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chis 4 days ago [-]
It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
To be specific: There's a new lower chassis, and a new chassis top with haptic touchpad. On my older framework I could buy just the chassis top to get the new touchpad. Crazy that they could make that work.
I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations nerding out over the new devices and shouting out specific team members who did the designs. Really hope the company is doing well.
> That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
It's sorta essential imo if they want to make good on their one value-prop: repairability and the good will that comes with it. If they start releasing a tonne of SKUs with a million different parts, they'll inevitably have to sunset parts at a clip that'll completely make useless their repairability claims.
I am a happy Framework laptop owner, but I paid a premium b/c I expect moves like this. If this would change, it would become just an over-priced laptop... might as well by another Thinkpad or Dell XPS.
That said, I'm super happy they apparently have the good sense to see this. Not all companies make moves in their best interests.
noosphr 3 days ago [-]
Parts are open source. Other people can keep making them. There's franken think pads from China that use a x61 chassis made 15 years after the release. I had a soup of them before I moved to framework for my daily drivers.
jychang 3 days ago [-]
That's not open source. That's like decompiling closed source software years after support ended, in order to make a patch.
bfivyvysj 3 days ago [-]
Weird to frame that as "their one value prop" as if the quality of their offering in general is just plain better. It comes at a premium thats my only gripe with it.
setr 3 days ago [-]
If it’s their only value proposition, then every other element is just plain worse. This is the only aspect that makes them not worthless.
tuckerman 4 days ago [-]
My heart sank when they said 13 pro and then to see that so much is backwards compatible was amazing. It's quite refreshing to see a company live up to their mission so well.
cogman10 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, really impressive to see that you can take a 13 and turn it into a 13 pro with just a few new parts.
I've just ordered my own 13 pro. I've been waiting for a laptop and this ticks all the boxes. I'd previously ordered a new dell xps laptop and ultimately returned it because the keyboard was busted. I would have kept it if I could have swapped the keyboard for a new one. The use of LPCAMM is also really nice. I've hoped to see this standard start taking flight and I'm happy to grab a product with it included.
steveBK123 3 days ago [-]
I'm not in the market for a Windows or Linux machine myself, but the way this company operates I feel like supporting them with a purchase at some point regardless.. maybe their Desktop tower
drywipes 2 days ago [-]
I was screaming at my screen when I heard 13 Pro but I am now ever so happy when they mentioned being able to just replace, part-by-part, a regular Framework 13 into a Framework 13 Pro.
Trollmann 4 days ago [-]
Same, though the battery upgrade alone will be around $260 because of the new bottom cover, at that might just throw in the speaker upgrade as well for $19.
Not sure if I even want a haptic touchpad at all.
ghqst 4 days ago [-]
Haptic trackpads are the secret sauce that make MacBooks so pleasant to use. You probably want one.
pmontra 4 days ago [-]
It's a matter of preferences. Actually I like trackpads that don't mind and have physical buttons. The separation between the surface that moves the pointer on screen and the surfaces that generate the clicks means that there are no misclicks and no involuntary pointer movements while clicking.
Gigachad 3 days ago [-]
The MacBook software is so good that I’ve never had issues with misclicks or movement despite your palms sitting on it while typing.
Long ago I installed Linux on a MacBook and found it unusable because of clicks and movement while typing. It’s probably improved these days though.
bombcar 3 days ago [-]
It is so incredibly "weird" to press on a MacBook (non Neo) trackpad when it is off, it's like touching a dead thing.
aitchnyu 3 days ago [-]
I had palm rejection work perfectly in my 2015 laptop; for my 2022 laptop, I had to switch to Fedora for the latest software.
rolymath 3 days ago [-]
Spoken like someone who has never used a haptic trackpad.
myself248 3 days ago [-]
Haptic schmaptic, I just want my Framework's enormous trackpad to respect deadzones and stop detecting my palms. I had to entirely disable tap-to-click, because nothing else would work.
I might have to try their preinstalled Ubuntu images or something and see if there's some secret sauce in the input configs.
> For Linux libinput “Disable While Typing” (DWT) problems, this page claims libinput will only use the DWT setting if the keyboard and touchpad are either both identified as internal devices, or are both identified as the same device.
There is no accounting for taste.
For instance, I still prefer discrete buttons over tap-clicks or multi-finger-taps, but I would accept the mild annoyance of tap clicks over the pressing down the pad itself.
VectorLock 3 days ago [-]
Is the software that makes them so pleasant to use available on Linux?
Trollmann 3 days ago [-]
Not a huge fan of the "force touch" trackpads on newer macs, the old man yells at the clouds.
In all seriousness though I have used a pre force touch MacBook not too long ago and I prefer that experience a lot over the new one I have from work.
Though the larger size of these trackpads is something I really like and where neither the older MacBook nor the the current non-pro Framework 13 come close.
pxc 3 days ago [-]
Me, neither! I just had someone suggest to me yesterday that I was "holding it wrong" for preferring a real click mechanism on my trackpads.
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
So you if you want the newer bottom you have to upgrade the battery is what you're saying ?
cbsmith 3 days ago [-]
More like the reverse: if you want the new battery you need a new bottom.
riknos314 4 days ago [-]
The new battery is physically larger, so the old bottom cannot accommodate it.
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
Oh right but if I want to keep everything but the chassis I can, correct ?
>It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
Unfortunately, as is usual for them (edit: and it makes sense; I'm not blaming them), the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering (edit: or pre-ordering) yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping. But yes, this is amazing, and the new pieces are not things I was expecting from them. As soon as it's available, I'll be taking my relatively recent AMD mainboard and putting it in a new chassis+battery+keyboard+speakers+touchpad, possibly skipping the display (I don't care much about a touchscreen, but I do care about display quality, so I'll wait for comparisons to the current 2.8k display). My laptop will, at that point, be almost entirely in a Ship of Theseus situation: I think that only the bezel and some of the expansion cards will be from the original, first-generation laptop I bought from them. That mainboard runs a number of services for me, along with an older display. A second, newer one is waiting for RAM to be a reasonable price (since the RAM it was using is now on my current mainboard); I had planned to use it for some of my research, but maybe I'll end up putting it into this older chassis and have a spare laptop again.
That all this is possible is wonderful, and a credit to them in staying true to their stated ideals.
overfeed 4 days ago [-]
> Unfortunately, as is usual for them, the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping.
Why would you expect otherwise? I fully expect any OEM to place itself at the front of the queue for parts coming from its suppliers. If for some reason they sold parts before the laptops started shipping, I'd fully expect impatient customers would build complete machines from parts ahead of the shipping dates, which would wreak all kinds of havoc on logistics.
cge 4 days ago [-]
Yes, I really should have clarified: it makes sense, and I'm not blaming them. It's more just that, given their business model, and that they do intend to sell upgrade kits, I imagine that along with the people pre-ordering full laptops, there are quite a few of us who would be eager to pre-order upgrade kits or the parts to upgrade our current laptops.
_-_-__-_-_- 3 days ago [-]
Yes, black upgrade kit please. I have it linked and will be checking daily. For me with a 12th gen Intel, it will be worth it to have a new screen, battery, chassis and haptic touchpad. Hardware is just too expensive to upgrade, but the chassis would provide nice quality of life improvements.
reaperducer 4 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, as is usual for them, the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping.
It's unfortunate that they can't sell you something that hasn't been manufactured? That doesn't yet exist?
HN is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to complain about.
cge 4 days ago [-]
I had meant they aren't available even for pre-ordering, and likely won't be until the laptops are either regularly shipping rather than shipping in numbered batches, or are on a high-numbered batch. This could be months after the actual laptops start shipping. This is a process I've been through a few times at this point. It also wasn't really meant as a substantial complaint about Framework, and more just a mention of an understandable annoyance: it makes sense that they'd prioritize getting full laptops shipped.
On the other hand, nrp, since you're likely to be in this thread: if you had pre-orders and/or batched shipments of parts/upgrade kits, I would likely be paying a deposit or even the full price today, rather than ordering in a few months. Even if that meant ordering a full upgrade kit with a new display, but getting the upgrade sooner, I'd probably still go for it.
d3Xt3r 4 days ago [-]
But they are available for pre-order though? At least here in NZ. I just ordered the AMD version, but the Intel one is available too (except the Ultra X9 which is already sold out).
cge 4 days ago [-]
The opposite upgrade kit: people with a mainboard they'd like to keep, but who want all the other upgrades. The kit is listed, but isn't available yet.
yencabulator 4 days ago [-]
Nitpick: hot swap means without powering off. Not recommended for motherboards, batteries, RAM etc. The running electricity is the "hot" part, and without that it's just "swap".
flakiness 3 days ago [-]
> I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations
+1. The less-scripted plus the lack of the pretending-reality-distortion personality is such a breeze.
grep_name 3 days ago [-]
I have a framework 13. It looks like eventually you'll be able to upgrade the chassis to the pro one, including the battery, for under 200? Am I reading this right? That's borderline unbelievable to me
universa1 3 days ago [-]
if you count all parts, bottom, keyboard, cover, battery its more like 500 to 600.
unclad5968 4 days ago [-]
Isnt that the entire value proposition of the company?
lynndotpy 4 days ago [-]
It's kind of mind boggling to me that they have a tight chassis, AND it meets their buildable/ugpradeable/repairable goals, AND their backwards compatibility is reaching back five years now.
I think a number of people would have expected these to eventually require a trade-off. Especially coming from pc-building land, where we see new non-backwards-compatible CPU and RAM sockets every 6 or so years.
There's a version of this where Frame.work said, "Design tradeoffs mean the 13 Pro is a new platform that is largely not backwards compatible, but don't worry, the 13 series will still get 5+ years of support and parts" and everyone goes "Aw, well, I guess that's reasonable."
I really want to emphasize that it's looking like Framework is creating a laptop with _better_ backwards compatibility and build-ability than a desktop PC.
All this is to say that this is very very impressive!
aljgz 4 days ago [-]
Even more impressive than going back 5 years is going back all the way to the first version. While I'm a software engineer, I've worked in teams where we shipped hardware, and for a consumer product with lots of constraints including implicit expectations, going against the entire trend of the past 15 years and targeting a hard-to satisfy market segment, they far exceeded what I expected when they announced their first product.
idiotsecant 3 days ago [-]
Its backwards compatible to the first version??? How did they do this.
toyg 3 days ago [-]
At some point they will still likely have to force that cut-off, but yeah, it's great that they seem to be able to stretch it for longer than most people would have expected.
pdpi 4 days ago [-]
Unfortunately, we live in a world where most companies pay lip service to their stated value proposition, while racing to the bottom.
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
Remember "Microsoft loves linux" ?
oaiey 3 days ago [-]
As in sells a ton in azure. I am pretty sure they still love that.
chis 4 days ago [-]
They could have done a much more minimal version and called it a day. Being able to swap individual components of the chassis into a 5 year old model is, to me, going way above and beyond.
al_borland 4 days ago [-]
Doing the bare minimum isn’t how brand loyalty is built.
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
Sadly brand loyalty isn't as valuable as one would think in a world where price and shiny-looking features tend to dominate
gaudystead 3 days ago [-]
Every day feels like a day closer to, if not already at, a day where discerning customers are the minority.
simonjgreen 4 days ago [-]
That doesn’t negate how impressive it is
amelius 4 days ago [-]
Yes, saying you will do X and then doing X is more impressive than just doing X.
simonjgreen 4 days ago [-]
Isn't it sad that we are surrounded by so many broken promises that that is remarkable
stavros 3 days ago [-]
Planning is just very hard.
amelius 4 days ago [-]
No, the statement is universal.
prism56 4 days ago [-]
Yes but it's truly impressive to see it. It shows it can be done.
An 11th gen CPU/mobo that came out in 2020 can be dropped straight into this new chassis.
Or the newest display be can be dropped into your 2020 laptop/chassis.
aembleton 4 days ago [-]
I wish they booted them up in that video. Its one thing being able to plug parts in but its another for them to all work together.
prism56 4 days ago [-]
Based on my experience upgrading my FW. There's probably drivers and bios updates needed to do the transfer
tosti 4 days ago [-]
Back in 2002 I took the HDD from one PC, put it in a different PC, worked just fine. The worst thing that could happen is that the other one already had another disk so I had to change /etc/fstab to say "hdb" instead of "hda" and vice versa. Didn't take long for that to get fixed by specifying UUIDs and having initramfs sort it out.
IDK why it's not working for you but this should all just work without bothering with any configuration, drivers, or whatever.
Esophagus4 4 days ago [-]
> shouting out specific team members who did the designs
Inside the case somewhere on mine there was a list of all the names of the people who worked on it. Was pretty cool.
chias 3 days ago [-]
This is great! Though in my case, since i have the very first generation they made, i probably need to upgrade every part of the thing so might as well just get a new one
zobzu 3 days ago [-]
yeah.. but.. it cost more overall. i can kust buy a brand new laptop every 3y and its cheaper if i stick to other brands.
ThePowerOfFuet 3 days ago [-]
Yeah, man. Who gives a fuck about e-waste and the environment anyway?
dheera 3 days ago [-]
I was really hoping for 6 USB-C ports, dual NVMe, a flush bezel, a better webcam, and most of all, I was hoping for a cooling design upgrade that doesn't cause the computer to self-roast if placed on top of a sofa due to ventilation blockage. Bleh.
3 days ago [-]
kelnos 4 days ago [-]
As soon as I saw the email announcement for the 13 Pro, my face fell. My assumption was that this was a brand new, incompatible chassis, and that my current 13 would be obsolete, and if I want to go further, I'd have to buy a whole new chassis in one go. Essentially a full laptop replacement, completely betraying the entire point.
And then I click through and see the compatibility table and my jaw drops. Amazing! Yes, it's a new chassis, but all the parts that matter will fit into my old chassis. And if I want to upgrade the chassis, I can even do that piece by piece as well, not all at once.
I'm also glad to see another Intel mainboard, and one with the new, actually-powerful iGPUs. A part of me has considered over time defecting to AMD, but I'm still just more comfortable with Intel, for some reason that probably isn't rational. My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6. But I know these days it's hard to reason about real-world performance just by core count, especially with the different flavors of cores we have now.
Another worry: the thermals of the original 13 chassis have never been great, and I'm concerned that the new mainboard will throttle a bunch under load when installed in the old chassis.
At any rate, I may not upgrade this year, given RAM prices. I have 64GB of DDR4 in my current laptop, and replacing that with the same amount of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X is probably more expensive than the rest of the laptop itself.
But maybe over the next few years I'll ship-of-theseus myself into a new laptop.
dangus 3 days ago [-]
I think the term “throttling” has done some poisoning of the way we discuss laptops. It’s like a derogatory word that implies instability or something like that.
I wouldn’t think of thermal performance in laptops as “throttling,” think about it in terms of “how much power is this laptop manufacturer deciding to give the chip versus its maximum possible rating and what does that mean for me?”
Performance per watt has a massive diminishing returns curve so you often do NOT want a laptop manufacturer to push the chip to its limit.
Obviously, framework has a limitation that many other similar laptops don’t have by having one fan rather than two, but for these chips in particular I wouldn’t be very concerned as they just don’t consume enough power to create a lot of heat.
I don’t think you need to be concerned with the chassis cooling in the original versus the pro because I think most of the heat dissipation design is on the mainboard. Both versions of the laptop just have a big opening on the bottom for intake then spit out the exhaust out the back. The new chassis is unchanged in that regard.
This concept of “throttling” becomes more of a “design tradeoffs” discussion especially in the world of gaming laptops, which is why I don’t like using the term “throttling.”
Is the thin and light MacBook Pro-sized Zephyrus G14 “throttling” because its RTX 5070ti is being fed less power than a big thick Lenovo Legion? I say no, it’s just being tuned to the intended use case. No, you don’t get the “full power” of the GPU but even the thickest laptops generally don’t get that compared to desktop systems.
super256 3 days ago [-]
Some laptops do become unusable once they start thermal throttling. I have an Matebook X Pro (2020, the one with i7) which throttles to the point where I can't even properly write code in VSC anymore (I do only light web apps).
3 days ago [-]
enochthered 3 days ago [-]
I had the same emotional ride. I'm glad they've kept to the "brand promise" of being able to upgrade an old machine.
I'm two years into my fw 13 and think I'll start by upgrading the chassis. I also bought 64GB of DDR5 (it was on sale, if you can imagine such a thing) - The trackpad, speakers and battery are the parts of the machine that I don't really love so will be happy to upgrade those.
I think if I can I'll keep the silver top cover - A bit of a "I had a fw before they were cool" statement
notenlish 4 days ago [-]
The thermals hopefully won't be a problem, since the new Intel chips are quite efficient.
dheera 3 days ago [-]
The main problem with Framework 13 thermals is that if you just put it on top of a bed or sofa, the cloth blocks the bottom ventilation holes and the PC roasts itself with zero airflow. It's fine placed on top of a table, just not on a soft surface. I wish they would fix this glaring issue. Most normies are just going to place their laptops on the couch or bed without thinking about it.
Macbooks have a better design here. They are safe to put on top of sofas and beds. No ventilation holes on the bottom.
loloquwowndueo 3 days ago [-]
Normies don’t buy framework laptops.
Search this thread for the “oh but it’s so expensive, I could just buy a new laptop from any other manufacturer every 3 years and it would be cheaper” posts - those are the normies.
nathan-hello 3 days ago [-]
normie absolutely love the expansion io slots.
“wait so i can have TWO ethernet ports???”
i have been responsible for at least three fw16 sales because I got one first, and this was the biggest thing i heard
subarctic 3 days ago [-]
What would a normie need a second ethernet port for? Even a first ethernet port for that matter
loloquwowndueo 3 days ago [-]
Nah. Normies needing Ethernet ports buy usb c to Ethernet adapters at Walmart or Best Buy.
stavros 3 days ago [-]
Does anyone know whether the AMD chips are more performant? I like AMD more as a company, especially since I like healthy competition. I'd prefer an AMD chip if it's as efficient and performant as the Intel ones.
dangus 3 days ago [-]
Absolutely don’t buy the AMD 300 series chips in the current Framework 13” lineup. Panther Lake is what you want. It’s a large leapfrog over what AMD has been offering for this product category.
You’ll get far better battery life for all use cases as well as performance that matches or beats AMD. Also, if you select the X7 you’re getting the best integrated graphics on the market that isn’t made by Apple - basically on par with the M5, and far better than the top option from Framework (HX370) while sipping battery by comparison.
I’m sure AMD will come back soon with a good answer to Panther Lake, but as of right now, it’s not what you want.
Don’t worry about AMD needing your charity, they aren’t going anywhere, they’re a more valuable company than Intel, and they’ll compete in this segment in the future. It’s just not the right buy right now.
stavros 3 days ago [-]
This is a great answer, very helpful. Thanks!
dangus 3 days ago [-]
As a slight piece of pedantry to myself, when I said “best integrated graphics on the market besides Apple” I excluded AMD strix halo since you basically can’t get it in a laptop anyway, and the one or two models you can get it in don’t make a whole lot of purchase sense.
dangus 2 days ago [-]
Another piece of correction to myself…I was reviewing benchmarks and I was a bit too excited about the CPU performance specifically.
Something like a Ryzen AI HX370 and even the 350 does perform better than the 8 core X7 Intel chip, along with a number of other options.
But on the graphics side, the Intel is really fantastic.
And of course we are talking about a thin and light laptop where you’re going to appreciate stellar battery life a lot more than exceptional performance for the most part.
Tpt 3 days ago [-]
My bet (I don't think there is any confirmation of it) is that the AMD board is still the one released last year. The main difference I see is that the new Intel board uses LPCAMM2 memory whereas the AMD board relies on usual socketed memory that has higher latency and is more memory hungry.
kelnos 3 days ago [-]
Looking at Intel's specs, it seems my current CPU has a base of 28W, boost up to 64W. The high end part Framework is selling for the 13 Pro has a base of 25W, boost to 80W.
So seems basically the same on the low end, with the new part boosting quite a bit higher. Presumably you get more perf per watt on the new CPU, but still.
fooqux 3 days ago [-]
I don't know what CPU you currently have but don't sleep on performance increases. If this new chip can do the same amount of work for less cycles, that's less time spent making heat.
vaylian 3 days ago [-]
Do they support S3 sleep (suspend to RAM) again?
CarVac 3 days ago [-]
> My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6.
I was looking at benchmark comparisons between my i5-1240P which has 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, and the Ultra 5 325 which has 4 performance cores and 4 low-cache ultra low power efficiency cores.
The 325 is still faster multicore than the 1240P.
_-_-__-_-_- 3 days ago [-]
This is my plan as well, start with the chassis and find a newer mainboard second-hand. I configured a 2TB SSD and 64 GB of LPCAMM2 RAM to see the price for the new 13 pro and it was doubled from about 1500 CAD to over 3200 CAD before tax. Upgrading the mainboard, when I have a perfectly functioning (and fast) 12th gen Intel i5, is out of the question for now.
dangus 3 days ago [-]
If you ever decide to buy the whole new system, buy it without memory and storage from Framework and of course DIY instead of assembled. You can get them cheaper elsewhere. They aren’t Apple-level overpriced for memory but they are noticeably overpriced.
This advice is a bit more difficult with the current LPCAMM situation. In the US, besides Framework, I was only able to find a 32GB module from Adorama, seemingly a left over new stock Crucial module that I assume must be discontinued in Crucial-branded form, or eBay. But it is far cheaper than Framework’s price ($250) and seemingly still available.
(Interestingly, Adorama’s website says that it’s “trending.”)
You’ll save at least a little bit of pocket change buying your SSD elsewhere at the very least.
_-_-__-_-_- 2 days ago [-]
That's what I did when purchasing my 12th gen. At current prices, 64GB of LPCAMM2 is over 900$ CAD. I bought my current 64GB LPDDR4 ram for ~160$ CAD. New chassis first and then a new mainboard once prices stabilize.
hgo 3 days ago [-]
I saw the announcement video and I'm so relieved to hear actual honest language!
- Actually naming your inspiration as Apple
- Saying that thanks to machined body, the keyboard is actually slightly better. No overstatement, just an honest detail
- No: "This is our best laptop yet" (As if managing to not making it worse is something to be proud of)
- To the point, fast paced, clear communication
- Honestly stating that you're working hard on getting as good as "the gold standard, which of course is Apples track pad" and that you think you'll get there soon
- Clearly stating that the new memory standard is not magically your own invention somehow even though you're the first to use it
- Clearly stating the actual numbers of the battery in Wh and density AND also how many video minutes you get
- Clearly stating, not hiding but also not overstating that you started the company for the purpose of upgradeability
- Proving what you mean with examples before emphasising that "we really mean it when we say we have redesigned the computer from the ground up" (While absolutely fantastically letting the new motherboards upgrade last generation chassis!)
Result: I placed a pre-order, and kind of felt sad for this honest and clear language to apparently be rare.
3 days ago [-]
pojntfx 4 days ago [-]
I'm really looking forward to having this as the go-to laptop to recommend to devs again. The original Framework chassis was really showing it's age next to e.g. a MacBook Pro or the new XPS 14.
Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.
jampekka 4 days ago [-]
> Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.
Does it have such battery life on Linux? The benchmarks, apart from suspend battery life, are for Windows.
sdoering 4 days ago [-]
Can't attest to framework, but after switching to an arch based syttem on my Quite low level HP Envy 13'' I get about 130% - 170% of time out of the system.
Yes, I am running mostly in dark mode now. Yes, I am using the terminal significantly more often now (80% of the time). But also I have always a browser, always Slack, WhatsApp, Obsidian and more often than not a few other things running on virtual screens.
Just the added battery life made this my daily driver. Yes - I so, so want to buy a framework. Still waiting for the multicolored international keyboards - and also the prices for memory just kill it for me right now. The system I would love to have is about 2k more than a few months ago. I just can't splurge that much right now.
luqtas 4 days ago [-]
unless you screen is OLED, dark-mode has no or zero impact on battery usage, maybe even non-significant impact on OLEDs
pxc 3 days ago [-]
HP Envy does have OLED screen options. I'd assume it's what they have, if they thought dark mode was relevant.
aembleton 4 days ago [-]
Don't most LCD screens have localised dimming of the backlight these days?
3836293648 4 days ago [-]
Not laptops. Local dimming zones look awful when you have a white cursor moving around, so it's mostly still just a TV-feature
wtallis 4 days ago [-]
Looking awful has not prevented local dimming from becoming quite common on laptops. Apple has been doing an okay job of it in the MacBook Pro for several years. Lots of Windows laptops have been very hit-or-miss about it, but at least with those you often have an OLED option. I've seen multiple Windows laptops from more than one OEM where opening a terminal window with light text on a dark background means you can easily spot a single line of text getting much dimmer toward the center of the dark window, and lighter near the perimeter where it's close to other light content. And that's for static content; as you mentioned motion can bring more problems as the backlight lags behind the LCD.
Chemiseblanc 3 days ago [-]
I'm using CachyOS on my framework and after switching from windows gained about 30%-50% battery life depending on exactly what I'm doing.
pxc 3 days ago [-]
Wow. For as long as I can remember it was usually the opposite for me. Even after configuring TLP and looking for things to tune manually with powertop, I usually didn't get battery usage quite as low as I wanted. I thought it was still typical for Windows to be better.
Are you running a DE or just a lightweight WM?
sdoering 3 days ago [-]
I’m running a Hyprland-based setup, so more WM/compositor than full DE, with a small bit of tuning in Arch’s power settings.
kelnos 4 days ago [-]
I'd be surprised. Granted, not quite apples-to-apples, but I have the original Framework 13 chassis, 13th-gen Intel mainboard, original battery, and I've never gotten more than 5 hours or so, 6, maybe, at most, on Linux. Yes, the new 13 Pro comes with a larger batter, and maybe the new mainboard is more power-efficient, but 24h+ sounds way too optimistic.
cromka 4 days ago [-]
Panther lake is substantially more efficient than your 13th gen and they increased the battery capacity by 35%. They claim 20h, not 24h, and that 20h is for video watching, not general use.
pojntfx 4 days ago [-]
Don't see why it wouldn't - as long as pstate etc. works it should be the same. I'd argue it's probably better given that modern desktops use far less resources in the background compared to Windows
I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.
michaelt 4 days ago [-]
A lot of office workers these days spend a lot of time in video calls.
So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding.
Linux is something of a second-class citizen for both GPU vendors and browser vendors. So for example if you're using Firefox and an nvidia GPU on Linux? No video encode/decode acceleration for you. The browser will silently switch to CPU decoding.
This translates into worse battery life.
pwnna 4 days ago [-]
HW video decoding is now available and by default on in Chrome on at least Ubuntu with my Intel iGPU. I was also surprised when they turned it on under the radar. I saw this the other day debugging a problem and saw others see it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1ojydv9/comment/nm8...
JohnTHaller 4 days ago [-]
Firefox has had GPU video decoding in Linux on by default since 2023 for Intel and 2025 for AMD from what I've read
temp0826 4 days ago [-]
HW decoding works fine. But some distros (looking at you Fedora) have legal issues around providing it out of the box.
giancarlostoro 4 days ago [-]
Call me crazy, but most people working typically leave their laptops wired in to either a charger or a hub so they can have more monitors. I know some people will go through the effort of charging and pulling the cord, and charging later, but most people don't want to micromanage something they can forget about while working. If you're living on battery life for a work call, it would not matter if you're on Windows, changes are high your batterly life will self-terminate quicker than you realize.
michaelt 4 days ago [-]
Among Linux users, long battery life is for in-office workers (who leave their desk to attend meetings) in hybrid companies (where no meetings are laptop-free) in roles that sometimes involve back-to-back meetings.
d3Xt3r 3 days ago [-]
But these people would already have a company-provisioned laptop.
jim33442 3 days ago [-]
I thought the idea was the Framework is the company-provisioned one. Or are they letting people do corp work on personal laptops?
dtj1123 3 days ago [-]
I don't want to maintain state on two laptops
eloisant 3 days ago [-]
With the right tooling, the state is minimal and gets synchronized between laptops.
mmcnl 4 days ago [-]
CPU decoding/encoding for video means warm chassis + spinning fans. Fan noise is very annoying with video calls.
unethical_ban 3 days ago [-]
I don't understand why. From what I can tell, some of this is remedied just by changing feature flags in Firefox, which (if correct) would mean it ships with the capability, but decides not to.
