were the worst keyboard I’ve ever used from 2016-2019, but the latest models have a brand new keyboard and it’s my favorite laptop keyboard ever, although that’s obviously just personal preference.
"Single-use" may have been the wrong expression. I meant, I needed something that could break, be stolen, or tempered with at the airport, without me losing trust/access to my main work/digital life tool, and without me getting too sad about it.
I try the Macbooks' keyboards every time I see one in the store. Yes, it has been even worse, but the new ones feel clickity-clackity, like an ATM pad, to me too. No travel, and annoying high pitched noises. Feels weird to rest your fingers on those keys. Not even close to a Thinkpad keyboard, old or new. I could get used to it, but it is not a great input device. Not at all. Trackpad rocks of course, but so does the nipple, if you type a lot.
Magnesium? I must be confused then, because the “thinkpad” I was imagining was made of plastic. I’ve definitely felt a magnesium laptop from Microsoft’s surface brand before and that build quality was great.
Jeez, I explicitly stated my comment was about "snappiness" only. Sure you can move the goalpost, if it makes you happy, but I am not trying to argue a 10 year old Thinkpad, or any laptop that age, is nicer than a recent Macbook. You win, tiger.
I don't live in SF but paid about that much (bit less) for my current laptop. It's more than I've ever paid for a laptop before but I wanted something that would last a good while both in terms of build quality and specs/upgradability. I got a Dell Latitude but the latest Thinkpad T-series was running about the same price with similar specs. I live in the UK.
My last laptop purchase was 11 years ago. I got recall-upgraded to a new laptop 6 years ago. Once amortised, it's a really small price to pay for something I use this much.
My private laptops are around 1000 to 1500. But I also have my desktop PC.
My company laptop is 3k$ and I actually carry that around more often. True I care less about it but I still don't feel like I'm dropping devices while I'm moving.
I dropt my Thinkpad primarily at home when it was sitting next to the couch :')
I charge 1000 Euro per day when I'm consulting. That would be in Berlin. For that money, I need a laptop that is fast and works. I spend most waking hours using it so it also needs to be comfortable to use. So, I value quality and performance.
That being said, my expensive 2017 Macbook Pro broke a few weeks ago and I picked up a very nicely discounted Samsung Galaxy book for about 700 Euro because the only macs available were obsolete and the new ones had 4 week delivery times. It's a 16GB, i5 with a surprisingly decent Iris XE graphics system on a chip thing and 512GB ssd. Nothing fancy but good enough for the money and great value at that price actually.
I put Manjaro on it and was up and running in a few hours. I only had 4 hours to configure it in the evening as I had a customer meeting the next morning and needed a working development environment. So, I was pretty pleased all of that worked out fine. That means that laptop earned itself back in under a day. I even managed to revive some of my 32 bit Steam library and get playable fps (with that intel XE graphics!). And unlike the mac, it does not have thermal throttling issues. It was always unusable for gaming.
I'll probably buy one of the new fancy macs when delivery times improve a bit and when we get some clarity on the inevitable early adopter issues (which bits are going to break this time?). But I'm not in a hurry. This thing works well enough and I'm kind of liking Manjaro so far. Lots of rough edges but nothing I can't deal with. Definitely not for users not comfortable using a command line.
I'd totally spend 3000-4000 Euro on a laptop regardless of the OS if it is good value for money. My last mac book pro was 3500 Euro. Money is not the issue for me when I literally spend a lot of my billable time waiting for this thing to do stuff for minutes on end many times a day and interrupting my flow (which is priceless). But I expect performance for that money as well as a decent keyboard (so definitely not my Macbook Pro) and a nice screen. Apple fixed all of those things with their latest iteration but the configuration I'd want puts me close to 4000-5000 Euro this time. I'm actually considering doing that. But it's a lot of money and Apple tax this time. And the build quality of the last one was terrible, which makes me more hesitant. The worst I've ever seen from Apple. Hence, the cheapo emergency replacement.
So, this laptop looks like a great deal. Twice the memory (or more if you upgrade), ssd, and better CPU than what I picked up for just 700 Euro a few weeks ago. Close to good enough for me. I'd like a proper screen though. Not having retina/HDPI feels like going back to the stone age a bit. Yes, Linux needs a bit of work on that front but Wayland seems capable of this at least. But other than that, not bad. If they do a more expensive version with a better screen, I'd consider getting one.
Finding decent laptops is actually a problem. There are not a lot of premium laptops that are nice enough for my criteria. I don't want a gaming laptop monstrosity that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I don't care for Thinkpads with a nipple and shitty touchpad. Dell has support issues though their XPS is pretty nice. But I want something premium, with a nice screen, keyboard and touchpad that doesn't feel like a huge compromise. This Samsung is quite nice on this front actually considering the price. The touchpad could be a bit bigger. But it does multi touch and it works (after lots of fiddling with settings). The 1080p screen feels like a huge leap backwards after having used a Retina screen for the last few years. Not loving that.
I have several laptops that are multiple times that. It's common for people earning $200k+ per year to spend 5-10k per year on computing hardware.
My desktop was like $14k new. It has been my daily driver for over 4 years, so less than $300/month (and still going down). That's a rounding error in relation to the money I have earned using it.
My laptop is a X1 Carbon Gen 3 (released in 2015). Bought it used on ebay and I'm still fairly happy with it. I will say, the lack of hardware transcoding is the biggest pain point these days. When I was still in school and had zoom calls, those were a nightmare and ramped up to a consistent 90% CPU usage. Other than that, Rust compiles times are slow, but nothing else is a huge issue.
Next machine needs to have hardware transcoding though. That's become so important to me. Needing to give up all of my processing power just to be on a video call is awful, but it served well for years for $400.
I didn’t realize it had a hardwire switch for the webcam, that’s a nice feature they could put on the front page. I see it now on their “learn more” page.
It would be nice if the expansion cards came with a plastic cap to protect the usb c plug, I wouldn’t want to toss the spare hdmi card in my bag as is, but in the spirit of open hardware maybe one will pop up on thigaverse.
> It would be nice if the expansion cards came with a plastic cap to protect the usb c plug,...
Have your pick of these [1]. There are expansion card holders/cases, which might also be an option.
I'm evaluating reports of Framework+Linux-distros' sleep/wake/hibernate impacts upon video resolution switching, WiFi stability, and trackpad stability, to determine when to pull the trigger on purchasing a fully tricked-out model. I can afford to run an Apple M-class laptop (holding out for next batch) and a Framework at the same time, and make the effort to transition off the macOS ecosystem (any consumer-grade and office apps I want not available on Linux, I'm happy to run under Windows within Linux).
The straw that broke my camel's back was the latest macOS update that deleted all Safari tabs. Around the same time, iOS update did something similar: deleted all back history on all Safari tabs. After the many other problems I put up with in macOS, I figured if I'm going to be spelunking around the system to fix Apple software problems as frequently as I have found myself doing in the past decade, I might as well work with others on the source, as Linux is getting awfully close to "good enough" quality these days for my daily driver, at least enough for me to give it a fair shot with sustained effort on peer hardware as my Apple gear.
I also recently(~1 month) purchased one of these, (DIY edition + windows). So far my only complaint is the screen size. I was really wanting a 17" touch screen and a keyboard with a num pad. My first thought when I was opening + working with this was that the whole experience felt like a labor of love.
I paid $500 for each laptop my kids needed at beginning of pandemic in March 2020 (so $1000 in total). Each is a Ryzen 7, 16 GB RAM and 1 TB SSD (one of them is actually NVMe). Both laptops are still performing greatly without hiccups and they saw 2 vacations on the other side of the country during the 2 summers. And one of them (the NVMe one) I used it to do my work during the 2 weeks vacation last summer (virtualization and virtual machines for all my projects, though I had to get an external USB SSD for the virtual machines to fit with me).
All in all if you take care of them it can be used as work horse during vacations. Only thing I can't do on them is last generation gaming, for that I need my usual work horse which is a $2500 desktop gaming rig.
Do you mean 75% of the price? I find it nearly impossible to believe you got a 1/4 discount off a 1 year old refurbished high-end ultra book. You’re telling me a $2k laptop dropped to $500?
You can find a $1500 laptop for $400-ish if you're willing to wait it out. Either used or refurbs from other countries, provided you can live with some minor inconveniences like the wrong keyboard. Nothing a $2 sticker set won't fix.
Well this isn't the market for you, and Framework have never claimed to be going for the ultra cheap laptop market. At least not yet... perhaps if they get a lot of enthusiastic support they'll see a market for the $500 upgradeable laptop.
I don't understand what's so configurable about this laptop. All you can choose is the expansion cards which control what ports you get, which is useless.
You should look at the Linus tech tips review. The components inside are all clearly marked and easy to upgrade. Even the screen has an easily removable bezel.
You can buy it without RAM, without storage, without WiFi card, and without OS and sort out all those things yourself. It's still a laptop with all that entails, but everything that was reasonable to make configurable or swappable -- they did it.
Do you actually save money if you buy all those components yourself? With all the shortages and issues it is a real nightmare sourcing inexpensive components these days. Unless you're at a huge scale and have contracts with the component manufacturers, or you've been hoarding a supply of parts from years ago... I bet it's going to be cheaper to tick a box when ordering vs. buying the same stuff from newegg, etc.
Yes, even if only because you can choose something lower-spec'd than they offer, they're certainly not ripping anyone off (like any other manufacturer does!) vs. buying the same elsewhere. I checked Amazon & Scan at my time of pre-order (UK) and decided to go for it just for the.. 'thrill' of it. (Suppose I can/should check again nearer the time.)
I love the concept of the Framework and it fits my use-case but I really wish they would at least add some form of screen configurability/options to their tech roadmap.
- I need a mate screen option, glossy displays in ambient light give me headaches.
- Some folks will also probably want touchscreens (uber glossy), more power to them
- Would also be very cool to bring back the old tech of transflective displays like the one in the Pixel Qi display. For folks that want to work outside (me again!) and are not fussed about color accuracy.
Unfortunately I didn’t see any comments other than one in passing about the trackpad’s feel and software integration. At the moment I consider macOS to still have the edge over other implementations (software, the glass feel and haptics all in harmony), but I do know that in recent years the precision touchpads have come a long way.
Quote: "If you need to do native iOS or macOS development then a MacBook is your obvious choice."
No, it's not. I do cross-platform development for over a decade now and all I have are virtual machines. Over 2 dozens of them and I never owned any Apple hardware. Why pay for overpriced hardware when virtualization covers everything for a 100th of the price?
Except I am not an user, I'm a developer, hence no EULA infringement. You might want to take a second look at their EULA for their Apple developer ID and you'll see that for those $100/year they sing a very different song. Money talks!
No, it's still prohibited. From Apple's terms for devs[0]:
"You agree not to install, use or run the Apple SDKs on any non-Apple-branded computer, and not to install, use or run iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, macOS and Provisioning Profiles on or in connection with devices other than Apple-branded products, or to enable others to do so."
