I like the idea of replaceable and upgradable parts. But I would be totally convinced this platform is also a viable ecosystem if parts were also sourced by suppliers competing with Framework and everyone is profitable/sustainable.
nothing is stopping others from selling "Framework-compatible parts", the CAD for all bays, expansion bays, etc. are open source https://github.com/FrameworkComputer
Permission is one. (A pretty important one, at that.)
A second is funding, the prospect of becoming profitable. This hurdle, Framework seems to have taken (for now), but it also seems to be stopping competitors (for now).
Would be great if something grew from hobbyist / enthusiasts.
Can you elaborate on the permission comment? The designs in their github allow commercial use with attribution. They even link to a Google form for submitting your product to their marketplace. Is there a submarine restriction somewhere?
>Would be great if something grew from hobbyist / enthusiasts.
Making PCBs to support modern x86 and even high-end ARM CPUs with DDR5 RAM and also PCI-express is beyond the skillset of a vast majority of hobbyist and enthusiasts. It gets so so far up the creek of high frequency signal engineering under electrical engineering. It's not impossible, just very time consuming and costly (between equipment required for testing and PCB manufacturing).
But yea all the other stuff in a framework could get hobbyists and enthusiasts making their own elements like the expansion cards and keyboard significantly more easily if there was a need for it.
I did a DDR3 layout, sure there's a lot to think about if you want it to work in extreme temperatures or with lots of EMI. But for hobbyist use its essentially get the right trace width for the PCB material using an online impedance calculator, and then length match and match the count of vias for all your traces of the same bus and don't exceed the length restrictions. Don't forget to have a good ground plane. This will work 99% of the time.
Its time consuming and annoying but not rocket science.
Framework doesn’t ship to China yet and when I got mine shipped via a third party, the customs stole some parts claiming that the laptop lacked certification. Once it’s open to the Chinese market, tons of cheap and low quality parts will flood the market
I own a framework, and 3/4 of the ports are failing.
I shilled this machine hard when I got it, but now I have dubious connections to my ext-monitor and my microphone. Sometimes when I'm moving files to-from my SSD I have intermittent failures.
Also the hinge that it comes with is fucking atrocious.
I really wanted to love this $1500 product, but frankly; I'm just going to resuscitate my thinkpad, and get my work to provide a desktop and use x11 forwarding on it.
I own a framework, one of the early ones from launch. All of the ports are working. My SSD has no problems, and the hinge has been fine for us, but they upgraded it after launch so newer ones should be better.
The hinge _was_ light on the old ones (deliberately, they wanted it to be easy to open with one hand), but after a lot of feedback like this, they went with a heavier one. I have a 12th gen and a 13th gen (one is my wife's), and the new one has a stiffer hinge that doesn't move if you aggressively move the laptop.
Because it's Framework, you can of course buy the heavier hinge and put it on the older models; I haven't, because it's not a problem for me, but if it's one for you, it's a fix you can do cheaply.
My ports are fine, something funky is up with yours. All 1st Gen hinges are bad, but the 2nd Gen hinge is almost perfect. All speakers are bad, battery life is bad, the fan is just a jet engine some times. The promise of an upgradable laptop is great, but it's less great if it's an excuse to ship sub-par default parts. If I have to replace most parts to end up with a laptop that makes me happy, it feels ... like I was cheated of the actual initial promise.
That said, I am happy with it. And still, I'm in for the experiment. If I can get one truly great inter-generational mainboard update while retaining most parts, then the "build" will have paid for itself. I'm on a 12th gen mainboard, hoping my next update will be some time around 2026 or 2027.
I own a Framework, have been using it daily for 2+ years, and it's been a rock-solid workhorse for me - haven't dealt with any of the issues that you describe. Sorry to hear! Have you contacted support?
The reason i have no Framework is the lack of a track point in stead/addition to a touchpad that can be turned off by default. Basically i have to keep using Thinkpads until another manufacturer sees the light and includes an optional working track point in their keyboards.
Sadly I think this is hopeless. The trackpoint is a thing of the past. Modern thinkpad trackpoints are notably not as good as the ones from 10 years ago anyway. I personally use it less and less on my p14s and surprisingly, it's not that annoying.
Swap the ports and see if the problems moved with the module, or stay fixed with a port location. Try on a LiveCD with Linux to rule out the OS. If nothing else - probably MB.
You can replace the ports and the hinge, without too much expense, and this is kinda the defining feature of this product line. Did you try replacing the ports and the hinge?
The ports and hinge shouldn’t fail within the lifetime of a laptop. Sure occasionally you’ll get a defect, but the average experience should be that nothing needs replacing other than physically damaged parts from misuse.
Just another random suggestion which could be astray... Is the port issue you're having with the 1TB expansion card, or is the SSD issue which you describe a separate issue, i.e. with the internal SSD?
As one extra piece of anecdata, I haven't had any issues with the ports either, though I have had the expansion card issue.
Just in case anyone is wondering about their support, Frame.work were very good about offering to fix the expansion card issue, and my fan-scraping-noise issue, both for no cost. Unfortunately I am in a country they don't sell to yet so they can't help me yet. They did say that if they later expand to offer sales here, they would still offer a fix, even though outside of the warranty period.
Not convinced yet of AMD an Linux for mobile devices. Just sent back a T14s Gen 4 with Ryzen I wait for a long time because of power/stability issues (S2idle, sleep+wakeup problems, GPU, WiFi, ...).