There's other software that can do GPU acceleration in the repos, and there are plenty of distros that enable closed-source software. It's shocking to me how difficult it seems to be to get GPU acceleration working in Linux.
jampekka 4 days ago [-]
> I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.
They ship with Ubuntu on it, which would be quite natural choice for such benchmark. Also they do do the standby test on Ubuntu for some reason.
Can't help but suspect there's a reason why Linux numbers are not given. :(
cogman10 4 days ago [-]
There have been fairly recent changes to the linux kernel to better support panther lake in terms of power performance. I'd suspect a major reason for holding back is because ubuntu 26.04 has not been released yet and it is using kernel 7.0 which includes these power improvements. 24.04 does not.
By the time these laptops start shipping, 26.04 should be released and testing should be easy. I suspect no major differences from it vs windows.
7.1 includes even more performance improvements for panther lake. [1]
If I was releasing a laptop with Linux support as a key selling point, and the battery life was bad on Ubuntu 24.04 but good on the pre-release 26.04, then I'd advertise the good figures and write "tested on Ubuntu 26.04 beta, requires Linux 7.0 or later" in the footnotes.
I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.
ssl-3 4 days ago [-]
I'm a long-time Linux user who might actually be in the market for a just-works upgradeable laptop[1] that comes with Ubuntu.
I already know that combinations of hardware and software can be stretched and tweaked to do really interesting things in really excellent ways. I don't need them to tell me that computer systems are flexible. That's just noise.
And I don't want them to tell me how their (unreleased) hardware might work in the future with some unreleased/beta software. That tends to be interpreted as speculation, or as lies and deceit.
I'd prefer to see benchmarks of how it works if it shipped today.
If those benchmarks are unsavory (as they may presently be) and thus omitted, then that's not ideal but it's okay.
I definitely don't want to feel as if I'm being lied to, in place of an omission.
[1]: I just want a 15" version. I'm not a fan of little screens. My eyes aren't getting any better.
d3Xt3r 3 days ago [-]
They have a 16" version btw.
luyu_wu 4 days ago [-]
Keep in mind the Ultra 300 chips also only have recent support in the kernel. The battery life likely isn't great for now (as with previous gen Intels right after release).
It makes sense to me that for now the benchmarks would be Windows specific.
cogman10 4 days ago [-]
Ubuntu 26.04 hasn't been released yet and that's likely what they'll test on. It includes kernel 7.0 which has a bunch of the panther lake support.
muyuu 4 days ago [-]
DHH has been posting specific support for Framework, so maybe Omarchy/Arch is one of the main options.
dtj1123 3 days ago [-]
Genuine question, what is it about DHH that makes you think he can move the needle on battery life for Linux?
My understanding is that he's a giant in the enterprise software space, I don't see how that would give him any clout in the hardware space.
muyuu 3 days ago [-]
battery life for Linux is not some grand project, it's just support and setup of existing kernel drivers, typically at the distro level - which is why it's already there for some setups
he mentioned good numbers before, but of course you may want to wait for reviews
dtj1123 3 days ago [-]
This is essentially why I'm confused. All he's doing is setting up pre-existing drivers, any chimp with access to ChatGPT can do that.
I don't see that he's bringing anything noteworthy to the table, but I've repeatedly heard people talk as though he's going to bring better battery life to Linux through omarchy.
muyuu 3 days ago [-]
merit doesn't matter
people want to get laptops that work well and have good battery life, whether this was easy or hard to achieve means naught
dtj1123 17 hours ago [-]
Whilst that is technically a sentence, I don't think you've actually said anything
I don't see why it wouldn't? I have a 16" MSI laptop with an 11th gen Intel processor (known for horrible battery life), I use Arch/Hyprland and it gets 5-6 hours with a battery degraded to 68%. Which is still in the ballpark of what most users said they got on Windows when this model was new.
Linux battery life is fine and on par with (or possibly better than) Windows these days if you don't do anything silly (I'm sure some distro and DE consume silly amounts of power just because, but it doesn't have to be that way).
Based on reports about Panther Lake, the new process, plus a 13" screen and large-ish battery, I believe the battery life claims.
4 days ago [-]
mayama 3 days ago [-]
They have a battery live stream from 100% to 0 linked on their product page which is broken. Hopefully they'll fix it and add both linux and windows version of the test.
zackify 4 days ago [-]
DHH has been using omarchy with pantherlake getting 16+ hours
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
Yes, it was not mentionned often in the list of complaints about the fw 13 because the chassis was good enough but my main gripe was that it felt flimsy.
Strangely it was not flimsy and held its own but it felt flimsy and to be honest I never was quite able to tell why. What one want for a premium laptop is the satisfying rigidity of a Macbook and it didn't have it.
So for me this new chassis is a banger release. It's amazing that I can just drop my "old" hardware in it and it would just work.
CarVac 3 days ago [-]
Rigid = premium-feeling
Strong = won't break
My Framework 13 is robust but isn't the most rigid-feeling. If I one-hand hold the laptop by the front edge it presses the touchpad clicker.
jordand 4 days ago [-]
The LPCAMM2 memory is both the biggest plus for me, and the biggest challenge for it given how rare it is to find in stock, and the premium price over LPDDR5 and crazy prices of it.
4 days ago [-]
subscribed 4 days ago [-]
Featute/performance wise the latest 13s are great for anything work related (I have this small AMD one), but the battery life is pretty awful.
nrp 4 days ago [-]
I’m happy to answer questions folks have around the product (later today).
Agingcoder 4 days ago [-]
This looks suspiciously like something I could buy : a lightweight well made Linux laptop, with long battery life.
I currently use a MacBook and won’t get near a windows machine.
Two questions
1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?
Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.
nrp 3 days ago [-]
As other comments have noted, we have Framework Laptop 16 for folks who want bigger screens, and we had some updates for that product today too: haptic touchpad option and an entry-level Ryzen 5 version.
We've been sending pre-release hardware to developers at a bunch of distros to make sure that the core use cases like suspend/resume work as expected out of the box. You can check our general Linux support at frame.work/linux
Agingcoder 2 days ago [-]
It is unfortunately very heavy (2.4kg vs 1.5 for my mb air 15)
I take note though that the 13 inches framework is bigger than it seems because of the aspect ratio
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
I want to say as a fw13 owner that people don't realize that the 3:2 screen ratio gives you extra vertical space compared to your typical notebook and the screen does not feel small at all. That was an excellent decision from their design team.
organsnyder 3 days ago [-]
Agreed. I have a work MBP 14" and a Framework 13, and I didn't realize until just now that they weren't the same screen size. The Framework 13 is very comfortable to use.
3 days ago [-]
komali2 3 days ago [-]
Agreed. Whenever I grab my thinkpad I find the 16:9 ratio jarring. I'm a 3:2 guy now through and through, can't ever go back.
0xc133 4 days ago [-]
I’m not @nrp but I think I can safely answer this one:
> 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
They make a Framework 16, so a Framework 16 Pro now suddenly seems like a possibility, but I don’t think they’re going to make a 15-inch when they have the 16.
kombine 4 days ago [-]
Framework 16 is way too bulky. I would like a laptop with a similar form-factor to ThinkPad P1.
yencabulator 3 days ago [-]
But Thinkpad P1 is 15.6"? That's very close to the Framework 16.
Thinkpad P1: W 361.8mm x D 245.7mm x H 18.4mm
Framework 16: W 356.58mm x D 270.00mm x H 17.95mm
The Framework 13 roughly matches 14" laptops from other manufacturers. It's really a 13.5", and has a taller aspect ratio than typical.
codethief 4 days ago [-]
> will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
Seconding this question, though I would also be very interested in learning whether they're planning a 14" version.
chis 4 days ago [-]
Are you guys thinking about pushing to improve the linux software experience at all? To me that could almost be another selling point, if Framework 13 came with some downstream patches that improved sleep, power management, multi-display and hi-dpi monitor handling, etc.
And secondly how healthy is framework as a company, and to what extent do you make money from consumers vs sales to big companies?
vaylian 3 days ago [-]
Framework is not really a software company. But they are actively working together with various Linux distributions and they also provide funding for open source development.
uxcolumbo 4 days ago [-]
Any plans to have a keyboard with a trackpoint and thumb buttons? I Don't need a trackpad.
If you add this then you'll have a new customer for life.
The trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me chained to Thinkpads.
nine_k 4 days ago [-]
Same here. I wonder if a third party could offer a keyboard with a trackpoint, now that the keyboard is an individually upgradeable part.
mapcars 3 days ago [-]
That would be fantastic! The standard keyboard design is extremely outdated, while for desktop there are some products pushing it with ortholinear layout and thumb clusters, for laptops its doesn't exist at all.
I don't know how much keyboard-design flexibility is available to you, but innovative keyboard could even be a killer feature.
pxc 3 days ago [-]
How is ortholinear supposed to be better? I've never used a full-size ortholinear keyboard but every time I've had one on a portable keyboard or mobile device it has driven me nuts (and staggered keyboards of the same sizes have not).
I agree that offering more user choice here could be a unique and standout feature, though. One of the small things I love about their keyboard offerings is that they offer all blank key cap options.
mapcars 19 hours ago [-]
Keys are aligned vertically, so your fingers move mostly straight up/down instead of diagonally.
The grid layout makes key positions more predictable and consistent.
Most ortholinear boards are 40–60% layouts.
Heavy use of layers (like Fn, but more advanced)
koiueo 3 days ago [-]
+1 to that.
I don't know how relevant is the parent argument these days, but pfu see released HHKB with trackpoint. Even despite dropping their signature topre switches, I consider this one of the best purchases. My wrists can't thank me enough.
I won't consider a laptop without one.
koiueo 3 days ago [-]
*patent argument
Apologies for the edit in a separate comment. But the typo was so misleading, I decided to fix it.
brookritz 4 days ago [-]
same
jjice 4 days ago [-]
First off, Framework is maybe the most exciting company I've seen over the last 5 years. My Framework 13 AMD is a wonderful machine. Thank you to your and your team for the incredible work and commitment!
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
That's actually the part that I was getting confused by. Does everything with a yellow caution sign have to be upgraded together, or can that happen over time?
Reading it again, I'm assuming they're overtime and individual upgrades that can take place? If someone could confirm or deny that for me, I would appreciate it. I may just be overthinking this table.
Edit: yeah that's what I'm taking away after rereading this a few more times. Very impressed by the modularity on each of those parts.
pimterry 4 days ago [-]
All the battery life stats use Windows for testing. How does the equivalent Linux performance compare?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
We're going to publish more Linux benchmarks as well. We have s0ix noted (7 days), and we're trying to make some more repeatable productivity-oriented workflows for Linux to use. We expect that Phoronix will publish some pretty thorough power efficiency tests too. We'll certainly be providing them with review hardware.
_-_-__-_-_- 3 days ago [-]
Thank you Nirav for everything you are doing for right-to-repair and better hardware. And, thank you for directly engaging with the community. I can't wait to update my 12th gen i5 FW 13 with a new chassis!
schaefer 3 days ago [-]
Thank you for supporting Phoronix.
They are the #1 review I keep an eye on for linux laptops.
zdragnar 4 days ago [-]
Always depends on your configuration but I've not had issues with arch or fedora getting comparable battery life to Windows in a long time.
saltamimi 4 days ago [-]
Hey Nirav, congrats on the newest release and I'm really eyeing the 13 Pro.
A couple of questions:
1. How are the thermals? I've had mixed experiences with my 11th gen FW 13 throttling under load with the fan sounding noisy. It's fine if I'm alone but if I'm at a team gathering, it's noticeably loud.
2. Does the lid open with one hand?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
1. Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is super efficient for video conferencing. That's a use case that Intel has specifically been optimizing for, so as long as you're using video conferencing software that leverages hardware encode/decode, which should be most of them at this point, the fan should stay off entirely.
2. We have one hand open on the lid for each generation of 13.
saltamimi 3 days ago [-]
1. That's awesome! I assume RDP or VNC would be the same then, I use that for work primarily.
2. Huh. Well, I feel like an idiot! I always use two hands when opening the lid, muscle memory, I guess.
ps. one question you don't have to answer: for the wireless keyboard, did you guys consider something like a fingerprint sensor? I like the idea of having something like that akin to Mac's Wireless Keyboard but I don't know how much integration something like that would need.
aecsocket 4 days ago [-]
I'm excited for the new speakers - that's been one of the biggest pain points on my 13.
- Is the Dolby Atmos configuration available for Linux as well as Windows? Or more generally, will the speakers sound as good on Linux as they do on Windows?
- Will we be able to get audio comparison samples between the old and new speakers?
chaosharmonic 3 days ago [-]
For those of us that, say, just got a new battery months before this was announced... a while ago (I forget when), there was talk of possibly sharing designs to enable repurposing them as power banks. Any word about that?
Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am also curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)
oxxoxoxooo 3 days ago [-]
Hi! Congratulation on the launch, I hope the users will like these!
Please, I do have a question about Desktop: there have been numerous reports of noisy PSU fan and little feedback from FW [1], could you shed some light on the situation? Are you seeing noisy PSU yourself, are there plans for a fix or another PSU? I understand you wanted a separate, and thus reparable Flex ATX PSU, but maybe just one larger fan for the whole case would have worked better (c.f. Steam Machine)?
Does the Dolby treatment carry into Linux with comparable performance, or does "best sound" require Windows?
slickytail 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
ilaksh 4 days ago [-]
Has anyone tried Qwen 3.6 35B A3B on the 370 version with plenty of ram and if so what's the best tokens per second you can get, with the ideal quant, like maybe the U GGUF at 4 bit
cge 4 days ago [-]
Q4_K_S Qwen3.5 30B-A3B runs at around 29 t/s for me on the 370 version with 64 GB of RAM, running llama.cpp without any tweaking. I haven't tried Qwen3.6 yet, but could download it tomorrow; since I have a 128GB FW Desktop at home, I tend to use that remotely rather than my laptop directly, which preserves my battery.
trostaft 4 days ago [-]
Really happy to see the new chassis for the 13 Pro! I own the 16 myself, and have been really happy with it, and am excited to see the haptic touchpad + unibody modules hit the marketplace. Those address the largest build quality issues I had with the device.
You probably can't comment on this, but just to note it, I would be very excited to see the 16 get a similar Pro chassis.
loloquwowndueo 4 days ago [-]
I’d prefer a non-touchscreen. Touchscreen does add about 200g of weight. Is that likely to be an option?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
This is an in-cell touchscreen and we didn't add cover glass. That means there is no weight impact to having it.
eichin 3 days ago [-]
And no brightness impact either, right? (I think that was in the LTT video.) We always ordered thinkpads without touchscreens, but it sounds like just leaving it off in software might actually be sufficient...
loloquwowndueo 3 days ago [-]
Awesome! Thanks! I’d still prefer a non-touchscreen (I have no use for it) but this is good to know.
daemonologist 4 days ago [-]
The touchscreen is backward-compatible with the old/regular FW13, so I imagine the regular FW13 screen is forward-compatible with the Pro. (Of course, I don't know if they'll sell that configuration or if you'd have to cobble it together from the marketplace.)
petu 4 days ago [-]
> Touchscreen does add about 200g of weight.
200g is weight of a smartphone, there's no way touch weighs that much.
Framework 13 Pro screen seems to have plastic surface as before, not glass-laminated (which I guess could add 200g, but it's not a requirement for laptop touchscreen)
loloquwowndueo 4 days ago [-]
I have two Dell xps 13, two generations apart, the newer one is touchscreen the other (older) isn’t. Guess which one weighs 1.3kg and which weighs 1.1kg.
I’ve literally never used the touchscreen.
tredre3 4 days ago [-]
> two generations apart
You're blaming the touchscreen for a lot here, when the explanation is likely a lot more pedestrian. Change in case molding, change in PCB size, slight change in battery size...
4 days ago [-]
petu 4 days ago [-]
If they're two generations apart, then 200g difference could be hiding anywhere, but touchscreen (I really doubt it adds even 20g).
e.g. 30g in larger heatsinks, 80g in glass-laminated screen, 20g in larger battery, 40g in more stiffer chassis. 30g in aluminium top case instead of carbon fiber :)
agluszak 4 days ago [-]
> two generations apart
Maybe that's the reason, not the touchscreen?
loloquwowndueo 4 days ago [-]
Wait, so they get _heavier_ each generation?
I don’t buy it.
lawn 3 days ago [-]
So you'd rather buy the far-fetched conclusion that it's the touch screens fault?
Weird.
A bigger battery is the more likely cause.
einpoklum 4 days ago [-]
Exactly. Why would I touch my screen? My hands are on the keyboard, I'm not lifting them.
speedgoose 4 days ago [-]
Developing applications for touch devices is much nicer on a laptop with a touchscreen.
loloquwowndueo 4 days ago [-]
It’s not something I do. Hence - can I have one without a touchscreen?
yaksha 3 days ago [-]
Framework does sell their parts piecemeal, so if you were inclined once new parts are available, you could put together one to your liking without a touchscreen.
I guess not. A touchscreen is cheap anyway, compared to many other components.
internet_points 3 days ago [-]
I thought I would never use one either, but whenever I use my SO's laptop with touchscreen, I keep touching the screen for "quick actions" like pausing video or starting apps or moving things around. I don't use it when I need precision, but when I need to just do one thing quickly where I don't need accuracy, I actually find it really handy.
But I wouldn't pay (much) extra for it.
tapia 4 days ago [-]
Touchscreen is one of those things that sound nice, but in my experience are not so useful. At least not for my typical use (programming, writing, even CAD design). Before having a framework 13 I had a dell xps 13 with touchscreen for about ten years. I never really had a use for it. But hey, the rest of the specs of the screen alone make it still a nice upgrade possibility for the future :)
TechPlasma 3 days ago [-]
Now that you have a custom touch-screen. How long until you release a tablet (Surface-pro-like) form factor? I'm still using my 2017 Surface Pro because the form factor is amazing, but no one has come up with anything to compete with it.
I know it's not the most ideal form factor for a repairable device, but I can dream.
OuterVale 3 days ago [-]
Not quite the same form-factor, but they've gotten pretty close to a tablet with the Framework Laptop 12.
I would love a good Linux tablet with long battery life, repairability be damned.
derekp7 2 days ago [-]
The biggest issue with a Linux tablet, is you don't have a lot of tablet apps for Linux. Desktop apps don't translate to tablet usage that well. I found that out when I was using a Chromebook tablet, with the Linux mode add-in. Tried using things like openoffice, even firefox, and there were just too many issues (smaller tap targets, things like dragging your finger on a window selecting text (i.e., what a mouse would do) instead of scrolling like you would expect on a tablet of phone, etc).
So you are either running Linux with a web browser that has a tablet mode, and making sure all apps are web apps adapted for mobile or at least non-keyboard use. Or you re-invent Android. One thing that somewhat worked was Nokia's Maemo -- it used X11, but the defined UI toolkit and guidelines made everything uniform and touch-screen friendly. Not sure about how the successor projects look if they are what I remember from Maemo / Meego (so maybe Sailfish or Tizen, not sure how open these are though).
d3Xt3r 4 days ago [-]
Why is the AMD version not available in LPCAMM2, and can we expect to see an LPCAMM2 version in the near future?
yencabulator 3 days ago [-]
Probably because it's not really a brand new AMD motherboard?
I'd expect/hope to see whatever comes after Strix Halo in a Framework motherboard. That's when you should be looking for LPCAMM2 for AMD.
throwaway85825 3 days ago [-]
Not sure fhe Halo series will be LPCAMM compatible. The framework with the Halo chip is soldered.
yencabulator 3 days ago [-]
I looked into it a little and it does seem like LPCAMM2 just can't provide that memory bandwidth through a single socket and dual socket would be overly complex to wire up. Bummer :-(
freedomben 4 days ago [-]
You magnificent bastard, you know just how to suck money out of my wallet. And it's not even Christmas yet :-)
lawn 4 days ago [-]
Will the hinges be 360 like the laptop 12? I wonder how useful the touchscreen will be without it.
pcchristie 3 days ago [-]
It looks like not (you'd assume they'd have called it out if it was). I really don't understand the utility of a touchscreen without a 360 degree hinge.
apetresc 4 days ago [-]
This is my main question as well. Either stock or with some sort of separate hinge kit, that would completely seal the deal for me.
lawn 3 days ago [-]
Response from the support (according to the Framework forum):
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro Touchscreen supports touch input but does not currently support stylus input. Like other Framework Laptop 13 models, it opens with a maximum hinge angle of 180 degrees and is not designed for pen or convertible-style use.
Pretty disappointing honestly.
rainingmonkey 3 days ago [-]
Will you produce a keyboard with full size up/down arrows?
klooney 3 days ago [-]
What's the sleep situation? I have an ancient Dell with S3, which is totally fine, and a Mac for work, which is fine, but the modern standby situation, as summarized by people who are mad about it, sounds bad.
mixmastamyk 3 days ago [-]
There’s hope. My 12th gen intel still supports sleep, while the AMD doesn’t. Need to use Linux to access it I think. Haven’t confirmed that on latest hardware however.
fl13p 4 days ago [-]
Is the keyboard for the 13 pro the same?
The upgrade kits I'm seeing on the marketplace have a keyboard included.
Would it be possible to have a input cover pro, bottom cover pro, batteries pro, speakers pro and use my existing keyboard?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
The keyboard is mechanically the same, but it's a new SKU because we had to move the flex tail locations to support the haptic touchpad.
fl13p 3 days ago [-]
Thanks for answering my question--the haptic touchpad + improved speakers alone are worth me going all in on the upgrade kit :)
_-_-__-_-_- 3 days ago [-]
I'm so excited, I was dancing after the announcement!
acidtechno303 4 days ago [-]
Tagging along: will they ever get QMK?
_aavaa_ 4 days ago [-]
What’s the display color accuracy like outside of sRGB? How much of adobe or P3 does it cover?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
This is a 100% sRGB panel. We did look at expanded colorspace, but kept 100% sRGB to optimize for power consumption.
codethief 4 days ago [-]
Hi nrp, what's the battery life like on the more high-end CPUs (Ultra X7 358H, Ultra X9 388H)? Are you also planning to offer a non-touch display?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
Ultra X7 358H is the config we've used for most of our battery life tests, and efficiency should be very similar on the X9 config. We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
codethief 3 days ago [-]
Thanks!
> We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
The reason I asked was mostly that, in my experience, touch displays tend to be glossier / less matte than non-touch ones.
iamdamian 4 days ago [-]
I preordered a 13 Pro with Ryzen, which I'm already very excited about. Reading between the lines of your video announcement, though, it seems like the Intel experience might be more optimal (you pointed out Intel's new low power efficiency cores and Dolby sound being tested with Intel).
If I want the best battery life and sound possible with Linux, should I switch my preorder to Intel?
cassianoleal 4 days ago [-]
I'm also curious about these.
What I am also curious is around memory management. On the Intel, I can get at most 64Gb RAM for now, 96Gb in the future. On AMD I can get 128Gb right now. Do they differ in how they can share RAM with the GPU? Do either need me to specify how much is vRAM and how much is available to the CPU, or are them both unified, similar to how Apple Silicon does it?
schmorptron 3 days ago [-]
for the current moment, Intel seems to be ahead of AMD for both power efficiency and iGPU performance. Panther Lake is really, really good.
lawn 4 days ago [-]
Qmk support for the keyboard, like the Laptop 16 has?
DreadY2K 3 days ago [-]
I noticed my 13 thermally handles being on a soft surface (like a bed or a couch) very poorly, it gets quite warm to the touch and runs the fans hard even at rest. Does the improved thermals of the 13 pro also help this case?
j01 4 days ago [-]
I love it, I've been waiting for years to buy a Framework, but my current laptop has so far refused to die. I think it's now finally old enough to justify upgrading.
Will the new keyboard colour schemes come to other locales? I love the orange/black/grey but probably not enough to learn American English.
_-_-__-_-_- 3 days ago [-]
French Canadian in black with the orange/grey/black please!
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
There's no mention of Wi-Fi. Is the network card integrated to the new intel mainboards ?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
Wi-Fi is an M.2 2230 like on each of our products. We're using Intel's BE211 module for Wi-Fi 7.
sounds 4 days ago [-]
Question: did the hints given at https://frame.work/nextgen include any secret messages you want the public to know about? Maybe the secret was missed during the run up to today?
dadoum 3 days ago [-]
Hey, love that thing and I am considering to sell my current laptop to get one, but I wanted to first know if the laptop features pen/stylus support? I guess not, as it is not using a full glass cover like the 12 and otherwise it would have probably been advertised, and can we expect in the future an upgrade path towards that (by replacing only the panel or the whole top part maybe?)
adioe3 3 days ago [-]
One pain point is writing at night the keyboard backlight has only one bright white color.
Will it be possible to change the backlight color to, f.ex. dark red?
0xc133 4 days ago [-]
Any word on availability for that 12-core ARM mainboard? Also for the record I’d really love a Snapdragon X2 (or later) option someday…
And anyway the performance of this CIX chip is really bad compared to the Snapdragon X2 or current x86 chips. Jeff Geerling has geekbench results here:
I didn’t realize they were selling it on another site, thanks for the link! (Framework has the RISC-V board on their shop, so I was expecting to see the MetaComputing one there too.)
And yeah… what I really want is some Oryon cores in a Framework 13 motherboard.
advirol 3 days ago [-]
Will there be more keyboard choices?
I'd like a keyboard with dedicated Home, End, Insert, Delete, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The layout of the ThinkPad keyboards is especially nice here: The PageUp and PageDown keys are above the Left and Right arrow keys.
miguelxpn 3 days ago [-]
Any plans to start shipping to Brazil? I'd be all over this if I could buy one.
I would love to buy one and know a bunch of others. Wonder if shipping to Japan is in the works?
snvzz 2 days ago [-]
Selected Japan on top right of the main page, it told me no-go.
Been waiting for years. I wonder what the hold up is.
rootnod3 3 days ago [-]
Yeah, waiting for that too. They should expand the regions instead of new models. Availability is really limited.
cassianoleal 4 days ago [-]
Do these laptops, either the Intel or the AMD version, work with eGPUs on Linux?
GyroTech 3 days ago [-]
I have the 13" with AMD 7040 and eGPU worked fine, but I switched back to a SFF desktop as I couldn't git hot-swapping to work reliably and bandwidth loss over thunderbolt was a little more than I was happy with. But functionally/mechanically it worked
jonf3n 2 days ago [-]
Were you not getting the full 40gbps?
cassianoleal 3 days ago [-]
Awesome, thanks for the information!
Retr0id 4 days ago [-]
How well does the haptic trackpad stack up against the ones found in macbooks?
d3Xt3r 4 days ago [-]
I just realised that the credit card I used to place my preorder will expire next month. Will there be an option to update my card details when I need to pay the full amount?
nrp 3 days ago [-]
Yes, you'll get notified when your batch is getting ready to ship, and you can update your payment information. You can also update the default payment method in your user account any time.
varispeed 4 days ago [-]
Any blue-sky thinking like 256GB RAM support?