Except I am not an user, I'm a developer, hence no EULA infringement.
IANAL, but it doesn't work like that. Like any original creative work, macOS falls under copyright protection. Apple only gives you a licenses you to copy/run macOS on Apple-branded hardware.
You might want to take a second look at their EULA for their Apple developer ID
I don't see anything in the Apple Developer Agreement that would cancel the terms of the macOS EULA. But I'd love to be proven wrong, please give me a pointer.
you'll see that for those $100/year they sing a very different song. Money talks!
$100/year is less than pocket change for Apple. Even if they have a million paying developers (unlikely), it's ~1/3658th of their yearly revenue. If they'd make their iPhones 50 cents more expensive, they would make more money.
The $100 per year is only there as one of the many ways to fight scammers. It makes it more costly to open many accounts, they have a credit card (with a name) on file, etc. Sure, it is not air tight, but it is just one of many measures.
Framework is remarkable. Intel MacBook Pro power in MacBook Air footprint.
The build quality is far better than first gen devices, if not second.
Given enough time, it might be able to get many people off macOS.
The screen is amazingly crisp if you can overlook the fun resolution. Hard to look past 3x2.
Why did I return it?
I realized I needed to begin with a retail and turnkey Ubuntu experience where everything just worked and the things that mattered to me worked out of the box.
Framework is not quite an optimized retail Ubuntu experience yet like a Dell XPS with mature drivers largely ready to go.
- Battery life isn’t optimized and maximized out of the box, you will have to tpm. I have limited time for this at present. I’m sure there’s lots of interpretations that is not a a big deal. I’d rather be solving problems with the laptop than be solving problems in the laptop. I want max battery life without investing hours up front.
- Fingerprint reader required manual setup
- Wifi can have hiccups on the latest Ubuntu, and without trying into optimizing battery and kernels upset instead of getting things done.
- Touchpad is so so. Good hardware, maybe more tweaking in Linux needed. Very used to macOS too.
- HDMI port draws extra battery life when not in use so you have to to keep it removed.
The components otherwise seem high quality and well put together.
Again it’s not that these issues can’t be overcome, or that they won’t be out of the box in the future, I simply don’t have the time for either at present.
It was a joy to use for browsing in Ubuntu 21.04 as stuff is broken in 21.10.
Will update the article and write in more detail about fan noise and heating. But in short:
- Trackpad is decent. However, as some others have mentioned, it can be a bit touchy. It's happened a few times that I'm typing and I accidentally rest part of my right thumb on the trackpad and that changes the insertion point inadvertently. Not a big issue. As a matter of fact, it's more an indication that I need to correct my hands posture for better ergonomics.
- Bluetooth. It's pretty stable. I have a Bluetooth mouse and Galaxy Buds connected and they work flawlessly. I'll try more devices.
The author does not address the screen resolution (and just says the screen is nice) but I'm hearing that the screen res is a bit to high to work with without scaling and a tad to low to do 2x scaling. And people don't like fractional scaling, at least in Gnome (it seems to look weird). Is this still an issue?
I tend to prefer 1080p for this reason on 12-14" screens. My Thinkpad X13 gen 2 has a 13.3", 1920x1200 screen, windows sets it to 150%, which seems ok, although Ubuntu works well for me without scaling still. The Frame work laptop has an even higher res (2256x1504). I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this.
What do people think of this? I'm hoping that in the future you can choose the screen (and easily get replacements as well, I hear they are working on that).
Edit: I hope these issues are being addressed by established DE's, I'm assuming they won't be an issue on Canonical's (hypothetical ;)) Flutter based DE that's (obviously ;)) coming and on System76's Rust based new DE for Pop OS [0].
I run Mint with 2x scaling on mine and I like it a lot. The screen's not quite as sharp as the one on the old XPS it replaced, but it's still quite nice.
I run a middling-width monospace font, and I can't quite fit two 80-column windows side by side at 2x without reducing the font size, but if you want that then you want smaller text anyway. (If you run a narrow font it shouldn't be an issue.) Other UI elements are not unreasonably large in my opinion, but YMMV.
Isn't scaling from 3072x1728 to 3840x2160 (so 125%) very blurry? A one-pixel line at 3072x1728 would be spread over slight more than line pixel wide on 4k.
To get nice integer scaling one could render at 15360x8640 (16k) which is 5x3072x1728 and 4x3840x2160 but I doubt that's what Wayland is doing. No common graphics card could handle that.
The font hinting relies on the resolution too. By scaling the rendered pixmap 125% the fonts would look bad too. Rendering the fonts in a larger size at the native screen resolution should look better.
Who said anything about scaling rendered pixmaps? Proper UI scaling is handled at the desktop and UI toolkit level, instead of brute force changing desktop resolution or scaling rendered windows. That's why it's not a simple problem and support varies not only based on operating system, but also UI libraries used by applications, their combination, application developers updating their UI libraries and using the new APIs. Whether the UI toolkit exposes it to application developer by having the graphic api operate at pixel independent units or having the developer manually calculate sizes based on the scaling factor or relative to something like default font size varies. Basic geometric shapes and text (assuming vector instead of bitmap fonts) can be rendered at any size and resolution. As for more photo like images downscaling them by fractional amount typically works quite well, so if they are big enough for integer 2x scaling they also work with 1.25 scale.
For scaling 125%, the client windows are rendered at 2x their size and sampled down. On the parent's system, a full-screen window would be rendered at 6144x3456 and scaled down to 3840x2160 (0.625%).
This gives a blurry result and is taxing on the graphics chip.
Qt apps and Firefox support scaling themselves which gives a much crisper result for fonts and line-art.
Isn't macOS using the same approach? I remember it even having a warning at certain scale that it will be more computationally intensive. And blurriness from downscaling nearest bigger integer size is nowhere near as bad as blurriness from software which use xwayland and gets rendered at 1x scale and then upscaled.
I’m not on Ubuntu but using Wayland on nixos. Fractional scaling does not look or work well at all in my experience. I decided on 1.0 scaling and pushed it all over to font sizing (around 1.5). This works pretty well for most apps but it is a little small sometimes. The biggest issue is having to manually scale up some apps that don’t keep my preferences.
Gnome's accessibility feature "larger text" works a bit better than font scaling IMEx. With font scaling often some alignment and spacing seems odd. And you can toggle "larger text" with one click, if you make the accessibility menu permanent.
> I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this.
I'm doing this, in particular on a 24" 4k screen. It's true that it may look a bit "weird", in that fonts are huge compared to other UI elements.
However, for me that's a win. I don't care to have huge buttons or what have you, I mostly use shortcuts. So I get nice, sharp fonts and also get to have smaller UI elements which leave more screen space for the text.
Resolution is independent of size. Just because it doesn't work perfectly on Linux high DPI is much nicer and easier to read.
The decapsulate on of resolution and size is btw already quite old. Games have this as well were they dynamically change the internal resolution but not the screen resolution.
And you might not care about it but:
- text is much smoother
- images from DSLR have higher resolution than 4k for ages and you can see the difference
The only arguments against 4k on smaller screens should be power consumption and not scaling issues. But for this we should focus on dynamic refrehsrates and similar power saving mechanism and again NOT complaining about 4k.
MacOS is doing this flawless for years. Windows can do it and under Linux it starts to be usable based on comments of this article.
If somebody understands the situation better on MacOS I'd be interested, but based on my experience, Windows is the only OS that gets this as close as possible to right. It's a single setting that affects all applications and I can set monitors independently and it will scale on the fly (even if it does look a little weird as you drag an app across and it dynamically shifts)
Every now and then I'll come across a app that doesn't quite deal with high DPI scaling correctly, but it is the exception to the rule.
Linux also works pretty well, but as with everything Linux, it's almost always "it depends and well, not quite" (not usually multi-monitor aware, lots of per app settings)
I'm not really sure what you think 'scaling' means or what you think this Stack Exchange answer means, but macOS (not 'MacOS') does allow scaling the UI of both integral and external monitors, and independently.
It renders a high-resolution image to a buffer, and then scales that when rendering to the actual screen buffer. The buffer image is at least as large as the actual screen buffer.
You can see for yourself that it isn't changing the hardware resolution of external monitors when scaling by taking a look at the actual resolution on your monitors OSD if it has done. It'll always be the native resolution.
In Mac OS, because that's how its scaling is designed. Windows does not have this problem, because it tells programs to render themselves at 1.33 or whatever and provides facilities to do it without pain in the ass. As the result scaling in Windows is painless with any displays at any resolutions. In fact, my main setup has two 1.25x DPI displays and an old 1x DPI display with zero blending or sizing artifacts excluding brief moments when you move a window from 1.25x display to 1x one until it lands.
Again I don't really know what you think you mean by 'blurred'? How do you think this is working?
If I tried all the possible scalings for my external monitor, the grey line around each window, to give a specific example of, is always a crisp physical one-pixel wide.
macOS creates a buffer to render to that is the same size as the physical output you're choosing to use, and is able to render with pixel precision in that buffer.
4k external monitor - here's HN at all the scalings https://imgur.com/a/QTrI6uJ. For example, look at the white box around the Y, that's always rendered precisely on hard physical pixel boundaries. It's one pixel for some scalings, then moves to two pixels for larger scalings. It's never a blur from a larger or smaller image that is then interpolated. It renders at the native resolution, knowing physical pixel boundaries, by the scaling of the render commands (the x and y to render at, before the render command runs) not an intermediate rendered image. (Remember to download the images so you aren't using browser interpolation to scale them.)
This looks pretty good. Though scaling in browsers has been mostly independent of corresponding OS features for quite a while. E.g. the issues mentioned above with Linux and fractional scaling do not affect browsers as much. The problem is usually with native UI elements, such as the settings app itself.
What does it expose? In Sierra as you can see from the screenshot it simply shows scaled resolutions. So you can just divide native resolution by the scaled to get the factor.
What? MacOS does scale. MacOS was doing this correctly years before Windows!
First of all, DPI is not the metric we're interested in. That is a unit for print quality, and it has no relevance for an OS, for Photoshop, or anything we do on a screen. The operating system does not know how big your screen is. Inches nor dots are relevant; only pixels are. It would be more accurate to talk about the ratio of monitor pixels to apparent pixels. I guess Microsoft finally got the memo in Windows 11 (or was it 10?) and changed to percentages.
In MacOS, a 4K monitor set to 1920x1080 will still be 3840x2160, but it displays 4 pixels for every 1 apparent pixel. Everything scales correctly, except for legacy applications. The UI elements, text, etc. appear to be a sharper version of 1080p. In Windows land, this is the same thing as "200%." As far as I can tell, Windows does the same thing but uses scaling percentages instead of apparent resolution.
Your only problem with Windows appears to be that it named the scaling setting "DPI" until Windows 7 or so to handle scaling. But as the parent mentioned, Windows is definitely superior to MacOS, as it provides arbitrary scaling ratios, and renders text perfectly at any ratio.
