Framework is now available in Australia
frame.work
frame.work
I really wanted to support this company because I believe in repairability! But repairability is meaningless the software doesn't work... I'm not a 16 year old enthusiast anymore, I don't have the time or patience to troubleshoot drivers, firmware, devices etc. etc. :(
If you do so make sure to buy the longest extended warranty you can, covering the slightest tiny thing that can happen to your M1 Mac. Mine was a fine machine, zero bug, while the screen worked. These M1 Mac laptops have brittle porcelain screens. As someone put it here: it's the bend-gate all over again. FWIW I've got both a 2013 and a 2014 MacBook Air as well as a 4 years old (?) LG Gram laptop. They all have their screens still working fine and I'm pretty sure I know how to handle a laptop: these new M1 laptops are just fragile.
I damaged the screen in every laptop that I ever owned - either by creating pressure marks or - like in the most recent one - somehow stretching(either via temperature or flexing the surprisingly flimsy cover) the adhesive which kept all the LCD layers in place, creating a diagonal clouding pattern in the process.
My next laptop will be a framework because then at least I will be able to easily replace the screen once the inevitable happens.
The reports were spontaneous cracks after only days or weeks. And the tolerances were blamed because small debris caught under the screen would allegedly put undue pressure on the screen.
Anything I've ever had a fault not caused by me with has been replaced free of charge years after I bought it, including from large American companies like Amazon and Apple.
Nothing about the M1s is more fragile than before, just treat your things more carefully.
But I'm sure you'll find stats and horror stories that say otherwise, as if, somehow, Apple (or anyone) is capable of producing hardware and software that's impossible to break, never fails, and lasts forever.
It does a lot of things right - especially sleep - however I'm constantly running into problems with buggy software which is unfixable because Apple don't do compatibility.
Also not having a battery which can be replaced or storage which can be user-upgraded is absolute garbage in 2022.
EDIT: if I was still a gamer I'd be laughing the MacBook out of the room.
You're aware that the compatibility of any software (that's not Apple software) is the responsibility of the software vendor with regards to making it work on Silicon? Have I misunderstood you here? You can't actually expect Apple to just magically make code designed for one CPU architecture just work on another? There's kernel level translations you can do between opcodes, but that can't be expected to be perfect. The perfect solution is the vendor updates their software.
Microsoft on the other hand: Windows is literally full of work-arounds they added to ensure that new releases did not break existing software.
Apple at this point is FAR larger company than Microsoft was in the early 2000s. They're a goliath and should be more than capable of doing what Microsoft did.
User upgradeable storage is a very niche feature.
2014 MBP: worked well for a couple of years, then developed a fault where it randomly half comes out of sleep, then gets very hot, even when closed in a bag.
2018 MBP: randomly completely crashes, with no warning whatsoever, roughly once a day.
I think you'd like apple silicon macs.
Dell QC has been pretty terrible the past decade, and they're inferior in basically every way (Intel-only, mediocre cooling solutions, meh battery size, expensive, long-standing (like multi-year, basically entire product life cycle) unresolved bugs/incompatibilities even for their dev edition versions, soldered RAM, awful support, etc).
One other thing is that if you are a Linux user, I really don't see much point in rolling the dice/fighting obscure compatibility bugs (most of them being BIOS/ACPI bugs that are hard to impossible for mere mortal end-users to fix) when there are similar (or better) alternatives that are known to work OOTB, or better yet, explicitly support Linux.
Anywhere, here's the rub. I bought my 64GB memory kit for $250. It cost an extra $125 at retail to add an extra 32GB of memory, which almost all laptop manufacturers have decided not to even allow as an option for segmentation/planned obsolescence purposes. Which is fine, that's their prerogative, but since there are enough decent options that allow more memory, it also means that I, or anyone else who needs more RAM just won't be giving them any money instead.
If it makes you feel any better about your purchase, I don't get great battery life either. I didn't make any attempt to optimize it, and I get about 3-4 hours of dev time out of it (yes, not very scientific, I know).
Your review was great though, I might get a framework as my next laptop assuming they are still good in a few years time.
I don't know about your workload, but in you case you ever wanted to poke around, one thing that might be worth looking into is to see whether the MUX switch (only accessible in Windows) is on its dGPU-only mode. On iGPU mode, the battery life tests for idle and wifi web browsing seem pretty good in Windows: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Asus-ROG-Zephyrus-G14-GA402R-G...
On Windows, 3rd parties have been working on a utility called AATU to improve performance and longevity: https://amdaputuningutility.com/
And on Linux, I used https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj all the time for my preferred use cases (eg, setting the temp limit below when fans turn on to get a completely silent laptop on battery, lowering max power limits if I wanted to hit a certain amount of battery life, etc). (TLP has run-on-ac and run-on-bat commands so you can easily set your defaults based on whether you're plugged in or not (udev can see power events too).