I have a feeling that laptops don't keep up with the today's dev workflows.
Schiendelman 4 days ago [-]
The ram is an Intel chipset limitation, I don't know that they can do anything about it. Even AMD only goes up to 128GB now.
throwuxiytayq 4 days ago [-]
what’s the screen like compared to the previous fw13 options? i’m considering an upgrade (screen-only, from the first gen one)
and by the way, it’s a world where it’s hard to be a fan of any company any more and the fact that you guys remain exceptional gives me hope
skywal_l 3 days ago [-]
Any plan for a 75% keyboard?
throwaway85825 3 days ago [-]
Why LPCAMM and not SOCAMM2? What is the status of SOCAMM for laptops and would it be possible to do a SOCAMM for NVMe?
ben-schaaf 3 days ago [-]
Socamm is all about data centre capacity. It starts at 128GB and you can only order it in bulk(?) from data centre providers.
On the other hand I can go to a local store and buy a stick of 32GB lpcamm2.
throwaway85825 3 days ago [-]
There's no reason they couldn't use smaller capacity modules. SOCAMM has better area efficiency and z height, both highly relevant for thin and light laptops.
ben-schaaf 3 days ago [-]
There's a big reason they shouldn't do that though: Laptops have already standardized enough on LPCAMM2 for the modules to be widely available.
throwaway85825 3 days ago [-]
The form factor is only a tiny part of the RAM module price. DRAM already isn't compatible gen to gen so you might as well go with the most optimized form factor
ben-schaaf 3 days ago [-]
I agree, competition and economies of scale are much larger factors. Custom RAM SKUs for a single manufacturer with no competition will obviously cost more than an industry standard part. And you'll be locked to buying RAM upgrades from framework themselves.
throwaway85825 3 days ago [-]
SOCAMM is a jedec standard nvidia is already shipping in several products.
kingsleyopara 4 days ago [-]
Thanks Nirav, always appreciated :)
P.S. The printer gag was cruel, just saying.
gioele 4 days ago [-]
No silver option?
jackwilsdon 4 days ago [-]
There are silver pro parts on the marketplace, although I'm not sure if they're more aimed at converting a standard 13 to a pro:
Why do you keep sponsoring Rails World and giving laptops to David Heinemeier Hansson? After the community reaction last time, don't you understand the message you're sending with this behavior? Are you not concerned about the rise of fascism and white nationalism, trends which gain legitimacy in part through corporate endorsement of people like DHH?
mutexjp 3 days ago [-]
for the love of god when are you going to start selling in Japan?
throwawaypath 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
tovej 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
spartanatreyu 3 days ago [-]
[flagged]
throwaway85825 3 days ago [-]
It's interesting what political issues people make paramount. Apple does ewaste as a service but don't have a fraction of the criticism and infighting as the open source community.
spartanatreyu 3 days ago [-]
> It's interesting what political issues people make paramount.
The related political issue here is people's right to exist.
Are you suggesting this issue should not be the most important issue?
If this is the most important issue: what's the point of bringing up your following sentence?
If this is not the most important issue: what in your mind would be a more important issue?
hellcow 3 days ago [-]
Exactly right. There's no issue more important to me than safety for the most vulnerable minority populations. This is a deal-breaker issue.
I won't touch their laptops again.
konmok 2 days ago [-]
Apple markets to a very different customer base.
einpoklum 4 days ago [-]
Why is this not offered with a decent keyboard? Proper key caps and meaningful travel.
cassianoleal 3 days ago [-]
16 hours after "being happy to answer questions", most questions are left unanswered. :(
brson 4 days ago [-]
I'll take this opportunity to report on my Framework Laptop 13 experience. I've had it for over a year.
The case is warped in multiple places. One USB C module doesn't accept a power charge reliably. It can overheat and shutdown. If the case flexes a little the trackpad stops responding - it needs to be on a flat surface. Power brick died.
On the plus side, my partner had one and when she threw it away she gave me her parts and I was able to swap some out. That was cool.
passivepinetree 3 days ago [-]
Adding to the review thread: I bought a Framework 13 in 2021. I'm sold on the ideal, I really like the chassis and the keyboard, and I _love_ the screen ratio. I replaced several parts and own every type of connector. I really liked my 13!
I just had my mainboard die, and I was advised there currently isn't another mainboard in stock that works with my old DDR4 RAM. They don't have any newer DDR5 RAM in stock apparently either, so I was out of luck and ended up buying a Lemur Pro last week.
In my experience, the Framework hardware is great but very flakey and frequently needs replacing.
Support is awful; they'll repeatedly ask you to do things you've already done (and shown proof of), they can take days to get back to you, and are generally unhelpful. They also didn't think to mention to me when I said I needed to buy a new laptop and their parts were all out of stock that they had a new machine coming out in the next week, which is insane to me. I would've been an easy convert. Sometimes I think it's bots doing the support, but if that was the case, they'd reply back faster.
Time will tell whether I'll return back to the ecosystem, but the support experience (and the hardware being poor enough that I frequently need support) is putting me off for now.
margana 20 hours ago [-]
You do realize you can buy DDR5 SODIMM from anywhere, right? Even if they didn't have it in stock for individual purchases, how did that force you to abandon the whole system? That's like throwing away your phone because you couldn't buy a replacement standard USB PD charger specifically from the phone manufacturer.
mplanchard 4 days ago [-]
To compare anecdotes, I’ve had mine for 3 years, and it’s still working great. Haven’t had any issues with it.
DreadY2K 3 days ago [-]
Similar story here. Mine is 3 years old, and the battery is about 80% of its original capacity and the touchpad occasionally drops clicks, but otherwise it's still working great! Also the charging cable frayed, but I have plenty of those cables around.
In general, coming from a MacBook, I’ve had more quality issues with the framework, but fixing them has always been possible with a little digging. I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning how to take apart and fix my gear, but I’m also the sort of person who darns holes in his socks, so ymmv.
999900000999 3 days ago [-]
I was just at an event.
The vibe I got was the quality is really bad, BUT the people who like Framework and believe in it gladly just buy another one.
Not for me though. Within 6 months we’ll see similar specs from other oems at 50 to 70% of the price
MostlyStable 3 days ago [-]
>gladly just buy another one.
I'm not going to weigh in on quality issues (I have had a 16 for a little over a year and it's been great, but it probably gets far less abuse the way I use it than average), but I'm surprised to hear this because the whole point of Framework is that when something breaks you don't need to "buy another one". You just buy the specific part that broke. Chassis warped? Buy the top/bottom/whatever part of it is warped. Hinges worn out? Replace just those, etc.
The kind of person who is happy to just buy a new one when a particular component breaks seems like the kind of person who would probably prefer to buy something else, or so I would have supposed.
I very much like the modularity, upgradability, and repairability, but those things come with tradeoffs, and if one isn't the kind of person who is interested in repairing a computer piecemeal, I'm not sure I understand why one would accept the tradeoffs.
I like Framework, I like their mission, and I intend to continue to support them as a customer (I'll likely buy the new wireless keyboard as soon as it's in stock), but my intention is to never buy another complete laptop from them again, unless I for some reason decide I need to have 2 laptops. It may be that in a decade or two, I have Ship-of-Theseused my 16 into an entirely new laptop, but I can't imagine the scenario where I replace the entire thing in one go.
999900000999 2 days ago [-]
The mainboard is what appears to go wrong and it ends up being the same price as many competing laptops.
Maybe this will be different with the pro, but no one knows until they actually ship.
As for the Framework 16, I brought a 5070TI laptop recently for around 1200$ after a nice rebate. After a bit of complaining( which was also needed to honor the rebate ), they added a second year warranty too.
For the Framework 16, with the 5070 addon(which has 8GB of VRAM compared to the 12GB on the 5070TI).
Sure, the framework might be better, but is it worth twice as much ?
Night_Thastus 4 days ago [-]
That's rough. Did you contact their support about it? I measure a lot of companies by how they handle recovering from stuff like this.
dpatterbee 3 days ago [-]
I contacted their support because my charging cable frayed and I thought I was still in warranty. Turns out I'd miscalculated and I was a year out but they replaced it for free anyway.
Their support has been very responsive and helpful every time I've contacted them so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't have helped the GP.
duped 3 days ago [-]
I've had to replace the chassis, the mainboard, the trackpad, and the keyboard.
I bought it because it's repairable but I didn't realize that meant I was going to have to repair it more than any other device I've purchased.
d3Xt3r 4 days ago [-]
Hopeful that's no longer an issue with the Pro version, being made of a machined single-piece aluminum block.
marcus2026 3 days ago [-]
More for the review thread;
I was really sold on the idea of a repairable laptop and the Linux support was excellent. I like the laptop a lot and it happily replaced the old-skool Macbook that had served me so well over the years.
However, I had a screen die on me and that's when I found that their product support was truly appalling (even worse than Apple!) - They took ages to reply and then asking endless irrelevant questions in a very arrogant tone (version of BIOS, operating systems etc) - in the end, I gave up and bought the replacement screen myself.
I'll buy a Thinkpad next time.
cromka 3 days ago [-]
If you consider Apple hardware support bad then I honestly don't know what you're expectations are. Apple support is the best I have ever experienced and I have tried all types of brands and warranties. Only thing that can match it is NBD warranty at HP/Lenovo/Dell.
susanthenerd 3 days ago [-]
I had to fight support for multiple times over the las 3 years of having mine due to repeated issues, breach of statutory warranty and so on
3 days ago [-]
Iridescent_ 3 days ago [-]
How do you even warp these things? Had mine for 3y, sturdy as hell.
So sturdy in fact that the only piece I've had to replace is the charger, what's the point in swappable parts now right? /s
kingsleyopara 4 days ago [-]
I really want to love this thing but at least in the UK, matching specs it comes out as more expensive than the MBP - even worse when you factor in potential discounts/sales which framework doesn't offer.
MacBook Pro 14: £2199 (M5 Pro, 24GB, 1TB, no adapter) - added as I think it’s an even better deal
ericd 4 days ago [-]
I’d just keep in mind that you’re comparing a niche product from a startup breaking into a notoriously competitive market who are also doing the harder task of making these slim devices user upgradeable to a product from one of the largest companies in the world, with a CEO that is well known for being a master of supply chain, and with all of the economies of scale.
And they’re miraculously within 10-20% of each other.
Lammy 4 days ago [-]
Dumb comparison, because buying a Framework is a single transaction where I exchange money for a computer, and buying a Mac is an entrypoint to “The Ecosystem” where Apple wants to squeeze me for $<pricing_tier>/month forever.
I've bought two Apple products in my life, both Macbook Pros, one in 2014 and one in 2021. I have a Pixel phone, zero transactions in the App Store all-time, pay $0 to Apple on any kind of subscription basis. Not disagreeing with the nature of their incentive structure, but if they're intentionally crippling their hardware division somehow to squeeze me for money, they're really bad at it.
iririririr 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
llbbdd 4 days ago [-]
They were accused of that by people who didn't understand that batteries degrade over time, and the resulting legal suits were entirely about disclosing the throttling, not the throttling itself. Newer iPhone models still do the exact same thing, they just provide more information about it, and let you toggle it off.
The idea that they were doing this maliciously never made sense anyway, customers who haven't upgraded in a while might be the least lucrative audience to target.
iririririr 2 days ago [-]
yet they released a "fix" later.
you're just eating up the damage control narrative they pushed later, on ios18. and they also pushed it in 26 for some reason
thebruce87m 4 days ago [-]
This has never happened. Batterygate was about stopping individual handsets from rebooting by triggering throttling after a brownout. If you are trying to drive up sales you would just let these out of warranty devices reboot. Literally doing nothing would have been easier for Apple.
afavour 4 days ago [-]
Buying a Mac is also a single transaction. Yes, they have lots of other services they want to sell you on but you're in no way obliged to take them up on it.
Lammy 4 days ago [-]
I don't want to use a computer whose greatest aspiration is to be a sales funnel even if I am personally strong-willed enough to say no when nagged.
afavour 4 days ago [-]
You’re imagining a “greatest aspiration” that doesn’t exist. macOS has an iCloud login button in the Settings app and that’s about it.
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
Sorry, but you're wrong. Music-dot-app is a great example. Check out all the ways it tries to upsell you even if you just want to play local files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anrB6fP1WeQ&t=65s
- opens to a full-page Apple Music subscription service ad on first run.
- search functionality defaults to “Apple Music” instead of “Local Library” (or “iTunes Store”) even when the user has no active subscription.
- Apple Music subscription upsell banner ad along the bottom of the search results screen, that stays on screen as you scroll the results pane.
Check out at the end when he demos Music-dot-app's Settings pane changing to include CD-ripping settings when and only when a CD drive is available, something they could also do and chose not to for Apple Music subscription service when the user isn't subscribed.
afavour 3 days ago [-]
Don't use the Music app. It's fully uninstallable, I don't think I've ever launched it. There are plenty of third party solutions available. I really don't consider Music.app to be a core OS feature.
But I think it is very fair to judge the OOTB experience as a whole as a reflection of the company's priorities.
3 days ago [-]
rimliu 3 days ago [-]
you are arguing with people who do actually use Macs by providing some random videos on youtube. How does that make sense?
Lammy 3 days ago [-]
> people who do actually use Macs
— Sent from my (work) MacBook Pro M3
rafram 4 days ago [-]
macOS seriously never nags you about services. Service nags aren't classy. You can credibly accuse Apple of plenty of things, but having a lack of class isn't one.
My last (and first, and only) iPhone was even worse. At one point the Settings app had no fewer than three paid-service nags at the top that I had to scroll through to even get to the first actual setting.
Image Playground isn’t a service, it’s a free local image generation model. But I’ll grant you that the News+ thing is kind of annoying. I wouldn’t call it a nag, though - it shows in the Settings anpp after you buy a new device that includes free months, while they’re still valid, then it goes away forever.
initatus 3 days ago [-]
> while they’re still valid, then it goes away forever.
It actually stays, even after expired. Then if you tap the "two weeks free!" it says "expired, so sorry, but do want to pay us a slightly discounted rate instead of free?"
Then the alert went away.
Super scummy.
Source: happened a few months ago with the promo on my newish iphone 17 when I thought I'd try appletv out to watch pluribus.
rafram 3 days ago [-]
This has not been my experience. I’ve never taken them up on any of those offers, and none of them are still visible in Settings on any of my devices.
rafram 4 days ago [-]
It's really not, though. You don't even need an Apple account to set up a Mac.
I pay $3/month to Apple in exchange for full-quality backups of decades of photos, but I could easily stop doing that, or switch to another provider, if I wanted to. (I don't, because $3/month is extremely fair for what I get.) I've never paid for any other Apple service and likely never will. The OS never, ever nags me about services - compare that to Windows!
vizzier 4 days ago [-]
> or switch to another provider
Can you though? Its been a few years since I've been on apple, but being able to get anything but icloud native support in other apps was basically non-existent. Compared to android where it gives you a plethora of choice out of the box.
rafram 4 days ago [-]
Yes - they're already on my computer, so any full-disk backup service will back them up by default. There's an option to purge them from disk and download from iCloud on demand, but you don't need to use it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111762
vizzier 4 days ago [-]
ah fair, I was thinking on the iphone, but in fairness this is a thread about a laptop
fizwidget 4 days ago [-]
Even on an iPhone you can back up your library to Google Photos or other services. You just can’t do so directly through Apple’s Photos app.
nicoburns 4 days ago [-]
It's different on mobile (iOS/Android) where individual apps need special support for cloud providers. On a mac everything is just a file for most apps, so all the cloud providers work by default.
HDBaseT 3 days ago [-]
Whilst you don't "need" an Apple account to setup a Mac, using a Macbook without an account may not be viable for a lot of people.
First and foremost, you cannot install any applications through the primary method of app installation, which is the App Store.
You also cannot use certain applications like iMovie (which is pre-installed) without an Apple Account.
MacOS will always prompt you in the Settings to sign in with iCloud. Opt into Betas, including Public and Developer Betas are not possible without an iCloud account.
The Apple land is miles better than the Microsoft land, which you aptly point out though.
d3Xt3r 3 days ago [-]
I've never seen it stated anywhere that the App Store is the primary method for macOS. Well, I could be wrong, maybe Apple does mention it somewhere, but pretty much every popular app publisher still publishes their .dmg file directly on their own website, much like most Windows developers.
At least I've never had to use the store in my 15+ years of using MacBooks, and I can't see myself using one anytime soon, unless Apple starts forcing you to (in which case I'll just stick to using homebrew).
rjh29 4 days ago [-]
You're also locked into their ecosystem for repairs, accessories etc. all of which are more expensive than anywhere else.
opan 4 days ago [-]
What kind of accessories? You can use cheap generic USB-C docks/hubs, depending on your needs. (macOS doesn't support DP MST so depending on # of screens you want to attach, you may need a more expensive dock, though it still doesn't have to be Apple-specific).
4 days ago [-]
aurareturn 3 days ago [-]
What $/month are you forced to buy for a Mac?
Neikius 4 days ago [-]
Does MBP run Linux? That would be the selling point for me ... But I guess I am not in a big group.
Also MBP is not really repairable at all.
pdpi 4 days ago [-]
> But I guess I am not in a big group.
Big enough that they specifically targeted that exact group with this laptop.
rjh29 4 days ago [-]
Probably a small group but worth more money.
Anonyneko 4 days ago [-]
M1 and M2 models run Asahi Linux, M3 and M4 don't run anything natively I think (but not entirely sure).
bestouff 4 days ago [-]
M1 and M2 run Linux but don't expect usable battery life, Thunderbolt output or a few other niceties.
Neikius 4 days ago [-]
Ah ofc I forgot. But iirc not everything works and battery life will probably suck, no? So not really a consideration in this case of price comparison. It is an option though :)
Personally I also can't stand the exterior design, albeit overall hardware of MBP is good. Guess if I land an old MBP this is what I'd do with it.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4 days ago [-]
How is Thunderbolt or display port alt mode support?
I will attempt to use Asahi as my daily driver once this is officially released.
Retr0id 4 days ago [-]
I do.
ErneX 4 days ago [-]
Not the M5.
adityamwagh 4 days ago [-]
It eventually will. But OP never asked about M5 specifically.
tredre3 4 days ago [-]
No, but OP was comparing the pricing of brand new laptops, so it was implied that they wouldn't be M1/M2 hence not supported by Asahi.
benoau 4 days ago [-]
Eventually in this context might be 4+ years from now.
hmry 4 days ago [-]
AFAIK Asahi development needs some hypervisor features for reverse engineering macOS drivers that only exist on M1-M3 and were removed on M4+. So yeah, it may be several years until they get support (or never, if nobody steps up to do it).
TiredOfLife 4 days ago [-]
On macbook you could emulate windows. Inside windows emulate linux. And it would still be much faster than this framework
dtj1123 3 days ago [-]
Name checks out.
manuhabitela 3 days ago [-]
To nuance this, the more you go up in specs, the more macbook become more expensive than comparable framework. Try to compare with a 64GB framework or 2TB framework for example.
One benefit of framework is you may not need to get storage, and just go use the one in your current laptop, saving around £200. And you might even try to source the RAM on your own to save a few more. But I admit that is somewhat difficult these days haha.
We should also consider that repairability, upgradability and open hardware/software support don't come for free and are features that are worth paying for.
altairprime 4 days ago [-]
Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook, so you should choose a price you want to spend and then evaluate if you prefer a Framework or a Mac at that price point. If your available spending power is too low for a Framework, you’re not getting a Framework — and, separately, if you want a Framework for some reason specific to the Framework and can afford one, then the price of a Mac isn’t relevant unless a Mac can satisfy that same reason.
angulardragon03 4 days ago [-]
> Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook
Unrelated, but never thought I’d see this kind of sentiment
pdpi 4 days ago [-]
It's specifically aimed at Framework, though, not PCs in general.
Framework is very much a premium brand (where the premium experience is centred on repairability/upgradeability), and don't have the economies of scale Apple do. It's natural that they'd end up being more expensive.
altairprime 4 days ago [-]
> not PCs in general
Yeah, I’m assuming just the one of the various tiers here that’s in the same bucket as MacBooks, and that we’re generally talking devices that are specialty-capable; such as media production or Linux development or gaming or what have you. If you lump the entire “portable screen bigger than nine? inches and with an in-box physical keyboard and pointer controller” market together, you’ll disregard ‘glorified word processors’ that cost a couple hundred bucks (before the RAM underproduction grift) in their own specialty niche. Framework isn’t competing there, right? (I could have missed something..)
stetrain 4 days ago [-]
> Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook
Imagine telling this to someone in 2010 or 2015.
Schiendelman 4 days ago [-]
It was 2012 when I realized a midrange Macbook (not Pro or Air) was actually cost competitive with my PC laptop, and switched. There have been some configurations since then!
thebruce87m 4 days ago [-]
Back then I’d probably tell you how they hold their value and were cheaper in the long run anyway.
altairprime 4 days ago [-]
No one was willing to hear it back then, but some guy named Buffett knew what was up :)
porphyra 4 days ago [-]
Also very sad that the M5 dominates the X7 358H in singlethreaded performance, not to mention the M5 Pro that dominates it in both single- and multithreaded performance.
simonjgreen 4 days ago [-]
This is largely driven by RAM prices, which is a real shame.
nerdix 3 days ago [-]
I bought a Thinkpad P16s with 64 GB of LPDDR5x ram in October 2024 for just over $1100.
64 GB of LPDDR5x will add $849 to the price of a Framework 13 Pro. Thats insane. I would love a future Framework 16 Pro but that will probably run $3500 for the configuration that I would want if memory and storage prices don't come down.
d3Xt3r 3 days ago [-]
You need to consider the upgradability aspect too - the next time you want to upgrade, you just need to buy a new mainboard, which would be considerably cheaper than buying a whole new laptop.
robocat 3 days ago [-]
A new mainboard that may need new memory. From another comment in thread:
I have 64GB of DDR4 in my current laptop, and replacing that with the same amount of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X is probably more expensive than the rest of the laptop itself.
And another:
I just had my mainboard die, and I was advised there currently isn't another mainboard in stock that works with my old DDR4 RAM
yonatan8070 4 days ago [-]
At least it's available in the UK
I've wanted to get a Framework for a long time now, but their lack of shipping to Israel (and active prevention of using Freight forwarders) has prevented me.
If they were willing to sell me the 13 Pro, I'd sell my Yoga Pro 7 in a heartbeat to replace with a 13 Pro
Sweepi 3 days ago [-]
If anything brakes on the Framework, you get all the docs you need to attempt a repair yourself, also spare parts are available, also, you can upgrade SSD/RAM/Mainboard and ports.
Apple: Every repair is Mainboard replacement and costs 70% of the used value of the Notebook. Upgrades are impossible. Have a nice day!
rjh29 4 days ago [-]
Comparing it to a MacBook misses the point. The reason to buy the framework is modularity, repairability, customisability. You can upgrade your CPU, add specific ports you want, change ram. You can't do any of that with a Mac.
rick_dalton 4 days ago [-]
In his presentation, Nirav compared it twice to a MacBook. Even saying they want to build the MacBook of the Linux world iirc. While I also agree with you, it’s still a valid comparison.
buu700 3 days ago [-]
It's not just a valid comparison; for some of us, it's the only comparison that matters. Upgradability and repairability are really nice features, but the machine still needs to otherwise be an upgrade over the one it's replacing.
If the Framework Pro holds up in reviews and works as well with Linux as claimed, it'll probably replace my M2 Air as a daily driver. If they add Dvorak as an option so I don't have to rearrange the keys myself, that will make the choice a slam dunk.
rjh29 3 days ago [-]
IMHO you should just stay with a Mac. The Framework Pro is the antithesis of a Mac, you can literally take your old framework's mainboard and network card and put them into the new chassis. Everything is replaceable. As long as they continue with that trend, it'll always be thicker and heavier than a Mac, and will always make compromises.
The video says that directly. They want to compete with MacBook, but people coming to Framework from Mac are attracted to the idea of owning their own computer and being able to customise it.
buu700 3 days ago [-]
I'm not sure I understand your pitch. Most of those are features, not bugs. Why would I give up all of that plus first-class Linux support just to save checks notes 0.35mm in thickness?
rjh29 3 days ago [-]
"Upgradability and repairability are really nice features, but the machine still needs to otherwise be an upgrade over the one it's replacing."
You seemed like upgradability and repairability are secondary things to you, whereas the framework makes them its primary asset. It's unlikely the Framework Pro will ever be an "upgrade" over the MacBook in other areas. Comparing it to the MacBook completely skims over its most important differentiator.
buu700 3 days ago [-]
Well that's also true, but "really nice features" still means the opposite of "terrible anti-features". All else being equal, I don't not want those things.
The more important part is first-class Linux support. From my perspective, macOS is basically discount Linux; it's tolerable, but only if the gulf between a MacBook and the next best hardware is wide enough to justify it.
Assuming the basics hold up well, upgradability and repairability likely push Framework Pro over the edge for me from merely "close enough" to "materially superior" on balance. I'd still be interested if it didn't have those features, but I'd also look more closely at alternatives and be less willing to pay a premium over the cost of an equivalently-specced MBP.
matthewkayin 4 days ago [-]
Yeah, it is a valid comparison, and assuming the quality is close to par with a macbook, I think it would be worth the extra cost.
I'm someone who doesn't want to go through a new laptop every other year. I've got an M1 mac right now. I've owned it for 5 years and could easily see myself getting another 5 years of use out of it. Only problem is, the hard drive is small, I can't upgrade it. It only has 16 GB RAM, which is fine for now, but I can't upgrade it. One of the 2 USB C ports gave out on me. I can't repair it.
If I had a laptop that I could repair and upgrade that also ran Linux? I would absolutely pay $2k for it - as long as the quality is good - because I think I would save money in the long term by making a laptop like that last a long time.
rjh29 4 days ago [-]
I use thinkpad (T14s now, X1 Carbon and X220 in the past). The hard drive is just m.sata and very easy to upgrade. You really can't upgrade the disk on a Mac?
vizzier 4 days ago [-]
not since like 2015, they're soldered on to the mainboard
4 days ago [-]
4k93n2 4 days ago [-]
how would they compare over 10-15 years though. with one you are able to swap out the motherboard when you want an upgrade and with the other you have to buy a completely new device.
then when it comes to repairing broken parts they are on opposite ends of the scale where apple actually go out of their way to make it harder for you to do that and its probably more expensive as well since only apple certified repair shops have access to certain parts
aembleton 4 days ago [-]
> the other you have to buy a completely new device.
You can sell the old Macbook and recoup a lot of the original investment.
levkk 4 days ago [-]
On top of it, intel chips are not competitive with apple silicon. Why buy a laptop that's 30% slower and uses more energy for the same price?
ezst 4 days ago [-]
30% slower than a M5 is a M3/M4. I will take that, thank, and not concern myself with MacOS or the thousand cuts of leaving x86.
If you're even making this comparison, buy the MBP or keep looking.
pjmlp 4 days ago [-]
Same in Germany, it ends around similar Apple and Thinkpad prices.
Sephr 4 days ago [-]
My main gripes:
- There's zero mention of the display technology, just "2.8K Touchscreen Display"
- The optional HDMI ("3rd Gen") adapter is only 4K 60hz, when the host chip has integrated Thunderbolt 4 which can output 4K 240Hz
12_throw_away 4 days ago [-]
In the announcement video, he says the display is "LTPS LCD" (I don't actually know if that's good or not)
rick_dalton 4 days ago [-]
They would have definitely advertised if it was something special like mini-LED but it seems to be a pretty standard display.
