Framework Laptop 16 Deep Dive – Enclosure
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I had one years ago and it was built like a tank. Also, the screen (2560x1440) is possibly the best I've had on a laptop and the keyboard has particularly deep and solid travel making it the best typing experience I've had on a laptop too.
So, best laptop I've had tbh.
It's only an i7 6600U so not mega powerful but I don't write 2M LOC apps anyway so it's fine.
Just waiting on 32GB RAM arriving (official support is 16GB but the chipset supports 32).
I agree 100%... business-class laptops (and printers for that matter) all the way.
Also, there really isn't anything out there like a MacBook Air. Thin, light, fast, fanless (silent), and truly all day battery life.
I’m well aware of the limitations of discrete graphics on Macs.
When I go into either one of my corporate offices (rarely) or a client’s office, it’s nice to be able to just plug my laptop in the night before and not have to worry about a finding any place to plug it in during the day, going back and forth between conference rooms, etc.
I also go home to see my parents for a couple of weeks sometimes and work from there.
And I realize this is a very esoteric case. But I also do the whole “digital nomad” thing half the year.
It almost sounfs like you knew the answer to your question the entire time.
I gave up and went with cloud (ShadowPC).
Irrelevant given how easy it is to do. In macOS it's literally the equivalent of a feature flag.
I can connect to an external GPU via SSH or Jupyter from my MBP fine.
The internal GPU is also surprisingly capable for machine learning (which is the only usage I'm really interested in).
Using AMD chips is also not a magic bullet if you don't implement power management properly - a 25W AMD chip and a 25W Intel chip notionally pull the same power (although there are always games).
These are 14" "Ultrabooks" with the same rated battery capacity, dimensions and almost the same components.
The AMD one has 64 GB of RAM and a very bright screen (advertised as 1000 nits). The Intel one only has 32 GB and a very dim, 6 bit screen.
They both lack a dedicated GPU.
Under Linux with the AMD one, while doing basic dicking around on the internet and light Rust dev with intellij, I get a good 5-6 hours without draining the battery fully. The screen set to the minimum or almost (it's more than enough in a bright apartment – around 50% is enough when outside if the sun doesn't shine directly on it). I haven't tried this computer under Windows while unplugged.
With the Intel one, in the same conditions as above, except setting the screen a good 2/3-3/4 (the screen is absurdly bad and dim, so I need to up the backlight) I only get around 4 hours. Under Windows, it seems similar. But under Windows, standby seems to drain less battery (not counting when it hibernates). The PC does not have the option to enable S3.
Both laptops have the "battery saver" function on, which means it only charges to about 80% of the rated capacity. "Linux" means Arch with the latest "zen" kernel and X11. Windows is up-to-date 11 22h2. I didn't bother doing any specific tuning for either OS.
One other data point is a newer model of the same PC with a 12th gen i5 part (1240p I think but really not sure). My colleague who has it complains that the fan is always on. However, he uses Windows, and even on my 11th gen I do find the fan tends to come on fairly often, while it basically never does under Linux.
The chassis is replacable. You simply order a new chassis, pop the main board out of the old chassis and put it into the new one.
> What’s the point of trying to save the environment when the other 8 billion could care less?
...
Their pricing on the 13 is fair for the components they offer. I'm not in the market for a new laptop, still rocking a 2015 mbp...but if I need a new one, I hope they're still around.
> What’s the point of trying to save the environment when the other 8 billion could care less?
“What’s the point in doing things you personally care about if there isn’t worldwide consensus?”
Because these other 8 billion think just like you. More and more people don't think like that anymore, and they miss you.
To get out of that gridlock, don't wait (because you aren't stuck in traffic: you're traffic).
That it’s now law is just a mind game. They get you to habitually say yes to a series of nonsense tasks and arbitrary rules so later you don’t question when they march your children off to a pointless war
I don't know about the rest of the world but for people like me who care about their stuff to be sturdy/long-lasting/repairable, who feel responsible of what they buy and to stop littering the world with trash, I don't how Framework could have done better. I have the second generation, I don't care about you price for specs. It does make noise when compiling but hey at least I get the performance, the rest of the time with my terminal editor, dev server, and many tabs browser ? Not especially noisy and it is never slow.
It's all I wanted and I got it. Plus I can dream of replacing the motherboard in 10 years with a super low consumption cpu, if all my money isn't going to buying food made very expensive by climate change that is.
It does fit my needs perfectly though - a usually on desktop but portable for travel notebook PC with 64G ram and 2TB ssd for under $1200. Very cheap compared to other laptops with the same specs and I really like it.
Doesn't have a GPU.