I really hope AMD gets quality on par with Intel in this space. Maybe Framework did a better job than Lenovo, but I'm done experimenting for (going X1 Gen 11 now).
Both Gen 1 and Gen 3 AMD have been extremely stable with good battery life. The Gen 4 is new so it might take a few months for the kernel team to work out all of the bugs.
The X1 Gen 11 is a very premium machine but compared to the T series it's very expensive, and the CPU is underclocked.
> The X1 Gen 11 is a very premium machine but compared to the T series it's very expensive
Out of curiousity I set up a machine with max specs i7-1370p, 64GB RAM, 2.8K OLED; and the price came out to be $1685. Doesn't seem unreasonably expensive if you wait for a sale.
I have a T14 with Ryzen that I've used as a linux laptop from day 1 with the only issue being the wifi card, which I was able to solve on day 2 and haven't had an issue with since.
What? I have a number of Zen 1/2/3 laptops and the only one that gave me any trouble on Linux was the Zen 1 one. My wife has been using for 5 years. Everything else has been rock solid with a number of different distributions.
I wonder how it is on those linux laptop companies like tuxedo or system76. I know tuxedo and starbook etc. are just rebadged clevos, so they probably can't afford whole teams for hardware / software optimization, but sysem76 could have the engineering capacity for it.
I have a similar Gen 4 machine, but in P14s form, and all is well with the exception of sleep and wake up. I'm hoping that gets addressed quickly with some BIOS and kernel updates.
I don't think you can get used to RSI, you're more likely to get it with weird positions. Also, you also remap Ctrl to Caps Lock, so you still keep that.
I wouldn't count on it. My 12th generation Intel Framework has godawful battery life. Framework has apparently been beta testing a BIOS update since 2022 that will improve it (and nrp told me here on HN that it's still being worked on as of 6 months ago)... but it's not here yet.
In the mean time they've released a ton of new products and locked the 12th Gen BIOS threads on their forum (ironically, after talking about how they'll try to do a better job communicating the status of firmware updates).
I strongly suggest that if you buy one, you base your decision on the hardware and software as they are today, not on future improvements that may never come. If you're not willing to accept warts like poor battery life and nonfunctional brightness keys, you're better off getting a laptop that doesn't have those issues.
Framework is really appealing as thinkpads get more and more soldered everywhere. And pricing is surprisingly ok, especially if you target 64gb of RAM and a big ssd that you buy on your own and install yourself. You can almost buy 3 amd framework with those specs for one macbook pro.
Only thing that I'm afraid of is the build quality of the chassis that doesn't really seem on par with premium thinkpads and other business laptops.
> Only thing that I'm afraid of is the build quality of the chassis that doesn't really seem on par with premium thinkpads and other business laptops.
I guess in theory you would be able to manufacture it yourself, if the specification for the chassi is available publicly (which I guess it should as that's their whole shtick?).
You definitely could. All the details are available on the FrameworkComputer github org and you could either use what they have as a basis for a chassis or design your own custom chassis that fits the framework parts.
I want one but it's not quite there yet for me, still 50% more expensive than a thinkpad (let alone a refurb one, which is arguably better for the environment than buying a framework) and it falls behind on keyboard, trackpad, chassis materials and number of ports. They are doing amazing work but it needs a few more iterations.
The chassis is made of much cheaper materials, it does not look cheap but it won't withstand the abuse of a thinkpad t series or similar.
I don't agree. I've owned a ThinkPad T and currently have a Framework. I'd give the build quality edge to the Framework, even without the repairability (which is obviously better).
There is some subjectivity but the Framework is plastic+aluminium, glossy and has flex especially in the lid, and photos online show it warping when dropped.
The T14s is made of magnesium. It is completely solid, even the keyboard does not flex when typed on. It feels much more premium imo.
I'm curious how it's 50% more expensive than (new) thinkpads. Personally I'm looking for machines where there is at least 64gb soldered, or the possibility to upgrade later. In the thinkpad line that means basically only the X1 now for 13/14 inches laptops. And it's not cheaper than the framework.
I agree about the rest, a few things are not quite there yet, or maybe will never be. But on lots of things it is really refreshing.
I'm typing on a P14s Gen 4 (AMD), which has 64gb soldered and a Ryzen 7840 SOC. It also has an OLED screen, which is hit-or-miss depending on your preferences; I value the high resolution and color accuracy, but it's not the best choice for battery life.
The Framework keyboards are not particularly appealing compared to (earlier) ThinkPads, in terms of layout. No full-height cursor keys or top row, too many keys missing one might want, in particular on Windows. Unfortunately the keyboard cutout is vertically so constrained that a third party also can’t do anything about it.
Soldered LPDDR5x has more bandwidth, lower latency, and consumes less power than the equivalent DDR5 SODIMM. It can also be clocked higher due to signal integrity constraints, and you really want higher clocks with a Ryzen SOC.
If you plan on maxing-out the memory, the only advantage of SODIMMs I see are in repairability. That said, I have verified exactly one bad stick of RAM in over 3 decades of computing, so I personally think the downside of soldered RAM is overblown.
For me it goes beyond repair, if I sell the device later and the next user wants more RAM, they have the option to do so. Plus bringing ram forward between mainboard upgrades (save for transitions between DDR4, DDR5, and whatever else may come in the future).