To go deeper into nitpicking, DPI is not even that misleading, if you take "inch" in DPI to be equal to 72 points as used in font sizes. Then a 72pt font on the screen with DPI X will be rendered with height of X pixels.
DPI is a valid metric for anything that the human eye sees. There's no difference in that regard between text printed on paper, and text displayed on the screen. The smaller the dots, the better it looks.
The problem of 4k is efficiency. 1440p is already 2x at 14 inches, which at normal viewing distances is about as sharp as people can see. Going up to 4k does not really improve visual quality, but it dramatically increases the pixel count that must be rendered, which burns through a lot more power. 4k laptops have worse battery life and worse display performance than 1440p laptops, but they offer no upside for those downsides.
There is a reason macbooks, still the gold standard for hi dpi rendering, have never had 4k panels.
1440p is hugely common on gaming laptops. Alienware M15, Razer Blade 14/15, Lenovo Legion 5, etc... all offer displays in the QHD or WQXGA range.
The reason you typically see 1080p or 4k on ultrabooks is because 1080p is how you get the low entry price, and 4k is what sounds better on marketing and looks the best for text-related things (4k is not at all useless - the sharpness it provides to text is noticeable). The balance that QHD provides isn't very desirable in that market usually, although there are exceptions like the Framework laptop or the Surface Laptop 4. Usually those exceptions then also come with more unique aspect ratio displays like 3:2, though, so they aren't exactly 1440p/QHD. But they are in that density.
In my experience, fractional scaling in Gnome Wayland works at least as well as on Windows. I use 150% on my 4K 27" monitor and have experienced basically zero problems in the last few months.
I’m on PopOS running Wayland with fractional scaling to 200%. It looks fantastic imo and have only had some issues with Guake terminal when plugged in to an external monitor, which I believe may be a Guake-Wayland-specific bug.
I used to have issues with two different screens that needed different scaling but as of 20.04 it's mostly fine to use fractional scaling on one monitor and not the other.
I've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.
As an aside, I’m increasingly convinced that Fedora is probably the best Linux distro around right now for both enthusiasts and beginners.
Great stability. Close to the edge of progress. And they focus on delivering real unique value on top of what others have created as opposed to reskinning and hacking Gnome.
I’ve never used Fedora but I’m keen on moving over my personal desktop the next time I have a couple of days to mess around with it.
Personally, I've found fractional scaling on Gnome makes the window furniture too large for my taste. I've settled on boosting the default font size in gnome-tweaks to 125% instead, which makes font rendering match the DPI of my monitor but leaves window bars / tool bars etc at a more sensible size.
I am on gnome 41+wayland and quite satisfied with fractional scaling. That is with 4k@1.5X+2560x1440@1X. Fractional scaling related issues don't seem to be more often than programs not supporting wayland and scaling at all (in which case those programs are slightly blurry but reasonable size). There are certain settings which need to be enabled, they might be enabled by default on some distros. I might not notice some of the issues due to bad scaling at 4k still being comparable to lower resolution screen, unless things break badly. Issues might be more obvious with ~2K at 1.25-1.5 scale. Things may be slightly simpler in single monitor setups without mixed scaling. How much of effort configuring stuff is acceptable depends on person and what kind of software they commonly use.
* Gnome the desktop -> org.gnome.mutter/experimental-features "scale-monitor-framebuffer". Only integer scales available without this. Following assume that this is enabled.
* gnome apps: work great out of the box
* QT apps: Qt5 requires QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable to force wayland backend. Enabled by default in Qt6. Used to be quite bad ~1-2 years ago, but is now usable.
* Firefox: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
* chromium and electron: --ozone-platform=wayland seems fine for chrome, but some electron apps went crazy when moving between windows with different scale. Maybe the electron app bundled an older chrome version. No issues (except less sharp text) when not enabling the experimental wayland backend.
I've got a Thinkpad with a 14" screen at 2256x1504. Running Wayland and SwayWM, I could never get integer or fractional scaling to work just right. In the end, turning off system-wide scaling and configuring apps that don't scale automatically was what did the trick.
Sorry, I wasn't clear - just mentioning that I'm using Sway, but it's not the problem. The problem was with apps running in XWayland, e.g. Gimp, Firefox, Spotify, Slack, gnome apps, etc
Ah, gotcha. The Wayland situation in Firefox has been changing for every major release BTW. Been running it in native Wayland since recently and so far it’s mostly been good and stable. Still the occasional crash or popup glitch but since ~v94 it already feels worth it.
I like my fonts on the quite small side; ~14" @ 2256x1504 sounds ideal to me.
That aside, I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland on everything from a 6" Pinephone to 32"@4k in various configurations and it's been mostly painless. Mostly terminal, web browsing, Steam games (latter not on the Pinephone obv). I wouldn't be surprised if there can be issues with xwayland that I'm yet to experience.
Oh, actually not yet. That's surprising as in general I think Intel graphics tend to have the best compatibility out there. Currently main workstation on amdgpu on a 5xxxG - I'm still not sure if I've gotten the hardware transcoding etc working properly but that's all unrelated to fractional scaling, I assume.
I use Pop_OS on my Framework and loved 1.5x scaling except for screen tearing I get (YouTube for example). I reverted to 1x and increased icon and font sizes to semi compensate.
I've been wondering about this for a while. Why do we need scale numbers and can't use dpi? Essentially if wayland (or desktops shells) would specify sizes in a "real world unit" changing the size of windows, text etc would just mean changing the dpi. In particular it would be trivial to have different size/resolution monitors display the elements at the same size. Considering if elemtents are vector graphics we don't even need fractional scaling for desktop elements.
Now we still would need to scale images etc, but that is much less an issue than fractional scaling text or lines etc.
The only program I’ve seen do it “properly” is Darktable, which has a dots-per-inch setting for things which have to be compatible with real-world linear measurements (WYSIWYG stuff for the most part), a dots-per-degree setting for things which depend on how far away you are sitting from your screen (UI element size), and a font size. I suspect the reason people don’t regularly do this is the same as the reason CSS no longer has pixels: it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit.
(I just went to check my several-years-old impressions against Darktable’s almost-undocumented config file, and... it no longer seems to have these settings? I’m not sure.)
Unfortunately, the “UI scale” thing seems to be baked into Wayland nowadays; I have no idea how to get Evince to realize that an A4 sheet at 100% should be 210 cm wide whatever my screen resolution and “UI scale”.
> it’s difficult to design (in the declarative CSS model) with more than one independent length unit.
Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible. You need at least "real world units" for stuff like the minimum size of touch targets, and "angular units" (like CSS pixels) for the general scaling of widgets. Plus it would be nice to add a separate scaling factor for text, since users differ widely in what they find most readable. So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
> You need at least "real world units" for stuff like the minimum size of touch targets [...].
That touch targets need absolute lengths is a good point.
> So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
Yes, and you’ll notice that’s what Darktable does (or did) :) I’m not unsympathetic, just have never seen it done in a moderately complex situation.
> Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible.
I suspect it’s not a question of theoretical expressive power so much as ergonomics: allowing easy description of (what people think about as) simple things. It probably doesn’t have to be precisely; if a full constraint-based / linear programming approach[1] is the way to go, I expect designers will adapt, it’s just that last I checked those could be quite tricky to use: small changes could lead to drastic rearrangements of the layout, and as soon as you try to add a couple of breakpoints the whole thing becomes NP-complete.
It’s like, say, LR(k) parsers. LR(k) parsers are nice, fast, and good at expressing our intuitions about ambiguity (unlike ordered choice). They are expressive enough for almost anything you might want to say. But nobody really wants to work with them, the failures are tricky and hard to predict, and they lack many things you want for modularity (say, closure under unions).
It seems to me that the situation with truly resolution-independent layouts is similar in this respect: we can technically do them, to some extent, but they are a pain, so nobody does. And it’s not so much a problem of finding the perfect language as a problem of figuring out what it is that we want to say that seems so simple in our heads.
It's incredibly hard to change course if the UI toolkits weren't designed for it in the first place.
Android is still about the only OS with reliable density independence. It's also the only one where things like DPI were an initial part of the UI system, and not something bolted on later.
Windows has been trying to retrofit density independence for nearly a decade now, and it's still pretty hit or miss. Apple didn't bother trying at all, and has been more successful at pretending it works (so scale rendering by whole numbers only, then fractionally scale the resulting image to the actual display size). Web browsers mostly went the Apple route, but we all also regularly expect pinch/zoom scaling to fix any glaring issues anyway and just accept it's kinda janky. Linux... well, Linux is still struggling with the basics of putting stuff on screen (Wayland vs. X11). I wouldn't hold my breath for that ecosystem to get this UX refinement working well anytime soon. Especially not across the many UI widget systems, window managers with differing border decorations, DEs, etc...
"dialog units" seems to be about the size of the system font, not about DPI independence. Things like WM_DPICHANGED seem to only really show up in Windows 8+, with some stuff like LOGPIXELSX showing up as "early" as Windows 2000 but doesn't look very complete.
The size of the system font was basically a proxy for DPI. If you set scale to higher than 100% in, say, Win2K, it would also increase that size.
(This doesn't handle multi-monitor setups well, since font size would be the same for them all. But multiple monitors were not exactly common back then.)
WM_DPICHANGED is a late addition, yes, but it's only necessary for the apps to dynamically reflow if the user changes that setting. Before it showed up, you'd have to restart the app for it to register the new value - but that does not preclude DPI independence as such.
The real problem was that almost everything in Win32 outside of CreateDialog uses device pixels to position. You were supposed to use GetDialogBaseUnits and/or MapDialogRect manually to get the correct values, and very few apps did.
For another early example, Visual Basic (VB6, pre-.NET, so we're talking 1998) measured everything in twips.
> The size of the system font was basically a proxy for DPI.
Not entirely. The font size can still be changed independently of the DPI, and not everything should be scaled as a result. Things like dividing lines and padding probably shouldn't be scaled when the font size is increased.
You still need a distinct DIP value independent of scaled font size. So the value of 'dp' vs. 'sp' in Android terms, which it looks like Windows' now also has that distinction.
And yeah this is ignoring that things like the visual winforms tool in Visual Studio really just wanted to operate in fixed positions, and just getting things to work when the window was resized wasn't always intuitive or obvious. So even if the APIs were there, the ecosystem definitely didn't care about it and Microsoft's own tools definitely didn't help.
If I remember correctly, the system font size couldn't be changed independently of the DPI, at least not in a supported way. You could change it yourself on a per-window basis, but a well-behaved app is not supposed to do that.
Fixed layouts is orthogonal to all that - so long as those fixed layouts are defined in DPI-independent units, they will scale just fine. FWIW in WinForms (and also Delphi VCL, where this originated) you'd normally use anchors to design layouts that scale when the window is resized. Granted, it's nowhere near as flexible as proper layout containers - which WinForms (2.0+) also has, and which the visual form designer also supports, although it can be a pain to work with them.
Oh, and LOGPIXELSX/Y showed up much earlier than Win2K. If you're getting that from MSDN, keep in mind that 2K is basically as early as the docs go, even if the actual API is much older. For example, it says the same for CreateWindow, even though that one goes all the way back to Windows 1.0.