I imagine the purchase experience would be a lot smoother now.
500GB - WD_BLACK™ SN850 NVMe™ for $189? I can find that exact item for $139 from quite a few places.
32GB (1 x 32GB) DDR4-3200 for $256? I just ordered one for my current laptop for $149 (+ $11 shipping since I live in the country and can't just drop by a store), though no guarantee on it being the same brand (some start at $20-30 more).
1) if I source from them I’m more positive that they’d be able to help me if I have problems within the warranty period, so maybe saving $70 on a $1600 purchase isn’t worthwhile
2) peace of mind vs the mess of counterfeits from Amazon third party sellers
3) they are a small company and I want them and help them to succeed because I love what they are trying to do (but also, selfishly, I need them to stick around if I want to order parts in the future)
I had a very weird screen/UEFI issue and their support has been amazing.
This is business done right at so many levels they totally deserve a markup.
How many of use have spare SODIMMs and NVMes lying around from buying base models and upgrading HD and RAM ourselves. You can get a stock Frame Work and shove your spares in there. Or PIF your parts to someone that can't afford a spiffy new machine. You can even reuse your USB-C charger. It's still not "cheap" but saving a couple hundred dollars and reducing electronic waste is nice.
I think the the DIY spec should price in 2 USB-C modules, a HDMI module and a USB-A module though. You really can't use it without a few modules. Or Even 2 USB-C and 2 dummy modules (make dummy modules are release 3D model to print) if you already have a USB-C hub.
sure, the OEMs have their local websites and you can order from there without windows but your options are seriously limited.
then you have included ram limited to like 8GB for upwards of around 50k inr which is just insane. if one were to do a BOM on these brand new laptops, the markups would be insane.
with something like framework, i could potentially get the products at a same/cheaper rate because it is "upgradeable" and also because i dont have to pay for windows
Any idea when a model with anything-other-than-intel cpu's will be available? eg Ryzen, (or anything)
Asking because I swore off Intel a few years ago. :)
At least it's not the Apple markup.
To go from 256G to 512G in an M2 Air is an extra AU$450.
And I wouldn't call 30-60% a little, though it's not dissimilar from other non-Apple OEMs (Apple being in a league of their own). (I didn't sample any but those two items. Others may vary.)
It's worth pointing out that for Apple the labor cost is essentially zero. The factory workers in India/China/Vietnam are being paid around $2 an hour¶, and they would be installing RAM anyway. So charging $450 for an extra 256gb of RAM that probably costs Apple around $100 to $150 has zero relationship with the labor cost. It's pure profit.
¶I live in Vietnam and I know Samsung factory workers are paid about $200 a month here. I assume it's similar for Apple. China wages are a bit higher.
It's an extra AU$300 = US$200 for just the storage.
Your upgrade includes extra 2 GPU cores + better power adapter.
Languages used are Go/C/C++. Go builds are spectacularly fast so I don't think I'll notice a difference between i5 and i7. For C/C++ some projects I work on are large, for example the Linux kernel, but again I don't think I'll notice a huge gap between i5 and i7.
I think what interests me in the i5 versus i7 aside from i5 being cheaper is that the i5 might be more energy efficient than the i7; is that even a valid claim?
Also really hoping that some day they'll release a laptop keyboard with the inverted-T layout like Apple laptops.
The biggest performance difference between the i5-1240P and i7-1260P BTW though will probably be that the i5 only has 12MB of L3 cache, while the i7 has 18MB:
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/compare.html?pro...
It was not easy to find an AMD laptop with 4K 16" screen and socketed RAM at 32G... I had to accept one with an Nvidia GPU (3060M) in it I won't use, and which nouveau turns out not to support. So, no HDMI until that gets fixed.
Linus Tech Tips actually reached out to AMD on behalf of Framework and there he said there was no response on either side.
Secondly, I think he was giving it a shot as he's probably the largest media personality in the enthusiast PC space, and figured that reaching out to his AMD contacts would yield some results.
Unless Framework thought he would have better luck than them (for some reason?!) and asked him to, that would be different. But based on people here knowing about it, I think it's just arrogance.
Sibling commentor says Framework also didn't follow up, i.e. presumably they don't want to buy AMD chips at the moment, want to keep it 'simple' focus on one for now, or whatever.
And no doubt Intel has them by the short hairs; they can't afford to go all-in on AMD, and can't afford to break ranks. You have to be Dell, ASUS, or Lenovo to dare cross Intel. Intel has myriad ways to make life uncomfortable, and uses them ruthlessly.