I remember now too Dell was working on a new memory module for laptops called CAMM, I think it was aiming to bridge the gap between soldered and SODIMMs, but I'm not sure where its development currently is, nor the real world differences.
yeah I get the benefits. And yeah the "repair" argument I agree, good luck finding a bad stick :)
The real frustrating thing as for now in the real world is, there is an extremely low number of laptops with soldered ram that offers 64 GB. And the few that do, charge an absurd amount of money for it.
With socketed ram, I can:
- buy the cheapest built-in config of a laptop
- then buy the RAM I currently need on my own, often saving a few hundreds bucks just doing that
- then, in a few years, buy some new RAM again, when I need it, if I need it, instead of having to buy a whole new laptop.
That's how I went with thinkpads during 15 years. Now I have to pay 500$ more to be a bit future proof. If the manufacturer offers it. Double that if you want a mac.
So, still today, I'm 100% taking socketed ram instead of soldered one.
And I have a few use cases where 32 Gb is limiting. So I don't want to buy a brand new machine stuck at something that is, sometimes, already not ideal. And well, the usual next step is 64 Gb.
> That said, I have verified exactly one bad stick of RAM in over 3 decades of computing, so I personally think the downside of soldered RAM is overblown.
Man I must've been unlucky. I had a dead DDR stick around 10 years back and LPDDR (soldered on a ThinkPad x1) die on me around 6 years ago. Both of them died very early on though and were covered by warranty.
I had to send some bad RAM under warranty as well. Another upside with socketed RAM is that I was able to buy a small stick of RAM and get my machine going (although with constrained memory) until I received the new pair, which was a minor inconvenience.
Having soldered RAM would have meant shipping the entire system back, then find a spare system and the trouble of setting up all my softwares until then.
... and the 10x price difference, the waste and crippled hardware, the pathetic pricing options you get. Soldered ram has no place nor reason to exist in sad reality we live in.
But is that performance benefit worth the non replacability/upgradability.
Looks to me like laptops are fast enough these days and have been for more than a decade. I have 3 laptops, one from 2011, one from 2017 and one from 2019.
Even the oldest one is fine for everything. If I had specific tasks that needed more comoutation speed it would be make more sense to use a remote server than replace it.
That is not my experience at all. My Intel laptop bought new in 2023 took 40 minutes to compile LLVM, would get extremely hot and loud, and the screen would hang multiple times during the process. This laptop’s fan would even spin when watching YouTube. My current M1 chip takes only 20 minutes without fan or freezing screens. I’ve looked it up and the M1 chip requires only half the clock cycles to get data from memory and I suspect that does play a role in the dramatic difference in performance and energy efficiency.
Non-soldered RAM also means that I can also take advantage of the general trend of declining prices instead of having to pay top dollar for maximum configurations upfront. For example, 32 GB is plenty for a laptop for me in 2023, but my needs may change in 2025 or 2026, especially as memory requirements tend to increase over time. Thus I could get 32 GB of RAM today and then upgrade to 64 GB in a few years, when it would probably be cheaper. I’ve done this many times before: my 2006 MacBook shipped with 512 MB of RAM and a 60 GB hard drive. Three years later I upgraded to 2 GB of RAM and a 320 GB hard drive, and the price I paid for these upgrades was much lower in 2009 than it would have been in 2006, especially if I had to get the upgrades from Apple. Sadly being able to perform gradual upgrades hasn’t been an option for Apple laptops in a long time, and this practice is spreading to PCs.
> I personally think the downside of soldered RAM is overblown.
It is now, but only because it wasn't before. Narratives are slower to change than their subjects, especially in tech.
When soldered RAM started to take off, it was usually 1-2GB, which, even at the time, was a painful compromise. Even a lightweight Linux distro running a browser (i.e ChromeOS) will feel the limits of 4GB.
Now, most laptops have at least 8GB, which is good enough for most. 16GB is plenty unless you have some specialized workload that actually uses more, like compiling a large codebase or video editing.
64GB on a laptop is absurd. Whatever workload you have that needs that much memory should almost definitely run on a remote server anyway.
8GB is hardly good enough for most, with proliferation of Electron apps everywhere and browsers being such memory hogs.
I am easily utilizing all of my 32GB just normally running a browser, email client, Slack, database mgmt tool, a couple of light servers (e.g. NodeJS, Redis for local dev), VS Code, Figma and a Git client. I would definitely get 64GB for my next work laptop, and I don't consider myself special in my needs in any way as a developer, nor would anything significantly change if I used remote servers.
I have yet to see a use case where I need and can't replace a shitty electron app with a native one or its web equivalent running in a browser tab or window.
I have a laptop with 32GB, the only use case where I was maxing out the memory was when I was running a 6 nodes kubernetes cluster in vagrant virtual boxes.
And that was kinda stupid because I could have run those VMs in a remote hypervisor.
Browsers will happily use the RAM you give them, because they are caching everything they touch. With any relatively new NVMe SSD, that cache is probably close enough.
Modular LPDDR Memory Becomes A Reality: Samsung Introduces LPCAMM Memory Modules [1], fixes most of the problem. The only thing that soldered LPDDR ram offers is saved motherboard space. Which really isn't as much of a problem in modern laptop when SoC and GPU are so well integrated.