Sephr 4 days ago [-]
Judging by the graphics used in the launch event, it may actually be miniLED. Perhaps they aren't mentioning this so people don't compare their max 700 nits full screen brightness to other vendors' >1000 nits full screen brightness.
jonf3n 2 days ago [-]
Yes, it is HDMI version 2.0b -- they seem to try and hide that.
Really need TB5 and HDMI 2.1 at least!
jack_arleth 2 days ago [-]
HDMI 2.1 is basically blocked by the HDMI forum:
"... This isn’t some unsolved mystery buried deep in kernel code. The issue sits with the HDMI Forum, which controls the HDMI 2.1 specification. To implement it fully, you need to agree to licensing terms that clash hard with open-source licenses like GPL. ..."
Source: https://www.makeuseof.com/hdmi-forum-is-holding-back-linux-a...
So I can perfectly imagine a small hardware vendor like Framework being unable to get support for this.
Perhaps DP is a better solution for your use-case?
rglover 4 days ago [-]
Has anyone made the jump from a Mac to Framework as a daily driver? This is the first model to get my attention as a possible candidate for a full switch to Linux.
tuckerman 4 days ago [-]
I did last year after deciding that Apple's software just isn't for me anymore. I've always had a Linux desktop around (and used to daily drive Linux on a laptop years ago) so I was happy to consolidate on my preferred platform.
Biggest gripes I had are:
A) battery life (both during use and standby just kinda sucking on Linux in general compared to os x, not exactly framework specific but I did get used to how amazing my m1 pro for longevity)
B) the case looking nice but feeling a little flimsy
C) the speakers are pretty bad (though I did get turned on to easyeffects and there is a profile for the 13 which helped a bit)
D) macs completely spoiled me trackpad wise
It seems like they are taking a stab at all of these in some way and I'm excited to see how it goes, especially with so much being backwards compatible.
enochthered 3 days ago [-]
All the same gripes from me. None enough to be a deal breaker, but every once in a while I'll do something on my GFs macbook pro and be blown away by how solid it feels.
tuckerman 3 days ago [-]
I was pleased to see that The Verge's coverage of the event [1] was very positive on the feel of the laptop (even saying they got the hinge feel right like on the macbook which was the first thing I noticed being "not quite right" with the framework when I got it). I'm optimistic that this will be a big step in the right direction.
I use a MacBook Pro at work and a Framework 13 for personal use. The biggest downside to my Framework 13 is the low battery life; I’ve been getting only about 5 hours on Windows 11. Other than that, I like my Framework 13.
I am very excited about the Framework 13 Pro and it’s dramatically improved battery life. It’s unfortunate regarding RAM prices, though; I only paid $96 for 32GB of DDR5 RAM back in December 2023 when I ordered my Framework 13 (I bought my RAM on Newegg). It’s much more expensive today. I’d like to upgrade, but I can’t afford it at today’s RAM prices. With that said, because the RAM is still modular in the Framework 13 Pro, I could settle for a lower configuration and wait until a later date to upgrade the RAM.
unethical_ban 3 days ago [-]
If you live near a Microcenter, you can get 64GB for "only" $560 vs the $850 price on Framework's website.
Orygin 3 days ago [-]
Is it a LPCAMM2 module though?
unethical_ban 3 days ago [-]
Yes, a Crucial module. Though upon further inspection they might not be in stock. You have to check per store.
unethical_ban 4 days ago [-]
You could do what I'm considering doing, which is sell my old Framework at market price. The 64GB of RAM that I bought for $200 at the same time you did is now worth almost $800 on Amazon new.
gepardi 3 days ago [-]
Yeah, last June. I switched from an M1 Air to a 13”, 7640U.
I’m running Fedora. Other than some h265 and heic codec/file format issues, (I’ve had to convert videos and photos to more open codec/format), it’s been a great machine.
I miss the battery life of the M1 but I enjoy the comfort of knowing I can upgrade storage or fix anything I want when needed.
Other than personal web browsing, I do web development and tinkering with music creation (Bitwig).
I don’t think I’ll ever buy another Apple machine. I want to use devices that are repairable, support those companies, and use software that is open source or multi-platform without continuing subscriptions.
Now that I’m personally invested in Linux, I’d like to contribute to desktop app projects that are open source since now, I am also a user.
I have gradually been moving my digital life away from Google and Apple/iCloud.
somewhatjustin 4 days ago [-]
I was a Mac guy for 12+ years and switched to Linux on desktop + Framework about 2 years ago.
It takes time. On many dimensions, the Framework running Linux is laughably worse. I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
That being said, running Linux is very fun and can be productive if you choose a well-supported distribution and desktop environment. I landed on KDE Plasma and Fedora/Kununtu. It has been my daily driver and I see no reason to go back.
My gateway to Linux was buying an old Thinkpad T580 and messing around Arch Linux. If you’re on the fence, this may be a good place to start.
pxc 3 days ago [-]
> I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
In the days of S3, I never thought about it either. Ironically it's on my Mac that I have to remember to hibernate if I won't use my laptop for a week or whatever, because it'll die if I don't. It just happens to be that it was on a Mac on which I first tried "modern standby" features.
Anyway I feel you. This big battery life improvement is what has convinced me my next laptop can be a Framework.
gepardi 3 days ago [-]
I’ve been on Fedora Gnome but wonder if I’d like Plasma. I know that I can try it on a USB stick and I’ve also read that other people have made sure to install their operating system and their files on different partitions to make distro switching easier.
jjice 4 days ago [-]
I never used a Mac for my personal machine, but I've always used them as my work machines. I purchased the first generation of the Framework 13 AMD laptops And it's been my personal machine ever since. It's a damn fine machine and I love having full control over the components in my machine without some OEM nonsense for repairs that manufacturers like Dell try to pull (wouldn't accept non-OEM batteries for me in the past).
The battery life is the biggest negative compared to a MacBook, but that seems to be better now (though I doubt it, or anyone, can compete with the power/performance that Apple is putting out now).
The issue with my advice to you though is that I prefer Linux. And I would be running Linux at work if I could. Mac OS is fine, but I do prefer Linux as my main operating system.
If I didn't specifically want to run Linux, though, I would probably be using a MacBook, despite their lack of repairability.
All that said, I really love my framework and I don't intend on buying another machine any time soon, especially because I can upgrade my Framework 5 years from now (hopefully).
mshroyer 3 days ago [-]
I switched my main home computer to the Framework 13 (albeit on Windows) in 2021, after multiple weeks with my MBP sent away for AppleCare. I had some minor electrical issues with the original 11th gen Intel motherboard, but the 13th gen Intel board I've since upgraded to has been perfect.
It's by far the best primary computer I've owned. The tradeoffs in battery life, speaker sound quality, and so on didn't matter much for my use case, so I was happy to take them; but this new model seems to fix those issues too, so I think it'll appeal to a much wider audience.
varun_ch 4 days ago [-]
I have a MacBook Air M2. I bought a framework 13 last year right before the RAM shortage. I really wanted to love it but ended up returning it due to really bad battery life performance (NixOS). Still on the MacBook today, but heavily considering the new framework
Cider9986 4 days ago [-]
I'm on the same Mac as you. Have you tried Asahi Linux? I am running Asahi Remix with Gnome and couldn't be happier.
perks_12 3 days ago [-]
I did. I keep my charging cable close, or basically always attached. Battery life is abysmal. No idea why, had other Linux-based laptops before. Battery life was never good, but never this bad.
pshirshov 4 days ago [-]
I did. Linux obliterates Mac in agentic workflows.
cassianoleal 4 days ago [-]
In which way? Also, out of curiosity, are you running local LLMs? How's the general experience?
pshirshov 4 days ago [-]
1) Reliable sandbox
2) Nixos makes it easy for agents to research, debug and patch every aspect of the system, even applying kernel patches for the sake of debugging
3) CLI-oriented toolchains. Claude spent around 17 hours trying to set up xcode publishing and in the end just told me to press the button once Organizer pops up.
4) Containers
cassianoleal 3 days ago [-]
Thanks!
1. I won't be using NixOS so that point is moot to me.
2. Reliable sandbox I can get using Apple Containers. I won't argue that the Linux experience is better, because it is. Alone it wouldn't be a reason for me to switch but it does count towards it.
3. Fair enough, I haven't had that issue on the Mac but that may just be because I'm working with other kinds of tech or I have the things I need installed in a different way.
4. Same as 2, really - unless I misunderstood you.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I have been primarily a Mac user for longer than I care to admit and lately macOS and the ecossystem have been growing more hostile to me. I've been on the lookout for a Linux laptop that wouldn't feel like much of a downgrade and the Framework 13 might be it so I'm trying to get as much information as I can before I commit (especially money) to the switch.
pshirshov 3 days ago [-]
> apple containers
Virtual machines. I can't ask claude to figure out an issue on the hw host w/o falling back to per-action confirmations or giving it full unconditional access. When everything runs on one host I can organize controllable sandbox escapes for Claude and let it work in huge batches with minimal attention.
> won't be using
Well, that's your choice to avoid efficient agentic workflows
> misunderstood
There are no containers on mac, there are VMs hosting containers and subtractive sandbox filtering syscalls.
> get as much
FW 13 is great, FW 16 is a disaster.
cassianoleal 3 days ago [-]
> I can't ask claude to figure out an issue on the hw host w/o falling back to per-action confirmations or giving it full unconditional access.
Yeah that seems to confirm my suspicion that we have very different use cases. :)
> I can't ask claude to figure out an issue on the hw host w/o falling back to per-action confirmations or giving it full unconditional access.
Doesn't help me if the agent is efficient but I'm not. :D
> There are no containers on mac, there are VMs hosting containers and subtractive sandbox filtering syscalls.
I understand the tech. It serves the purpose I need from it.
> FW 13 is great, FW 16 is a disaster.
Thanks! I did take a quick peek at the 16 but I find it too big anyway.
jim33442 3 days ago [-]
Why do you need agents patching your kernel to enable efficient agentic workflows? Are those agents working on building a kernel? If they're just building some web backend or whatever, I don't see why any of this is needed.
jim33442 3 days ago [-]
I don't get #3 because all those CLIs work on Mac too. You're only forced to use Xcode if you're doing certain Apple platform dev, which does suck, but is there a better Linux-only alternative for that?
koiueo 3 days ago [-]
Containers are great. But on MBP I have rancher, and a beautiful mirror-like screen, and that enormous trackpad which can fit my momma's fat ass.
No technical argument will fit with the mindset of an average dev preferring MacBook.
bigyabai 3 days ago [-]
Tough sell, I can buy a Magic Trackpad and use it on any machine I want.
koiueo 3 days ago [-]
The /s should have been obvious.
I wouldn't try selling MacBooks to anyone. It's the worst popular device in terms of ergonomics, paired with OS that is incredibly hostile to developers and power users
jim33442 3 days ago [-]
Don't worry, they don't need help selling it
jwcooper 4 days ago [-]
I was on a Macbook Pro (multiple models for many years) and jumped to the 12th gen intel framework. It is fantastic laptop, just showing its age a bit (mostly battery life as I still have the smaller battery and 12th gen intel wasn't that great for battery).
I upgraded the screen and speakers, nothing else really needed changing throughout the years.
I was so tired of the bad docker performance on macOS that I went to a framework with Linux. Linux on a laptop (Fedora/Gnome specifically) worked so much better than I expected too.
I'm hopeful I can pre-order this new model as well.
iknowstuff 4 days ago [-]
Did you try OrbStack on macOS before switching? Wondering if it would still bother you
biehl 4 days ago [-]
The new container tool is also very nice on MacOS
commandersaki 4 days ago [-]
Tried once, not very fond of my FW 13" Intel 13th Gen 2. Mac superior in both hardware & software.
muyuu 4 days ago [-]
DHH spoke about precisely that move at length in his Lex Fridman interview. Which incidentally is the only full episode i have ever watched.
archon810 3 days ago [-]
Is there an option for a keyboard with dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End/Insert/Delete keys? I looked at a bunch of designs and didn't find any. If this is a developer-focused laptop, how can the keyboard be so developer-unfriendly? This is why I keep getting Lenovo laptops, they don't compromise on these keys.
3 days ago [-]
kombine 3 days ago [-]
I agree, ThinkPad T14 series has the perfect keyboard that I genuinely miss on my corporate HP laptop.
nmlt 3 days ago [-]
There are enough keys there, just configure some to your liking. That’s a software problem.
manuhabitela 3 days ago [-]
You certainly can't remap the Fn key on the software side. If the keyboard firmware allows to remap the Fn-layer it would be a dream :)
delamon 3 days ago [-]
Not really. PgUp, PgDown are missing. It is possible to configure software combination that would emulate them. But emulation is emulation.
advirol 3 days ago [-]
What I miss is a keyboard with dedicated keys for Home, End, Insert, Delete, PageUp, and PageDown. Sadly, this is still something only ThinkPads get right.
I really would like to give other laptops a chance but the substandard keyboards of most laptops are always holding me back.
manuhabitela 3 days ago [-]
yeah, why don't vendors just copy the damn thinkpad layout? It's a _pro_ line-up, we deserve a keyboard where _pros_ can directly use the keyboard shortcuts in their _pro_ apps :)
I wonder if the 13 pro uses qmk or similar for its keyboard firmware, I think the framework 16 does, so maybe? Being able to re-arrange on the hardware level the Fn-key related layer would make it the perfect laptop keyboard for me.
Otherwise, it rubs me the wrong way to pay 3 000€ for a premium device with a rather frustrating keyboard layout. But oh well, paying even more for macbook pros that have an even worse keyboard makes the pill easier to swallow I guess.
redditor98654 3 days ago [-]
Absolutely. What I had hoped was a proper 75% layout with proper full sized up and down arrow keys.
babylon5 4 days ago [-]
Nice upgrades, but no mention of ECC RAM, the single thing that I wanted from an upgrade for a decade? Why do chip makers refuse to take our money? :-P
to be fair, your money isn't as good as VC money for RAM at the moment
babylon5 4 days ago [-]
Are Nvidia using ecc ram? If not this should mean it is less supply constrained than regular ram.
vizzier 4 days ago [-]
I'm open to being wrong, but so far as I understand it ECC mostly lives at the controller level and shares the same DRAM chips across all forms of server memory (including non-ecc), which is why we see price increases across all sectors including consumer.
Those DRAM chips being the bottleneck that would require hard to build new silicon fabs to increase supply.
morserer 2 days ago [-]
Confused, doesn't all DDR5 support inline ECC by default? Or are you talking about the ability to enable it in the BIOS/OS?
cromka 2 days ago [-]
You mean On-die ECC. That's not the same as regular ECC.
Melatonic 4 days ago [-]
Do mobile CPU's and northbridges support ECC?
babylon5 3 days ago [-]
Handheld mobile no. Laptops could, but rarely/never do due to policy not technical requirements.
hecifato 4 days ago [-]
I’ve been a MacBook guy for almost a decade now, but I’ve been watching Framework since their first announcement. This is the most appealing Framework device I’ve seen.
The new display, battery life, the new Intel chips, and LPCAM2 memory all look great. I love my M1 MBP but Apple’s software quality has been rough the past year especially. I think this is also the first time the Framework 13 has officially supported Thunderbolt? Depending on how macOS 27 turns out I may seriously consider the 13 Pro as my next laptop. I’d slap Fedora Workstation on it and call it a day.
mshroyer 3 days ago [-]
I was lucky enough to be at the event and I can say the 13 Pro feels great in the hand. Overall chassis stiffness, typing (I guess due to the increased chassis stiffness), and the new touchpad all feel premium. Between that and the battery life, I think this really has a chance to win over a lot more current MBP users.
This is a very impressive release. At 17h to 20hr battery life on Linux, I'll finally be a able to solve my MacBook addiction. With my M2 MacBook running Asahi Linux or my work M3 MacBook running MacOS I easily get 10+hrs on battery.
I've made several "attempts" to jump ship from Apple hardware before, like the dell XPS "developer edition" which ships with Linux so all the hardware was supported out of the box; the hardware was OK, but the battery life was abysmal. If I can't get 8hr of battery on a machine battery it's just a portable desktop.
MarsIronPI 4 days ago [-]
Man, I want to get a Framework, but I'm held back by the lack of trackpoint. Yes, I know it's not going to happen officially, but I just can't see myself using a laptop without one. So, until someone figures out some mod or 3rd-party part I'm sticking with Thinkpads.
nhumrich 4 days ago [-]
Dell Precision used to have track points. Now the only holdout is Thinkpad. I sometimes wonder how much the track point itself keeps that product line successful.
That being said, thinkpads are almost as upgradeable as frameworks. The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
asimovDev 3 days ago [-]
I wonder if Lenovo has telemetry of some kind that tells them how many people use the trackpad and how often compared to the trackpad / mouse.
manuhabitela 3 days ago [-]
I'd bet a bunch of money that it's barely used anymore.
Only benefit of trackpoint nowadays is that you don't move your hand. Otherwise, it's all downsides compared to modern trackpads, especially haptic ones like here. It's less precise, less ergonomic. Nowadays I'd rather move my hand a few centimeters off, than put regular strain on my forearm and struggle being precise with the pointer.
And most thinkpad users, employees of big companies, don't care at all about the trackpoint. I'm pretty sure it's only kept for the thinkpad brand and to keep the vocal minority of us geeks pleased.
MarsIronPI 2 days ago [-]
I can tell you I use the mouse on my Thinkpad far more than on any other device I've used, all because it's frictionless and doesn't require me to move my hand.
internet_points 2 days ago [-]
I do too. But I'm starting to get some pain in my index finger, so I think it's probably time for me to move on. I hear Framework is shipping to my country now...
manuhabitela 2 days ago [-]
I agree the discomfort, or after a while, even the pain when using the trackpoint, is something very noticeable on modern thinkpads. I don't recall being this annoyed with the older thinkpads like T61, x200 and all. Or maybe we are just getting old and more fragile haha
MarsIronPI 3 days ago [-]
> The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
Hm, I wish they had scores for the X230 and older; I'd like to see how they compare. IMO they're better, if nothing else because you can replace RAM, SSD and battery without unscrewing the entire bottom.
nhumrich 3 days ago [-]
I don't think the difference between half the bottom and entire bottom would make a difference according to ifix it. It's more about:
1. Is it possible
2. Is it documented
3. Do you need proprietary parts
4. Without solder
brookritz 4 days ago [-]
same
jasonjmcghee 4 days ago [-]
Out of sheer curiosity, why do apple devices have astronomically longer battery life when sleeping? (How is the sleep so efficient?)
I was busy with work and didn't touch my personal laptop for a few weeks and it still had well over half the battery.
iknowstuff 4 days ago [-]
They write their own software. And firmware. Other OEMs can just beg their tier 1/2 suppliers to get their shit together and put components to sleep properly by making windows, drivers, and firmware work well together.
Also things like lpddr5x, ssd controller built into the SoC with cache in unified ram (instead of running a whole ass separate computer with its own ram on an m2 stick) etc
cogman10 4 days ago [-]
This is it.
Sleep is such a finicky thing which requires all parts of the system to do it right.
My desktop lost the ability to sleep because I guess the nvidia drivers have decided that you are wrong to want to put things to sleep.
trelane 4 days ago [-]
Exactly. This is precisely why I stopped buying Windows computers and started buying System76. Well that and the support.
Looks like Framework has started heading this direction too, which is nice to see.
jeffbee 4 days ago [-]
Great point about the storage. That is another place where the repairability meme is really not helping. Moving the storage controller up into the host SoC is a good idea and the PC world should adopt it.
Apple's storage controller is not even a PCIe peripheral internally, so it's saving power and latency cutting out that interface, even when it's active.
Plasmoid2000ad 4 days ago [-]
I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around how this could work for PCs today.
I'm guessing Intel/AMD could integrate a single SSD controller that OEMs could use for a specially socketed SSD?
I'm not familiar enough with SSD controllers - but what limits would this introduce. I'm thinking they can't be totally generic - with any NAND chips, any layout, 1-4 chips and TLC or QLC NAND - any capacity etc. It strikes me it would be limiting - you would become restricted to a a small subset of SSDs, maybe not forwards compatible with newer NAND chips etc.
I'd think only the minority of PC Laptops would make sense to have this - ones with soldered SSDs - and I don't know many of these. So Intel/AMD would need a big push to integrate any controller. Maybe Windows ARM laptops, if the controller makes a big enough difference, will do this. I'm curious now if any Snapdragon devices are doing this already.
jeffbee 4 days ago [-]
I think it's just a vertical integration thing. They know what's in the machine and they can make sure that their suspend path puts every peripheral to sleep. Linux has no idea what's in your machine and there may be some device in there somewhere that freaks out if the machine goes to sleep without saying goodnight. Even a 50mW draw will destroy the suspend power budget. Chromebooks have similar vertical integration with respect to ChromeOS and they also enjoy long sleep life. Hypothetically an integrator like Framework can also guarantee this but I can't vouch for it being true, and they would not have any control over Ubuntu updates after the laptop is delivered to the customer.
Just to beat my favorite dead horse, this is why the insistence on SO-DIMMs "BEcAuse it's rEpAIrAble" has wrecked the reputation of a lot of laptops. DDR on a stick is fundamentally hostile to sleep power draw. Soldered-down LPDDR memory has always been massively superior for energy savings, and LP-CAMM finally solves the issue.
Rohansi 4 days ago [-]
How does soldering memory help reduce sleep power consumption vs. using a socket? What is different other than how they are physically connected to the board?
jeffbee 4 days ago [-]
It's not the form factor itself that is the problem. LPDDR is more efficient for various reasons and cannot be on a DIMM. It physically will not work with a socket. That is the problem that LP-CAMM solves: LPDDR but still removable.
Koffiepoeder 4 days ago [-]
You did not answer the question.
jeffbee 4 days ago [-]
Did I not? I'm trying my best here. The question is sort of off-target, though. What I am trying to say is: 1) DDR uses more power than LPDDR; 2) LPDDR cannot work on a DIMM socket, because of its lower voltage signals, and other reasons; 3) SO-DIMMs always contain the higher power DDR; QED) if you insist on SO-DIMMs, then you have to spend more energy.
Koffiepoeder 4 days ago [-]
Rohansi was basically asking 'why', you keep on reiterating that DDR uses more power than LPDDR, but fail to answer why this is the case. Is it clock speed? Is it voltage? Is it a protocol/specification difference? 'various reasons' is not an answer.
jeffbee 4 days ago [-]
LPDDR is very different from DDR so I don't really feel like diving into it in this tiny box. It has its own oscillators so the CPU doesn't have to clock it while asleep; it adaptively refreshes less often according to temperature; during self-refresh the cells are charged to a lower voltage that wouldn't really work for high-speed I/O but works fine for retention.
ua709 4 days ago [-]
There is no physics based reason why it couldn't work. If the industry really wanted to do it they could. But they don't. The primary reason is LPDDR just has too many pins. A DDR5 SODIMM has 262 pins and is an unwieldy beast. LPDDR5 has 644 pins.
LPCAMM2 really shows the trade-offs. It adds a lot of bulk and cost, and repairability hasn't been valued high enough by the market to cover that overhead for most consumers. That's why Micron exited the market they played a big part in founding.
Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby": the CPU is running in a low power mode (not powered off like "old" S3 sleep), can be turned on periodically and can turn on other devices even when the computer is "sleeping".
My Zen2 based Lenovo laptop has 6-7 hours of battery when doing basic tasks in both Windows and Linux, but sleep on Linux lasts a week while on Windows it's empty in 24 hours.
cheema33 4 days ago [-]
> Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby"...
And that is OK, as long as they provide a way for you to disable it. I do not want my laptop to be doing things when I put it in sleep mode. Nothing at all. Save battery life above all else when sleeping. But Microsoft does not appear to provide a way to do that. At least none that I can see.
iknowstuff 4 days ago [-]
Macs have that too, just implemented well. In addition, CPUs with connected standby don’t have the normal sleep so even on linux they run in connected standby. Maybe its less buggy in your case? Consider yourself lucky, lots of people encounter problems with sleep on linux
trelane 4 days ago [-]
> lots of people encounter problems with sleep on linux
Yeah, because they buy a Windows laptop, slap Linux on it, and expect it to work.
OSX sucks even more by this metric; it won't even install!
tikkabhuna 3 days ago [-]
I was looking into hibernation on my Framework 13 with Ubuntu. Debian doesn't support it with SecureBoot enabled. Now you might say "just disable SecureBoot", but that is a whole new concept to understand.
I've found suspend performance has improved since upgrading to a kernel that supports the AMD 7640U NPU cores. I have no concrete evidence of that though.
I'm happy to accept poorer sleep performance to have a repairable laptop and Linux OSS (with good support), but I wouldn't say its problem free.
jim33442 3 days ago [-]
Well if you buy a Linux laptop and slap Windows on it, sleep will most likely work. Unfortunately Microsoft got preferential treatment.
TiredOfLife 4 days ago [-]
And the funny thing is that with Windows 10 they completely abandoned all the software that could take advantage of connected standby
Neikius 4 days ago [-]
Trying to reduce idle power use of a simple esp32 based project I did a while back... Yeah it is indeed tricky. Apple having full control of their hardware supply chain, firmware and software helps a ton. And PC standardization issues do no good either.
On the other hand framework is actually in a good position to do something about it. Similar to valve. I think they do have more control than a regular PC vendor when also using Linux ad they have a very limited portfolio of devices and can actually upstream software fixes.
DanHulton 3 days ago [-]
Oh my god, yet _another_ "developer-focused" laptop with full-sized left/right arrow keys, which are an absolutely miserable experience to actually use.
How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
( Yes, I know they used full-sized keys for a while, I moaned and cursed them at the time as well.)
trostaft 3 days ago [-]
?
Sorry, I've never seen this perspective, why do you want the smaller ones? The small arrow keys on my MacBook are one of my least favorite parts of the keyboard.
bschwindHN 3 days ago [-]
You want the smaller ones so you can easily locate the arrow key cluster without having to look. The empty space above the left and right arrow keys is a good tactile indicator that your fingers are on the correct location.
bigyabai 3 days ago [-]
The modern Thinkpad arrow cluster spoils me; most other laptops leave me reaching for a convenient pgup/pgdn key that doesn't exist.
I'd much rather see something like that, going back to Fn+up/dn makes me feel like a caveman.
stavros 3 days ago [-]
Real developers use hjkl, which, if this keyboard uses QMK like their previous ones, you can just remap to actual arrows (with a modifier key). I am only slightly joking.
kristianp 3 days ago [-]
I agree with you that having full height left-right and half-sized up-down is a pain, because of the inconsistency.
The problem I have with laptop keyboard is that the arrow key height is too small, and the cluster itself is too crowded to sit my fingers on comfortably when using arrows. I want the arrow cluster to have full sized keys.
manuhabitela 3 days ago [-]
> How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
Thinkpads also do this right, and have a way better keyboard layout than macbooks actually :)
lawn 3 days ago [-]
A developer-focused laptop shouldn't even need arrow keys.
It's weird what people prioritize.
sosodev 4 days ago [-]
TIL LPCAMM2 exists. What an awesome solution to allow memory replacements while meeting all of the other requirements for laptops.
Spunkie 4 days ago [-]
Well to be fair they only kind of quasi-exist for consumers right now. As far as I can tell Crucial was providing the only consumer accessible lpcamm2 modules on the market right now.
Crucial is certainly the only option that comes up looking on amazon or newegg right now. Lenovo has some OEM modules but they are obviously marketed as replacement parts to just their laptops, not sure how the warranty and support for them would be outside a lenovo product.