Even the Big Kids sabotage their own "build-a-laptop" pages to carefully steer you away from AMD machines they do build. Particularly Lenovo.
Now AMD on the other hand, he likely did overestimate the influence AMD marketing (and hence indirectly Linus) had over AMD's business deals planning, but the lack of follow-up is also from the framework side
If you hadn't jumped into internet point scoring mode you would have seen that nowhere did I imply AMD was obliged to care.
Linus certainly has a lot of influence with the AMD consumer marketing folks given that he is arguably the largest media source in that division's target market. He incorrectly assumed that that meant anything else to AMD. You can see how someone thinks "Oh AMD always replies to my emails really quick, they must care what I think", and not familiar with interior workings of corporate politics wrongly extrapolate that out to the entire company, rather than the one division who's job is to care about people like him - he was a PM at a regional retailer, then he was a youtuber, so I think as obvious as this would be to anyone who's worked in a large corporation, it is not his background.
Lack of follow up by framework is from Linus's own description. By the sounds of it his contact at framework was like "yeah we'll think about that, but we're busy right now" and put it on a backlog somewhere.
> I don't know what AMD's valuation has to do with how seriously Framework will take an enquiry from one of their top ten investors.
Just as I don't know what Framework's valuation has to do with why one of the contributors to it is justified in taking it upon himself to try to order the company a different CPU.
> He incorrectly assumed that that meant anything else to AMD.
I think we agree there.
> Lack of follow up by framework is from Linus's own description. By the sounds of it his contact at framework was like "yeah we'll think about that, but we're busy right now" and put it on a backlog somewhere.
Right, they did not ask for his help, it doesn't really make any sense that he took it upon himself to try. What was AMD supposed to say, 'sure we will sell if Framework wants to order'? And then what, Framework is just as uninterested/not prioritising it as yesterday?
The MBA M2 is great by the way, I love Linux on the desktop but it’s been a while since I had working touchpad gestures and sleep/hibernate that didn’t just die sometimes. No moving parts, all-day battery life, and having my computer in Find My is nice too. I know though once the storage starts going it’ll be an expensive replacement or a new computer altogether.
(Also, the Framework is available for pre-order - the turnaround on my new laptop was about 3 weeks but I have no idea how long I’d wait for a Framework, is it still being released in limited batches?)
Unfortunately it's not clear if their pricing is in USD, CAD, or AUD.
Quite a difference between a laptop being priced at USD$1,639.00 (~=$2,414.25) or AUD$1,639.00
I'm used to US-based companies just using $ to mean USD, and hence a little cautious.
As a suggestion, It might be worthwhile actually putting the currency code beside the amount.
Have you some reason to suspect they're doing it wrong?
I've come across plenty of overseas online stores that "advertise" to Australians that don't follow ACL, apply GST, etc.
I'm also not entirely certain that ACL dictates that they must advertise it in AUD. A quick browse of the ACL Sales Practices PDF[1] only mentions that currency here:
A price is not a ‘displayed price’ when it is: [...] not in Australian currency, or unlikely to be interpreted as Australian currency. " [1]
> Have you some reason to suspect they're doing it wrong?
Decades of buying stuff online from other suppliers who advertise as shipping to Australia, just show stuff with a $ symbol and mean USD.
It's not a Framework-specific thing, it's just every online store that isn't clearly Australian I look for that currency code beside the symbol. After it was pointed out (a few times now) that there's an AUD symbol in the top of the page, then it's now clear in my mind.
[1] https://consumer.gov.au/sites/consumer/files/2016/05/0553FT_...
It's a little annoying to switch from a full-size MBP to the smaller form factor though. Hopefully we'll see a larger model at some point.
Personally, I appreciate that Alacritty works well with what I've got on the Framework.
E: IIRC some in the community have reported that the USB-C expansion slots are in fact Thunderbolt 4 (I'm not exactly sure on this point but my recollection is TB4 rather than TB3) so you could go the eGPU route
edit: i am actually very stupid
You are under the same condition that many overseas people have, and that is expecting to see "price" not correctly stated, depending on many factors, none of which are clearly marked.
I have seen GST added TWICE from some american websites. Dont beat yourself up about it mate.
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Mainboard+Replacement+Guide/...
The only annoyance is the battery connector where you need to be extra careful not to bend a pin (I wonder why they couldn't do like other connectors with more plastic guide length to avoid angled insertion).
- 64GB RAM is really nice on a laptop
- also nice to be able to add "internal"-like storage with their 1TB NVME extension card.