The screen resolution is my least favourite aspect of the Framework, for sure. Not a deal breaker, but every now and then my eye catches a poorly aliased bit of text and gets sad.
I've basically resigned myself to running Sway in 1.5x scale mode, which means that things get rendered at 2x and scaled down. Sway does about as well as I think any desktop environment could be expected to, but it's never going to be the same as rendering at true screen resolution. Alas, running in 1x or 2x and using font settings to handle it breaks down the moment you connect to an external display that really is 1x or 2x.
That said, I love the rest of the laptop (well, maybe except the battery life), so my hope is that at some point we can buy a replacement screen at a more useful resolution, at which point I'll be first in line to buy and install it.
I love high res smaller screens. I have the X13 with 2560x1600. I leave the screen at 100% (perfect size for window widgets, etc.) and scale fonts by 1.5. Works great and everything is super sharp. I can also scale down the fonts if I want and don't lose the sharpness due to the increased dpi.
Anyone wanting to upgrade their laptop in the near future should probably wait a few months, because new models that were announced at CES will show up with the next gen Intel or AMD CPUs that will hopefully be worth the wait. This looks like one of those "generational" upgrades that we have only every 7 years or so.
I'm not sure if the Apple M1 is going to be beaten (especially in the efficiency department), but challenged for sure. Will have to wait and see.
The new Thinkpad, imo. I really like most of what they've done with it, but I'm just not into that keyboard... It doesn't look too usable, although people are saying it's good.
Long time thinkpad user here - my previous was a W520 specifically for that older style keyboard. I am not a fan of Chiclet keyboards but I put the Framework keyboard up there with Thinkpads / OG Pixelbook. Too bad they're not out at a best buy for you to walk up and try...
I really hope there will be some competition to the Apple M1 chip soon. All other laptops seems bulky, noisy and powerconsuming compared to the MacBook Pro M1 I've been using for a year now.
> Graphics card - Can this be made upgradable in the future? Would seriously consider building one for gaming if they were.
Oh man if they found a way to have upgradable GPU on a laptop it would be next level! I think it can be done through M.2 slot (the reason why you can get M.2 to PCIe adapters is because M.2 provides a PCIe interface [1], some eGPU solutions use M.2 [2], IIRC it's just a 4 lanes connection through the M.2 connector but better than nothing) - so in order to make this possible on a laptop you would basically have to take small (mobile class) GPUs and solder them on a board that can be inserted in an M.2 slot... I think this is not rocket science but probably those GPUs would be expensive unless the concept really takes off and they are mass produced.
EDIT - I just remembered that in the past there were some gaming laptops with upgradeable GPU, I think they were made maybe by Asus? And if I remember correctly it was a proprietary connector (but I might be wrong)
It was dells area 51m recently. I own one, and it was marketed as upgradeable, though it turns out its only upgradable in the same class e.g. mine can only be swapped with a 2060 2070 or 2080.
This is what I have been looking into for a portable gaming setup.
My framework setup already has so much raw power in terms of RAM and CPU. A solid GPU is the next step :-)
Would do a GPU pass through setup with virtio/QEMU and a Linux host… if only eGPU setups weren’t so damned expensive! And that’s not even factoring in the sheer lack of availability of 30x series cards.
I have a custom built small form factor PC in a Dan Case A4 [0]. The case is a lot smaller than a Razer Core. And it's a whole PC, not just a GPU. Fits in a cabin bag or backpack and I have traveled with it.
You can go even smaller at 3.9L in a Velka 3 [1], if you use a single fan graphics card.
Buyer beware: for the Dan Case, it's only compatible with 2.25 slot (45mm) width cards at max. Most 3080s are 2.5 slot (50mm) wide. The EVGA 3080 XC3 Black is a notable exception, and is a very satisfying tight fit [0]. There's also a 3D printed GPU spacer to increase width of the case (sacrificing portability) [1].
That's my experience too. Honestly I don't think people are going to upgrade their Framework laptops much. And while they're popular now, it's still likely they'll stop producing parts (assuming the standard for each component isn't completely free to copy). Then you're out of luck.
But the real huge win is replacing broken components easily. That alone is making the Framework extremely tempting for me.
Upgrading a GPU internally in a laptop chassis is tricky because you need the power/heat/space to work for the range of possible products. And I like a CPU where you might design for a 35W CPU and that gives you dozens of options from 15W to 35W, the GPU range needs to encompass 100W (!) if the purpose is meant to allow configuring as a gaming machine. This will obviously affect cooling/power supply/bulk for all who buy the laptop and don’t want the gaming config.
External GPUs have their own difficulties but I think it’s a less challenging design problem than “configurable GPUs [up to enthusiast/gaming/pro cards]”
My HP ZBook from 2014 has upgradable CPU and GPU. I guess that after a few years the problem would be to find a new part that fits into the slots or somebody selling an old compatible one at a reasonable price.
Heads up to anyone who is running into the right click issue on Ubuntu relating to the framework laptop (right click acts a bit funky), I added the following lines to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf
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[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 389 ms ] threadI'm sad about the speakers if they are as flat as they said, even more if they are not upgradable parts. MacBook speakers are really good for their purpose and I even consider them to be one of the importants things I trully love on macbooks (with the screen and the touchpad).
Anyway, I'm still looking to buy a Framework laptop soon but I'd love to be able to test one before buying it.
While you can certainly manually add DSP to your system (PulseEffects, some random JACK or PipeWire flow, etc. - I do exactly this for headphone calibration on my desktop), what we need is a standardized mechanism for storing speaker profiles and having the audio subsystem seamlessly and transparently apply the right EQ and crossover profile for your device (there are usually more than 2 speakers). This is already a thing on e.g. Android, but not desktop Linux.
This is required for MacBooks too. For Asahi Linux, once the underlying sound hardware works, we'll be spending some time working out a sane way to do this; I consider it a mandatory feature in this day and age. And once that's all done, everyone will be able to use it to get proper sound on any laptop as long as they can obtain or make an EQ profile.
For the Macs, our plan is to measure impulse responses of what macOS does (we have the ability to snoop on its hardware accesses, so we can just play a test sound and capture the raw samples going to the speakers) and use them on Linux. This should give identical audio at moderate volumes. I'll have to check whether it also does some kind of compression or volume-dependent EQ worth replicating or emulating too, at higher volumes.
They do some sort of crosstalk cancellation to make stereo sound better, it'd be interesting to look at those impulse responses and see that happening!
When travelling I will always use headset, when hooked to docking it uses my home studio monitor speakers and if I want to listen to watch a movie in the bed or a show in my kitchen it is paired to my Bose bluetooth speaker.
This is absolutely something we want to improve in the future. We're actively investigating other audio parts we can use that have better capability, but equally importantly, supply availability and software support.
It’s wonderful when companies listen to (potential) customers.
You are doing an amazing (and important) work.
I wish you all the best and you are on my top list for my next laptop (although, my current one is far from dead).
The “for less” bit might be true but is the better specs part?
In a comparison[1] the M1 in a MacBook Air seems to handily beat the Intel Core i7 1165G7 chip on most metrics.
Personally I’m not that CPU bound generally and I like Intel Linux compatibility so I’d still make the trade off.
1. https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-i7-1165g7-v...
Compiling LLVM eats a lot of memory for instance. 16Gb is not really enough to take full advantage of the number of CPUs in a modern laptop.
Is this a laptop for everyone? Not necessarily, but for certain classes of users it's manna from heaven.
I’m sure there are other 'workstation-ish' jobs that people would happily run on their laptop if it had > 16Gb memory. 64Gb is quite the leap.
No $2000 laptop in 2020 should have only quad core cpus.
The M1 16gb will run circles around the i7-1185g7 (highest spec chip framework sells) compiling llvm with 64gb of ram.
Only using a shitload of idle VMs will have any apparent benefit over M1 MacBook pros.
The cpu is just too limiting for the 64gb of ram argument.
I have an M1 MBP and an 1185g7 based Linux laptop. Single core benchmarks, the i7 comes out slightly ahead. Multi core benchmarks, the M1 comes out slightly ahead. There are no circles being run around in performance - only in battery efficiency. For day to day developer usage, testing things literally side by side, I find absolutely no discernible difference in speed.
The M1 does win for battery life, but the battery still lasts for a full work day in my i7 laptop. Honestly at home I always reach for the Linux laptop, because I don't really need the battery life. But for going out and about away from power, the M1 MBP has advantages. Sadly the software (personally) lets it down, I'd probably use the MBP more if it has better Linux support in the future.
It will run circles around the 1185g7 compiling large codebases.
Passmarks across hundreds of benches show a 25% single and 40% multithreaded performance boost over the 1185g7.
I’ve got an i9 8/16 laptop chip and the 13” M1 is trading blows with my laptop despite 2-3x the thermal headroom and considerably less cores/threads across all workloads.
The i9 Apple laptops were notorious for not having a cooling system that could match the heat output of the CPU & throttling almost instantly.
Modern Intel laptop CPUs are no where near the performance / W of the M1, but they are considerably better than those that Apple stuffed into their laptops a few years ago with inadequate cooling I believe.
The only problem with the first generation framework laptop is intel’s quad core CPU because of thermal and power problems associated with their process nodes.
Hex core is really the lowest I will go now for anything over $1000. If this was a Ryzen 5800u, I’d have bought one already.
FWIW, Cinebench multi-core benchmark is around 20% faster for me on the M1.
[0]: https://developer.arm.com/documentation/100076/0100/a64-inst...
Many of us spend substantial periods of time writing up the technical documentation in Confluence or use JIRA. Confluence alone loads approximately 22Mb of mangled and compacted JavaScript for each open page in a separate browser tab.
Before M1, Confluence and JIRA were the single most source of a sustained battery drain, irrespective of the browser. On M1 based laptops, the battery impact is so negligible that it can be considered non-existent. How much of this subjected experience can be attributed just to the the ARM 8.3 JavaScript hardware acceleration is an interesting question as the JavaScript browser performance on Intel CPU's has also been affected by Spectre and Meltdown mitigations in the CPU microcode.
LLVM builds eat memory in my experience & end up swapping if you don’t play games with the build system to reduce the parallelism of memory intensive parts of the build.
If you’ve got a VM or two sitting around then obviously that makes things worse.
2) If you need 64Gb just sometimes, swapping on M1 MBP is insanely fast.
Also, you want to ignore 400 Gb/s provided by Apple's 64Gb memory, but... you know.
It’s often tempting to dismiss a product that doesn’t meet your own personal use cases but it’s a bit naive.
It’s actually fun to see products get popular that I know I wouldn’t buy myself. It doesn’t make them bad it just makes them not for me right now.
I just couldn't bring myself to use macOS daily, so I punted the laptop change to next year. I wish Apple would just sell their hardware like anyone else, working with OS vendors to get it supported.
Apple doesn't provide Linux drivers for their components, but neither does "anyone else", sadly.