But the Crucial brand was unceremoniously sacrificed by Micron to the AI gods at the beginning of this year. So will these lpcamm2 modules even be available once current stock runs out? The 64gb module is already sitting at $1000 on newegg.
Samsung is making lpcamm2 modules but no telling when those will actually hit the market and be accessible.
kube-system 4 days ago [-]
It doesn't meet all of them. AMD considered it for Strix Halo but said it didn't meet their latency requirements.
wmf 4 days ago [-]
LPCAMM2 latency should be the same as soldered. The problem is that Strix Halo wants a L-shaped memory layout and LPCAMMs are straight.
iamcalledrob 4 days ago [-]
I really wish this had a 4K display option. As someone who dislikes fractional scaling.
I'm clinging on to my older Thinkpad X1 because the 4K display is so good.
SomeoneOnTheWeb 4 days ago [-]
Doesn't it work perfectly with a 2880px-wide display with 2x scaling?
iamcalledrob 4 days ago [-]
It just, just not enough real estate!
tuetuopay 4 days ago [-]
As a heavy fractional scaling user, as long as the display has enough DPI, it's a non-issue. At my last job I was happily running 1.35 scaling, and I run my TV at 1.5 scaling. Make sure you're using a sane compositor, which excludes DWM; most Wayland compositors should run just fine.
iamcalledrob 3 days ago [-]
Glad it works for you. It runs fine, but details become blurry as they get spread across pixels,
I do UI design, so I find it important to see things in full fidelity (no pixel smudging).
tuetuopay 3 days ago [-]
Well I'd argue it'd help you to make designs that don't require perfect pixel alignments to look good, the same way developers should run crappy 10 year old computers. But that's the sadistic way. Anything graphics-related does require 1:1 display.
However, to be fair, that's only at lower DPIs smudging's an issue. Anything retina-ish and integer scaling loses all meaning. I'm typing this on a 15" 4K laptop on 1.75 scaling with HN set to 120% zoom. At those DPIs, it does not matter at all. I adjust most websites zoom level because a lot of them think the content must breathe, while I think I should not fiddle with my scroll to read a paragraph.
dismalaf 4 days ago [-]
Forget fractional scaling, just keep scale at 100% and increase font and icon sizes.
Groxx 4 days ago [-]
Which is something like 2/3rds successful in my experience (I use this daily), and requires tons of fiddling to get things looking even mostly reasonable (lots of misalignments and funky padding otherwise). And lots of applications don't respect it and you're stuck with too-small controls when it fails. Which makes it a noticeably-worse success rate than fractional scaling, afaict.
I still use it because the end result on some of my most-used applications is nicer, and it seems to be slightly-noticeably better performing (on a high framerate screen). So it's good enough for my tastes. But it really isn't anything I'd call "successful".
zackify 4 days ago [-]
on omarchy ill switch with super + / and use 1x, 1.6x and 2x when needed.
1.6x works surprisingly well now, that wasnt the case a couple years ago
cassianoleal 4 days ago [-]
The whole page advertises how well this runs Linux, but then…
> The side-firing speakers are tuned with Dolby Atmos® to deliver clear, balanced audio on Windows
Kirby64 4 days ago [-]
Don't forget literally all the battery values are specified as Windows 11.
yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago [-]
Not literally all; they say
> 7 days
> Standby without charging
> Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
(I'm unimpressed with listing all the "active" battery life listings with Windows, mind; I just want us to be precise in our criticisms.)
olejorgenb 3 days ago [-]
I don't want "standby", I want suspend where the only power usage is keeping the ram alive...
IshKebab 4 days ago [-]
Can you really blame them for that?
yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago [-]
Yes. Easily. If you proclaim up front that a device is "Linux first", it seems reasonable to suggest that maybe you should tell us about its performance on Linux.
IshKebab 4 days ago [-]
Yeah I mean I don't think they want to say because the numbers are going to be bad, and it's probably not within their power to fix it.
They should probably give the Linux numbers after the Windows ones at least tbf, even if they are bad.
snarkconjecture 4 days ago [-]
I am much more likely to fault them for omitting important information specifically to hide a weak point of the product rather than out of laziness.
IshKebab 3 days ago [-]
It's not a weak point of their product; it's a weak point of Linux.
yjftsjthsd-h 3 days ago [-]
It's really not. Leaving aside Android because that has a very different userspace, Chromebooks have excellent battery life even when not running ChromeOS, because they have proper drivers and someone actually bothered optimizing for power efficiency. And there are plenty of cases of people switching a machine from Windows to some Linux distro and significantly improving battery life (see elsewhere in this comment section). So no, if a given laptop is described as the vendor as "Linux first" and has poor battery life, that's on them.
aljgz 4 days ago [-]
If you are an avid Linux user, you should know that this kind of Criticism is not on point.
Battery life? Should they share all possible config combinations? Should they share the most power-saving setting (and then be blamed for sharing numbers that almost no one gets to reproduce?)
As a Linux user on an AMD FW my battery life is good enough (7ish hours of work), and I never felt I need to tune it further from the OOB Fedora Kinoite.
ua709 4 days ago [-]
They should share the battery life numbers of default shipping configuration while running Linux with whatever settings they want. Then publish the configuration and settings. Same as every other manufacturer.
In my experience, Linux support on Framework is worse than on a typical ThinkPad, and they don't have much interest in contributing to the ecosystem like System76 does. They still make good products, I'm just very unimpressed with the Linux marketing.
dangus 3 days ago [-]
For me it’s very much “it just works” with pretty much every distro I try. I had to configure zero hardware. How much better am I supposed to expect it to be?
They financially sponsor Linux/OSS projects and give them laptops to test on. What more do you want them to do?
They don’t have a zillion employees like Lenovo who is the #1 volume computer company in the world.
Finally, IMO, System76 is a much worse example because they aren’t focusing on the things Linux needs to grow. Linux doesn’t need contributions like their their silly Ubuntu reskin distro to be popular on the desktop. Instead, Linux needs a company making compatible hardware that is good, attractive hardware that will stop people from buying a MacBook instead.
The System76 lineup is a complete mess of white label Clevo systems. They have no business offering 8 different laptop models. That just tells potential customers “wow, buying a Linux laptop is a lot more complicated than buying a Mac!”
tredre3 4 days ago [-]
I agree with you, it would have been nice if their speakers had dedicated hardware to drive them instead of the magical dolby software.
All laptop speakers sound like shit on Linux. I'm sure people will reply with their anecdotal evidence, or pretend that it's not that bad once you have a good EQ. But we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I've spent hours trying to get multiple laptop speakers at least half as good as they sound on Windows. No success. And I'm talking thinkpads, dell xps, the usual linux go-tos, not some exotic stuff.
muyuu 4 days ago [-]
Maybe you have very niche needs, but for most of us speakers on laptops are never great and they're not really there for that. Reminds me of people shopping for high performance scooters. I mean, you're riding a scooter... it's not meant for that.
TiredOfLife 3 days ago [-]
You can record the applied effect and then use it in linux
moffkalast 4 days ago [-]
Well you know how it is on linux, one wrong move and pulseaudio needs restarting lol.
nine_k 4 days ago [-]
Who does still run pulseaudio when pipewire exists?
moffkalast 4 days ago [-]
People using LTS releases, who do you know... actual work instead of just compiling your kernel over and over.
nine_k 3 days ago [-]
An LTS releases that are soo old usually run on servers, where pulseaudio is not really a thing.
My distro's compile farm compiles kernels for me (thanks guys!), and switched to pipewire years ago.
jampekka 4 days ago [-]
Edit: This is incorrect, as pointed out below.
Pulseaudio still does the device juggling etc on most systems even when there's a pipewire backend.
sph 4 days ago [-]
Wrong. Pipewire is pulseaudio-compatible, and the device juggling is done by wireplumber
yjftsjthsd-h 4 days ago [-]
Are you sure? On every device I could quickly reach (Gentoo, NixOS, Pop OS, all with vanilla/default pipewire configs), `ps aux |grep -i pulse` only turns up pipewire-pulse.
rjh29 4 days ago [-]
At least pulseaudio is pretty much dead now and we have pipewire.
That is a problem that Linux has, but this is actually one time that it really isn't. Pipewire is flat-out better than pulse, while including sufficient compatibility that it really does just supersede the thing.
rjh29 4 days ago [-]
Yeah pretty funny when apps are using alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire all on the same system!
vbezhenar 3 days ago [-]
This page is confusing and maybe even misleading. They write "Linux first". Few paragraphs later they write: 20 hours, Netflix 4K streaming, 250nit brightness, 30% volume, Windows 11. Why didn't they stream Neflix on Ubuntu they ship with?
Overall it looks awesome. I just bought Thinkpad T14s upgrading from the same model of older generation, I wish Framework would expand its sales coverage, probably would buy it without second thought if it was available in my country without overseas shipping and customs tax hurdles.
ben-schaaf 3 days ago [-]
> Why didn't they stream Neflix on Ubuntu they ship with?
It's not exactly impressive to say you can stream 20 hours of 540p video. Netflix DRM is awful for Linux users.
Though I agree it would have been better to show a benchmark of youtube or similar for Linux.
sunbum 3 days ago [-]
Netflix doesnt support 4k streaming on Linux.
Orygin 3 days ago [-]
They should have tested something else, like a raw H265 4K video or something.
Can't imagine "pro" users would be amazed by the battery life of watching netflix.
3 days ago [-]
Mashimo 3 days ago [-]
I bet the linux drivers are not fully done yet and will mature after release.
vincentkriek 3 days ago [-]
4k on linux is not possible due to drm I think?
iamdamian 4 days ago [-]
For me, this was an immediate buy.
Everything about this is what I've been looking for in a Linux laptop. (Also, how refreshing is it to not have to think hard about how much RAM you might need over the next few years because you know you can always upgrade it later?)
nhumrich 4 days ago [-]
Or, another way to think about this: "buy more ram when it becomes more affordable"
niteshpant 4 days ago [-]
These are cool laptops. But, after getting a decent config (32gb ram, 1tb ssd, 7 series chip), the price is ~$2300. At that point, a MacBook Pro seems like a better choice. I'd not want to develop on anything less than that config. The selling point seems to be the Linux + Framework brand + highly customizable machine you can actually own
I've always wondered if these laptops can scale beyond the enthusiast group. If so, how?
vizzier 4 days ago [-]
14" macbook pro with those specs is ~2100. 200 dollar delta for repair-ability seems acceptable to me.
stavros 3 days ago [-]
I'd pay $200 to run Linux. The repairability is a bonus.
CarVac 3 days ago [-]
It's $200 cheaper than that for that configuration with Linux instead, only $2100.
stavros 3 days ago [-]
Oooh, no contest then. I'm definitely getting one to replace my previous Framework.
beepbooptheory 4 days ago [-]
I am sure many will jump in here to talk about the upgradability story, but for me personally I do not think of Macbooks as a serious alternative either way. Even if I could get over not being able to replace my hard drive or RAM, I would still have to be OK using a proprietary OS I can't control, designed by people who just want to keep extracting my money ultimately.
Having something called an "App Store" on my personal laptop I can't remove.. I'd deal with having 4gb of RAM before I lived that reality.
m463 4 days ago [-]
This is a tough one because a macbook pro hooks you into the apple ecosystem and makes apple money. Let alone the macbook neo.
This is like the really cheap televisions that harvest your data for profit.
How can you compete/compare against vizio if it makes more on your data than on the television?
jim33442 3 days ago [-]
So I got a 13" MacBook Air recently. It didn't require me to log into iCloud, but I did cause I wanted some things synced, which is free cause I'm not uploading photos. I don't buy anything from the Mac App Store cause why. The OS lets me run anything I want on it. The hardware technically doesn't care what OS it runs, though nothing else really works unless you count Asahi. In what way am I locked into generating them more money?
vvpan 4 days ago [-]
But you can upgrade it later by swapping parts and not buying a new machine, so it should be cheaper in the long run.
pxc 3 days ago [-]
Is Framework open to an OLED panel option in the future? I have an eye disease that makes extremely high contrast and extremely deep blacks very helpful to me, since it means I can get good contrast with less total light. I can still read LCD displays well enough, but as my eyes worsen, that may not be true.
Since Framework has a great track record with display upgradability, just an indication that there is serious interest in OLED options in the future would be enough to sell me.
So if anyone at Framework is reading this: is there any opposition inside framework to OLED? Any fundamental constraints that make OLED panels unlikely for the next several years?
manuhabitela 4 days ago [-]
Man, this looks really, really impressive. It basically solves every issue we could find to the framework 13. Can't wait for the reviews.
Accepting the prices of the ram shortage era is still painful, but even with the 64gb option, here in France it's still a great deal compared to similarly configured premium thinkpads or macbook pros.
sandreas 4 days ago [-]
Here is a more explanatory video what's new and how it looks.
Mainly just a trade-off because of because of the bigger battery (but it sounds like they'll sell you the bottom chassis pieces as well).
cbsmith 3 days ago [-]
Yup. Sounds right. Interestingly though, you can use the new input cover with the older frames.
pveierland 3 days ago [-]
I'm amazed looking at the upgrade kit. It's everything you need to go from the old 13" to the Pro; including chassis, display, battery, keyboard etc - listed at $255. That's an instant buy from me.
Agreed - $255 sounded too good to be true. Fingers crossed it doesn't end up too crazy, because that chassis looks good!
arximboldi 3 days ago [-]
Same... I bought a 13 last year, super happy with it but was kind of sad after seeing this release because this new design is just so much better and addresses all the concerns I had with the machine... until I saw this.
Fuck I do love these guys! Give me a little hope in humanity.
Will definitely buy this new chasis as soon as I can!
chrysoprace 3 days ago [-]
I'll be excited to buy one of these (or the newer iteration) if component prices ever return to pre-2025 levels. AUD$800 for 32GB RAM is insanity (which is of course not within their control, but my purchasing impulses are - at least for now).
dehugger 4 days ago [-]
A laptop without a unified memory model is categorically incapable of being the "ultimate developer laptop". Framework already have Strix Halo machines, I don't know why they felt the need to hamstring this thing with Intel.
Sephr 4 days ago [-]
Where are you getting that this doesn't have a unified memory model? This laptop uses an iGPU with shared memory.
nfriedly 4 days ago [-]
FWIW, the ordering page lets you also choose AMD Ryzen 350 / HX 370. It's not the Strix Halo chips you're hoping for, but it is something.
ColonelPhantom 4 days ago [-]
Hilariously, those AMD chips are way behind the Intels in terms of memory.
First off, I believe that Intel has its memory far more "unified". AMD typically has a stricter VRAM/RAM 'tradeoff' setting that does not exist on Intel in the same way to my knowledge. (See how on Strix Halo systems, there is a thing about "allocating" 96 GB to the GPU, which seems to be needed sometimes but prevents the CPU from accessing that memory.)
Secondly, the Panther Lake board has LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 memory at 7467 MT/s, while the AMD boards are stuck with DDR5 SODIMMs at a meagre 5600 MT/s. In other words, the Intel board gets a third more memory bandwidth!
blm126 4 days ago [-]
I’ve got the Framework desktop with strix halo. You can reserve memory for the GPU, but it’s straightforward at least on Linux to have the GPU dynamically grab memory as needed. I’ve got my VRAM set to 512MB and regularly use 120GB+for AI stuff.
dehugger 4 days ago [-]
Really? Because I did look through the entire spec list they provided and didnt see any non-Intel. Didnt get to the order screen since it was behind a waitlist sign up. I agree, that is better then nothing.
pdpi 4 days ago [-]
It's now new, it's the motherboard they already ship with the regular FW13. Because the bits are mostly interchangeable, they just let you order the FW13 Pro with the AMD motherboard.
dehugger 4 days ago [-]
Awesome, thats good news. I have a FW Desktop with the 395+ in it and have generally been impressed with it. Hoping that will eventually make its way into these machines.
unethical_ban 4 days ago [-]
Quick search shows LPCAMM2 at 7500MT/s is about 120GB/s, which seems about on par with M4 base and a bit better than DDR5.
BTW as an AMD fanboy and stockholder, Intel's latest generation of CPUs is quality.
new_user55 4 days ago [-]
I will guess for linux. Most out of the box linux laptops I saw were intel based. I guess open source support of intel is best among others in the industry. Even in my current thinkpad first thing I did was to replace its wifi module from realtek to intel (realtek was always hanging/dropping connection etc).
femiagbabiaka 4 days ago [-]
Why?
bestouff 4 days ago [-]
Running local AI requires unified memory.
luyu_wu 4 days ago [-]
The iGP can access shared memory the same as with any modern system. I'm confused where you got this idea from.
dehugger 4 days ago [-]
There is a huge difference between on-die and off-die memory. Where that shared memory is located matters immensely.
Rohansi 4 days ago [-]
Assuming you're referring to Apple Silicon's memory bandwidth, that is not necessarily because the memory is on-die. The bandwidth comes from having more channels to access memory. This gives the SoC a wider bus to increase throughput vs. your typical x86 system with two channels. For whatever reasons Intel/AMD decided that two channels is all the typical consumer chips can support now so it's on them.
Melatonic 4 days ago [-]
On laptops right? Weve seen more channels for years elsewhere
Rohansi 4 days ago [-]
Yes, on laptops, but even on most desktops now too. Higher number of channels is getting more limited to server systems.
dehugger 4 days ago [-]
Ah I see, thanks for breaking it down.
ColonelPhantom 4 days ago [-]
You mentioned Strix Halo, which also has off-die memory. Strix Halo does have a real advantage from its wider memory bus (four channels for 256 bit instead of 128 bit), but Strix Point is equivalent-ish to Intel's platforms like Panther Lake or Arrow Lake in terms of memory setup.
In fact, Intel also had Lunar Lake, which had on-package memory. However, it was still limited to 128-bit dual-channel, so there weren't really many performance benefits; it did however help with power efficiency.
dehugger 3 days ago [-]
I appreciate everyone's corrections here, my apologies. I clearly misunderstood the situation.
fulafel 4 days ago [-]
Macs or other competing systems don't have on-die memory.
(Except for the caches, which everybody has)
kcb 4 days ago [-]
Nonsense, Apple has on package memory and the primary reason for that is overall packaging and layout not performance
sdwvit 4 days ago [-]
It is much slower, but still possible to run on ram
Rohansi 4 days ago [-]
There is no VRAM in this laptop so how is it not unified? The CPU and GPU both share the same memory.
TiredOfLife 3 days ago [-]
Good thing that all 13" Frameworks have unified memory
dismalaf 4 days ago [-]
> hamstring this thing with Intel.
Have you missed all the recent Intel news or something?
_bobm 4 days ago [-]
What are the news recently?
dismalaf 4 days ago [-]
Well, Intel was kind of in the dumps because their process fell behind. They didn't bet on EUV and got leapfrogged by TSMC and Samsung who did use ASML's EUV technology.
They eventually got on the EUV train and were the first customer to receive ASML's current state of the art machine which they call high-NA EUV. Intel's 18A process is the first to use this machine as part of the manufacturing process, Panther Lake uses this process so now they're right back to being SOTA.
All the news about them (stock price movements, theories about them going bankrupt, Panther Lake, etc...) for the last 2 years has essentially been people betting on whether or not they can successfully incorporate SOTA ASML machines into their manufacturing.
lawn 4 days ago [-]
Gotta be honest, I have. I'm still living in a world where AMD is superior, but that may not be the case today?
okanat 4 days ago [-]
For laptops Lunar lake and Panther lake addressed many issues and brought x86 power consumption to Apple Silicon levels.
nmlt 3 days ago [-]
Is that true? Many other comments in this thread are saying Apple Silicon has something like 30% better efficiency/battery life.
dismalaf 3 days ago [-]
Apple Silicon had a process node advantage over the Core 100 and 200 series due to having a better allocation with TSMC.
Now Intel's process node is also SOTA and on par with TSMC 2nm so they should be more or less equivalent and the only differences down to what set of compromises they make in the design of the chips.
awongh 4 days ago [-]
How is ubuntu support for touchscreens these days?
How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness, and for native-feeling integration with ubuntu?
I am, naturally, a bit skeptical that touchscreen UI would be any good in linux.
bigyabai 4 days ago [-]
> How is ubuntu support for touchscreens these days?
GNOME supports multitouch gestures, and the GTK4 toolkit is overall very touch-native. It strikes a nice balance between overpadded and touch-accessible, IMO: https://www.gnome.org/
> How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness
With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
awongh 4 days ago [-]
> GNOME supports
I've heard that there's *support* -but is the experience of having a touchscreen on an ubuntu device actually usable and good?
For example some random GUI app you're likely to use on ubuntu is the experience not broken?
I guess Chrome is the first thing that comes to mind.
bigyabai 4 days ago [-]
My only issue with Chrome on touchscreen was the lack of 1:1 scroll/zoom gestures. As a Firefox user it was something that I got used to, but I just updated Chromium and apparently that's been fixed now too.
Besides that, it all works about as well as you'd expect it to. You can drag the window around by the tab bar and tap-and-hold to pull up a context menu.
akdev1l 4 days ago [-]
>With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
Come on lol. I have a couple steam decks and both are really clunky.
Most applications are not built using GTK4 nor Qt6 for that matter.
On my steam deck the keyboard never pops up by itself so I have to use a key combination and it feels like I am moving a ghost mouse around the place (rather than proper touch screen support)
I ran gnome on the deck for a while but anyway the on-screen keyboard provided by the gnome sucked so bad that I gave up (sucked as in, it groups all the keys around the center of the screen tightly together and very small)
I also have an M1 iPad Pro. No comparison because those issues simply don’t exist on iOS.
bigyabai 4 days ago [-]
I don't know what to tell you. I'm running it on the desktop with a drawing tablet, Magic Trackpad and oodles of apps, and it's not noticeably different from the stability of iPadOS.
My touchscreen laptop is closing in on being a decade old (i7 6600u) and the worst thing I can say about the experience is that it VSyncs down to 30fps during more taxing animations (just like my iPad does).
> Any gesture functionality is dependent on the software you are running. This includes both, the application (e.g. Firefox) and the desktop environment (e.g. GNOME). The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
I love Linux but no need to embellish the current state imo
I am glad that it is working really well for you though
bigyabai 3 days ago [-]
> There is a whole section on touchscreen annoyances from the Linux Surface project
Taking a quick look, all of the things they list are basically reiterating what I've already said vis-a-vis Wayland:
You should make sure that you are running a Wayland desktop session [...]
It is important, that your applications run on Wayland as well.
akdev1l 3 days ago [-]
> The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
Yeah no. All of this depends on everything up to the application.
A gtk2 application will have no support for anything. A GTK3 application running on xwayland will have poorer support as well. And anyway most applications just treat the touchscreen as an invisible pointer as it says there.
Just to give an example of some basic thing that doesn’t work reliably: you can’t reliably use a long press gesture. In most apps that will be equivalent to holding the left click (aka does nothing but a long click). On iOS you will get a contextual menu to select/format text or whatever. (You can find a real report of this issue here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/crLHZhHkuM - “how do I right click using the touchscreen?” from barely 6 months ago)
Your claim that this is an equivalent experience to an iPad is just false.
I’ve been around long enough to remember setting up TouchEgg, the situation is better now but still not equivalent at all.
Anyway originally I wanted to reply to provide balance to your take so casual readers wouldn’t install Linux on their tablets and expect iPadOS. I think that has been sufficiently achieved by this comment chain, readers can choose which side to take :-)
Cheers!
bigyabai 3 days ago [-]
I remember TouchEgg too, I did use x11 for a few years. The experience back then was not comparable to an iPad, but the modern Wayland session is.
If you're going to fight over edge-case consistency, then at least be consistent. People build iPad apps with horrible custom widgets that block context menus too. They run "real" software in QEMU and iTerm that truly has no support for any of their default HIDs. Linux has more software to support, by nature it's going to have the larger number of inconsistent experiences. I don't think that's a fair basis of comparison, though.
Strictly speaking, I think KDE and GNOME's Wayland stacks are the closest equivalent to the Quartz Compositor on the market. I don't really know any other stack that comes close.
awongh 3 days ago [-]
This is helpful :)
To go back to the app-by-app comment, I do know that there are like ubuntu tablet and touch setups.
Are there any browsers already setup to be more touch native, or specific browser builds that are more touch native already?
Your FW's Keyboard breaks? Original price you paid, bonus: you can just buy the newest model.
You want to upgrade anything in your MBP? "You know, with how thin, lightweight and fast they are, it's physically impossible to make them user-serviceable"
On the FW? They gave you the one tool you needed when you purchased your laptop.
As I love the idea of modular and repairable laptop, I've got some issues with it. I have Framework 13 AMD with Fedora (as Arch was almost unusable on it for me).
Connecting external hardware to it, especially dock stations and monitors - which work flawlessly with another laptops - sometimes works, sometimes not...
ThePyCoder 3 days ago [-]
Please check their docs. I have a fw13 amd as well and there's one usb port on the mainboard that does not support video out over usb c. It could be that!
dangus 4 days ago [-]
I was sure they’d deliver Panther Lake but didn’t think it would have LPCAMM.
I thought they’d either solder the memory or skip out on delivering the good integrated graphics from the X SKUs.
I’m stunned in a good way. This is a MacBook Pro killer for the nerdier end of Apple’s market.
The fact that you mostly can pick and choose your upgrades to Pro is really cool, too.
The mid-tier X7 board sold alone seems like a great value and it would be a pretty solid uplift to the old system.
Retr0id 4 days ago [-]
Depending on how good that haptic trackpad is, this could be a real Macbook Pro competitor. 32GB of RAM on my M1 Pro is starting to feel a bit cramped.
mikkelam 4 days ago [-]
I've been super happy with my Framework desktop. And since getting that I've been craving replacing my MacBook... This looks super attractive
luxuryballs 3 days ago [-]
why is it so hard to find a simple keyboard layout diagram, the first full view of the keyboard I could find was flashing between different color options making it hard to see what the keys are, the first thing I think of for a “developer laptop” is what the keyboard is, feels like it should be more front-and-center (I might have just missed it though, on mobile)
sharms 4 days ago [-]
This is great - a Macbook Pro for Linux users, made of CNC milled aluminum, haptic trackpad, and 20+ hours of 4k video playback under Linux
rick_dalton 4 days ago [-]
The 20h figure is specifically for streaming 4k Netflix in the app on Windows. Netflix doesn’t even support 4K streaming on Linux as far as I know.
sharms 4 days ago [-]
Good call out - but seeing 2.5W consumption at idle from people with it already on Linux so these numbers will hold (like Dell XPS 14)
pb7 4 days ago [-]
Why are they advertising only Linux OSes but the battery life numbers are for Windows 11? Why not show the Linux numbers?
EricRiese 3 days ago [-]
It's so ironic. I've had several Thinkpads over the years and I've repaired or upgraded every one of them, from RAM, SSDs, an upgraded screen, and a new fan/heatsink assembly. I have a first generation Framework 13 and I've yet to upgrade it. And by now this new Pro model has an upgrade for every component. If it weren't for crazy prices, I'd just buy a whole new laptop.
At least I have the option of that CoolerMaster case. But maybe it'd be best to just sell the whole thing.
ciaranmca 4 days ago [-]
Don’t think I have ever came across a queue to buy a laptop before but congrats to the framework team.
ua709 4 days ago [-]
The expansion card system seems like something I would actually really like, especially as a hardware engineer. But the more I thought about it I couldn't really think of any compelling expansion cards that were worth the effort. So I figured I would look at what was in their store to see what other people thought up, and there isn't really any 3rd party store that I could find.