"Samsung says that LPDDR5X LPCAMMs only occupy 40% of the space of a DDR5 SO-DIMM, and improve power efficiency by up to 70%, roughly in line with the general benefit of LPDDR5X over DDR5."
Surely the main benefit is cost? RAM size (and disk size in Apple's case) are used for price differentiation. If you can replace them yourself they can't charge you through the nose for bigger sizes.
I wonder if they eventually branch out into boutique quality stuff - since they should be upgradeable for at least an upgrade cycle it shouldn't be that big of a deal to have a case/keyboard that's 3-4x regular price if the quality/durability is there.
>Only thing that I'm afraid of is the build quality of the chassis that doesn't really seem on par with premium thinkpads and other business laptops.
That is something I "hope" they could work on, but also aware this may distract them from other much more important things. In a perfect world you could have a laptop that has the chassis of a MacBook but the portability, repairability or Framework.
I mean, the entire reason the Asahi team are able to do what they do is because Apple isn’t stopping them at all (in the context of laptops/Mac Minis at least). It’s just that they’re not doing anything to help them except for maintaining the ability to boot a different OS.
They do allow it, it works fine unless you need one of the not yet implemented features (HDMI out, webcam and sound mostly, although the latter can be enabled at your own risks).
> Can’t compare. Apple is way too ahead on that front
What do you mean? The whole point of a comparison is to show what is better in what categories. If one was WAY ahead in performance or price that would be heavily talked about and graphed and compared.
It's an important point that absolutely should be compared.
This was answered by the Ars Staff in the comments.
> Answered your own question. There really aren't good actively developed cross-platform battery life tests available, at all. And rolling and maintaining my own, especially one that's in any way indicative of real-world performance, isn't something I have the resources to do (or the authority to make anyone else on staff use, honestly).
This review has battery life comparisons to the M2 Pro macbook, and while the macbook is obviously still superior, the framework doesn't seem as ridiculously far behind anymore as before and can compete in some capacity.
I'm not sure I exactly follow your logic - do you think that price is insane(ly high)? or insane(ly low)? If it's high, why would you want to order it when you get laid off?
It's low compared to Apple (which is the only comparison I'm making).
The cheapest I can find that is comparable is an M1 Macbook Air which, for the same price point, comes with 16gb RAM + 256gb storage, or an M2 Macbook Pro w/ 8gb RAM.
"Insanely low" is definitely an exaggeration but in the modern day this just seems pretty reasonable for what appears to be decent specs - plus I just really like Framework's model.
Not parent poster but my reason is that I use my job's workstation as my personal laptop as well; so as to avoid getting yet another laptop (minimalism and all that).
For such a low-volume company, the prices are very ok! Still expensive for budget-constrained buyers of course, but not more than others in their segment. The ability to order without RAM or SSD makes up for any difference as well, buying those aftermarket is a really good deal.
The only ridiculous thing about framework's pricing are the CPU tier upgrades - almost 400 bucks to go from the ryzen 5 to the ryzen 7 is ridiculous.
(Then again, you can just get the ryzen 5 and use the money you saved to upgrade your motherboard a year earlier and get the zen6 / zen7 ryzen 5 motherboard)
I'm using a Framework laptop since November 2021, as my everyday laptop. I don't treat my laptop with too much care. It has been working really well. I also have an M1 MBP, and an xps 13. They both feel more solid, but I don't care. I hate the UX in macos, and I don't like how I'm basically stuck with my choices of ram, hdd, and ports.
My only major problem with the framework laptop was the stupid Intel thermal throttling. If only Intel had decided to apply the throttling gradually as the cpu gets closer to the limits (instead of working full speed and then suddenly drop to 400Mhz or even 200 if it reaches a certain temperature, they could lower the max speed over a range of 2-3 degrees, that would work perfectly well: the cpu would settle on a slightly lower frequency than max, and no one would notice, except benchmarks, which were probably the only thing that Intel cared about).
My desktop is based on AMD. I'm much happier. Even with an Nvidia GPU and Linux, I'm doing amazingly well.
Whenever I really need to get a new laptop, Framework with an AMD cpu is my #1 choice.
It does not hurt if they manage to add the external GPU support to the 13" version by that time :D. That would be the ultimate laptop. I'll probably even sell my $6000 desktop. For now, I prefer not to carry a larger laptop.
Very happy to hear that I have some good options when my current Thinkpad finally retires. But I won't replace a perfectly good computer just for the sake of it.
Got a Thinkpad L13 with Ryzen 5 pro right now. Cheap, but it does the job. And best of all, no qualcomm wifi chipset. Mediatek, it's not intel but it works.
All USB-c, even 4G and smartcard slot.
Funny but the L13 has pretty much the same cons. Battery life is meh, and fans are noisy when I play games on it.
It doesn't matter, it's enough battery for a 4 hour work session on the go, which is more than I need before I need a break. And when I game I have the sound turned up anyways.
Linux driver sucks. I accidentally got one with my last computer and it had weak signal, intermittent disconnecting, bluetooth interference, just overall crap.
In general the Intel wifi driver is the best but you never see an Intel wifi card with a Ryzen CPU. So mediatek was the best I could find.
Interesting to see their test indicating battery life is worse than the Intel 13th gen variant. Notebookcheck's result[1] was vastly different:
> Runtimes are longer than the Intel-based configurations by significant margins due to the lower power consumption levels mentioned above. We're able to browse the web for over 3 hours longer on our AMD model versus the Core i7-1370P model when both are set to Balanced mode and 150 nit brightness.