Injection molding semi-liquid magnesium seems…quite difficult to say the least!
Tangentially, I wish there was some online resources for learning how best design for manufacture for things like laptops and cases.
Contract CNC fabrication is really inexpensive these days until you need 10 iterations to fix your dumb mistakes.
Unfortunately maker-spaces (the only kinds of places where you could get cheap access to good 3+ axis CNC mills) seem to have gone out of fashion. CNC mills in general cost about 5 digits just for the machine, and usually that again for the tooling.
I think the closest one can get to learning some DFM without working on a machine would be watching machinists on YouTube. Back in the day NYC CNC was great, but I think they post more hype content these days.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I spent a decent amount of time designing for and then fabricating stuff on CNC machines over the last couple years. To my knowledge, operations are cheap while setups are expensive: if you can design a part around a fixed orientation in a machine, it saves a lot of operator time.
I built one out of a PM-833TV and it's taken years to get working well, and I probably should have just bought a used HAAS at this point, but if you build it You Will Learn one way or another.
Words of wisdom I wish I'd had: spend the money on decent over specced servos with ethercat. Don't skimp or you'll end up having to just redo stuff and it'll cost a lot of money. Do not buy stepper motors period.
* https://wiki.printnc.info/en/home
* https://github.com/threedesigns/printNC
* Discord invite: https://discord.gg/RxzPna6 <-- extremely active CNC enthusiast discord
It's "kind of high end" as it uses steel beams (not aluminium) for rigidity, so it's capable of driving some really powerful gear... fairly cheaply. :)
The US$2k you mention above would indeed be the practical lower bound.
About 10 years ago I worked for a medical device company and we used thixo parts for a portable ultrasound system (think chunky laptop form factor). In my first few weeks, I had a proto part that needed a rework, so I chucked the thixomolded part into the bandsaw to chop it up, before the shop manager chewed me out for almost setting the shop on fire (who let this clueless engineer into my shop...etc etc). Magnesium dust is stupid flammable and burns incredibly fast and hot.
There were only a handful of vendors in the world at that time that had the capability to mold the size of parts we needed, it's a vastly different process to casting other metals, in part due to the hazards of the material itself. Warning to all overly ambitious framework owners: careful if you decide to chop or drill into that case!
One thing I personally noticed with these types of "cast-looking" parts is that they tend to fail in a brittle way and there's really not much ductility. I've seen many notebooks with Mg alloy casings that shatter when dropped, and I've always preferred the Apple unibody machined aluminum for this reason - if it's bent or drops, it tends to retain its integrity much better. Granted, aluminum doesn't tend to have all that much ductility before it too, breaks, but I've found it more robust.
Machining from a billet of material guarantees consistent crystal structure, and is usually the go to when strength/appearance is a larger consideration than cost or weight. Billets can be formed very precisely and consistently, without consideration of the final product
In his defense, an engineer should have known this. In your defense, we all have blind spots - we might know 98% of the obvious things and still get caught by a handful of them. That’s why supervision is so important!
For getting an idea, I like to play with clay, then move to CAD once something is fairly decided, with foam/cardboard mockups to get "real world" size feel. Then, a desk full of 3d printed mini versions, and then whatever final version.
You are effectively asking for a disclosure of shop secrets. Even in cases of completely no-name factories, there will be so much of clever things nobody would put on a paper.
One factory owner went nuts when we were going with inspection for a client in 2009, just because we clicked seemingly innocuous looking jig which was putting threaded inserts into mould. It later came out that nobody else anywhere had anything like that, and most factories rely on laborious process of manually putting inserts into the mould.
There is so many unobvious things which 99% of people without actual manufacturing experience routinely overlook in ubiquitous items around us.
I once been openning up dozens of laptop samples, and one in 100, from a noname factory had seemingly no ribs in its bottom cover, and seemingly nothing restraining it flexing, and sliding. Then, after days of hair pulling, the secret cracked.. nuts, and screws inside were not meeting orcompletely, but were suspended with preloaded fasteners, which used those few free millimetres of free travel for it.
I’m most excited for the ortholinear keyboard attachment. That makes it a must-buy for me, since after switching to a Kinesis Advantage I just can’t type on a staggered layout anymore.
See parent for context
A split and thumb clusters would make it perfect, but I'll take what I can get.
For my personal mix of tendon and joint problems actual separation isn’t helpful because some pronation is actually good for me. But obviously that’s going to vary.
Nice laptop keyboard.
Really looking forward to using linux as my main laptop os again.
The only issues I have with it is battery life (though I have the battery set to charge to 70% max, which leaves a lot on the table), and the fact that Intel processors heat up very easily.