According to it there are more 3rd party main boards than expansion cards. I kinda get it, but wow. End of an era I guess.
whalesalad 4 days ago [-]
Pre-ordered a Ultra X7 358H with 32GB as an upgrade from an M2 Air. I hope that I do not regret this.
erichocean 4 days ago [-]
I wish they offered a Dvorak keyboard. Of all laptops, this is the most obvious one to do it.
0xc133 4 days ago [-]
They do offer blank keycaps, no labels, as an option…
daemin 3 days ago [-]
Part of me was hoping there would be some sort of official arm mainboard announced, I know there's the third party version but they don't seem to sell the main board only.
jeremy8883 3 days ago [-]
Finally a haptic trackpad. Unfortunately not having one was a dealbreaker when purchasing my laptop last year, but next upgrade I'll be able to consider them again.
asadm 4 days ago [-]
I wish it was easy to port Asahi Linux to macbook neo. That would be insane!
LandenLove 3 days ago [-]
It's unfortunate that I am unable to access these new products because Framework does not ship to Japan. I have an original Framework 13 that's CPU fan has been making death noises. There is also a broken screw mount in the base.
I didn't do shipment forwarding. I just bought the product and later moved to Japan. Also, Framework supposedly blocks shipment forwarding.
It's odd, because I remember them advertising a Japanese keyboard layout in the past. They must not see a large enough market to justify the costs.
spaghettifythis 3 days ago [-]
Same problem here in NZ - they only ship to AUS, despite lots of people here being keen on their laptops. I know multiple people who have made it a point to time a trip to AUS with buying a Framework so they can pick it up while they're over there.
LandenLove 3 days ago [-]
I hope they ship to your region soon!
bodge5000 4 days ago [-]
Just wish they'd give the FW16 the same treatment, at least in terms of the build. You shouldn't choose a laptop based on looks but thats hitting exactly what I want, minus the 16" screen
The highest tier of this laptop comes with four performance cores and twelve efficiency cores? What kind of Linux-kernel-compiler wants four cores?
WanderPanda 3 days ago [-]
I would be really interested in a podcast with the CEO where he goes a bit into the trade-offs of backwards and forwards compatibility. I can not imagine that their planning was so immaculate that there aren't any regressions that a clean slate design could have cleaned up. Nevertheless, amazing job for putting this together it looks like a phenomenal product!
dalmo3 3 days ago [-]
Ohh they finally ship to New Zealand. It's a shame they wouldn't last year, and I ended up with a Lenovo :/
commandersaki 4 days ago [-]
Blah why do they insist on those full height arrow keys.
ciupicri 3 days ago [-]
Full?! I'm seeing half up/down keys.
z3ugma 4 days ago [-]
It doesn't come with any RAM? You have to add $140 for 8GB or "bring your own"...so the list price does not represent a working computer?
yencabulator 3 days ago [-]
Select "Pre-built" instead of "DIY Edition" if you want everything installed. The DIY edition has been very popular historically and lets you bargain hunt for storage & RAM in the current stupid pricing situation.
etothet 4 days ago [-]
I really like what Framwork has been doing, but I have an honest question: is 20 hours of Netflix 4k streaming at 250nit and 30% volume a spec to show off? I genuinely don't know.
I thought most modern laptops have dedicated video decode hardware that is fairly easy on battery. At only 250nit though...that seems dim by today's standards. I'm happy to be wrong though!
andrelaszlo 4 days ago [-]
It's beautiful. Just got a Framework 13 a few months ago, so I can't justify buying a pro just to get it in black... right?
kstrauser 3 days ago [-]
I think the pro is enough of an upgrade that it would pay for itself over the course of a year or so. It'd be practical and responsible for you to switch.
(Now you have to validate the next person's justification when it comes up again.)
alsetmusic 4 days ago [-]
I continue to admire Framework from afar. If I were to switch from MacOS to Linux, they'd be at the top of my list when shopping.
unethical_ban 4 days ago [-]
This is awesome. I like my 2 year old framework and this new RAM looks really interesting, I need to learn more.
However, the 358H processor + 64GB RAM + 1TB NVMe is $2700. Wow. Even if I sold my current AMD 7840U with 64GB of RAM it would still be quite an investment.
The biggest question I have, which is probably easily searchable: How well will this run local LLMs? Seems the RAM is fast enough.
yencabulator 3 days ago [-]
The Intel chipset and LPCAMM2 are limited to 128 bit RAM bus so about half the speed of a Strix Halo (e.g. https://frame.work/desktop).
rldjbpin 3 days ago [-]
the chassis upgrade is welcome and it is nice to see the company grow enough to start creating custom hardware, and supporting standards that should keep things modular without sacrifice.
at the same time, there is a decent level of risk with using "new" standards before the industry catches up. lpcamm2 is great and should allow faster memory while "upgradable". the issue is with only having one slot which forces you to replace memory instead of adding to it. this is working with the assumption of having a single slot, which i am happy to be proven wrong on.
the current timing is a shame but at least when one needs to shell out so much money after all, might as well get better performance and hardware along with it.
altern8 4 days ago [-]
Looks awesome, but any developer laptop should have an inverted-T layout for arrows.
Those might look cool, but they're a huge pain to use.
jmakov 3 days ago [-]
No Ryzen options? Also no 1600nits display for working outside. Battery and display brightness are the only reasons I'm sticking with Macbook Pro.Sad it's not a priority for any other manufacturer. Because that's all you need, quality display, battery and remote access.
modderation 3 days ago [-]
Intel got a lot of attention during the keynote, but the Ryzen AI 300 series mainboards are available if you want them. It's one of the first few choices in the configuration flow.
poisonborz 3 days ago [-]
I really wish they'd do a tablet / MS Surface alternative. After the Laptop 12 the experience should be there. The demand is real and the current landscape looks dire. Alone the people who say they'd love an iPad Pro with a real OS on it.
Rooster61 4 days ago [-]
Is there a side by side comparison for their products anywhere? I'd like to compare this to the current 16 specs. And are they planning a "Pro" version of the 16?
I don't have plans to buy a laptop in the near future, but its nice to have this as an option. I like the idea of a bespoke Linux machine I could use.
turowicz 3 days ago [-]
You can get a new Asus P16 ProArt with 5070 for exact same price (AI 370, 2TB drive, 64GB RAM)
kombine 3 days ago [-]
16" inch laptop with a tkl keyboard and an AMD chip - why don't we have more of them on the market?
ndom91 4 days ago [-]
Anyone know much about the new top of the line Intel vs AMD CPU options? Which is more power efficient? Powerful?
dismalaf 3 days ago [-]
AMD Ryzen AI 400 is built on TSMC 4nm and Panther Lake is on Intel's 18A so Intel is literally a generation ahead for this product cycle and wins hands down...
nottorp 3 days ago [-]
But is the GPU good for anything? I'm used to Intel being completely crap and AMD actually being able to run games if you can live without 8k and 400 fps.
Also how's Linux support for either?
dismalaf 3 days ago [-]
Intel GPUs have never been that bad... In the past they were simply small because the expectation was they'd be paired with a dGPU.
The Core series has GPUs on par with or even slightly bigger than most of the Ryzen AI series (look up benchmarks and articles).
nottorp 3 days ago [-]
> they were simply small
But that's bad in my book. I'm happy with 720p on low detail once in a while if it's a laptop. What I remember is Intel GPUS being unable to do even that.
If they caught up with AMD iGPUs, that's great. I don't do desktop replacement laptops, I prefer the ones I can hold in one hand, the dGPU is in my desktop.
dismalaf 3 days ago [-]
> What I remember is Intel GPUS being unable to do even that.
Maybe in the days of HD graphics cards... I've got a Tiger Lake chipset and the Xe iGPU outperforms the laptop 3050 dGPU in actual games (due to having access to waaaaaay more RAM).
nottorp 3 days ago [-]
Well it's hard to erase a crap reputation.
During the previous chip crisis when covid and crypto were waning I needed a new desktop. Damned if I was going to buy a discrete video card at those prices so I went AMD integrated graphics. Didn't even stop to look at Intel.
(For the record said desktop has a discrete GPU now, but I bought it like 2 years after I built the desktop.)
dismalaf 2 days ago [-]
Dunno, AMD (and ATI) had a poor reputation for years and only rehabbed it when they released the Zen architecture in 2017. Even then it took a few generations to be seen as better than Intel.
Intel has had a positive reputation the vast majority of the time from 1990 up to now, with only the last few years being bad.
nottorp 2 days ago [-]
> Intel has had a positive reputation
For integrated GPUs? Both sides were crap until Zen. I just didn't notice Intel caught up.
> from 1990 up to now
For CPUs they're fortunately still playing catch up with each other. You remember when AMD released Zen, but do you remember when Intel released the Core stuff and how crap Pentium 4 / Netburst was right before that?
dismalaf 1 days ago [-]
I'm just saying that people buy the best thing and memories are short, no one really cares what brand their CPU is...
wmf 4 days ago [-]
Intel Core Ultra 3xx is mostly better than AMD Ryzen 3xx/4xx. This year you're better off with Intel.
canada_dry 3 days ago [-]
Without a mockup of what all the customizable parts will look like... it's hard to commit to a build.
rubiquity 4 days ago [-]
Are the mainboards and upgrade kits available for purchase now or just the whole laptop?
I often see people talking about how MacBooks are better for local LLM usage. How would this compare?
darkwater 4 days ago [-]
When my hard plastic chassis T470 from 2016 dies and cannot be repaired, I will for sure buy a Framework.
nailer 3 days ago [-]
> The side-firing speakers are tuned with Dolby Atmos® to deliver clear, balanced audio on Windows, ideal for calls or music while you work.
Isn't this a Linux device? Why not skip mentioning this non-feature?
whatever1 3 days ago [-]
Please make a standalone case with a usb port for the keyboard trackpad! I would love to have it for when I connect the laptop to an external monitor. I hate the mouse, but I love the trackpad right under the keyboard.
There is no such product in the market.
ericfrederich 3 days ago [-]
Glad they got a touchscreen but would really like to see a convertible/2-in-1
robotnikman 3 days ago [-]
That would be the Framework 12, I hope they release one with the new panther lake processors soon. Seems like Intel is finally starting to get up to speed with TSMC again.
LorenDB 4 days ago [-]
I'm happy to see they finally added a touchscreen. This will probably be my next laptop.
sudo_cowsay 3 days ago [-]
This fixes a lot of things that had made me hesitant to buy Framework before.
varispeed 4 days ago [-]
> up to 64GB of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X
That's a non-starter. Why not 128GB or push boundary for 256GB?
voxadam 4 days ago [-]
> Why not 128GB or push boundary for 256GB?
As I understand it, 64 GB modules are largest LPCAMM2 modules yet released with 96 GB being announced only a couple months ago. 128 GB might be possible on the Ultra 5 325 once either sufficiently large LPCAMM2 modules have been release or if the motherboard was redesigned to support dual LPCAMM2 modules, the Ultra X7 358H and Ultra X9 388H only support 96 GB. Support for 256 GB would likely require a desktop processor, or a redesign from Intel to support a quarter terabyte of memory on a mobile processor.
Last I checked, one kidney might not even suffice to pay for 256GB anymore.
jpeeler 4 days ago [-]
Maybe because 64 GB is $849.
nhumrich 4 days ago [-]
Personally, I don't understand aluminum chassis. Sure, it feels more premium, but it comes with quite a bit more weight than plastic, and I much prefer less weight over "feel" when it comes to a laptop.
whalesalad 4 days ago [-]
It manages heat better, with the entire chassis acting as a heatsink. Also unlike plastic, under repetetive heat/cool cycles the tolerances won't change like plastic will.
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
Plastic. Never again will I allow a laptop to be unusable after some time because of a cracked chassis that couldn't handle mechanical and thermal stress correctly. Never.
4 days ago [-]
cromka 4 days ago [-]
Too bad there's no second m2 slot for extra disk and no 5G WWAN support.
guerby 3 days ago [-]
You can add extra disk via the removable slots, frame.work shop has various disk sizes.
cromka 3 days ago [-]
Its not about size but being able to run a RAID1 setup for speed and redundancy. External USB storage doesn't help here.
guerby 3 days ago [-]
"With a USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface, it reaches 1000 MB/s read and 800 MB/s write speeds. It is fast enough to run apps and even boot an operating system from"
cromka 3 days ago [-]
That doesn't matter. Fastest PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD is 14000MB/s. You typically run RAID1 on identical drives. It's also about IOPs, not just speed.
philistine 4 days ago [-]
Hey let's make a very versatile laptop with tons of options for consumers, and let's not offer the other Standard Canadian French keyboard, let's just have the old one Windows forces on people.
cassepipe 4 days ago [-]
You could get a blank keyboard, and nice transparent stickers.
kapilvt 4 days ago [-]
Assuming the Qualcomm ARM lawsuits are what’s preventing the AArch64 debut…
fy20 3 days ago [-]
Interesting that the memory in the laptop is upgradeable or bring-your-own, where as in the Framework Desktop it is soldered. How does that work?
robotnikman 3 days ago [-]
The desktops use AMD Strix Halo chips which require soldered on memory for the required bandwidth.
amai 3 days ago [-]
Why do I need a touchscreen and Dolby Atmos as developer?
TonyTrapp 3 days ago [-]
YMMV but I primarily have a touch screen on my laptop so that I can see how my software breaks when people try to use it with a touch screen.
I wonder if they'll ever make a "Toughbook" type of laptop. Those things are very interesting, since you can shove drives in and out of them and it matches the spirit of what this is.
atlgator 4 days ago [-]
The 20 hour battery rating is for Windows 11. How long does Linux last?
koalaman 4 days ago [-]
I'm struggling to understand if this supports usb-c based thunderbolt
daemonologist 4 days ago [-]
All four ports support Thunderbolt 4 - if you scroll down to "Interfaces" on the product specs page there's a graphic showing everything that's supported.
jonf3n 2 days ago [-]
They do a terrible job with the documentation... making TB4 (superior) sound like it is USB-C (3.2 or something?). Only the Intel versions seem to support Thunderbolt, the AMD not which I think is the main issue.
Anyway, the next Frameworks need to adopt Thunderbolt 5 to handle modern HDMI 2.1 and 2.2, eGPU, Oculink, etc.
koalaman 4 days ago [-]
nice! Thanks! I had no idea USB4 and Thunderbolt were equivalent.
ciupicri 3 days ago [-]
They aren't equivalent. The "shape" of the port is the same, it's (USB) Type-C. Though as far as I know most of the time you can use USB4 peripherals with TB4 ports.
pigeons 3 days ago [-]
Trackpoint/nipple?
Elixir6419 4 days ago [-]
I would love to go framework and the specs here look pretty awesome but 5g modem is a must have for me and they dont really have an option for that. I am guessing due to the antennas.
nightski 3 days ago [-]
Beautiful laptop and then they stick a tiny 13" screen on there, I don't get it. 14" is the perfect size. Guess it just isn't the one for me.
yencabulator 3 days ago [-]
It's a 13.5" screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio. It's very comparable to many consumer-style 14" 16:10 screens.
wiseowise 3 days ago [-]
If Framework offered MacOS keyboard layout I’d switch without a thought.
> Watch a Framework Laptop 13 Pro battery go from 100% to 0%. Live.
Live stream is not available.
NewJazz 4 days ago [-]
LPCAMM2 looks interesting. How much is that RAM though :'(
yonatan8070 4 days ago [-]
I went on the configurator page briefly, like 400$ for 32GB IIRC.
They don't ship to where I am so I didn't stay long
asimovDev 3 days ago [-]
this looks exciting. We are allowed to choose between Windows, macOS and Linu at my job so I might consider this when we are due for an upgrade in a year or 2. Feels wrong to discard our M2 Pro machines when they are perfectly capable of my relatively minuscule workloads at the moment, it only slowed down once when I had a memory leak in Safari from a AWS tab
lawn 4 days ago [-]
Please say that the new keyboard has QMK support?
It's the one thing I'm jealous of the Laptop 16 together with their key module that should let you design arbitrary layouts.
gigatexal 3 days ago [-]
This reminds me of the legit coal smoke black PowerBooks of yesteryear. If they make a 16 inch model I’ll def consider it.
spankibalt 3 days ago [-]
Cool, though I'd prefer a Framework 12 Pro (convertible, or even a detachable) with a Wacom EMR digitizer.
fwipsy 4 days ago [-]
Framework is cool, but Lenovo and Dell have been selling repairable enterprise laptops with Linux support for years. Some Precision/XPS laptops even have replaceable graphics cards.* It feels like they don't get nearly as much attention.
* Some will even work with graphics cards from newer laptops using the same chassis; for example, the Precision 7530 (8th gen Intel + Pascal GPUs) can be upgraded with Precision 7540 (Turing) GPUs. This isn't officially supported, though, and may not apply to later models.
alfiedotwtf 3 days ago [-]
This looks like it would fit my next purchase, but how does VRAM work in this scenario (I can’t find anything in the docs)?
jmakov 2 days ago [-]
Linux first but the battery life measured on Win 11?
outlore 4 days ago [-]
Can this drive a Studio Display XDR at 120 Hz? I wonder if anyone else is thinking about this and how to figure out compatibility.
dzhiurgis 4 days ago [-]
Very nitpicky, but video files for ASCII animation while advertising developer laptop. Cmon man.
ciupicri 3 days ago [-]
> with excellent Linux support
So can we finally update the firmware for the Sandisk SN7100 and 850X SSDs under Linux? Last time I've checked you couldn't even download the firmware for WD 850X using a plain browser. You had to use their "special" Windows software.
It’s a niche box within its own niche (Linux). Perhaps they’ll do a pivot to eco friendly slippers. I admire their manifesto, but can’t see them surviving. You can get a last year’s decent Thinkpad for $400-600 with parts galore. This thing, you buy it on principle only.
christophilus 4 days ago [-]
Well, this looks excellent.
rkagerer 3 days ago [-]
Thoughts on the chassis being all aluminum, vs. a magnesium alloy?
rkagerer 3 days ago [-]
In case anyone's curious, my basis for comparison is an old Dell M6600 that's magnesium and has been awesome in terms of rigidity and durability. I still use it regularly even though it's going on 15 years old! (Mainly because I haven't found a newer laptop that's similarly maintainable that I actually like). Also wish it had an option for more RAM, even if the cost is astronomical at today's prices.
sourcegrift 3 days ago [-]
What linux needs is a better logo, it's come so far ahead
koiueo 3 days ago [-]
I said it before, I'll say it again: I won't consider Framework until they ditch they're crippled cursor block or offer trackpoint.
I'll buy one on the day of release if they offer both options (my most recent¹ Lenovo is long overdue for replacement)
¹ I don't think I'll ever sell my X220, any I regret selling my X270. Everything after that was a disappointment.
dbg31415 3 days ago [-]
Do people actually like touch screens?
That's a huge negative for me.
modderation 3 days ago [-]
You can always order the pro parts along with a regular display from the regular Framework 13. Some assembly required, but the bits are all interchangeable, so you can have your non-touch display.
Alternatively, you can also "not touch" the touch display :)
landsman 3 days ago [-]
I have to buy it. This company deserve a support.
rickdg 4 days ago [-]
Very cool upgraded version. How noisy or hot does it get?
iririririr 4 days ago [-]
"pro" in the name, without ECC ram is a travesty
voxadam 4 days ago [-]
Does the LPCAMM2 standard allow for a full-blown ECC interface, as opposed being limited to the on-die ECC that's part of the DDR5 spec?
snvzz 2 days ago [-]
Apparently the interface itself does support ECC, but there is no end user product implementing it.
As I require ECC, it seems I won't be upgrading anytime soon.
multimoon 4 days ago [-]
I hope you’re being sarcastic because if not you’re delisional to expect ECC ram in a laptop. You’re going to pile up software updates that you should absolutely reboot for long before a comic ray causes a meaningful bit flip. ECC is only worthwhile in servers and is a waste of money otherwise, especially since “pro” for laptop = prosumer device.
If you don’t reboot your laptop in years where ECC matters I’m not sure how to help you.
3 days ago [-]
benoau 4 days ago [-]
I might be in love...
lazy-lambda 4 days ago [-]
I am getting this one for sure. The waiting is over.
nl 3 days ago [-]
Strix Halo version available for pre-order!
StrLght 3 days ago [-]
It's not? The only 2 options available there are last gen Strix Point (AI 300 series).
cyberax 4 days ago [-]
I was hoping for a monitor update for the 16" laptop. But:
Sorry. That's just not going to cut it. These are 5-year-old specs.
Jyaif 4 days ago [-]
Those transparent bezel look incredibly good.
nreece 3 days ago [-]
I would have liked the option of non-touch display, and although the display is variable rate (30-120Hz) it's not going to be as optimal as the 1-120Hz panel in the Dell XPS 14 getting it to 40+ hours (https://x.com/dhh/status/2040139744445673938).
Barbing 3 days ago [-]
Congratulations! Incredible!
matheusmoreira 3 days ago [-]
> Your country might not be supported yet.
:(
smallstepforman 4 days ago [-]
Who watches Netflix at 30% brightness? Another useless marketing blurb, really puts me off from reading the rest.
jhasse 4 days ago [-]
I do. Why not?
killingtime74 3 days ago [-]
Only 2.8k non OLED display?
Melatonic 3 days ago [-]
Damn this is cool !!
foresterre 4 days ago [-]
Finally! Glad they will now offer something which doesn't have a bending frame.
... but I wish they would make something with a bit more screen estate without being heavy and bulky. Their 16" is just too big. I really like the Dell XPS 14 and MBP 14", which I think is the right trade-off between screen size and portability.
maximzxc 3 days ago [-]
Why no trackpoint support yet? I saw it being requested a lot of times already. Really tired of using ThinkPads, would love to change to anything else, but trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me from switching.
skywal_l 4 days ago [-]
75% keyboard?
iknowstuff 4 days ago [-]
No numpad
subscribed 4 days ago [-]
sigh. I wish I knew. I've got Framework 13 (Ryzen AI 300 series) and it's battery life is absolutely awful. Won't even survive a weekend in sleep. My old, dying Dell was better.
unethical_ban 4 days ago [-]
This is the next Framework I will buy, unless AMD's AI 400 series is better.
I await a Linux-based battery test for both active work and overnight suspend consumption. I don't think suspend battery drain is vendor-specific though; AMD and Intel both shat the bed compared to Apple due to hardware decision-making.
edit: I missed this.
>7 days Standby without charging, Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
farfatched 3 days ago [-]
I'm a "Linux I. 2nd hand ThinkPad" type of person, but have recently admired my [first] MacBook Air.
Does a Framework Laptop bridge the gap somewhat?
muyuu 4 days ago [-]
Now that RAM is unobtainium anyway, it seems like the case for very energy efficient laptops is more compelling vs inference-capable ones.
haspok 4 days ago [-]
No dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Ins/Del? Meh.
No T-shape cursor keys?!? Lame. No love. No want. Go home.
Thinkpad FTW. Sorry.
4 days ago [-]
manuhabitela 4 days ago [-]
I have to agree the keyboard layout is a noticeable bummer. The only actually impactful one I can find on this laptop on my side for now. So, props to the team still!
tokyobreakfast 4 days ago [-]
I get to choose 4 ports in a $2,000+ "developer" laptop? Is this a joke?
Most of the port options are decoys because it means 1 or 0 USB ports.
And no I'm not carrying around a satchel of modules like an old British lord.
andrewmcwatters 4 days ago [-]
[dead]
monegator 4 days ago [-]
- Intel CPU -> No thanks
- Touchscreen -> mmkay, but i don't really care
- Haptic touchpad -> I absolutely hate those. I want to click buttons. Buttons. Buttons.
Well, this is not for me i guess :(
modeless 3 days ago [-]
Hard for me to justify an Intel or even AMD chip now when not just Apple but even Qualcomm are trouncing them on single core performance. The Snapdragon X2 Elite performance cores are faster than any Intel or AMD core ever made, full stop.
Unfortunately Linux support isn't fully baked yet, but people are working on it.
To be specific: There's a new lower chassis, and a new chassis top with haptic touchpad. On my older framework I could buy just the chassis top to get the new touchpad. Crazy that they could make that work.
I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations nerding out over the new devices and shouting out specific team members who did the designs. Really hope the company is doing well.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSxgCEpkiKM
It's sorta essential imo if they want to make good on their one value-prop: repairability and the good will that comes with it. If they start releasing a tonne of SKUs with a million different parts, they'll inevitably have to sunset parts at a clip that'll completely make useless their repairability claims.
I am a happy Framework laptop owner, but I paid a premium b/c I expect moves like this. If this would change, it would become just an over-priced laptop... might as well by another Thinkpad or Dell XPS.
That said, I'm super happy they apparently have the good sense to see this. Not all companies make moves in their best interests.
I've just ordered my own 13 pro. I've been waiting for a laptop and this ticks all the boxes. I'd previously ordered a new dell xps laptop and ultimately returned it because the keyboard was busted. I would have kept it if I could have swapped the keyboard for a new one. The use of LPCAMM is also really nice. I've hoped to see this standard start taking flight and I'm happy to grab a product with it included.
Long ago I installed Linux on a MacBook and found it unusable because of clicks and movement while typing. It’s probably improved these days though.
I might have to try their preinstalled Ubuntu images or something and see if there's some secret sauce in the input configs.
> For Linux libinput “Disable While Typing” (DWT) problems, this page claims libinput will only use the DWT setting if the keyboard and touchpad are either both identified as internal devices, or are both identified as the same device.
sudo nano /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks
[Framework Touchpad Fix] MatchName=* MatchUdevType=touchpad AttrKeyboardIntegration=internal
Unfortunately, as is usual for them (edit: and it makes sense; I'm not blaming them), the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering (edit: or pre-ordering) yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping. But yes, this is amazing, and the new pieces are not things I was expecting from them. As soon as it's available, I'll be taking my relatively recent AMD mainboard and putting it in a new chassis+battery+keyboard+speakers+touchpad, possibly skipping the display (I don't care much about a touchscreen, but I do care about display quality, so I'll wait for comparisons to the current 2.8k display). My laptop will, at that point, be almost entirely in a Ship of Theseus situation: I think that only the bezel and some of the expansion cards will be from the original, first-generation laptop I bought from them. That mainboard runs a number of services for me, along with an older display. A second, newer one is waiting for RAM to be a reasonable price (since the RAM it was using is now on my current mainboard); I had planned to use it for some of my research, but maybe I'll end up putting it into this older chassis and have a spare laptop again.
That all this is possible is wonderful, and a credit to them in staying true to their stated ideals.
Why would you expect otherwise? I fully expect any OEM to place itself at the front of the queue for parts coming from its suppliers. If for some reason they sold parts before the laptops started shipping, I'd fully expect impatient customers would build complete machines from parts ahead of the shipping dates, which would wreak all kinds of havoc on logistics.
It's unfortunate that they can't sell you something that hasn't been manufactured? That doesn't yet exist?
HN is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to complain about.
On the other hand, nrp, since you're likely to be in this thread: if you had pre-orders and/or batched shipments of parts/upgrade kits, I would likely be paying a deposit or even the full price today, rather than ordering in a few months. Even if that meant ordering a full upgrade kit with a new display, but getting the upgrade sooner, I'd probably still go for it.
+1. The less-scripted plus the lack of the pretending-reality-distortion personality is such a breeze.
I think a number of people would have expected these to eventually require a trade-off. Especially coming from pc-building land, where we see new non-backwards-compatible CPU and RAM sockets every 6 or so years.