Updated parent comment with links.
The back 2 are USB 4 while the front are usb 3.2 is one thing.
Last I read, the USB a cards don't fully enter suspend in the os. I have an 11th gen and I pop out my USB a to save battery when I don't need it. The hdmi also used to have that problem but that's since been fixed.
They are all USB-C as far as the physical interface goes, but their protocol capabilities are different: the rear ones are USB4 (actually full TB4 AFAIU, except Intel refuses to certify AMD systems), the front ones are USB3.2+DP and USB3.2. The fundamental reason seems to be that a “mobile CPU” is more of a SoC, including built-in USB capability, and (unlike the Intels) the AMD ones only do two USB4 ports, which on the Framework are routed to the rear.
This, then, is done through USB4-capable retimers, which turned out to draw noticeable power when a USB-A card with a pulldown is connected and idling; but no better retimers could be substituted. The front USB3.2 ports use different retimers and don’t suffer from this. (Why do the Intel motherboards not have this problem? No idea, but if I had to guess, Intel probably makes the retimers for those and is refusing to let them be used with AMD processors.)
Also this is the type of stuff where Apple would make sure the end user would not have to worry about it. Charitably, they’d put in the money/effort to make sure all 4 USB ports are the same (notably, all USB ports on a macbook pro can charge at 100W, which is not a trivial task); or uncharitably, they’d just say fuck it and ship a laptop with only 2 USB ports.
I mean, yes, Apple (even before they get to making their own silicon) can slam a wad of cash on the table and say “make us a better retimer or else” or perhaps even “make us a better SoC or else”. Not a lot of other laptop manufacturers can. (Now that I’m looking, it seems that Intel and Kandou are basically it when it comes to USB4 retimers, and the Kandou ones—whose deficiencies we’re discussing here—only recently arrived on the market.)
That said, I believe all Frameworks will accept 100W down any of the four ports, even if the batteries are only designed to charge at 55 or 61W[1] and the rest will have to be consumed by the rest of the system somehow.
Of course. I just wanted to be clear that Framework laptops have 100W-rated power circuitry that works through any of the four ports, yet it would not be entirely correct to say that they “charge at 100W”: the batteries charge at 1C, that is capacity/1h; any power over that only counts towards powering the running system.
Not just overheating, but overheating the chips to the level where they put extra performance stress on the kernel for some weird reasons. Basically I was seeing 70% CPU usage plugged in on the left and 20% usage on the right with the same task. MacOS has many issues like that, the "Apple cares more about users/design" idea is a bad meme at this point.
It has been like this for years. Apple does some things well, and there are reasons to like those things, but their following is overzealous to the point of kneeling before what is, fundamentally, still a for-profit corporation.
I feel like business schools have failed this generation of management. They look at Apple and see them do something that customers like, but it has a cost to the company, like giving up the ability to track people. So they conclude that it will be an advantage if they defect and make money from ads.
Then they see Apple do something customers hate and get away with it and the lesson they take is that they can get away with it too. But they can't, because the reason why Apple got away with it was by doing the thing the customers liked. And then they can't understand why they can't achieve Apple's margins.
You idiots, do the opposite. Then you can charge Apple's margins from the first one and take their market share with the second one.
IIRC this is not a reflection on actual CPU use. Those extra CPU usage is more like throttling. I don't remember where I read this though, worth searching about this if you're interested.
Yeah, ordered one relatively early and have been waiting a long time. Wish these new platform schedules were better aligned to the school year. :-/
Been wanting to get away from Intel for a while but seeing how much better the gen 13 iCPUs battery life is, sort of reconsidering. Must have finally found a way to reduce power draw.
The reduction in port flexibility partially negates the whole idea, which was a bit of a gimmick in the first place. Oh well, at least the ports are protected from damage.
Linux support is often good but AFAIK they still don't ship it from the factory, making it second-class for regular folks.
2023 and still no mention of ECC RAM! Still not even an option!
All in all I like our Frameworks but the company and products still need to grow a bit.
I pre-ordered this, 2nd batch, and have been awaiting the charge/shipping confirmation (which was originally scheduled to be last month, some more delay is understandable, but kinda annoying that they didn't communicate more about updated expected shipping window for batches 2+).
Browsing their forums, I'm a little disheartened to see that it appears that the Intel 12th gen model has yet to get a stable firmware update - there was a beta bios released last December, windows installer only, and it often fails, and at that point they seem to have just gotten stuck. I totally understand not being able to fix some things that some demanding users keep yelling about, but not being able to make any stable release with any fixes is ... a bit scary. Not releasing the stand-alone EFI or self-booting firmware-update installer variant first is also a head-scratcher.
I really had the opposite impression before I recently started digging into their forums. The Intel 11th gen model seems to have gotten a few good firmware updates. They had this whole blog post about how they updated the 12th gen firmware for full Thunderbolt certification of the usb-c ports. ... but that's the update that they can't actually get a stable release of, for over 9 months now ...
I'm still rooting for them, and hoping this is just one speed-bump.
Are the s3 sleep issues on Linux fixed with this build? From previous reviews the intel builds were losing 30-40% overnight.
