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Comment by noirbot | Hacker News Reader

As someone who bought a Framework to try to support a better model, my #1 complaint about it by far is that the battery is essentially worthless. It maybe gets 3 hours of use on a full charge, and 9 hours while closed and hibernated.

I returned a M1 Macbook Air to get the Framework instead, so essentially, I've now paid 50% more to get a laptop with almost infinitely worse battery life when idle and 3-4x worse battery life in use. It's also slower, heavier, thicker, and has a screen resolution that a lot of apps don't know how to use well.

At this rate, I better be able to replace the battery because I'm having to do a full charge/discharge cycle multiple times a day if I'm not just constantly leaving it plugged in.

I love the idea of it in theory, but it's essentially a worse laptop than even the decade-old Apple laptops that did have replaceable batteries.

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You seem to think that Framework can fix their battery by gluing it in and welding the case shut?

I don't know, but whatever they did has made for a decidedly worse laptop, and I assume they didn't set out to make a laptop that had an essentially unusable battery. I'm assuming good intent on their part that this is the best laptop they could make with the parts/design constraints. I'll be happy if the v2 of it is better though.

Is it the battery, or the power usage of the laptop? The battery is a pretty physical thing, storing that many Watt-hours. If you have a 100 Wh battery, Apple uses 10 W and Framework 50 W, then you’ll get a 5x difference on the same battery.

Does it matter? It's not as if I designed this laptop myself. I had 2 options. If you can only put a battery in your laptop that holds X W/hrs of power and you sell it with a CPU and other components that demand enough power to drain it in 3 hours, then that's a design flaw.

At least unless you put a big glaring "This laptop has 3 hours battery life" on the purchase page. Instead, they just repeatedly say how many Watts the battery holds and leaves you to assume that it's such a big number that it'll have great battery life.

> It's also slower, heavier, thicker,

The Framework and M1 Macbook Air weight the same at 1.3 kg, and are both 16 mm thick, according to the specs that I can find. Did it really _seem_ thicker and heavier to you?

I'm a little surprised, but the weight being roughly the same makes sense. The thickness is a little deceptive. I think they're both measured from their thickest point, but the Framework is essentially a solid brick with only a slight taper on the front and back edge, while the Air tapers to nearly a point on a number of sides. For reference, Apple lists the Air at:

Height: 0.16–0.63 inch (0.41–1.61 cm)

So they're the same thickness at their thickest point, but I'd guess that the Air has much less of the laptop at that thickness. I'd be curious about a volumetric comparison.

It's not the battery size which is the issue here, but how much power the hardware uses. The capacity of the battery of the Framework is 55W, while the capacity of the battery of the M1 MacBook Air is 49,9Wh. So apparently Framework managed to fit a larger battery in a equally large case, without the need to glue it in.

To my point above, I'm pretty sure the Framework case is quite a bit larger in volume than the MBA case, so it's not really apples to apples there. Perhaps it's just that the Intel processor in the Framework is a massive energy hog (likely), but even my old Intel Macbook had easily 2x the battery life.

In the end, I wasn't even trying to say that the battery size mattered. If anything, the fact that it's a bigger battery almost makes it worse. They crammed more battery in and it's still a drastically worse user experience when it comes to everything about the battery.

Some of this is definitely because they're having to buy worse parts to try to make sure they're replaceable, and maybe that would improve if more places made parts for it. Maybe I could upgrade to a more efficient CPU/Mobo in the future, or a better battery, but then what do I do with the old one? I'm still contributing to e-waste.

Well, you'd have almost twice the battery-life, if you used Windows.

And you can get comparable results in Linux, but you need to tweak it yourself at the moment.

I'm using Linux and Windows. I regret to inform you that neither helps all that much. I've even spent a decent amount of time shoving values into config files to try to improve things on Linux.

The comparison begins and ends with M1 vs Intel chip. Linux is the second factor unfortunately.

I like that everyone just assumes I'm using Linux. But even my 2017 Macbook on Intel was doing better than this, and the issues I'm seeing with Framework occur on Fedora and Windows essentially equally.

The 2017 MacBook MacBook with just 1 port and a battery 8/10ths the size of Framework but with a CPU that is under a quarter the wattage in TDP? (7 vs. 28W?). And has a lower screen resolution (yes it matters) and has a manufacturer custom tweaked OS?

Correct? And yet, with all of that, that old Macbook was a more capable laptop in almost every way than the Framework I have now. It doesn't matter that the Framework has a better CPU or monitor if it dies halfway through even a short flight. And all the extra resolution only helps so much if both Linux and Windows barely handle the resolution/aspect ratio well.

The ports are great - I love that about the Framework, but having an HDMI port only matters so much if the battery is so bad you can't even show a fully movie on a TV with it not plugged in to power (and with a fairly beefy power transformer at that.)

I'm not arguing the Framework isn't more powerful on paper, but functionally, I just can barely use it. I was on a trip the other month and walked to a coffee shop in the morning to do some work and lost 20% of my battery charge on the way to the shop with it just in my backpack. Every minute using it I'm aware of how fast it's discharging in a way that literally no other electronic device I've owned in a decade has made me think about it.

I've heard the HDMI expansion in the framework can draw 1W doing nothing. Heard similar things about other framework expansions.

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