I really hope Intel and AMD get their shit together and release a processor as efficient as Apple silicon, I don't want to end up using my MacBook more than my Framework.
> with no externally visible fasteners
I wonder if it was easier or thinner to do that way, or if it was a deliberate design choice for a more minimal appearance.
Personally I don't mind seeing fasteners. After swapping LCDs on my old Thinkpads a couple times, I stopped replacing the screw covers and embraced one fewer step for future maintenance.
(not affiliated with the Framework company, only as a owner of two 13" Framework laptops; so I might be wrong/incomplete about the limitations implied by the OP)
I really hope thunderbolt 5 in asymmetrical mode can devote the entire 120Gbps of outgoing data to PCIe, and doesn't have some stupid limit like 64Gbps.
And when a new standard amounts to "arrange the pins like this", it's not a very big deal.
But when the trend for ridiculously thin laptops came, they went back to upside down.
I can understand why people with money to burn might not understand the limitations of trying to make a modular architecture work over the long term. Back in the day, dropping in an SSD represented a massive, relatively inexpensive upgrade. But, a desktop has cross-compatibility and flexibility primarily afforded by its massive size and weight. I'm not convinced these sorts of cross compatible upgrades will continue to surface into the future. And especially not on a laptop/mobile form factor.
Now, my desktop's IO ports are 2/3 fried. Its memory, motherboard, CPU, GPU, OS and hard drive are hopelessly outdated. It will never make sense to meaningfully upgrade it, upgrade would mean wholesale replacement of everything. I could keep the case and the CPU cooler, big whoop.
Today it seems that a decent computer (~$1000k) will simply just run most things perfectly fine for around 5-7 years, after which all the main bus and peripheral tech will have moved on. It's easier to junk that system and buy another one almost from scratch. The main benefit I can think of for still buying your own parts and putting it together (or having somebody put it together) is price/performance /customizability still leads. I was able to retire (give to my wife) an 8 year old desktop which is still perfectly fine for her needs, and buy an all new system, but thread what I wanted through a budget by ultra-specifying specific parts. I couldn't find a pre-built that was close, even after I just paid Microcenter to put it all together for me. This also turned out to be a good idea as they were able to on-the-spot substitute a few pieces based on compatibility and inventory.
And it is in a 7.5l SFF case.
If anything, I would think using something for as long as possible instead of buying and generating large amounts of e-waste puts me more in the Greatest Generation category. Otherwise, I'm sure I would love to have the latest and greatest all the time too, but on a stats basis, also not being able to afford it puts me less in the boomer category, and more in the younger generation category, no?
For a mainboard upgrade, it might make sense if two generations ahead is seriously better. For example, 13th gen i5 is outperforming the 12th gen i7. The i5 mainboard costs 450$ and the i7 1000$, so if you can wait for two new generations it would be worth it.
They've already outdone every other laptop manufacturer: you can swap a new 13th gen system board into an original 11th gen Framework.
My friend's wife has a Framework, and she suffered a liquid spill which reached the system board. He ordered parts, did the swap, and she's back in action for less than half the cost of a new laptop. If it were Dell or Lenovo, you'd be trying your luck with used eBay parts. The housing would have ~20 tiny plastic clips that you break one or two of every time you open it up. (Or adhesive, ugh.) It's just a sketchier proposition.
My last upgrade was RAM to 64GB, before that the GPU (RX 470 to RX 6600), before that, the mainboard and CPU from some ancient Intel i3 to Ryzen 5 3600. And between all those upgrades, more and more SSDs were added.
There's some issue where the battery drains fairly quickly in suspend which requires enabling "deep sleep" mode, but it still drains a lot faster than other laptops I've had.
And then the battery life in general isn't very good; I'd say ~2 hours at full brightness with some video streaming mixed in with normal browsing.
I wonder if that's the same experience other people have? And whether the 16 will have better battery life?
I agree with you on suspend, though: even with "deep" sleep enabled ("s2idle" is garbage), I still lose about 20% overnight.
Hmm, I can't with a Macbook Air M1. I lose maybe up to 10% a day.
When suspended, I see it appearing on the network a few times each hour. I can leave a process running in the background and see that it's getting a few seconds of cpu time each time this "suspended" mac wakes up to do whatever it is doing. There are no settings I can see for a deeper sleep and to stop it doing whatever it is doing. I think they check for updates and such.
Lots of places other than Starbucks I want a good battery life portable computer.
If that doesn't help, I'd recommend reviewing some of the resources:
* Framework Forum Linux battery life tuning thread (300+ messages) https://community.frame.work/t/guide-linux-battery-life-tuni...