I want to be able to shut the lid, and open it up a few days later, with instant start, with only a few % off the battery. My Macbook can do this, but it’s not Linux, and not a framework
As LL/SC type architectures get more and more widespread, I am wondering all the novel ways in which programmers may discover new "anomalies" with the old memory model rules and constraints.
speculative execution combined with relaxed semantics... and now LL/SC widespread bubbleless cache exclusiveness acquirement?
In all honestly mathematical operations are still better performed by LOCK prefixed architectures since there is no reason to go to the assembler level to re-read the cache... if all you're going to be doing is perform a mathematical operation.
LL/SC is good for displays/publishing operations (losers win all) ... not for graphics or mathematical ops.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadWouldn't that be great?!
A second is funding, the prospect of becoming profitable. This hurdle, Framework seems to have taken (for now), but it also seems to be stopping competitors (for now).
Would be great if something grew from hobbyist / enthusiasts.
Just meant that so far, the permission has not led to a thriving ecosystem. So beyond permission there must be factors. Like access to money.
Not at all frameworks fault, of course. I was trying to argue from perspective of potential competitor what would be holding them back.
Yes, you definitely did. You replied "Permission is one." to "Nothing is stopping".
That's how I read it first time.
Making PCBs to support modern x86 and even high-end ARM CPUs with DDR5 RAM and also PCI-express is beyond the skillset of a vast majority of hobbyist and enthusiasts. It gets so so far up the creek of high frequency signal engineering under electrical engineering. It's not impossible, just very time consuming and costly (between equipment required for testing and PCB manufacturing).
But yea all the other stuff in a framework could get hobbyists and enthusiasts making their own elements like the expansion cards and keyboard significantly more easily if there was a need for it.
Its time consuming and annoying but not rocket science.
I really wanted to love this $1500 product, but frankly; I'm just going to resuscitate my thinkpad, and get my work to provide a desktop and use x11 forwarding on it.
Also, where did you buy your laptop ? I know they found some hinges out of spec mid 2022 and where sending replacements to the users ( https://community.frame.work/t/explainer-lid-rigidity-hinge-... )
The hinge is certainly flimsy.
Because it's Framework, you can of course buy the heavier hinge and put it on the older models; I haven't, because it's not a problem for me, but if it's one for you, it's a fix you can do cheaply.
That said, I am happy with it. And still, I'm in for the experiment. If I can get one truly great inter-generational mainboard update while retaining most parts, then the "build" will have paid for itself. I'm on a 12th gen mainboard, hoping my next update will be some time around 2026 or 2027.
Why are you living with these defects instead of servicing the thing?
Edit: Looking at your comment history, maybe that was a mistake.
Swap the ports and see if the problems moved with the module, or stay fixed with a port location. Try on a LiveCD with Linux to rule out the OS. If nothing else - probably MB.
If you're having an issue with the 1TB expansion card disconnecting, it could be this: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/1TB+Expansion+Card+Throttlin...
As one extra piece of anecdata, I haven't had any issues with the ports either, though I have had the expansion card issue.
Just in case anyone is wondering about their support, Frame.work were very good about offering to fix the expansion card issue, and my fan-scraping-noise issue, both for no cost. Unfortunately I am in a country they don't sell to yet so they can't help me yet. They did say that if they later expand to offer sales here, they would still offer a fix, even though outside of the warranty period.
I really hope AMD gets quality on par with Intel in this space. Maybe Framework did a better job than Lenovo, but I'm done experimenting for (going X1 Gen 11 now).
The X1 Gen 11 is a very premium machine but compared to the T series it's very expensive, and the CPU is underclocked.
Out of curiousity I set up a machine with max specs i7-1370p, 64GB RAM, 2.8K OLED; and the price came out to be $1685. Doesn't seem unreasonably expensive if you wait for a sale.
Hard to argue with the Steam Deck.
Someone changed their keyboard to colemak using this technique: https://community.frame.work/t/changed-my-keyboard-layout-in...
In the mean time they've released a ton of new products and locked the 12th Gen BIOS threads on their forum (ironically, after talking about how they'll try to do a better job communicating the status of firmware updates).
I strongly suggest that if you buy one, you base your decision on the hardware and software as they are today, not on future improvements that may never come. If you're not willing to accept warts like poor battery life and nonfunctional brightness keys, you're better off getting a laptop that doesn't have those issues.
Only thing that I'm afraid of is the build quality of the chassis that doesn't really seem on par with premium thinkpads and other business laptops.
I guess in theory you would be able to manufacture it yourself, if the specification for the chassi is available publicly (which I guess it should as that's their whole shtick?).
https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/Framework-Laptop-13
The chassis is made of much cheaper materials, it does not look cheap but it won't withstand the abuse of a thinkpad t series or similar.
The T14s is made of magnesium. It is completely solid, even the keyboard does not flex when typed on. It feels much more premium imo.
I agree about the rest, a few things are not quite there yet, or maybe will never be. But on lots of things it is really refreshing.
I have the gen 2 which is the most annoying thinkpad I ever had, but well, it's still really great compared to other brands.
If you plan on maxing-out the memory, the only advantage of SODIMMs I see are in repairability. That said, I have verified exactly one bad stick of RAM in over 3 decades of computing, so I personally think the downside of soldered RAM is overblown.