Note: I run debian 11 on it with GNOME, fingerprint reader supported by installing two tiny debian testing packages.
thermald and powertop suggested tunables.
https://au.starlabs.systems/products/starbook?variant=429313...
Every day I consider getting one... or an M2. But the deal breaker for an M1/M2 is the soldered SSD.
edited: typo in price
Is that a typo? Or are they actually that exxy?
But I'm excited nonetheless and perhaps at some stage I could see this being a nice companion to my full size laptop for other purposes.
I was really impressed that they made it so you could upgrade the original model to have the same improved lid and motherboard.
Sure, VAT's are different but it is supposed to be a common market after all...
https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Battery+Replacement+Guide/85
I've tried TLP and autocpufreq.. the latter maybe netted me an extra 30mins?
I might have to give Fedora a try for the first time in a decade..
Sounds like you're getting totally fine battery life though so I wouldn't stress about it!
I'm about to give Fedora a whirl. Hoping I can get close to your numbers.
Also, it's important to make sure you're running the latest kernel. Basically every release since 5.15 (up to 5.19 now) has had pretty important perf/power fixes for Alder Lake.
And thanks for your help on https://community.frame.work/t/12th-gen-battery-questions-on...
:)
I'm running Secure Boot w/ LUKS so installing a mainline kernel is a real PITA.
I eked maybe an extra half hour out by disabling the built-in power-profiles-daemon in favour of autocpufreq, but from the forum posts I've read if you need 6-7 hours reliably you may have to run Windows :(
I own a 3 years old Dell XPS 13, i7 16GB of RAM and run it on the latest Fedora (arch btw before). It is a personal laptop, I mainly use it to browse the web and occasionally work on personal projects (Python,Typescript,Rust), mostly on neovim, vscode otherwise.
For power management, I use TLP instead and also disabled power-profiles-daemon (I don´t know autocpufreq).
The key point especially for my usage was to enable as much as possible video hardware acceleration for every app especially the browser (firefox for me). Archwiki is your friend for that. Also for intel graphics you should make sure that the graphics micro controller is used (Guc) for media decoding. It is also well explained on the intel graphics Archwiki page (guc/huc firemare loading).
* On my Arch install (5.19 kernels, tlp and thermald installed, but default settings, running Sway WM), it idles at around 4W at 200 nits (if nothing is plugged into the USB ports and it's able to spend almost all its time in C10), otherwise you're looking at idles of around 6W. Overall, it should get about 10h doing "nothing."
* Light usage, including playing (VA-API hw accelerated) videos like YouTube will get to 8-12W.
I haven't done a lot of rundown tests, but I suspect for average usage (web browsing, basic productivity, light dev, but not monster compiles) you'd probably expect like 5-7h, but it's not going to give you 8h+ like you would expect with the best modern thin and lights.
A few other battery related notes:
* From Intel 11th-gen on, S3 suspend is no longer supported, just S0ix or s2idle ("modern standby") - I wrote a test script and for me, this uses about 0.7Wh when suspended, or about 1.3% of battery/hour - Windows machines automatically hibernate at 5% battery usage, and you'll probably want to setup suspend-then-hibernate for any newer Intel machine.
* The Framework 11th gen had some RTC/power off battery drain issues, but those are supposed to be fixed for 12th gen (I haven't tested as rundown times are in the weeks if its a problem).
Links to testing here: https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...
I also wrote a rough little tool to track battery rundown while suspended into a sqlite db here: https://github.com/lhl/batterylog
If you're looking for maximum battery life for a Linux laptop btw, Tuxedo and Slimbook (shared TongFang chassis) recently released two recent models that would do better than the Framework. An AMD 5700U 15" model w/ a 91Wh battery which is a lot more power efficient (and can be made more efficient with RyzenAdj) - I used the last version of this laptop (and wrote a review on that as well) the past two years and can attest that it's good, and the improvements on the refresh fix just about everything I didn't like about the first version, but the 5700U is sadly using older Zen2 cores that are outclassed at high-end performance, and suffers from retbleed mitigations as well. The second model are 14" Intel 12700H systems with 99Wh batteries (at the same weight as the Framework, very impressive). While a higher power consumption chip, you can tame it with thermald, auto-cpufreq, or manual RAPL settings and make it perform pretty close to a P chip I suspect, and you have almost twice the battery capacity to play with. (Obviously, get the version w/o an Nvidia dGPU if you care about battery life.)
Surely I should have the option of excluding it
Also I can't see any discrete GPU options, I'm assuming that'll come later
I also received a Framework just today, and it had no preinstalled OS.
RE: discrete GPUs, I'd expect those to be available on substantially later or substantially different model; the thermal needs are significant, and it's usually unnecessary on Framework's current target market of workstation-class laptops.