* anarcat's Framework Battery Life and Power management testing: https://anarc.at/hardware/laptop/framework-12th-gen/#battery...
* I also did a long review covering different ways of optimizing CPU performance, evaluating idle and near idle power consumption, various power-testing (including writing a suspend battery logging tool that people may find useful, etc): https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...
Solutions include not caring, buying a mac, or buying windows and using WSL.
Might not be as much as my work MacBook Pro, but definitely more pleasant to work with.
Most laptops with high brightness monitors would leave you with about 2-3 hours of battery life... many laptops can hit 300-400 nits, some even more.
sRGB and BT709 declare the brightness of SDR white as 100 nits, and 100-120 is considered acceptable.
The rest of what you say sounds like your Ubuntu is misconfigured, which is common with Ubuntu installs. The fix is usually either changing a few files in /etc, or installing an entirely different distro that isn't user hostile.
The old Framework 13s have a 55Wh battery, so 2-3h would require 18.3-27.5W of average power consumption. For context, PL1 (max sustained power limit) of the 12th-gen CPUs are set to 30W in the Framework and when I tested last year, powerstat (calculated w/ ACPI battery info) reported that the laptop my 1260P Framework idles at is about 3.34W w/ backlight off, 4.01W @ 200 nits, and 5.46W @ 100% BL.
I didn't realize displays had gotten this efficient. I remember when LED backlights were more efficient, but not efficient (huge leap over CCFL, obviously).
So yeah, sounds like the parent comment's Ubuntu is just grossly misconfigured, either out of the box, or merely a few things relevant to Intel Cove-era have to be manually flipped on/off.
I'd love to see if he can repeat it with any other distro, such as with SuSE, or Debian + task-laptop and KDE.
I really love the machine otherwise, but I can't say I haven't considered just getting a Macbook Air (especially now that they have the 15").
It has similar properties to aluminum but it can be cast, making it a material of choice as a more premium alternative to plastic.
It's an interesting material, it's very stiff and light, usually with a dark gray color and a sort of chalkboard-like texture.
It’s surprisingly hard to ignite! As your link explains it took them a bit haha.
Magnesium is pretty safe.
Related:
* Testing of WE43/Elektron 21 vs AZ91, ZE41: https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/2010Conference/files/Magnesium_U...
* Final FAA evaluation of flammability of various magnesium alloys (for aircraft use): https://www.fire.tc.faa.gov/pdf/ar11-13.pdf
* The Wikipedia is a pretty good overview of a bunch of the material properties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnesium_alloy
For context btw, ignition temp (in furnace) for magnesium alloys is around 600C, which a house fire can reach: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00109...
I believe Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple, still sleeps 6 workers to an apartment.
The thing is, if Chinese labor becomes more expensive, these workers will get replaced either by an automated factory elsewhere (maybe in America!) and unemployment.
"High suicide rate" is a relative term, and does not describe foxconn.
Specifically, the baseline China rate is either 100 or 220 per million per year depending on source. Foxconn had about 14 suicides that year out of about a million workers (or about half a million at the relevant factories? I'm not exactly sure.) That's an impressively low rate. And for reference the US rate is about 100-140 per million per year.
Maybe, just maybe, giving authoritarian autonomy to a factory complex full of human workers is not a good idea.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20101009065851/http://shanghaiis...
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-09-26/foxconn-w...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/29/apple-fox..., https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/24/business/foxconn-offer-protes...
[3] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/900698...
[5] https://www.reuters.com/article/china-foxconn-trial/family-o...
If the only reason we haven't fully automated something is because we can force 6 people to live in a 100ft apartment then there is something pretty fucked up.
Electronics will get more expensive.
Maybe that's not only ok, but actually desirable. More expensive electronics might help reduce ewaste (which is VERY hazardous in aggregate) and push manufacturers to go back to repairable and upgradeable designs.
A Dell XPS that comes with a lose trackpad, massive coil whine, batteries that drain when plugged in and so on?
Or an LG Gram Pro (more expensive than Framework) that isn't sold outside of the US and maybe some Asian countries where the only thing you can upgrade is the SSD?
Or maybe some Apple laptop?
I personally feel the price of a Framework is fair, even if it is 2500 USD (or more). Not necessarily because Framework is great (I would prefer 17"), but more because the alternatives are worse or don't exist.
The lowest-end model costs $1959, and is pretty meh: 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, crap 720p camera.
The higest-end model is also strangely 45%-off discounted, but runs $3769 regular. If the Framework 16 ends up costing $2500 (or even $3000) for a reasonably-spec'd setup, I think that'd be pretty fair, especially given the configurability and upgradeability. If you don't value those things, then you probably shouldn't be considering Framework in the first place.