I remember now too Dell was working on a new memory module for laptops called CAMM, I think it was aiming to bridge the gap between soldered and SODIMMs, but I'm not sure where its development currently is, nor the real world differences.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/342342-jedec-says-dell...
The real frustrating thing as for now in the real world is, there is an extremely low number of laptops with soldered ram that offers 64 GB. And the few that do, charge an absurd amount of money for it.
With socketed ram, I can:
- buy the cheapest built-in config of a laptop
- then buy the RAM I currently need on my own, often saving a few hundreds bucks just doing that
- then, in a few years, buy some new RAM again, when I need it, if I need it, instead of having to buy a whole new laptop.
That's how I went with thinkpads during 15 years. Now I have to pay 500$ more to be a bit future proof. If the manufacturer offers it. Double that if you want a mac.
So, still today, I'm 100% taking socketed ram instead of soldered one.
How many concurrent VMs would I ever want to run anyway?
If I ever go over 16GB, and actually notice it swapping on an NVMe drive... why not just remote to a real workstation?
And I have a few use cases where 32 Gb is limiting. So I don't want to buy a brand new machine stuck at something that is, sometimes, already not ideal. And well, the usual next step is 64 Gb.
Are we still talking about a laptop?
24 for chrome
8 for electron
10 for OS caching
4 for shared video memory
...and 2 that sit unused to let you know that you don't need any more to get the job done.
Load a "largish" dataframe you will wish for even more RAM.
Even on smallish dataframes with say 20-30GB usage it can be convenient to have a copy near by.
Man I must've been unlucky. I had a dead DDR stick around 10 years back and LPDDR (soldered on a ThinkPad x1) die on me around 6 years ago. Both of them died very early on though and were covered by warranty.
Having soldered RAM would have meant shipping the entire system back, then find a spare system and the trouble of setting up all my softwares until then.
Doesn’t it have performance benefits since it can be located closer to the processors?
Looks to me like laptops are fast enough these days and have been for more than a decade. I have 3 laptops, one from 2011, one from 2017 and one from 2019.
Even the oldest one is fine for everything. If I had specific tasks that needed more comoutation speed it would be make more sense to use a remote server than replace it.
Another advantage is that you don't have to buy ram from the OEM. I can buy 64GiB of ddr5 for <$150. Apple wants $400 for 64GiB.
It is now, but only because it wasn't before. Narratives are slower to change than their subjects, especially in tech.
When soldered RAM started to take off, it was usually 1-2GB, which, even at the time, was a painful compromise. Even a lightweight Linux distro running a browser (i.e ChromeOS) will feel the limits of 4GB.
Now, most laptops have at least 8GB, which is good enough for most. 16GB is plenty unless you have some specialized workload that actually uses more, like compiling a large codebase or video editing.
64GB on a laptop is absurd. Whatever workload you have that needs that much memory should almost definitely run on a remote server anyway.
I am easily utilizing all of my 32GB just normally running a browser, email client, Slack, database mgmt tool, a couple of light servers (e.g. NodeJS, Redis for local dev), VS Code, Figma and a Git client. I would definitely get 64GB for my next work laptop, and I don't consider myself special in my needs in any way as a developer, nor would anything significantly change if I used remote servers.
So your generalization might be a bit off.
I have a laptop with 32GB, the only use case where I was maxing out the memory was when I was running a 6 nodes kubernetes cluster in vagrant virtual boxes.
And that was kinda stupid because I could have run those VMs in a remote hypervisor.
But if you only had 16GB, would you notice?
Browsers will happily use the RAM you give them, because they are caching everything they touch. With any relatively new NVMe SSD, that cache is probably close enough.
"Samsung says that LPDDR5X LPCAMMs only occupy 40% of the space of a DDR5 SO-DIMM, and improve power efficiency by up to 70%, roughly in line with the general benefit of LPDDR5X over DDR5."
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/21069/modular-lpddr-becomes-a...
On a technical level I think you're right.
Any data points for the above?
Is it worth the ability to not replace them?
If so look forward to a marketplace of Framework laptops where you can easily sell your old model, and buy a new one.
That is something I "hope" they could work on, but also aware this may distract them from other much more important things. In a perfect world you could have a laptop that has the chassis of a MacBook but the portability, repairability or Framework.
How does the battery life compare to the M2 Macbook?
What do you mean? The whole point of a comparison is to show what is better in what categories. If one was WAY ahead in performance or price that would be heavily talked about and graphed and compared.
It's an important point that absolutely should be compared.
> Answered your own question. There really aren't good actively developed cross-platform battery life tests available, at all. And rolling and maintaining my own, especially one that's in any way indicative of real-world performance, isn't something I have the resources to do (or the authority to make anyone else on staff use, honestly).
https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/review-framework-lapto...
This review has battery life comparisons to the M2 Pro macbook, and while the macbook is obviously still superior, the framework doesn't seem as ridiculously far behind anymore as before and can compete in some capacity.
If I get laid off anytime soon I'm ordering this immediately.
The cheapest I can find that is comparable is an M1 Macbook Air which, for the same price point, comes with 16gb RAM + 256gb storage, or an M2 Macbook Pro w/ 8gb RAM.
"Insanely low" is definitely an exaggeration but in the modern day this just seems pretty reasonable for what appears to be decent specs - plus I just really like Framework's model.
The only ridiculous thing about framework's pricing are the CPU tier upgrades - almost 400 bucks to go from the ryzen 5 to the ryzen 7 is ridiculous.