But it means that Linux on M1 Macs might actually happen in the near future.
Edit: And Windows doesn't run natively/officially on M1 Macs because Microsoft has a stupid exclusivity deal: https://www.macrumors.com/2021/11/22/microsoft-qualcomm-arm-...
Apple not actively hindering Asahi Linux isn't exactly a great accomplishment. They chose not to write Linux drivers for their platform and that's their choice, but that puts them behind even Nvidia as far as supporting Linux goes.
Since Apple do not keep their firmware ABI stable across the board, we'll have specific firmware versions (=specific macOS versions they come from) "blessed" for Linux compatibility. For updates (bugfixes or security issues, chiefly) you'd re-run our installer which will eventually have an "upgrade my firmware please" mode. That would run from recovery mode, same as the original install. All this stuff is per-OS, so it does not affect any adjacent macOS install which will use its own firmware - you can upgrade macOS whenever you want without breaking Linux.
Wifi works fine (modulo some firmware support details that'll get ironed out); people have been doing performance and stability tests and there is no major issue. I've heard stories about bad radio performance on Macs in the past, but those are almost certainly due to using the wrong firmware or config. That's what my patch set fixes: we use all the same firmwares and configs that Apple does, so we get the same results.
ATI/AMD intentionally redesigned their GPU silicon to make it's possible to develop open source drivers without exposing HDCP secrets, and even the open source drivers can use HDCP if they want to.
This is not known very widely, but this is worthy of great praise if you ask me.
Can you clarify what you mean exactly? I have a hard time believing AMD ever ran HDCP keys through the Windows kernel.
Yes, I'd not argue with that, I also never wanted or implied that I shall be able to get said keys from the card.
AMD/ATI back in the day said that, they have intentionally coupled video decoders, related logic and HDCP to same IP block for performance and silicon real-estate reasons, but in order to keep their promises about open drivers and accessible hardware, starting with (then) next generation silicon, they'll move all HDCP stuff to another IP. In turn, they will allow unfettered access to all GPU including 3D and video related features sans HDCP. However, with that architecture, even open drivers can use HDCP related hardware and functions without compromising the security and licensing around it, as a result allowing identical experience and freedom (from a developer standpoint) regardless of the driver used.
This is something to praise for, IMHO.
Ultimately the open driver should always be able to do all the same things the closed driver does and get the same result. If there are any secrets in the closed driver that "can't" be exposed, that's a security flaw in the design.
So, they were unable to provide the access they wanted to provide (for video decoders, at least), on the previous (then current) architecture.
Considering HDCP came later, it might have just been slapped as a side module and some of their math magic might be offloaded to GPU even. I remember having old ATI drivers having a very cinematic look when video was accelerated by the GPU itself (it was surreally beautiful), but they had to throw all this machinery out from the driver when they started to modernize their stack (and they broke video playback for months due to not supporting proper overlay formats).
Similarly, I think closed source drivers were programming some of the cards during initialization, because I remember they're talking about moving all this init step to the BIOS itself, and opening some doors on the BIOS to tweak the card during the init (clocks, fans, temp reads, etc. IIRC) for allowing OS and open drivers to play nicer and with less effort with the cards in the long run.
The details are hazy, because these transitions were made almost a decade ago if not longer. However, while NVIDIA was playing the deaf, and Intel was just starting to provide good open drivers for their IGPs, AMDs move as a prime GPU vendor brought a lot of good light to them.
If you want, I can try to dig the history and create a timeline for you, but it might not be an immediate endeavor.
I'm just quite confused as to how HDCP factors into all that. HDCP really is just a hardware block that's part of the video output which you enable or disable; there is a bunch of nonsense associated with PAVP and other such stuff on Windows, but none of that should really matter to Linux, nor should whatever way HDCP is implemented affect other features of the open drivers. AMD certainly do deserve credit for their work on Linux support, I just find your specific HDCP story quite strange :-)
But if I go and buy a random Windows _laptop_ and try to slap Linux on it, I might have all sorts of issues with the trackpad, webcam, fingerprint sensors, never mind sleep/wake.
That's why Linux laptop vendors are a thing and deserve our praise (just like the companies you've mentioned)! All I'm saying is that Apple is hardly the only company left that doesn't actively support Linux.
I installed Linux on a 2015 MBP recently and there is no real way to get the webcam working.
?!?!
There are vendor-provided Linux drivers for pretty much everything?
Everything in Intel and AMD CPUs are supported in mainline. nVidia provides Linux drivers.
I don't have a clear view about how many devices nowadays are reverse-engineered, and how many are provided by someone with datasheet (it happens quite often that mainline drivers are not provided by vendor directly, but by a third party that got access to datasheet), but it really feels like most vendors do work with OS vendors to get their hardware supported, and that Apple is totally an exception in the hardware world.
Also, like Java, they have maintained their own nVidia drivers up to a certain point.
Today that gap is smaller since HW manufacturers are more open about their firmwares and drivers, and Linux is more widely adopted.
I just sent in a patch series to Linux a few days ago to get all custom Broadcom cards for T2 and M1 Macs working (~2017-present), with the right firmware selection logic. Took a week or so to develop and test on both ARM64 and x86. (There was some prior art but certainly nothing that would've taken more than a few more weeks to work out from scratch; besides, I found a Broadcom source dump for Android that contained most of the interesting knowledge excluding the Apple-only bits, since some of it is relevant to newer non-Apple chips too).
Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
OTOH, kudos for all the hard work you're doing on the kernel. Maybe one day I'd have enough spare time to work on that marvelous beast.
> Once you have a team of the right people and enough motivation, getting reverse engineered hardware working on Linux doesn't take as long as everyone thinks :-)
As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
The b43 days were definitely special, and that was a full from scratch reverse engineered driver plus open firmware, which is a crazy accomplishment. These days though, we just accept that we're going to have to run vendor firmware, either because there's signing involved or because it's a huge amount of work to attempt to reverse engineer and reimplement that bit. Firmwares have grown from dozens of kilobytes to megabytes and it's just not viable to rewrite all that any more, if it's even possible.
OTOH, we also have better tools for and experience reverse engineering now than we did back then. Ghidra has made "proper" disassembly and decompilation accessible to anyone, and we can run proprietary OSes in VMs to study how they interact with hardware.
> As long as the hardware (or the vendor) is not intentionally malicious towards Linux or being reverse engineered. I've seen my fair share. :-)
Well, it doesn't happen that often outside of closed platforms (i.e. needing an exploit to do anything) and Nvidia ;-)
When I was shopping around a few years ago, the fingerprint reader even on Dell's Linux-focused developer laptops was dead. I liked the Razer Blade, but many components didn't support Linux; looks like the trackpad on some models still doesn't work.
If "any vendor" actively supported Linux, we wouldn't need companies like Framework or system76 that pick compatible components. I'm not saying that Apple is particularly helpful, just that they're hardly alone in not caring about Linux.
Apple may not contribute much more than a bare platform with M1, but that isn't unusual in the scope of computer history. What's important is that they are not actively enforcing exclusivity or deterring the attempt. They've even shown tacit support in recent EFI patches by making changes that preserve the current mechanism other OSes can be loaded.
No one doubted that Intel could make a CPU as powerful. But everyone knows that it isn't gonna be cool and quiet.
Cellphones have moved away from replaceable batteries specifically because of fast charge. Most phones with 20 watt charging will reach ~50% battery in 30 mins, so even with battery degradation, you really don't notice the effect in day to day life.
Same thing with laptops, there really are very few situations where you don't have access to a charging port for ~6-8 hours.
Given that, Id personally rather take the hit on efficiency in return for way better compatibility, ability to run a full linux natively , and not deal with all the extra crap that Apple throws in the M1. And, If I really care about longevity, a second battery is easily an option for laptops like Frameworks.
I have to use it for work, and it really is a drag compared to Linux.
also, sometimes even a simple `ls` from terminal takes a few seconds. why? i have absolutely no idea.
If you don't have a stable internet connection, that could be the reason - macOS sends a hash of every executable to Apple's servers before it is opened[0]. This caused a major issue at the end of 2020, when these servers stopped working and all macs stopped working unless disconnected from the internet[1].
macOS has also been updated so that syspolicyd bypasses VPNs and system firewalls like Little Snitch[2], so you can't easily block these connections now.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/gp52pe/apple_is_tra...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24838816
I hate when people say "mine works," but here's an `ls` of my homedir showing it's not universally slow. I currently have an absolute garbage network connection.
> ls -G 0.00s user 0.00s system 64% cpu 0.010 total
There are also many, many other reasons it could be; some macOS specific and others that aren't--most importantly what they're seeing isn't universal. macOS often ships with very old GPL2 tools that can cause various problems (many people brew install updated GPL3 versions), people often have configurations that can slow down `ls` by multiple factors (colors, sorting, etc can each cause multiple queries to disk or require the listing to complete before displaying output), customizations causing a slow prompt, a slow or corrupt disk, listing a slow network drive, etc.
The VPN bypass was very quickly removed from macOS over a year ago [1]. So it would only be relevant if they were using a very old version of Big Sur.
[1] https://www.patreon.com/posts/46179028
Some specific examples,
No internet connection: instant fail over
Blocked OCSP firewall or whatever: instant fail over
Slow internet but still able to reach: slow start: 1+ seconds
Bad internet, not able to reach: 3-5 second delay waiting
Normal internet, OSCP reachable: <1 second delay
Disabled trustd: Nothing will start, single user mode and trustd restore required
I've experienced all of these and is one of the reasons I have a shiney new Framework laptop sitting waiting to be migrated over to. Also the "only on first run" also isn't true. It periodically checks for certificate revocation (as it should) and therefore will cause issues at sporadic intervals.
And the kicker of course is that all this is via plain ol' http, so everyone knows what developer's programs you're starting via the hash.
I've tried to push myself to use various Linux distros (most recently Pop and Ubuntu), but I always end up back on MacOS.
I also like the open nature of Linux. It's fun to be able to look into the source code for pretty much anything.
I do recognize that you could also just like Linux more from a usability perspective, which is your opinion to hold!
I understand that upgrading the CPU is not yet quit viable at this point in time for framework but still, it noticable lacks behind the competition when it comes to CPU perf for many (all) tasks.
And things will only get harder with the Ryzen 6000 laptop CPUs coming late this year (on the German marked maybe only early next year).
And similar is true for the competition from newer Intel processors.
Edit
This kinda has me stuck, 16GiB of RAM isn't enough, but the additional perf of the newer CPU is well wanted, but then USB ports being non easily repairable on a T14 is a problem to as I somehow tend to brake them. And only 2 USB-C ports on the T14 are a proble, too.
So it's not just me :)
I bought a Ryzen APU since everybody kept telling me that AMD GPUs where the best when it came to Linux support, and it has been a massive pain. It finally runs almost stable using the latest Pop_OS, but it has been a not fun journey to get here.
> Can this be made upgradable in the future? Would seriouly consider building one for gaming if they were.