[0] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...
The T16 comes with the following display in Australia: 16.0" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), IPS, Anti-Glare, Non-Touch, 45%NTSC, 300 nits, 60Hz
Apple is giving me a Macbook Pro with solid hardware for an equivalent amount of money that I can always count on for everything I do, and still set it for ~40% of the value 5+ years later.
I'm still looking for a notebook without a chicklet keyboard
If you're not an EE, the only things you can buy 3rd party are RAM, SSD, and Wi-Fi modules. Which you can do the same for Thinkpads.
That said -- I do appreciate that partial upgrades are possible with Frame.work. I own one and when I upgrade the motherboard, even though I can only buy a motherboard upgrade from them, I won't be upgrading the case, display, and other things that don't need upgrades.
I'm glad framework is trying this out. I'm not surprised about the battery life, but pretty much anything not made by Apple will have that issue lol.
Love the idea though. If I ever buy a laptop again it will be one of those.
There are ARM CPUs available, but they are mostly for servers or very low end devices, there's not a lot in the pro laptop market, and even if a low-end server chip could be repurposed, I don't know if the brand recognition would work, customers know AMD and Intel and what they're getting in terms of performance at different specs. That all works differently with ARM.
And then on the software side, Windows support seems... partial? Linux support is much better, but selling a laptop with only Linux as an option is a big step down in available market, and even Linux struggles with compatibility sometimes.
Apple's ARM chips are the only mainstream laptop/desktop class chips, but that's a completely distinct software and hardware ecosystem that neither Framework nor anyone else have access to.
Anyway, I thought Windows runs on arm now? Although honestly, nowadays general public runs everything in a browser - why do they still need Windows?
Distro support for ARM is good, but the state of packaging software on Linux isn't wonderful, it's certainly not something the average computer user could manage (hence why Linux for desktop/laptop use isn't popular outside of software engineering). ARM adds one more layer of complexity, and given that this is already difficult, that rules out more of the market.
I gather Windows on ARM support is poor. The OS technically works, but a lot of software doesn't, and most software must run in emulation, which isn't great. MS announced more tooling for this at BUILD in March, but we're ~5 years in? and this is still going (macOS effectively fully transitioned in ~18 months). I think it's got a way to go before there aren't any obvious trade-offs for users.
You're right most users probably don't need Windows, and something like a Chromebook would be more appropriate, and there are ARM Chromebooks. That's not the market for these laptops though, and the CPUs are much too low end for these machines.
Are PCIe cards just dongles in another form factor? Is it a question of how much of the peripheral's surface area is visible from the outside? Or is it the difficulty of insertion/removal that separates expansion cards from dongles?
For me it's the dangling that makes the dongle a dongle.
The Framework laptop expansion cards are all USB-C dongles in a different form factor. It's purely an esthetic choice. You don't like the dangle. Thats a valid opinion. I have a USB-C hub that handles all the connections I need in a dongle-dangle.
The only real objective benefit of it, IMO, (and this is HUGE) is the repairability. I am a huge fan of that, and hope that other makes would step up (or be forced to step up) and make the same kind of changes.
The distinction between USB-C and PCIe, on the other hand, is meaningless for most peripherals.
An imaginary handheld AM radio is more similar to a handheld FM radio than the handheld FM radio is to a desktop FM radio, from the user's perspective. You could say that "comparing AM to FM is apples to oranges", but the user wouldn't care as much as they care about how they actually interact with the thing.
If that's not your point, then what is your point? My issue with dongle-based connections is generally 2 fold: dongles are an awkward thing to have/carry around and having dongle-based connectors usually means you only have 1-2 connectors total. Neither of those issues applies in this case, so to whatever extent they can be considered dongles, they also aren't a problem in my mind.
Most people buying them will likely use their own RAM, storage and OS anyway.
And either way, you'd ostensibly want to make sure your computer is supposed to work once you assemble it yourself.
I'm only saying that it's funny to learn that Framework undergoes some effort to assemble and test the laptop only to undo that work so the buyer can assemble the entire thing. It might be for entirely good reasons, but that doesn't make it a bit funny prima facie.
It might be funny, but your argument wasn't just that, it was that you wouldn't buy it because of this fact, which seems absurd.
They're using known good hardware to make sure the parts they do send you will work. The hardware they're putting in and taking out prior to shipping will likely not even remotely be the parts you actually use since it's BYO. They're just there to make sure that what they do ship will work once assembled.
As another commenter said, would you rather they didn't perform QA and just let the customer figure out that their mainboard is actually busted after spending time assembling it? That would be an exceptionally bad user experience.