(Then again, you can just get the ryzen 5 and use the money you saved to upgrade your motherboard a year earlier and get the zen6 / zen7 ryzen 5 motherboard)
My desktop is based on AMD. I'm much happier. Even with an Nvidia GPU and Linux, I'm doing amazingly well. Whenever I really need to get a new laptop, Framework with an AMD cpu is my #1 choice. It does not hurt if they manage to add the external GPU support to the 13" version by that time :D. That would be the ultimate laptop. I'll probably even sell my $6000 desktop. For now, I prefer not to carry a larger laptop.
Got a Thinkpad L13 with Ryzen 5 pro right now. Cheap, but it does the job. And best of all, no qualcomm wifi chipset. Mediatek, it's not intel but it works.
All USB-c, even 4G and smartcard slot.
Funny but the L13 has pretty much the same cons. Battery life is meh, and fans are noisy when I play games on it.
It doesn't matter, it's enough battery for a 4 hour work session on the go, which is more than I need before I need a break. And when I game I have the sound turned up anyways.
In general the Intel wifi driver is the best but you never see an Intel wifi card with a Ryzen CPU. So mediatek was the best I could find.
> Runtimes are longer than the Intel-based configurations by significant margins due to the lower power consumption levels mentioned above. We're able to browse the web for over 3 hours longer on our AMD model versus the Core i7-1370P model when both are set to Balanced mode and 150 nit brightness.
[1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Framework-Laptop-13-5-Ryzen-7-...
Link to official comment https://www.reddit.com/r/framework/comments/16ytxjd/comment/...
Direct to knowledge base https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/expansion-card-functi...
Last I read, the USB a cards don't fully enter suspend in the os. I have an 11th gen and I pop out my USB a to save battery when I don't need it. The hdmi also used to have that problem but that's since been fixed.
This, then, is done through USB4-capable retimers, which turned out to draw noticeable power when a USB-A card with a pulldown is connected and idling; but no better retimers could be substituted. The front USB3.2 ports use different retimers and don’t suffer from this. (Why do the Intel motherboards not have this problem? No idea, but if I had to guess, Intel probably makes the retimers for those and is refusing to let them be used with AMD processors.)
Also this is the type of stuff where Apple would make sure the end user would not have to worry about it. Charitably, they’d put in the money/effort to make sure all 4 USB ports are the same (notably, all USB ports on a macbook pro can charge at 100W, which is not a trivial task); or uncharitably, they’d just say fuck it and ship a laptop with only 2 USB ports.
That said, I believe all Frameworks will accept 100W down any of the four ports, even if the batteries are only designed to charge at 55 or 61W[1] and the rest will have to be consumed by the rest of the system somehow.
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/how-fast-can-the-battery-be-c...
The wattage figures on a charger are the maximum it can provide. The connected device only draws what it needs.
Some of the earlier macbooks with USB-C had overheating problems if the USB-C power cable was connected to any of the ports on the left side.
I feel like business schools have failed this generation of management. They look at Apple and see them do something that customers like, but it has a cost to the company, like giving up the ability to track people. So they conclude that it will be an advantage if they defect and make money from ads.
Then they see Apple do something customers hate and get away with it and the lesson they take is that they can get away with it too. But they can't, because the reason why Apple got away with it was by doing the thing the customers liked. And then they can't understand why they can't achieve Apple's margins.
You idiots, do the opposite. Then you can charge Apple's margins from the first one and take their market share with the second one.
Been wanting to get away from Intel for a while but seeing how much better the gen 13 iCPUs battery life is, sort of reconsidering. Must have finally found a way to reduce power draw.
The reduction in port flexibility partially negates the whole idea, which was a bit of a gimmick in the first place. Oh well, at least the ports are protected from damage.
Linux support is often good but AFAIK they still don't ship it from the factory, making it second-class for regular folks.
2023 and still no mention of ECC RAM! Still not even an option!
All in all I like our Frameworks but the company and products still need to grow a bit.
Browsing their forums, I'm a little disheartened to see that it appears that the Intel 12th gen model has yet to get a stable firmware update - there was a beta bios released last December, windows installer only, and it often fails, and at that point they seem to have just gotten stuck. I totally understand not being able to fix some things that some demanding users keep yelling about, but not being able to make any stable release with any fixes is ... a bit scary. Not releasing the stand-alone EFI or self-booting firmware-update installer variant first is also a head-scratcher.
I really had the opposite impression before I recently started digging into their forums. The Intel 11th gen model seems to have gotten a few good firmware updates. They had this whole blog post about how they updated the 12th gen firmware for full Thunderbolt certification of the usb-c ports. ... but that's the update that they can't actually get a stable release of, for over 9 months now ...
I'm still rooting for them, and hoping this is just one speed-bump.
Links: https://community.frame.work/t/12th-gen-intel-core-bios-3-06... https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptops-are-now-thunderbol...
I want to be able to shut the lid, and open it up a few days later, with instant start, with only a few % off the battery. My Macbook can do this, but it’s not Linux, and not a framework
In all honestly mathematical operations are still better performed by LOCK prefixed architectures since there is no reason to go to the assembler level to re-read the cache... if all you're going to be doing is perform a mathematical operation.
LL/SC is good for displays/publishing operations (losers win all) ... not for graphics or mathematical ops.