IMO gaming with the current Framework design is a lost cause as cooling would become a major issue that I imagine will require designing around.
If I recall correctly, framework's USB ports are Thunderbolt-compatible, has anyone tried using an eGPU enclosure with them?
I know expensive laptops are the norm in SF, but does anyone else pay that much for laptops they may drop or looked at any time?
(My current workhorse is a T-series thinkpad I got for free)
But then again, I would never buy those when just released.
- great touchpad (and gestures)
- all day battery
- no noise at all (optional but for me a big plus)
- hinge that stands the test of time
- aluminum (of very resistant) body
i'll buy a laptop that checks these off under $1600, but so far m1 air is the only one I found, and it's cheaper than that
And I don't get the "better productivity" talk either. During the most productive period of my life (by a huge margin, now I understand) I only had a $200 laptop. It was literally sold as "the cheapest laptop you will ever find".
(I give you the noise though, I hate fan noise)
Edit: do hinges ever break? Unless you sit on it, I have never seen this happen even with the cheapest laptops.
> And I don't get the "better productivity" talk either.
Among other reasons some people are concerned with energy use in general.
Like for someone who works in Photoshop/Illustrator/Sketch/Figma even a little will need a great screen and almost without exception you’re not going to be getting that in a $200 laptop. This admittedly can be worked around with a “cheap” $300 IPS external monitor, but at that point you’re spending more on the monitor than your laptop which feels upside-down. (I know this from experience — at one point I had to do PS work on a $500 Gateway laptop and it was miserable because a quarter of the document’s details weren’t even visible).
Or if you’re compiling code a lot, you’re going to want more oomph than a $200 laptop can provide, because otherwise you’re going to be twiddling your thumbs and getting distracted and breaking flow waiting for code to compile. For me this is particularly impactful, and any reduction in compile times is easily felt.
As for hinges, on even a number of “mid tier” laptops, they tend to get loose and wobbly over time. I’ve seen a number of IdeaPads owned by friends and family suffer this fate.
It only costed me 375 euros. It is not a high end model, but a mid range (Lenovo E580) from a few years ago that was specced with the fastest i7 cpu and with as many ram (32GB) as supported. It is not Macbook M1 whatever fast/nice but for me it is still pretty much current. I cringe when people say they cannot work with 1080p screen but the reality is you are perefectly comfortable on them as long as you don't know better. This is something I have learned with different domains, not just computing but also sport equipment, music hardware. You don't necessarily miss the new tech until you tried it and you are not necessarily less productive, comfortable, creative or competitive on older tech, only expectations changes. But once you tested the new drug sure it is hard to come back.
Personal anecdote: at one point in the early 2010s I was cash strapped and needed a reasonably capable machine. First I tried that $500 Gateway I mentioned, which was terrible to use across almost all dimensions. I ended up returning that machine and instead putting it toward a used Dell Precision M4400 workstation laptop, which was expensive when it was new in 2008 but I got it along with a bunch of accessories off of Craigslist for $350. That thing was immensely better than the cheap 4 years newer Gateway in every way, and much much more usable for work. That machine held out for me for several years until I could afford something better.
As far as screens go, resolution is less important to me than panel quality. I’ll take a 1280x800 screen with decent color performance over a 1920x1080 screen with garbage color. In the case of the cheap Gateway, the screen’s unusability had more to do with it being a terrible bottom of the barrel TN display than it having a 1366x768 resolution. While the Precision’s panel was higher rez (1920x1200) it also handled color much much better which is what made the difference for me.
I was very surprised after I bought a nice big monitor and great mouse that I ignored them most of the time, so now I just work off the laptop, it works best for me, which I never would have guessed in my desktop years
That said, I've been very productive with a creaky noisy cheap lenovo with ubuntu so in my case it's not just about productivity but also comfort
Re: do hinges ever break? they tend to, when you use the laptop 10 hours per day
- not just a great touchpad, literally the best one in the game undisputed
- all day battery life. And not PC laptops that claim 14 hours of battery but see 5 in reality, I’m talking actually 14 hours of battery in real world use.
However getting accidental damage protection, like from Lenovo, does help the peace of mind.
I mean, I still use a laptop in the evenings, but for work a desktop is to me a must.
But I agree that working all day on a laptop in laptop mode is right out.
I have a laptop for those rare cases when I need to work where i am not at either of those locations.
With so capable phones in pocket, I rarely find myself needing to pull out a laptop to the point that I don't think I'd buy replacement if this one broke.
But to each his own.
For my work machine, a laptop is preferred because then I can do my work anywhere without fuss even without an internet connection.
Besides, with an M1 Pro, plugging my work laptop into the Thunderbolt hub at my desk provides a near-desktop experience for the overwhelming majority of its usage. For day to day work the difference between my M1 Pro laptop and 5950X desktop isn’t staggering enough to justify giving up portability.
Anyway a laptop becomes a desktop by plugging it's usb-c port to your docking station so there is very little downside appart from being subject to throttling when doing heavy cpu stuff to using one instead of a desktop. Which not everybody is subject too, mostly only people compiling stuff on their laptop.
I personnally spend most of my time in my office at home with dual screen but I like to move to the living room when attending conferences, in my rooftop when it is not to sunny or in the kitchen to have a chat with my gf while grabbing a tea when she is at home and I am waiting for a job/whatever to complete so a laptop is still nice to have even when working 100% from home.
So for me the £2000+ I paid for my laptop to max it out to the extreme is money well spent. Did I mention it's a taxable expense?
I dropped it 4 days after purchase.
My next laptop was $2000.
I dropped it a few months after purchase.
I don't live in SF. So I guess the answer to your question is yes.
My credit card has that and I've used it to replace a phone with a cracked screen. It was literally a 5 minute phone call to make the claim and all of my money was refunded the next day.
This is about snappiness only, I have no trouble finding workloads stressing this old i5 (e.g. 2k/4k videos), where an M1 would fly through. Personally, I just think snappiness alone is a bit forced argument to spent 2k$.
When this is your main tool, it’s much more pleasant to use something with a nice build quality.
I guess different people just have different needs. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Tho, I suspect it will perform much, much better cleaned, repaired and thermal-paste reapplied. But I wont open it, as long as I have no alternative set up.
(Also M1 + Linux, would be a no-brainer for me - best bang for the buck right now. I just fucking hate Apple OSs and the ecosystem. Oh and the keyboard too - feels as pleasant an ATM's number pad... Following Asahi closely, still.)
I try the Macbooks' keyboards every time I see one in the store. Yes, it has been even worse, but the new ones feel clickity-clackity, like an ATM pad, to me too. No travel, and annoying high pitched noises. Feels weird to rest your fingers on those keys. Not even close to a Thinkpad keyboard, old or new. I could get used to it, but it is not a great input device. Not at all. Trackpad rocks of course, but so does the nipple, if you type a lot.
Since it's a business expense, it's even cheaper.
My company laptop is 3k$ and I actually carry that around more often. True I care less about it but I still don't feel like I'm dropping devices while I'm moving.
I dropt my Thinkpad primarily at home when it was sitting next to the couch :')
That being said, my expensive 2017 Macbook Pro broke a few weeks ago and I picked up a very nicely discounted Samsung Galaxy book for about 700 Euro because the only macs available were obsolete and the new ones had 4 week delivery times. It's a 16GB, i5 with a surprisingly decent Iris XE graphics system on a chip thing and 512GB ssd. Nothing fancy but good enough for the money and great value at that price actually.
I put Manjaro on it and was up and running in a few hours. I only had 4 hours to configure it in the evening as I had a customer meeting the next morning and needed a working development environment. So, I was pretty pleased all of that worked out fine. That means that laptop earned itself back in under a day. I even managed to revive some of my 32 bit Steam library and get playable fps (with that intel XE graphics!). And unlike the mac, it does not have thermal throttling issues. It was always unusable for gaming.
I'll probably buy one of the new fancy macs when delivery times improve a bit and when we get some clarity on the inevitable early adopter issues (which bits are going to break this time?). But I'm not in a hurry. This thing works well enough and I'm kind of liking Manjaro so far. Lots of rough edges but nothing I can't deal with. Definitely not for users not comfortable using a command line.
I'd totally spend 3000-4000 Euro on a laptop regardless of the OS if it is good value for money. My last mac book pro was 3500 Euro. Money is not the issue for me when I literally spend a lot of my billable time waiting for this thing to do stuff for minutes on end many times a day and interrupting my flow (which is priceless). But I expect performance for that money as well as a decent keyboard (so definitely not my Macbook Pro) and a nice screen. Apple fixed all of those things with their latest iteration but the configuration I'd want puts me close to 4000-5000 Euro this time. I'm actually considering doing that. But it's a lot of money and Apple tax this time. And the build quality of the last one was terrible, which makes me more hesitant. The worst I've ever seen from Apple. Hence, the cheapo emergency replacement.
So, this laptop looks like a great deal. Twice the memory (or more if you upgrade), ssd, and better CPU than what I picked up for just 700 Euro a few weeks ago. Close to good enough for me. I'd like a proper screen though. Not having retina/HDPI feels like going back to the stone age a bit. Yes, Linux needs a bit of work on that front but Wayland seems capable of this at least. But other than that, not bad. If they do a more expensive version with a better screen, I'd consider getting one.
Finding decent laptops is actually a problem. There are not a lot of premium laptops that are nice enough for my criteria. I don't want a gaming laptop monstrosity that sounds like a vacuum cleaner. I don't care for Thinkpads with a nipple and shitty touchpad. Dell has support issues though their XPS is pretty nice. But I want something premium, with a nice screen, keyboard and touchpad that doesn't feel like a huge compromise. This Samsung is quite nice on this front actually considering the price. The touchpad could be a bit bigger. But it does multi touch and it works (after lots of fiddling with settings). The 1080p screen feels like a huge leap backwards after having used a Retina screen for the last few years. Not loving that.
My desktop was like $14k new. It has been my daily driver for over 4 years, so less than $300/month (and still going down). That's a rounding error in relation to the money I have earned using it.
Next machine needs to have hardware transcoding though. That's become so important to me. Needing to give up all of my processing power just to be on a video call is awful, but it served well for years for $400.
It would be nice if the expansion cards came with a plastic cap to protect the usb c plug, I wouldn’t want to toss the spare hdmi card in my bag as is, but in the spirit of open hardware maybe one will pop up on thigaverse.
For the Expansion Cards, there are some discussions on holders for them as well as 3D printed designs from the community: https://community.frame.work/t/expansion-card-carrying-case/...
Have your pick of these [1]. There are expansion card holders/cases, which might also be an option.
I'm evaluating reports of Framework+Linux-distros' sleep/wake/hibernate impacts upon video resolution switching, WiFi stability, and trackpad stability, to determine when to pull the trigger on purchasing a fully tricked-out model. I can afford to run an Apple M-class laptop (holding out for next batch) and a Framework at the same time, and make the effort to transition off the macOS ecosystem (any consumer-grade and office apps I want not available on Linux, I'm happy to run under Windows within Linux).