There's a version of this where Frame.work said, "Design tradeoffs mean the 13 Pro is a new platform that is largely not backwards compatible, but don't worry, the 13 series will still get 5+ years of support and parts" and everyone goes "Aw, well, I guess that's reasonable."
I really want to emphasize that it's looking like Framework is creating a laptop with _better_ backwards compatibility and build-ability than a desktop PC.
All this is to say that this is very very impressive!
An 11th gen CPU/mobo that came out in 2020 can be dropped straight into this new chassis.
Or the newest display be can be dropped into your 2020 laptop/chassis.
IDK why it's not working for you but this should all just work without bothering with any configuration, drivers, or whatever.
Inside the case somewhere on mine there was a list of all the names of the people who worked on it. Was pretty cool.
And then I click through and see the compatibility table and my jaw drops. Amazing! Yes, it's a new chassis, but all the parts that matter will fit into my old chassis. And if I want to upgrade the chassis, I can even do that piece by piece as well, not all at once.
I'm also glad to see another Intel mainboard, and one with the new, actually-powerful iGPUs. A part of me has considered over time defecting to AMD, but I'm still just more comfortable with Intel, for some reason that probably isn't rational. My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6. But I know these days it's hard to reason about real-world performance just by core count, especially with the different flavors of cores we have now.
Another worry: the thermals of the original 13 chassis have never been great, and I'm concerned that the new mainboard will throttle a bunch under load when installed in the old chassis.
At any rate, I may not upgrade this year, given RAM prices. I have 64GB of DDR4 in my current laptop, and replacing that with the same amount of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X is probably more expensive than the rest of the laptop itself.
But maybe over the next few years I'll ship-of-theseus myself into a new laptop.
I wouldn’t think of thermal performance in laptops as “throttling,” think about it in terms of “how much power is this laptop manufacturer deciding to give the chip versus its maximum possible rating and what does that mean for me?”
Performance per watt has a massive diminishing returns curve so you often do NOT want a laptop manufacturer to push the chip to its limit.
Obviously, framework has a limitation that many other similar laptops don’t have by having one fan rather than two, but for these chips in particular I wouldn’t be very concerned as they just don’t consume enough power to create a lot of heat.
I don’t think you need to be concerned with the chassis cooling in the original versus the pro because I think most of the heat dissipation design is on the mainboard. Both versions of the laptop just have a big opening on the bottom for intake then spit out the exhaust out the back. The new chassis is unchanged in that regard.
This concept of “throttling” becomes more of a “design tradeoffs” discussion especially in the world of gaming laptops, which is why I don’t like using the term “throttling.”
Is the thin and light MacBook Pro-sized Zephyrus G14 “throttling” because its RTX 5070ti is being fed less power than a big thick Lenovo Legion? I say no, it’s just being tuned to the intended use case. No, you don’t get the “full power” of the GPU but even the thickest laptops generally don’t get that compared to desktop systems.
I'm two years into my fw 13 and think I'll start by upgrading the chassis. I also bought 64GB of DDR5 (it was on sale, if you can imagine such a thing) - The trackpad, speakers and battery are the parts of the machine that I don't really love so will be happy to upgrade those.
I think if I can I'll keep the silver top cover - A bit of a "I had a fw before they were cool" statement
Macbooks have a better design here. They are safe to put on top of sofas and beds. No ventilation holes on the bottom.
Search this thread for the “oh but it’s so expensive, I could just buy a new laptop from any other manufacturer every 3 years and it would be cheaper” posts - those are the normies.
“wait so i can have TWO ethernet ports???”
i have been responsible for at least three fw16 sales because I got one first, and this was the biggest thing i heard
You’ll get far better battery life for all use cases as well as performance that matches or beats AMD. Also, if you select the X7 you’re getting the best integrated graphics on the market that isn’t made by Apple - basically on par with the M5, and far better than the top option from Framework (HX370) while sipping battery by comparison.
I’m sure AMD will come back soon with a good answer to Panther Lake, but as of right now, it’s not what you want.
Don’t worry about AMD needing your charity, they aren’t going anywhere, they’re a more valuable company than Intel, and they’ll compete in this segment in the future. It’s just not the right buy right now.
Something like a Ryzen AI HX370 and even the 350 does perform better than the 8 core X7 Intel chip, along with a number of other options.
But on the graphics side, the Intel is really fantastic.
And of course we are talking about a thin and light laptop where you’re going to appreciate stellar battery life a lot more than exceptional performance for the most part.
So seems basically the same on the low end, with the new part boosting quite a bit higher. Presumably you get more perf per watt on the new CPU, but still.
I was looking at benchmark comparisons between my i5-1240P which has 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, and the Ultra 5 325 which has 4 performance cores and 4 low-cache ultra low power efficiency cores.
The 325 is still faster multicore than the 1240P.
This advice is a bit more difficult with the current LPCAMM situation. In the US, besides Framework, I was only able to find a 32GB module from Adorama, seemingly a left over new stock Crucial module that I assume must be discontinued in Crucial-branded form, or eBay. But it is far cheaper than Framework’s price ($250) and seemingly still available.
(Interestingly, Adorama’s website says that it’s “trending.”)
You’ll save at least a little bit of pocket change buying your SSD elsewhere at the very least.
- Actually naming your inspiration as Apple
- Saying that thanks to machined body, the keyboard is actually slightly better. No overstatement, just an honest detail
- No: "This is our best laptop yet" (As if managing to not making it worse is something to be proud of)
- To the point, fast paced, clear communication
- Honestly stating that you're working hard on getting as good as "the gold standard, which of course is Apples track pad" and that you think you'll get there soon
- Clearly stating that the new memory standard is not magically your own invention somehow even though you're the first to use it
- Clearly stating the actual numbers of the battery in Wh and density AND also how many video minutes you get
- Clearly stating, not hiding but also not overstating that you started the company for the purpose of upgradeability
- Proving what you mean with examples before emphasising that "we really mean it when we say we have redesigned the computer from the ground up" (While absolutely fantastically letting the new motherboards upgrade last generation chassis!)
Result: I placed a pre-order, and kind of felt sad for this honest and clear language to apparently be rare.
Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.
Does it have such battery life on Linux? The benchmarks, apart from suspend battery life, are for Windows.
Yes, I am running mostly in dark mode now. Yes, I am using the terminal significantly more often now (80% of the time). But also I have always a browser, always Slack, WhatsApp, Obsidian and more often than not a few other things running on virtual screens.
Just the added battery life made this my daily driver. Yes - I so, so want to buy a framework. Still waiting for the multicolored international keyboards - and also the prices for memory just kill it for me right now. The system I would love to have is about 2k more than a few months ago. I just can't splurge that much right now.
Are you running a DE or just a lightweight WM?
I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.
So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding.
Linux is something of a second-class citizen for both GPU vendors and browser vendors. So for example if you're using Firefox and an nvidia GPU on Linux? No video encode/decode acceleration for you. The browser will silently switch to CPU decoding.
This translates into worse battery life.
There's other software that can do GPU acceleration in the repos, and there are plenty of distros that enable closed-source software. It's shocking to me how difficult it seems to be to get GPU acceleration working in Linux.
They ship with Ubuntu on it, which would be quite natural choice for such benchmark. Also they do do the standby test on Ubuntu for some reason.
Can't help but suspect there's a reason why Linux numbers are not given. :(
By the time these laptops start shipping, 26.04 should be released and testing should be easy. I suspect no major differences from it vs windows.
7.1 includes even more performance improvements for panther lake. [1]
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Enabled-Intel-FRED
I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.
I already know that combinations of hardware and software can be stretched and tweaked to do really interesting things in really excellent ways. I don't need them to tell me that computer systems are flexible. That's just noise.
And I don't want them to tell me how their (unreleased) hardware might work in the future with some unreleased/beta software. That tends to be interpreted as speculation, or as lies and deceit.
I'd prefer to see benchmarks of how it works if it shipped today.
If those benchmarks are unsavory (as they may presently be) and thus omitted, then that's not ideal but it's okay.
I definitely don't want to feel as if I'm being lied to, in place of an omission.
[1]: I just want a 15" version. I'm not a fan of little screens. My eyes aren't getting any better.
My understanding is that he's a giant in the enterprise software space, I don't see how that would give him any clout in the hardware space.
https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046677012878708834
he mentioned good numbers before, but of course you may want to wait for reviews
I don't see that he's bringing anything noteworthy to the table, but I've repeatedly heard people talk as though he's going to bring better battery life to Linux through omarchy.
people want to get laptops that work well and have good battery life, whether this was easy or hard to achieve means naught
Linux battery life is fine and on par with (or possibly better than) Windows these days if you don't do anything silly (I'm sure some distro and DE consume silly amounts of power just because, but it doesn't have to be that way).
Based on reports about Panther Lake, the new process, plus a 13" screen and large-ish battery, I believe the battery life claims.
Strangely it was not flimsy and held its own but it felt flimsy and to be honest I never was quite able to tell why. What one want for a premium laptop is the satisfying rigidity of a Macbook and it didn't have it.
So for me this new chassis is a banger release. It's amazing that I can just drop my "old" hardware in it and it would just work.
Strong = won't break
My Framework 13 is robust but isn't the most rigid-feeling. If I one-hand hold the laptop by the front edge it presses the touchpad clicker.
Two questions 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens ) 2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?
Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.
We've been sending pre-release hardware to developers at a bunch of distros to make sure that the core use cases like suspend/resume work as expected out of the box. You can check our general Linux support at frame.work/linux
I take note though that the 13 inches framework is bigger than it seems because of the aspect ratio
> 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
They make a Framework 16, so a Framework 16 Pro now suddenly seems like a possibility, but I don’t think they’re going to make a 15-inch when they have the 16.
Thinkpad P1: W 361.8mm x D 245.7mm x H 18.4mm
Framework 16: W 356.58mm x D 270.00mm x H 17.95mm
The Framework 13 roughly matches 14" laptops from other manufacturers. It's really a 13.5", and has a taller aspect ratio than typical.
Seconding this question, though I would also be very interested in learning whether they're planning a 14" version.
And secondly how healthy is framework as a company, and to what extent do you make money from consumers vs sales to big companies?
If you add this then you'll have a new customer for life.
The trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me chained to Thinkpads.
I don't know how much keyboard-design flexibility is available to you, but innovative keyboard could even be a killer feature.
I agree that offering more user choice here could be a unique and standout feature, though. One of the small things I love about their keyboard offerings is that they offer all blank key cap options.
The grid layout makes key positions more predictable and consistent.
Most ortholinear boards are 40–60% layouts.
Heavy use of layers (like Fn, but more advanced)
I don't know how relevant is the parent argument these days, but pfu see released HHKB with trackpoint. Even despite dropping their signature topre switches, I consider this one of the best purchases. My wrists can't thank me enough.
I won't consider a laptop without one.
Apologies for the edit in a separate comment. But the typo was so misleading, I decided to fix it.
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
Reading it again, I'm assuming they're overtime and individual upgrades that can take place? If someone could confirm or deny that for me, I would appreciate it. I may just be overthinking this table.
Edit: yeah that's what I'm taking away after rereading this a few more times. Very impressed by the modularity on each of those parts.
A couple of questions:
1. How are the thermals? I've had mixed experiences with my 11th gen FW 13 throttling under load with the fan sounding noisy. It's fine if I'm alone but if I'm at a team gathering, it's noticeably loud.
2. Does the lid open with one hand?
2. We have one hand open on the lid for each generation of 13.
2. Huh. Well, I feel like an idiot! I always use two hands when opening the lid, muscle memory, I guess.
ps. one question you don't have to answer: for the wireless keyboard, did you guys consider something like a fingerprint sensor? I like the idea of having something like that akin to Mac's Wireless Keyboard but I don't know how much integration something like that would need.
- Is the Dolby Atmos configuration available for Linux as well as Windows? Or more generally, will the speakers sound as good on Linux as they do on Windows?
- Will we be able to get audio comparison samples between the old and new speakers?
Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am also curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)
Please, I do have a question about Desktop: there have been numerous reports of noisy PSU fan and little feedback from FW [1], could you shed some light on the situation? Are you seeing noisy PSU yourself, are there plans for a fix or another PSU? I understand you wanted a separate, and thus reparable Flex ATX PSU, but maybe just one larger fan for the whole case would have worked better (c.f. Steam Machine)?
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/noisy-psu-fan/74751
Thanks!
You probably can't comment on this, but just to note it, I would be very excited to see the 16 get a similar Pro chassis.
200g is weight of a smartphone, there's no way touch weighs that much.
Framework 13 Pro screen seems to have plastic surface as before, not glass-laminated (which I guess could add 200g, but it's not a requirement for laptop touchscreen)
I’ve literally never used the touchscreen.
You're blaming the touchscreen for a lot here, when the explanation is likely a lot more pedestrian. Change in case molding, change in PCB size, slight change in battery size...
e.g. 30g in larger heatsinks, 80g in glass-laminated screen, 20g in larger battery, 40g in more stiffer chassis. 30g in aluminium top case instead of carbon fiber :)
Maybe that's the reason, not the touchscreen?
I don’t buy it.
Weird.
A bigger battery is the more likely cause.
Eg - Current Framework 13 bottom stand alone https://frame.work/products/bottom-cover-kit?v=FRANFD0001
But I wouldn't pay (much) extra for it.
I know it's not the most ideal form factor for a repairable device, but I can dream.
https://frame.work/au/en/laptop12
So you are either running Linux with a web browser that has a tablet mode, and making sure all apps are web apps adapted for mobile or at least non-keyboard use. Or you re-invent Android. One thing that somewhat worked was Nokia's Maemo -- it used X11, but the defined UI toolkit and guidelines made everything uniform and touch-screen friendly. Not sure about how the successor projects look if they are what I remember from Maemo / Meego (so maybe Sailfish or Tizen, not sure how open these are though).
I'd expect/hope to see whatever comes after Strix Halo in a Framework motherboard. That's when you should be looking for LPCAMM2 for AMD.
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro Touchscreen supports touch input but does not currently support stylus input. Like other Framework Laptop 13 models, it opens with a maximum hinge angle of 180 degrees and is not designed for pen or convertible-style use.
Pretty disappointing honestly.
The upgrade kits I'm seeing on the marketplace have a keyboard included.
Would it be possible to have a input cover pro, bottom cover pro, batteries pro, speakers pro and use my existing keyboard?
> We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
The reason I asked was mostly that, in my experience, touch displays tend to be glossier / less matte than non-touch ones.
If I want the best battery life and sound possible with Linux, should I switch my preorder to Intel?
What I am also curious is around memory management. On the Intel, I can get at most 64Gb RAM for now, 96Gb in the future. On AMD I can get 128Gb right now. Do they differ in how they can share RAM with the GPU? Do either need me to specify how much is vRAM and how much is available to the CPU, or are them both unified, similar to how Apple Silicon does it?
Will the new keyboard colour schemes come to other locales? I love the orange/black/grey but probably not enough to learn American English.
Will it be possible to change the backlight color to, f.ex. dark red?
https://metacomputing.io/products/metacomputing-aipc?variant...
And anyway the performance of this CIX chip is really bad compared to the Snapdragon X2 or current x86 chips. Jeff Geerling has geekbench results here:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/arm-mainboard-for-fra...
And yeah… what I really want is some Oryon cores in a Framework 13 motherboard.
https://frame.work/no/en
Been waiting for years. I wonder what the hold up is.
I have a feeling that laptops don't keep up with the today's dev workflows.
and by the way, it’s a world where it’s hard to be a fan of any company any more and the fact that you guys remain exceptional gives me hope
On the other hand I can go to a local store and buy a stick of 32GB lpcamm2.
P.S. The printer gag was cruel, just saying.
https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop13pro-input-cover-ki...
https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop13pro-bottom-cover-k...
https://frame.work/gb/en/products/top-cover-cnc?v=FRANGKHA01 (not specifically a pro part but listed as compatible)
The related political issue here is people's right to exist.
- See: https://tekin.co.uk/2025/09/the-ruby-community-has-a-dhh-pro...
- See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human...
------------------------------------
Are you suggesting this issue should not be the most important issue?
If this is the most important issue: what's the point of bringing up your following sentence?
If this is not the most important issue: what in your mind would be a more important issue?
I won't touch their laptops again.
The case is warped in multiple places. One USB C module doesn't accept a power charge reliably. It can overheat and shutdown. If the case flexes a little the trackpad stops responding - it needs to be on a flat surface. Power brick died.
On the plus side, my partner had one and when she threw it away she gave me her parts and I was able to swap some out. That was cool.
I just had my mainboard die, and I was advised there currently isn't another mainboard in stock that works with my old DDR4 RAM. They don't have any newer DDR5 RAM in stock apparently either, so I was out of luck and ended up buying a Lemur Pro last week.
In my experience, the Framework hardware is great but very flakey and frequently needs replacing.
Support is awful; they'll repeatedly ask you to do things you've already done (and shown proof of), they can take days to get back to you, and are generally unhelpful. They also didn't think to mention to me when I said I needed to buy a new laptop and their parts were all out of stock that they had a new machine coming out in the next week, which is insane to me. I would've been an easy convert. Sometimes I think it's bots doing the support, but if that was the case, they'd reply back faster.
Time will tell whether I'll return back to the ecosystem, but the support experience (and the hardware being poor enough that I frequently need support) is putting me off for now.
In general, coming from a MacBook, I’ve had more quality issues with the framework, but fixing them has always been possible with a little digging. I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning how to take apart and fix my gear, but I’m also the sort of person who darns holes in his socks, so ymmv.
The vibe I got was the quality is really bad, BUT the people who like Framework and believe in it gladly just buy another one.
Not for me though. Within 6 months we’ll see similar specs from other oems at 50 to 70% of the price
I'm not going to weigh in on quality issues (I have had a 16 for a little over a year and it's been great, but it probably gets far less abuse the way I use it than average), but I'm surprised to hear this because the whole point of Framework is that when something breaks you don't need to "buy another one". You just buy the specific part that broke. Chassis warped? Buy the top/bottom/whatever part of it is warped. Hinges worn out? Replace just those, etc.
The kind of person who is happy to just buy a new one when a particular component breaks seems like the kind of person who would probably prefer to buy something else, or so I would have supposed.
I very much like the modularity, upgradability, and repairability, but those things come with tradeoffs, and if one isn't the kind of person who is interested in repairing a computer piecemeal, I'm not sure I understand why one would accept the tradeoffs.
I like Framework, I like their mission, and I intend to continue to support them as a customer (I'll likely buy the new wireless keyboard as soon as it's in stock), but my intention is to never buy another complete laptop from them again, unless I for some reason decide I need to have 2 laptops. It may be that in a decade or two, I have Ship-of-Theseused my 16 into an entirely new laptop, but I can't imagine the scenario where I replace the entire thing in one go.
Maybe this will be different with the pro, but no one knows until they actually ship.
As for the Framework 16, I brought a 5070TI laptop recently for around 1200$ after a nice rebate. After a bit of complaining( which was also needed to honor the rebate ), they added a second year warranty too.
For the Framework 16, with the 5070 addon(which has 8GB of VRAM compared to the 12GB on the 5070TI).
Sure, the framework might be better, but is it worth twice as much ?
Their support has been very responsive and helpful every time I've contacted them so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't have helped the GP.
I bought it because it's repairable but I didn't realize that meant I was going to have to repair it more than any other device I've purchased.
I was really sold on the idea of a repairable laptop and the Linux support was excellent. I like the laptop a lot and it happily replaced the old-skool Macbook that had served me so well over the years.
However, I had a screen die on me and that's when I found that their product support was truly appalling (even worse than Apple!) - They took ages to reply and then asking endless irrelevant questions in a very arrogant tone (version of BIOS, operating systems etc) - in the end, I gave up and bought the replacement screen myself.
I'll buy a Thinkpad next time.
Framework 13 Pro: £2064 (Ultra X7 358H, 16GB, 1TB, default ports, no adapter)
Framework 13 Pro: £2264 (Ultra X7 358H, 32GB, 1TB, default ports, no adapter)
MacBook Pro 14: £1699 (M5, 16GB, 1TB, no adapter)
MacBook Pro 14: £2099 (M5, 32GB, 1TB, no adapter)
MacBook Pro 14: £2199 (M5 Pro, 24GB, 1TB, no adapter) - added as I think it’s an even better deal
And they’re miraculously within 10-20% of each other.
Peep the margins on “Products” versus “Services” and you will understand what Apple's incentives are and why just selling me hardware isn't it: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2026-q1/FY26_Q1_Consol...
The idea that they were doing this maliciously never made sense anyway, customers who haven't upgraded in a while might be the least lucrative audience to target.
you're just eating up the damage control narrative they pushed later, on ios18. and they also pushed it in 26 for some reason
- opens to a full-page Apple Music subscription service ad on first run.
- search functionality defaults to “Apple Music” instead of “Local Library” (or “iTunes Store”) even when the user has no active subscription.
- Apple Music subscription upsell banner ad along the bottom of the search results screen, that stays on screen as you scroll the results pane.
Check out at the end when he demos Music-dot-app's Settings pane changing to include CD-ripping settings when and only when a CD drive is available, something they could also do and chose not to for Apple Music subscription service when the user isn't subscribed.
But I think it is very fair to judge the OOTB experience as a whole as a reflection of the company's priorities.
— Sent from my (work) MacBook Pro M3
My last (and first, and only) iPhone was even worse. At one point the Settings app had no fewer than three paid-service nags at the top that I had to scroll through to even get to the first actual setting.
Storage almost full: enable iCloud Backup!
Try Apple Music, first month free!!
Activate your Apple News+ free trial!!! https://i.ibb.co/Cp275qQ9/news.webp
It actually stays, even after expired. Then if you tap the "two weeks free!" it says "expired, so sorry, but do want to pay us a slightly discounted rate instead of free?"
Then the alert went away.
Super scummy.
Source: happened a few months ago with the promo on my newish iphone 17 when I thought I'd try appletv out to watch pluribus.
I pay $3/month to Apple in exchange for full-quality backups of decades of photos, but I could easily stop doing that, or switch to another provider, if I wanted to. (I don't, because $3/month is extremely fair for what I get.) I've never paid for any other Apple service and likely never will. The OS never, ever nags me about services - compare that to Windows!
Can you though? Its been a few years since I've been on apple, but being able to get anything but icloud native support in other apps was basically non-existent. Compared to android where it gives you a plethora of choice out of the box.
First and foremost, you cannot install any applications through the primary method of app installation, which is the App Store.
You also cannot use certain applications like iMovie (which is pre-installed) without an Apple Account.
MacOS will always prompt you in the Settings to sign in with iCloud. Opt into Betas, including Public and Developer Betas are not possible without an iCloud account.
The Apple land is miles better than the Microsoft land, which you aptly point out though.
At least I've never had to use the store in my 15+ years of using MacBooks, and I can't see myself using one anytime soon, unless Apple starts forcing you to (in which case I'll just stick to using homebrew).
Also MBP is not really repairable at all.
Big enough that they specifically targeted that exact group with this laptop.
Personally I also can't stand the exterior design, albeit overall hardware of MBP is good. Guess if I land an old MBP this is what I'd do with it.
What I really want is for other hardware vendors to catch up. I like Apple hardware but hate their software.
I will attempt to use Asahi as my daily driver once this is officially released.
One benefit of framework is you may not need to get storage, and just go use the one in your current laptop, saving around £200. And you might even try to source the RAM on your own to save a few more. But I admit that is somewhat difficult these days haha.
We should also consider that repairability, upgradability and open hardware/software support don't come for free and are features that are worth paying for.
Unrelated, but never thought I’d see this kind of sentiment
Framework is very much a premium brand (where the premium experience is centred on repairability/upgradeability), and don't have the economies of scale Apple do. It's natural that they'd end up being more expensive.
Yeah, I’m assuming just the one of the various tiers here that’s in the same bucket as MacBooks, and that we’re generally talking devices that are specialty-capable; such as media production or Linux development or gaming or what have you. If you lump the entire “portable screen bigger than nine? inches and with an in-box physical keyboard and pointer controller” market together, you’ll disregard ‘glorified word processors’ that cost a couple hundred bucks (before the RAM underproduction grift) in their own specialty niche. Framework isn’t competing there, right? (I could have missed something..)
Imagine telling this to someone in 2010 or 2015.
64 GB of LPDDR5x will add $849 to the price of a Framework 13 Pro. Thats insane. I would love a future Framework 16 Pro but that will probably run $3500 for the configuration that I would want if memory and storage prices don't come down.
I've wanted to get a Framework for a long time now, but their lack of shipping to Israel (and active prevention of using Freight forwarders) has prevented me.
If they were willing to sell me the 13 Pro, I'd sell my Yoga Pro 7 in a heartbeat to replace with a 13 Pro
Apple: Every repair is Mainboard replacement and costs 70% of the used value of the Notebook. Upgrades are impossible. Have a nice day!
If the Framework Pro holds up in reviews and works as well with Linux as claimed, it'll probably replace my M2 Air as a daily driver. If they add Dvorak as an option so I don't have to rearrange the keys myself, that will make the choice a slam dunk.
The video says that directly. They want to compete with MacBook, but people coming to Framework from Mac are attracted to the idea of owning their own computer and being able to customise it.
You seemed like upgradability and repairability are secondary things to you, whereas the framework makes them its primary asset. It's unlikely the Framework Pro will ever be an "upgrade" over the MacBook in other areas. Comparing it to the MacBook completely skims over its most important differentiator.
The more important part is first-class Linux support. From my perspective, macOS is basically discount Linux; it's tolerable, but only if the gulf between a MacBook and the next best hardware is wide enough to justify it.
Assuming the basics hold up well, upgradability and repairability likely push Framework Pro over the edge for me from merely "close enough" to "materially superior" on balance. I'd still be interested if it didn't have those features, but I'd also look more closely at alternatives and be less willing to pay a premium over the cost of an equivalently-specced MBP.
I'm someone who doesn't want to go through a new laptop every other year. I've got an M1 mac right now. I've owned it for 5 years and could easily see myself getting another 5 years of use out of it. Only problem is, the hard drive is small, I can't upgrade it. It only has 16 GB RAM, which is fine for now, but I can't upgrade it. One of the 2 USB C ports gave out on me. I can't repair it.
If I had a laptop that I could repair and upgrade that also ran Linux? I would absolutely pay $2k for it - as long as the quality is good - because I think I would save money in the long term by making a laptop like that last a long time.
then when it comes to repairing broken parts they are on opposite ends of the scale where apple actually go out of their way to make it harder for you to do that and its probably more expensive as well since only apple certified repair shops have access to certain parts
You can sell the old Macbook and recoup a lot of the original investment.
Leno 14.1": £300.19 (i7-8650U, 16GB, 1TB) Leno 14.1": £341.59 (i7-8650U, 32GB, 1TB)
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010289025003.html
- There's zero mention of the display technology, just "2.8K Touchscreen Display"
- The optional HDMI ("3rd Gen") adapter is only 4K 60hz, when the host chip has integrated Thunderbolt 4 which can output 4K 240Hz
So I can perfectly imagine a small hardware vendor like Framework being unable to get support for this. Perhaps DP is a better solution for your use-case?
Biggest gripes I had are:
A) battery life (both during use and standby just kinda sucking on Linux in general compared to os x, not exactly framework specific but I did get used to how amazing my m1 pro for longevity)
B) the case looking nice but feeling a little flimsy
C) the speakers are pretty bad (though I did get turned on to easyeffects and there is a profile for the 13 which helped a bit)
D) macs completely spoiled me trackpad wise
It seems like they are taking a stab at all of these in some way and I'm excited to see how it goes, especially with so much being backwards compatible.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/915508/framework-announces-...