The straw that broke my camel's back was the latest macOS update that deleted all Safari tabs. Around the same time, iOS update did something similar: deleted all back history on all Safari tabs. After the many other problems I put up with in macOS, I figured if I'm going to be spelunking around the system to fix Apple software problems as frequently as I have found myself doing in the past decade, I might as well work with others on the source, as Linux is getting awfully close to "good enough" quality these days for my daily driver, at least enough for me to give it a fair shot with sustained effort on peer hardware as my Apple gear.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Athingiverse.com+usb+c...
I’d usually be wary of dropping that much cash on a product from a vendor without a track record.
How well backed / funded are these guys?
[1] https://frame.work/blog/now-available-for-pre-order-in-uk-ge...
I paid £500 for a laptop 10 years ago (so, more with inflation) and it was:
1) Built really shit, fell apart after a year, broken hinges, weird fan noise
2) Got super hot.
3) had about 3hrs on battery if you avoided doing anything on it.
4) was huge and heavy.
Not saying you’re wrong. But maybe your expectations vastly differ from mine.
All in all if you take care of them it can be used as work horse during vacations. Only thing I can't do on them is last generation gaming, for that I need my usual work horse which is a $2500 desktop gaming rig.
Macbooks seemingly hold their value though, and it's a wonder of why this is.
This laptop is the reason I don’t buy bottom of the barrel prices with high specifications.
[0]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Acer-Aspire-5520G.6408.0.html
To be fair I haven't purchased a laptop since 2010.
These days you can't even change the battery on most laptops.
Given the number of people who argue about which ports are the right ones I think it's quite a nice feature.
- I need a mate screen option, glossy displays in ambient light give me headaches.
- Some folks will also probably want touchscreens (uber glossy), more power to them
- Would also be very cool to bring back the old tech of transflective displays like the one in the Pixel Qi display. For folks that want to work outside (me again!) and are not fussed about color accuracy.
No, it's not. I do cross-platform development for over a decade now and all I have are virtual machines. Over 2 dozens of them and I never owned any Apple hardware. Why pay for overpriced hardware when virtualization covers everything for a 100th of the price?
"You agree not to install, use or run the Apple SDKs on any non-Apple-branded computer, and not to install, use or run iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, macOS and Provisioning Profiles on or in connection with devices other than Apple-branded products, or to enable others to do so."
[0] https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/terms/apple-de...
IANAL, but it doesn't work like that. Like any original creative work, macOS falls under copyright protection. Apple only gives you a licenses you to copy/run macOS on Apple-branded hardware.
You might want to take a second look at their EULA for their Apple developer ID
I don't see anything in the Apple Developer Agreement that would cancel the terms of the macOS EULA. But I'd love to be proven wrong, please give me a pointer.
you'll see that for those $100/year they sing a very different song. Money talks!
$100/year is less than pocket change for Apple. Even if they have a million paying developers (unlikely), it's ~1/3658th of their yearly revenue. If they'd make their iPhones 50 cents more expensive, they would make more money.
The $100 per year is only there as one of the many ways to fight scammers. It makes it more costly to open many accounts, they have a credit card (with a name) on file, etc. Sure, it is not air tight, but it is just one of many measures.
I would never do iOS development seriously without native devices.
Virtualization brings you far, true, but it's still different.
I would even create a hardware lap if I would do end-user device Software development.
And the quote is still true. If you do iOS MacOS development it IS the obvious choice obviously.
Yours might be cheaper and might have other advantages but it is NOT obvious.
The build quality is far better than first gen devices, if not second.
Given enough time, it might be able to get many people off macOS.
The screen is amazingly crisp if you can overlook the fun resolution. Hard to look past 3x2.
Why did I return it?
I realized I needed to begin with a retail and turnkey Ubuntu experience where everything just worked and the things that mattered to me worked out of the box.
Framework is not quite an optimized retail Ubuntu experience yet like a Dell XPS with mature drivers largely ready to go.
- Battery life isn’t optimized and maximized out of the box, you will have to tpm. I have limited time for this at present. I’m sure there’s lots of interpretations that is not a a big deal. I’d rather be solving problems with the laptop than be solving problems in the laptop. I want max battery life without investing hours up front.
- Fingerprint reader required manual setup
- Wifi can have hiccups on the latest Ubuntu, and without trying into optimizing battery and kernels upset instead of getting things done.
- Touchpad is so so. Good hardware, maybe more tweaking in Linux needed. Very used to macOS too.
- HDMI port draws extra battery life when not in use so you have to to keep it removed.
The components otherwise seem high quality and well put together.
Again it’s not that these issues can’t be overcome, or that they won’t be out of the box in the future, I simply don’t have the time for either at present.
It was a joy to use for browsing in Ubuntu 21.04 as stuff is broken in 21.10.
- Trackpad is decent. However, as some others have mentioned, it can be a bit touchy. It's happened a few times that I'm typing and I accidentally rest part of my right thumb on the trackpad and that changes the insertion point inadvertently. Not a big issue. As a matter of fact, it's more an indication that I need to correct my hands posture for better ergonomics.
- Bluetooth. It's pretty stable. I have a Bluetooth mouse and Galaxy Buds connected and they work flawlessly. I'll try more devices.
(edit: added Galaxy Buds over Bluetooth)
I tend to prefer 1080p for this reason on 12-14" screens. My Thinkpad X13 gen 2 has a 13.3", 1920x1200 screen, windows sets it to 150%, which seems ok, although Ubuntu works well for me without scaling still. The Frame work laptop has an even higher res (2256x1504). I do hear people scaling the fonts and that seems to be a nice solution... I remember from back in the old days that I never really liked the look of this.
What do people think of this? I'm hoping that in the future you can choose the screen (and easily get replacements as well, I hear they are working on that).
Edit: I hope these issues are being addressed by established DE's, I'm assuming they won't be an issue on Canonical's (hypothetical ;)) Flutter based DE that's (obviously ;)) coming and on System76's Rust based new DE for Pop OS [0].
[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/08/system76_developing_n...
I run a middling-width monospace font, and I can't quite fit two 80-column windows side by side at 2x without reducing the font size, but if you want that then you want smaller text anyway. (If you run a narrow font it shouldn't be an issue.) Other UI elements are not unreasonably large in my opinion, but YMMV.
But a 1080p screen would be a no for me. At 2256x1504 on 13.5" screen I think Framework laptop would probably be fine at 100% ie no scaling
To get nice integer scaling one could render at 15360x8640 (16k) which is 5x3072x1728 and 4x3840x2160 but I doubt that's what Wayland is doing. No common graphics card could handle that.
The font hinting relies on the resolution too. By scaling the rendered pixmap 125% the fonts would look bad too. Rendering the fonts in a larger size at the native screen resolution should look better.
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/how-fractional-scaling-works-i...
For scaling 125%, the client windows are rendered at 2x their size and sampled down. On the parent's system, a full-screen window would be rendered at 6144x3456 and scaled down to 3840x2160 (0.625%).
This gives a blurry result and is taxing on the graphics chip.
Qt apps and Firefox support scaling themselves which gives a much crisper result for fonts and line-art.
I'm doing this, in particular on a 24" 4k screen. It's true that it may look a bit "weird", in that fonts are huge compared to other UI elements.
However, for me that's a win. I don't care to have huge buttons or what have you, I mostly use shortcuts. So I get nice, sharp fonts and also get to have smaller UI elements which leave more screen space for the text.
Resolution is independent of size. Just because it doesn't work perfectly on Linux high DPI is much nicer and easier to read.
The decapsulate on of resolution and size is btw already quite old. Games have this as well were they dynamically change the internal resolution but not the screen resolution.
And you might not care about it but: - text is much smoother - images from DSLR have higher resolution than 4k for ages and you can see the difference
The only arguments against 4k on smaller screens should be power consumption and not scaling issues. But for this we should focus on dynamic refrehsrates and similar power saving mechanism and again NOT complaining about 4k.
MacOS is doing this flawless for years. Windows can do it and under Linux it starts to be usable based on comments of this article.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/193723/scaling-all...
If somebody understands the situation better on MacOS I'd be interested, but based on my experience, Windows is the only OS that gets this as close as possible to right. It's a single setting that affects all applications and I can set monitors independently and it will scale on the fly (even if it does look a little weird as you drag an app across and it dynamically shifts)
Every now and then I'll come across a app that doesn't quite deal with high DPI scaling correctly, but it is the exception to the rule.
Linux also works pretty well, but as with everything Linux, it's almost always "it depends and well, not quite" (not usually multi-monitor aware, lots of per app settings)
I'm not sure what you mean. My MacOS does the scaling and it looks good.
How is MacOS scaling different?
It renders a high-resolution image to a buffer, and then scales that when rendering to the actual screen buffer. The buffer image is at least as large as the actual screen buffer.
You can see for yourself that it isn't changing the hardware resolution of external monitors when scaling by taking a look at the actual resolution on your monitors OSD if it has done. It'll always be the native resolution.
Non-integer scaling (of a pixel source, vectors are different but not relevant here) either requires blending or crisp unequal-sizing artifacts.
If I tried all the possible scalings for my external monitor, the grey line around each window, to give a specific example of, is always a crisp physical one-pixel wide.
macOS creates a buffer to render to that is the same size as the physical output you're choosing to use, and is able to render with pixel precision in that buffer.
However, it is unclear to me what are the scaling ratios relative to the native resolution in your examples. In this article for Sierra you seem to be only able to pick integer factors: https://www.eizoglobal.com/support/compatibility/dpi_scaling...
Maybe? But that's ancient history.
I don't know what the ratios are - the UI doesn't expose them.
But this is all a bit arbitrary - I think the macOS API deals with an abstract 'points' unit.
First of all, DPI is not the metric we're interested in. That is a unit for print quality, and it has no relevance for an OS, for Photoshop, or anything we do on a screen. The operating system does not know how big your screen is. Inches nor dots are relevant; only pixels are. It would be more accurate to talk about the ratio of monitor pixels to apparent pixels. I guess Microsoft finally got the memo in Windows 11 (or was it 10?) and changed to percentages.
In MacOS, a 4K monitor set to 1920x1080 will still be 3840x2160, but it displays 4 pixels for every 1 apparent pixel. Everything scales correctly, except for legacy applications. The UI elements, text, etc. appear to be a sharper version of 1080p. In Windows land, this is the same thing as "200%." As far as I can tell, Windows does the same thing but uses scaling percentages instead of apparent resolution.
To go deeper into nitpicking, DPI is not even that misleading, if you take "inch" in DPI to be equal to 72 points as used in font sizes. Then a 72pt font on the screen with DPI X will be rendered with height of X pixels.
And yes, the OS does in fact know how big your screen is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Display_Identificatio...
There is a reason macbooks, still the gold standard for hi dpi rendering, have never had 4k panels.
Speak for yourself. The 4k display in my XPS is my favorite output device I have ever owned. I wish my rMBP had that kind of pixel density.
There have been plenty of counter examples.