I am very excited about the Framework 13 Pro and it’s dramatically improved battery life. It’s unfortunate regarding RAM prices, though; I only paid $96 for 32GB of DDR5 RAM back in December 2023 when I ordered my Framework 13 (I bought my RAM on Newegg). It’s much more expensive today. I’d like to upgrade, but I can’t afford it at today’s RAM prices. With that said, because the RAM is still modular in the Framework 13 Pro, I could settle for a lower configuration and wait until a later date to upgrade the RAM.
I’m running Fedora. Other than some h265 and heic codec/file format issues, (I’ve had to convert videos and photos to more open codec/format), it’s been a great machine.
I miss the battery life of the M1 but I enjoy the comfort of knowing I can upgrade storage or fix anything I want when needed.
Other than personal web browsing, I do web development and tinkering with music creation (Bitwig).
I don’t think I’ll ever buy another Apple machine. I want to use devices that are repairable, support those companies, and use software that is open source or multi-platform without continuing subscriptions.
Now that I’m personally invested in Linux, I’d like to contribute to desktop app projects that are open source since now, I am also a user.
I have gradually been moving my digital life away from Google and Apple/iCloud.
It takes time. On many dimensions, the Framework running Linux is laughably worse. I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
That being said, running Linux is very fun and can be productive if you choose a well-supported distribution and desktop environment. I landed on KDE Plasma and Fedora/Kununtu. It has been my daily driver and I see no reason to go back.
My gateway to Linux was buying an old Thinkpad T580 and messing around Arch Linux. If you’re on the fence, this may be a good place to start.
In the days of S3, I never thought about it either. Ironically it's on my Mac that I have to remember to hibernate if I won't use my laptop for a week or whatever, because it'll die if I don't. It just happens to be that it was on a Mac on which I first tried "modern standby" features.
Anyway I feel you. This big battery life improvement is what has convinced me my next laptop can be a Framework.
The battery life is the biggest negative compared to a MacBook, but that seems to be better now (though I doubt it, or anyone, can compete with the power/performance that Apple is putting out now).
The issue with my advice to you though is that I prefer Linux. And I would be running Linux at work if I could. Mac OS is fine, but I do prefer Linux as my main operating system.
If I didn't specifically want to run Linux, though, I would probably be using a MacBook, despite their lack of repairability.
All that said, I really love my framework and I don't intend on buying another machine any time soon, especially because I can upgrade my Framework 5 years from now (hopefully).
It's by far the best primary computer I've owned. The tradeoffs in battery life, speaker sound quality, and so on didn't matter much for my use case, so I was happy to take them; but this new model seems to fix those issues too, so I think it'll appeal to a much wider audience.
1. I won't be using NixOS so that point is moot to me.
2. Reliable sandbox I can get using Apple Containers. I won't argue that the Linux experience is better, because it is. Alone it wouldn't be a reason for me to switch but it does count towards it.
3. Fair enough, I haven't had that issue on the Mac but that may just be because I'm working with other kinds of tech or I have the things I need installed in a different way.
4. Same as 2, really - unless I misunderstood you.
I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I have been primarily a Mac user for longer than I care to admit and lately macOS and the ecossystem have been growing more hostile to me. I've been on the lookout for a Linux laptop that wouldn't feel like much of a downgrade and the Framework 13 might be it so I'm trying to get as much information as I can before I commit (especially money) to the switch.
Virtual machines. I can't ask claude to figure out an issue on the hw host w/o falling back to per-action confirmations or giving it full unconditional access. When everything runs on one host I can organize controllable sandbox escapes for Claude and let it work in huge batches with minimal attention.
> won't be using
Well, that's your choice to avoid efficient agentic workflows
> misunderstood
There are no containers on mac, there are VMs hosting containers and subtractive sandbox filtering syscalls.
> get as much
FW 13 is great, FW 16 is a disaster.
Yeah that seems to confirm my suspicion that we have very different use cases. :)
> I can't ask claude to figure out an issue on the hw host w/o falling back to per-action confirmations or giving it full unconditional access.
Doesn't help me if the agent is efficient but I'm not. :D
> There are no containers on mac, there are VMs hosting containers and subtractive sandbox filtering syscalls.
I understand the tech. It serves the purpose I need from it.
> FW 13 is great, FW 16 is a disaster.
Thanks! I did take a quick peek at the 16 but I find it too big anyway.
No technical argument will fit with the mindset of an average dev preferring MacBook.
I wouldn't try selling MacBooks to anyone. It's the worst popular device in terms of ergonomics, paired with OS that is incredibly hostile to developers and power users
I upgraded the screen and speakers, nothing else really needed changing throughout the years.
I was so tired of the bad docker performance on macOS that I went to a framework with Linux. Linux on a laptop (Fedora/Gnome specifically) worked so much better than I expected too.
I'm hopeful I can pre-order this new model as well.
I really would like to give other laptops a chance but the substandard keyboards of most laptops are always holding me back.
I wonder if the 13 pro uses qmk or similar for its keyboard firmware, I think the framework 16 does, so maybe? Being able to re-arrange on the hardware level the Fn-key related layer would make it the perfect laptop keyboard for me.
Otherwise, it rubs me the wrong way to pay 3 000€ for a premium device with a rather frustrating keyboard layout. But oh well, paying even more for macbook pros that have an even worse keyboard makes the pill easier to swallow I guess.
A few years ago we were told only "Pro" parts have ECC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37828168
Those DRAM chips being the bottleneck that would require hard to build new silicon fabs to increase supply.
The new display, battery life, the new Intel chips, and LPCAM2 memory all look great. I love my M1 MBP but Apple’s software quality has been rough the past year especially. I think this is also the first time the Framework 13 has officially supported Thunderbolt? Depending on how macOS 27 turns out I may seriously consider the 13 Pro as my next laptop. I’d slap Fedora Workstation on it and call it a day.
FYI, the existing Framework 13 Intel motherboards do support Thunderbolt 4: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/usb-port-definition-matrix-... There's an additional, optional retimer update that's officially Thunderbolt certified, but I haven't bothered with that because my Thunderbolt dock was already working: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/framework-laptop-bios...
I've made several "attempts" to jump ship from Apple hardware before, like the dell XPS "developer edition" which ships with Linux so all the hardware was supported out of the box; the hardware was OK, but the battery life was abysmal. If I can't get 8hr of battery on a machine battery it's just a portable desktop.
That being said, thinkpads are almost as upgradeable as frameworks. The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
Only benefit of trackpoint nowadays is that you don't move your hand. Otherwise, it's all downsides compared to modern trackpads, especially haptic ones like here. It's less precise, less ergonomic. Nowadays I'd rather move my hand a few centimeters off, than put regular strain on my forearm and struggle being precise with the pointer.
And most thinkpad users, employees of big companies, don't care at all about the trackpoint. I'm pretty sure it's only kept for the thinkpad brand and to keep the vocal minority of us geeks pleased.
Hm, I wish they had scores for the X230 and older; I'd like to see how they compare. IMO they're better, if nothing else because you can replace RAM, SSD and battery without unscrewing the entire bottom.
I was busy with work and didn't touch my personal laptop for a few weeks and it still had well over half the battery.
Also things like lpddr5x, ssd controller built into the SoC with cache in unified ram (instead of running a whole ass separate computer with its own ram on an m2 stick) etc
Sleep is such a finicky thing which requires all parts of the system to do it right.
My desktop lost the ability to sleep because I guess the nvidia drivers have decided that you are wrong to want to put things to sleep.
Looks like Framework has started heading this direction too, which is nice to see.
Apple's storage controller is not even a PCIe peripheral internally, so it's saving power and latency cutting out that interface, even when it's active.
I'm guessing Intel/AMD could integrate a single SSD controller that OEMs could use for a specially socketed SSD?
I'm not familiar enough with SSD controllers - but what limits would this introduce. I'm thinking they can't be totally generic - with any NAND chips, any layout, 1-4 chips and TLC or QLC NAND - any capacity etc. It strikes me it would be limiting - you would become restricted to a a small subset of SSDs, maybe not forwards compatible with newer NAND chips etc.
I'd think only the minority of PC Laptops would make sense to have this - ones with soldered SSDs - and I don't know many of these. So Intel/AMD would need a big push to integrate any controller. Maybe Windows ARM laptops, if the controller makes a big enough difference, will do this. I'm curious now if any Snapdragon devices are doing this already.
Just to beat my favorite dead horse, this is why the insistence on SO-DIMMs "BEcAuse it's rEpAIrAble" has wrecked the reputation of a lot of laptops. DDR on a stick is fundamentally hostile to sleep power draw. Soldered-down LPDDR memory has always been massively superior for energy savings, and LP-CAMM finally solves the issue.
LPCAMM2 really shows the trade-offs. It adds a lot of bulk and cost, and repairability hasn't been valued high enough by the market to cover that overhead for most consumers. That's why Micron exited the market they played a big part in founding.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/95078/lpcamm2-memory-is-finally-...
My Zen2 based Lenovo laptop has 6-7 hours of battery when doing basic tasks in both Windows and Linux, but sleep on Linux lasts a week while on Windows it's empty in 24 hours.
And that is OK, as long as they provide a way for you to disable it. I do not want my laptop to be doing things when I put it in sleep mode. Nothing at all. Save battery life above all else when sleeping. But Microsoft does not appear to provide a way to do that. At least none that I can see.
Yeah, because they buy a Windows laptop, slap Linux on it, and expect it to work.
OSX sucks even more by this metric; it won't even install!
I've found suspend performance has improved since upgrading to a kernel that supports the AMD 7640U NPU cores. I have no concrete evidence of that though.
I'm happy to accept poorer sleep performance to have a repairable laptop and Linux OSS (with good support), but I wouldn't say its problem free.
On the other hand framework is actually in a good position to do something about it. Similar to valve. I think they do have more control than a regular PC vendor when also using Linux ad they have a very limited portfolio of devices and can actually upstream software fixes.
How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
( Yes, I know they used full-sized keys for a while, I moaned and cursed them at the time as well.)
Sorry, I've never seen this perspective, why do you want the smaller ones? The small arrow keys on my MacBook are one of my least favorite parts of the keyboard.
I'd much rather see something like that, going back to Fn+up/dn makes me feel like a caveman.
The problem I have with laptop keyboard is that the arrow key height is too small, and the cluster itself is too crowded to sit my fingers on comfortably when using arrows. I want the arrow cluster to have full sized keys.
Thinkpads also do this right, and have a way better keyboard layout than macbooks actually :)
It's weird what people prioritize.
Crucial is certainly the only option that comes up looking on amazon or newegg right now. Lenovo has some OEM modules but they are obviously marketed as replacement parts to just their laptops, not sure how the warranty and support for them would be outside a lenovo product.
But the Crucial brand was unceremoniously sacrificed by Micron to the AI gods at the beginning of this year. So will these lpcamm2 modules even be available once current stock runs out? The 64gb module is already sitting at $1000 on newegg.
Samsung is making lpcamm2 modules but no telling when those will actually hit the market and be accessible.
I'm clinging on to my older Thinkpad X1 because the 4K display is so good.
I do UI design, so I find it important to see things in full fidelity (no pixel smudging).
However, to be fair, that's only at lower DPIs smudging's an issue. Anything retina-ish and integer scaling loses all meaning. I'm typing this on a 15" 4K laptop on 1.75 scaling with HN set to 120% zoom. At those DPIs, it does not matter at all. I adjust most websites zoom level because a lot of them think the content must breathe, while I think I should not fiddle with my scroll to read a paragraph.
I still use it because the end result on some of my most-used applications is nicer, and it seems to be slightly-noticeably better performing (on a high framerate screen). So it's good enough for my tastes. But it really isn't anything I'd call "successful".
1.6x works surprisingly well now, that wasnt the case a couple years ago
> The side-firing speakers are tuned with Dolby Atmos® to deliver clear, balanced audio on Windows
> 7 days
> Standby without charging
> Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
(I'm unimpressed with listing all the "active" battery life listings with Windows, mind; I just want us to be precise in our criticisms.)
They should probably give the Linux numbers after the Windows ones at least tbf, even if they are bad.
Battery life? Should they share all possible config combinations? Should they share the most power-saving setting (and then be blamed for sharing numbers that almost no one gets to reproduce?)
As a Linux user on an AMD FW my battery life is good enough (7ish hours of work), and I never felt I need to tune it further from the OOB Fedora Kinoite.
i.e. https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/#footnote-5
They financially sponsor Linux/OSS projects and give them laptops to test on. What more do you want them to do?
They don’t have a zillion employees like Lenovo who is the #1 volume computer company in the world.
Finally, IMO, System76 is a much worse example because they aren’t focusing on the things Linux needs to grow. Linux doesn’t need contributions like their their silly Ubuntu reskin distro to be popular on the desktop. Instead, Linux needs a company making compatible hardware that is good, attractive hardware that will stop people from buying a MacBook instead.
The System76 lineup is a complete mess of white label Clevo systems. They have no business offering 8 different laptop models. That just tells potential customers “wow, buying a Linux laptop is a lot more complicated than buying a Mac!”
All laptop speakers sound like shit on Linux. I'm sure people will reply with their anecdotal evidence, or pretend that it's not that bad once you have a good EQ. But we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I've spent hours trying to get multiple laptop speakers at least half as good as they sound on Windows. No success. And I'm talking thinkpads, dell xps, the usual linux go-tos, not some exotic stuff.
My distro's compile farm compiles kernels for me (thanks guys!), and switched to pipewire years ago.
Pulseaudio still does the device juggling etc on most systems even when there's a pipewire backend.
Overall it looks awesome. I just bought Thinkpad T14s upgrading from the same model of older generation, I wish Framework would expand its sales coverage, probably would buy it without second thought if it was available in my country without overseas shipping and customs tax hurdles.
It's not exactly impressive to say you can stream 20 hours of 540p video. Netflix DRM is awful for Linux users.
Though I agree it would have been better to show a benchmark of youtube or similar for Linux.
Everything about this is what I've been looking for in a Linux laptop. (Also, how refreshing is it to not have to think hard about how much RAM you might need over the next few years because you know you can always upgrade it later?)
I've always wondered if these laptops can scale beyond the enthusiast group. If so, how?
Having something called an "App Store" on my personal laptop I can't remove.. I'd deal with having 4gb of RAM before I lived that reality.
This is like the really cheap televisions that harvest your data for profit.
How can you compete/compare against vizio if it makes more on your data than on the television?
Since Framework has a great track record with display upgradability, just an indication that there is serious interest in OLED options in the future would be enough to sell me.
So if anyone at Framework is reading this: is there any opposition inside framework to OLED? Any fundamental constraints that make OLED panels unlikely for the next several years?
Accepting the prices of the ram shortage era is still painful, but even with the 64gb option, here in France it's still a great deal compared to similarly configured premium thinkpads or macbook pros.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnOpIQJnYWU
"This product can only be used with both the Framework Laptop 13 Pro Bottom Cover and Framework Laptop 13 Pro Input Cover."
I applaud that the mainboard and keyboard are backwards compatible, but I don't think the pro is quite as backwards compatible as some are thinking
Mainly just a trade-off because of because of the bigger battery (but it sounds like they'll sell you the bottom chassis pieces as well).
https://frame.work/sg/en/products/framework-laptop-13-pro-ch...
Bottom cover alone goes for more than that, even without battery or speakers: https://frame.work/sg/en/products/laptop13pro-bottom-cover-k...
So does the screen: https://frame.work/sg/en/products/laptop13pro-display-kit
Fuck I do love these guys! Give me a little hope in humanity.
Will definitely buy this new chasis as soon as I can!
First off, I believe that Intel has its memory far more "unified". AMD typically has a stricter VRAM/RAM 'tradeoff' setting that does not exist on Intel in the same way to my knowledge. (See how on Strix Halo systems, there is a thing about "allocating" 96 GB to the GPU, which seems to be needed sometimes but prevents the CPU from accessing that memory.)
Secondly, the Panther Lake board has LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 memory at 7467 MT/s, while the AMD boards are stuck with DDR5 SODIMMs at a meagre 5600 MT/s. In other words, the Intel board gets a third more memory bandwidth!
BTW as an AMD fanboy and stockholder, Intel's latest generation of CPUs is quality.
In fact, Intel also had Lunar Lake, which had on-package memory. However, it was still limited to 128-bit dual-channel, so there weren't really many performance benefits; it did however help with power efficiency.
(Except for the caches, which everybody has)
Have you missed all the recent Intel news or something?
They eventually got on the EUV train and were the first customer to receive ASML's current state of the art machine which they call high-NA EUV. Intel's 18A process is the first to use this machine as part of the manufacturing process, Panther Lake uses this process so now they're right back to being SOTA.
All the news about them (stock price movements, theories about them going bankrupt, Panther Lake, etc...) for the last 2 years has essentially been people betting on whether or not they can successfully incorporate SOTA ASML machines into their manufacturing.
Now Intel's process node is also SOTA and on par with TSMC 2nm so they should be more or less equivalent and the only differences down to what set of compromises they make in the design of the chips.
How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness, and for native-feeling integration with ubuntu?
I am, naturally, a bit skeptical that touchscreen UI would be any good in linux.
GNOME supports multitouch gestures, and the GTK4 toolkit is overall very touch-native. It strikes a nice balance between overpadded and touch-accessible, IMO: https://www.gnome.org/
(some of the newer Libadwaita widgets that GNOME is using: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/wid... )
> How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness
With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
I've heard that there's *support* -but is the experience of having a touchscreen on an ubuntu device actually usable and good?
For example some random GUI app you're likely to use on ubuntu is the experience not broken?
I guess Chrome is the first thing that comes to mind.
Besides that, it all works about as well as you'd expect it to. You can drag the window around by the tab bar and tap-and-hold to pull up a context menu.
Come on lol. I have a couple steam decks and both are really clunky.
Most applications are not built using GTK4 nor Qt6 for that matter.
On my steam deck the keyboard never pops up by itself so I have to use a key combination and it feels like I am moving a ghost mouse around the place (rather than proper touch screen support)
I ran gnome on the deck for a while but anyway the on-screen keyboard provided by the gnome sucked so bad that I gave up (sucked as in, it groups all the keys around the center of the screen tightly together and very small)
I also have an M1 iPad Pro. No comparison because those issues simply don’t exist on iOS.
My touchscreen laptop is closing in on being a decade old (i7 6600u) and the worst thing I can say about the experience is that it VSyncs down to 30fps during more taxing animations (just like my iPad does).
> Any gesture functionality is dependent on the software you are running. This includes both, the application (e.g. Firefox) and the desktop environment (e.g. GNOME). The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
I love Linux but no need to embellish the current state imo
I am glad that it is working really well for you though
Taking a quick look, all of the things they list are basically reiterating what I've already said vis-a-vis Wayland:
Yeah no. All of this depends on everything up to the application.
A gtk2 application will have no support for anything. A GTK3 application running on xwayland will have poorer support as well. And anyway most applications just treat the touchscreen as an invisible pointer as it says there.
Just to give an example of some basic thing that doesn’t work reliably: you can’t reliably use a long press gesture. In most apps that will be equivalent to holding the left click (aka does nothing but a long click). On iOS you will get a contextual menu to select/format text or whatever. (You can find a real report of this issue here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/crLHZhHkuM - “how do I right click using the touchscreen?” from barely 6 months ago)
Your claim that this is an equivalent experience to an iPad is just false.
I’ve been around long enough to remember setting up TouchEgg, the situation is better now but still not equivalent at all.
Anyway originally I wanted to reply to provide balance to your take so casual readers wouldn’t install Linux on their tablets and expect iPadOS. I think that has been sufficiently achieved by this comment chain, readers can choose which side to take :-)
Cheers!
If you're going to fight over edge-case consistency, then at least be consistent. People build iPad apps with horrible custom widgets that block context menus too. They run "real" software in QEMU and iTerm that truly has no support for any of their default HIDs. Linux has more software to support, by nature it's going to have the larger number of inconsistent experiences. I don't think that's a fair basis of comparison, though.
Strictly speaking, I think KDE and GNOME's Wayland stacks are the closest equivalent to the Quartz Compositor on the market. I don't really know any other stack that comes close.
To go back to the app-by-app comment, I do know that there are like ubuntu tablet and touch setups.
Are there any browsers already setup to be more touch native, or specific browser builds that are more touch native already?
Everything around actually a Linux device with a touchscreen sucks.
Like on-screen keyboard will be inconsistent depending on the framework of the app.
comparing to iOS which was built from the ground up around that input method is simply not fair lol.
Framework Pro 13" DIY AMD Ryzen 7 350, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD = $2,049.00
Framework Pro 13" Pre-Built AMD Ryzen 7 350, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD = $2,059.00
Your FW's Keyboard breaks? Original price you paid, bonus: you can just buy the newest model.
You want to upgrade anything in your MBP? "You know, with how thin, lightweight and fast they are, it's physically impossible to make them user-serviceable"
On the FW? They gave you the one tool you needed when you purchased your laptop.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822483
Why are you lying? That price is to replace the main board.
Give us the price of the Framework's mainboard if you want to compare that.
They aren't lying. Apple's OEM keyboard repair will charge you for the entire topcase assembly, which can easily crest $500.
Contrast this with Framework or Thinkpad where a keyboard replacement is $20 and 5 minutes of screw work: https://www.ebay.com/itm/286053777254
I thought they’d either solder the memory or skip out on delivering the good integrated graphics from the X SKUs.
I’m stunned in a good way. This is a MacBook Pro killer for the nerdier end of Apple’s market.
The fact that you mostly can pick and choose your upgrades to Pro is really cool, too.
The mid-tier X7 board sold alone seems like a great value and it would be a pretty solid uplift to the old system.
At least I have the option of that CoolerMaster case. But maybe it'd be best to just sell the whole thing.
I did find this list: https://community.frame.work/t/list-of-company-or-individual...
According to it there are more 3rd party main boards than expansion cards. I kinda get it, but wow. End of an era I guess.
I didn't do shipment forwarding. I just bought the product and later moved to Japan. Also, Framework supposedly blocks shipment forwarding.
It's odd, because I remember them advertising a Japanese keyboard layout in the past. They must not see a large enough market to justify the costs.
I thought most modern laptops have dedicated video decode hardware that is fairly easy on battery. At only 250nit though...that seems dim by today's standards. I'm happy to be wrong though!
(Now you have to validate the next person's justification when it comes up again.)
However, the 358H processor + 64GB RAM + 1TB NVMe is $2700. Wow. Even if I sold my current AMD 7840U with 64GB of RAM it would still be quite an investment.
The biggest question I have, which is probably easily searchable: How well will this run local LLMs? Seems the RAM is fast enough.
at the same time, there is a decent level of risk with using "new" standards before the industry catches up. lpcamm2 is great and should allow faster memory while "upgradable". the issue is with only having one slot which forces you to replace memory instead of adding to it. this is working with the assumption of having a single slot, which i am happy to be proven wrong on.
the current timing is a shame but at least when one needs to shell out so much money after all, might as well get better performance and hardware along with it.
Those might look cool, but they're a huge pain to use.
I don't have plans to buy a laptop in the near future, but its nice to have this as an option. I like the idea of a bespoke Linux machine I could use.
Also how's Linux support for either?
The Core series has GPUs on par with or even slightly bigger than most of the Ryzen AI series (look up benchmarks and articles).
But that's bad in my book. I'm happy with 720p on low detail once in a while if it's a laptop. What I remember is Intel GPUS being unable to do even that.
If they caught up with AMD iGPUs, that's great. I don't do desktop replacement laptops, I prefer the ones I can hold in one hand, the dGPU is in my desktop.
Maybe in the days of HD graphics cards... I've got a Tiger Lake chipset and the Xe iGPU outperforms the laptop 3050 dGPU in actual games (due to having access to waaaaaay more RAM).
During the previous chip crisis when covid and crypto were waning I needed a new desktop. Damned if I was going to buy a discrete video card at those prices so I went AMD integrated graphics. Didn't even stop to look at Intel.
(For the record said desktop has a discrete GPU now, but I bought it like 2 years after I built the desktop.)
Intel has had a positive reputation the vast majority of the time from 1990 up to now, with only the last few years being bad.
For integrated GPUs? Both sides were crap until Zen. I just didn't notice Intel caught up.
> from 1990 up to now
For CPUs they're fortunately still playing catch up with each other. You remember when AMD released Zen, but do you remember when Intel released the Core stuff and how crap Pentium 4 / Netburst was right before that?
edit: I think I found it: https://frame.work/products/laptop13pro-mainboard-intel-ultr...
Isn't this a Linux device? Why not skip mentioning this non-feature?
There is no such product in the market.
That's a non-starter. Why not 128GB or push boundary for 256GB?
As I understand it, 64 GB modules are largest LPCAMM2 modules yet released with 96 GB being announced only a couple months ago. 128 GB might be possible on the Ultra 5 325 once either sufficiently large LPCAMM2 modules have been release or if the motherboard was redesigned to support dual LPCAMM2 modules, the Ultra X7 358H and Ultra X9 388H only support 96 GB. Support for 256 GB would likely require a desktop processor, or a redesign from Intel to support a quarter terabyte of memory on a mobile processor.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/245720/...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/245527/...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/245526/...
Intel has really crushed it lately.
Anyway, the next Frameworks need to adopt Thunderbolt 5 to handle modern HDMI 2.1 and 2.2, eGPU, Oculink, etc.
> Watch a Framework Laptop 13 Pro battery go from 100% to 0%. Live.
Live stream is not available.
They don't ship to where I am so I didn't stay long
It's the one thing I'm jealous of the Laptop 16 together with their key module that should let you design arbitrary layouts.
* Some will even work with graphics cards from newer laptops using the same chassis; for example, the Precision 7530 (8th gen Intel + Pascal GPUs) can be upgraded with Precision 7540 (Turing) GPUs. This isn't officially supported, though, and may not apply to later models.
So can we finally update the firmware for the Sandisk SN7100 and 850X SSDs under Linux? Last time I've checked you couldn't even download the firmware for WD 850X using a plain browser. You had to use their "special" Windows software.
I'll buy one on the day of release if they offer both options (my most recent¹ Lenovo is long overdue for replacement)
¹ I don't think I'll ever sell my X220, any I regret selling my X270. Everything after that was a disappointment.
That's a huge negative for me.
Alternatively, you can also "not touch" the touch display :)
As I require ECC, it seems I won't be upgrading anytime soon.
If you don’t reboot your laptop in years where ECC matters I’m not sure how to help you.
> 16" 16:1- Anti-glare matte display (2560x1600), 500 nits, no HDR
Sorry. That's just not going to cut it. These are 5-year-old specs.
:(
... but I wish they would make something with a bit more screen estate without being heavy and bulky. Their 16" is just too big. I really like the Dell XPS 14 and MBP 14", which I think is the right trade-off between screen size and portability.
I await a Linux-based battery test for both active work and overnight suspend consumption. I don't think suspend battery drain is vendor-specific though; AMD and Intel both shat the bed compared to Apple due to hardware decision-making.
edit: I missed this.
>7 days Standby without charging, Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
Does a Framework Laptop bridge the gap somewhat?
No T-shape cursor keys?!? Lame. No love. No want. Go home.
Thinkpad FTW. Sorry.
Most of the port options are decoys because it means 1 or 0 USB ports.
And no I'm not carrying around a satchel of modules like an old British lord.
- Touchscreen -> mmkay, but i don't really care
- Haptic touchpad -> I absolutely hate those. I want to click buttons. Buttons. Buttons.
Well, this is not for me i guess :(
Unfortunately Linux support isn't fully baked yet, but people are working on it.