Anyway, my smartphone has 1000x2000 resolution on a 6" display. The text looks perfect.
They can make very high resolution displays with very efficient energy consumption.
Feel free not to need it but my DSLR and my smartphone both take 4k and higher resolution pictures for years.
Yes I want such a display on my 14" laptop.
I do like the MacBook pro screen and it's much better than 1080p. True.
Because that's really low.
My 14 inch laptop is 1964 rows and I wouldn't really want anything lower than that.
The reason you typically see 1080p or 4k on ultrabooks is because 1080p is how you get the low entry price, and 4k is what sounds better on marketing and looks the best for text-related things (4k is not at all useless - the sharpness it provides to text is noticeable). The balance that QHD provides isn't very desirable in that market usually, although there are exceptions like the Framework laptop or the Surface Laptop 4. Usually those exceptions then also come with more unique aspect ratio displays like 3:2, though, so they aren't exactly 1440p/QHD. But they are in that density.
I’m on PopOS running Wayland with fractional scaling to 200%. It looks fantastic imo and have only had some issues with Guake terminal when plugged in to an external monitor, which I believe may be a Guake-Wayland-specific bug.
I've still had some issues with some applications not scaling their widgets properly, but it's mostly ok.
Great stability. Close to the edge of progress. And they focus on delivering real unique value on top of what others have created as opposed to reskinning and hacking Gnome.
I’ve never used Fedora but I’m keen on moving over my personal desktop the next time I have a couple of days to mess around with it.
* Gnome the desktop -> org.gnome.mutter/experimental-features "scale-monitor-framebuffer". Only integer scales available without this. Following assume that this is enabled.
* gnome apps: work great out of the box
* QT apps: Qt5 requires QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland environment variable to force wayland backend. Enabled by default in Qt6. Used to be quite bad ~1-2 years ago, but is now usable.
* Firefox: MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
* chromium and electron: --ozone-platform=wayland seems fine for chrome, but some electron apps went crazy when moving between windows with different scale. Maybe the electron app bundled an older chrome version. No issues (except less sharp text) when not enabling the experimental wayland backend.
That aside, I've been playing around with fractional scaling in Wayland on everything from a 6" Pinephone to 32"@4k in various configurations and it's been mostly painless. Mostly terminal, web browsing, Steam games (latter not on the Pinephone obv). I wouldn't be surprised if there can be issues with xwayland that I'm yet to experience.
Even with Intel graphics? I have stumbled on a number of showstopping bugs and moved back to X, which is also pretty horrible...
Now we still would need to scale images etc, but that is much less an issue than fractional scaling text or lines etc.
(I just went to check my several-years-old impressions against Darktable’s almost-undocumented config file, and... it no longer seems to have these settings? I’m not sure.)
Unfortunately, the “UI scale” thing seems to be baked into Wayland nowadays; I have no idea how to get Evince to realize that an A4 sheet at 100% should be 210 cm wide whatever my screen resolution and “UI scale”.
Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible. You need at least "real world units" for stuff like the minimum size of touch targets, and "angular units" (like CSS pixels) for the general scaling of widgets. Plus it would be nice to add a separate scaling factor for text, since users differ widely in what they find most readable. So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
That touch targets need absolute lengths is a good point.
> So that makes for three independent settings, in the general case.
Yes, and you’ll notice that’s what Darktable does (or did) :) I’m not unsympathetic, just have never seen it done in a moderately complex situation.
> Modern CSS is quite close to Turing complete, so an entirely constraint-driven design (which is what's needed when more than one unit is being chosen by the user) ought to be feasible.
I suspect it’s not a question of theoretical expressive power so much as ergonomics: allowing easy description of (what people think about as) simple things. It probably doesn’t have to be precisely; if a full constraint-based / linear programming approach[1] is the way to go, I expect designers will adapt, it’s just that last I checked those could be quite tricky to use: small changes could lead to drastic rearrangements of the layout, and as soon as you try to add a couple of breakpoints the whole thing becomes NP-complete.
It’s like, say, LR(k) parsers. LR(k) parsers are nice, fast, and good at expressing our intuitions about ambiguity (unlike ordered choice). They are expressive enough for almost anything you might want to say. But nobody really wants to work with them, the failures are tricky and hard to predict, and they lack many things you want for modularity (say, closure under unions).
It seems to me that the situation with truly resolution-independent layouts is similar in this respect: we can technically do them, to some extent, but they are a pain, so nobody does. And it’s not so much a problem of finding the perfect language as a problem of figuring out what it is that we want to say that seems so simple in our heads.
[1] https://gss.github.io/guides/ccss
Sure, that's a given with the constraint satisfaction approach but NP-complete problems work just fine when N is small enough.
Android is still about the only OS with reliable density independence. It's also the only one where things like DPI were an initial part of the UI system, and not something bolted on later.
Windows has been trying to retrofit density independence for nearly a decade now, and it's still pretty hit or miss. Apple didn't bother trying at all, and has been more successful at pretending it works (so scale rendering by whole numbers only, then fractionally scale the resulting image to the actual display size). Web browsers mostly went the Apple route, but we all also regularly expect pinch/zoom scaling to fix any glaring issues anyway and just accept it's kinda janky. Linux... well, Linux is still struggling with the basics of putting stuff on screen (Wayland vs. X11). I wouldn't hold my breath for that ecosystem to get this UX refinement working well anytime soon. Especially not across the many UI widget systems, window managers with differing border decorations, DEs, etc...
The problem, as usual, is getting the apps to actually use it.
(This doesn't handle multi-monitor setups well, since font size would be the same for them all. But multiple monitors were not exactly common back then.)
WM_DPICHANGED is a late addition, yes, but it's only necessary for the apps to dynamically reflow if the user changes that setting. Before it showed up, you'd have to restart the app for it to register the new value - but that does not preclude DPI independence as such.
The real problem was that almost everything in Win32 outside of CreateDialog uses device pixels to position. You were supposed to use GetDialogBaseUnits and/or MapDialogRect manually to get the correct values, and very few apps did.
For another early example, Visual Basic (VB6, pre-.NET, so we're talking 1998) measured everything in twips.
Not entirely. The font size can still be changed independently of the DPI, and not everything should be scaled as a result. Things like dividing lines and padding probably shouldn't be scaled when the font size is increased.
You still need a distinct DIP value independent of scaled font size. So the value of 'dp' vs. 'sp' in Android terms, which it looks like Windows' now also has that distinction.
And yeah this is ignoring that things like the visual winforms tool in Visual Studio really just wanted to operate in fixed positions, and just getting things to work when the window was resized wasn't always intuitive or obvious. So even if the APIs were there, the ecosystem definitely didn't care about it and Microsoft's own tools definitely didn't help.
Fixed layouts is orthogonal to all that - so long as those fixed layouts are defined in DPI-independent units, they will scale just fine. FWIW in WinForms (and also Delphi VCL, where this originated) you'd normally use anchors to design layouts that scale when the window is resized. Granted, it's nowhere near as flexible as proper layout containers - which WinForms (2.0+) also has, and which the visual form designer also supports, although it can be a pain to work with them.
I've basically resigned myself to running Sway in 1.5x scale mode, which means that things get rendered at 2x and scaled down. Sway does about as well as I think any desktop environment could be expected to, but it's never going to be the same as rendering at true screen resolution. Alas, running in 1x or 2x and using font settings to handle it breaks down the moment you connect to an external display that really is 1x or 2x.
That said, I love the rest of the laptop (well, maybe except the battery life), so my hope is that at some point we can buy a replacement screen at a more useful resolution, at which point I'll be first in line to buy and install it.
I'm not sure if the Apple M1 is going to be beaten (especially in the efficiency department), but challenged for sure. Will have to wait and see.
Oh man if they found a way to have upgradable GPU on a laptop it would be next level! I think it can be done through M.2 slot (the reason why you can get M.2 to PCIe adapters is because M.2 provides a PCIe interface [1], some eGPU solutions use M.2 [2], IIRC it's just a 4 lanes connection through the M.2 connector but better than nothing) - so in order to make this possible on a laptop you would basically have to take small (mobile class) GPUs and solder them on a board that can be inserted in an M.2 slot... I think this is not rocket science but probably those GPUs would be expensive unless the concept really takes off and they are mass produced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2
[2] https://linustechtips.com/topic/831808-m2-x4-egpu-dock-faste...
EDIT - I just remembered that in the past there were some gaming laptops with upgradeable GPU, I think they were made maybe by Asus? And if I remember correctly it was a proprietary connector (but I might be wrong)
EDIT 2 - yes I was thinking about MXM and it was not proprietary, thank you to those who pointed that out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module
EDIT 3 - my proposed idea didn't take cooling into consideration, as correctly pointed out in the comments.
It would be doubly great if the GPU were upgradable as you say.
I've got an HP Z2 Mini unit which also uses MXM for its GPU, and is upgradable.
Due to the cooling requirements of a GPU, MXM modules are often pretty thick though, so would probably make the whole laptop thicker.
You also have to consider how the heatsink & heatpipes for a GPU would attach to the GPU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module
You are thinking about MXM [0]
Idea was neat but Regular Joe doesn't upgrade GPU in the laptop. And Non-regular Joes who does demand what it should be cheap and performant.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_PCI_Express_Module
My framework setup already has so much raw power in terms of RAM and CPU. A solid GPU is the next step :-) Would do a GPU pass through setup with virtio/QEMU and a Linux host… if only eGPU setups weren’t so damned expensive! And that’s not even factoring in the sheer lack of availability of 30x series cards.
You can go even smaller at 3.9L in a Velka 3 [1], if you use a single fan graphics card.
- [0] https://www.dan-cases.com/dana4.php
- [1] https://www.velkase.com/products/velka-3
I’d love to get a setup like this going with a 30x series card, but I’m not sure how difficult getting one at listing price is these days.
Buyer beware: for the Dan Case, it's only compatible with 2.25 slot (45mm) width cards at max. Most 3080s are 2.5 slot (50mm) wide. The EVGA 3080 XC3 Black is a notable exception, and is a very satisfying tight fit [0]. There's also a 3D printed GPU spacer to increase width of the case (sacrificing portability) [1].
Here's my hardware:
- [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/jhrnob/evga_xc3_3080...- [1] https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2771844
Or make it upgradeable like an external GPU.
Using a mobile GPU chip and putting it into a small external GPU case could be easy.
The only reason why current external GPU cases are so big is that the form factor of GPUs is big and the big power consumption.
Using a mobile GPU could make this into a small cube of 15*15 or so.
However so few people ever bothered to upgrade them, hence why OEMs have moved on.
Even on desktops, every time I came around to upgrade components back in the day, it was about time to upgrade everything.
But the real huge win is replacing broken components easily. That alone is making the Framework extremely tempting for me.
External GPUs have their own difficulties but I think it’s a less challenging design problem than “configurable GPUs [up to enthusiast/gaming/pro cards]”
Section "InputClass"
EndSectionThis fixed the issue for me. Your mileage may vary though.