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Comment by hecanjog | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to be reading that, honestly. I have a first batch framework 13 without any upgrades and I spent the summer working with it outside. Nothing super crazy, 4-6 hour stretches in the park, but I never remember cutting it close with the battery. As long as we're sharing anecdotes, I'm happy with the battery life FWIW...

Edit: I'm running linux. I don't recall doing any battery optimization but maybe I installed or configured something a few years ago? I don't change things often.

Another edit: I just checked and I do have TLP installed!

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I love framework's mission. I would not change the past on buying a framework. To provide a counter example, quite often I open my bag to find that my Framework 13 has cooked itself in the bag. The battery life, and the bad intel sleep management have been a thorn in my side since I got it. But the power management does leave much to be desired.

Given LTT's review of the laptop, it may be best to wait for the 2nd revision of this which hopefully will deal with the deck flex and screen consistency issues.

You're not alone with the cooking laptop in a bag running Linux issue. I had those in the past with Dell/Toshiba laptops in the past.

Dell Windows laptops will also cook themselves. (For example: https://www.dell.com/community/en/conversations/xps/dell-957...)

Macbooks are the only device I would trust to not light a bag on fire…

Anecdata but I've had a MacBook do the cooking once, but it thermal throttled itself so it just got warm, not super hot.

Yeah I once had my old Macbook Air get insanely hot to the point it felt dangerous. I left it in the sink (dry and in case it blew up it would be somewhere non-flammable) to calm down and it was fine a few hours later.

It's funny but sad how this has literally been an issue for 20+ years and yet still no one can fix it. I've tried with many laptops, both Windows and Linux, and the only one that can reliably go into a backpack with >90% charge and come out after a flight with >80% is a Macbook, and that's also been true for more than a decade.

It does feel like Linux sleep is nearly impossible to do well. My go-to example of jaw-dropping, industry-leading Linux hardware support is the Steam Deck. They deserve lots of praise for the monumental effort and achievement to make that product work as well as it does. The sleep functionality is trash though, even after they put a ton of work in.

It’s excellent in that I can suspend any software and have it come back to life exactly the way I expect (no small feat!) and it’s excellent that it never cooks itself when unattended in a case or bag, but it is total trash that it eats 20-30% battery a day while “off”. That’s not a bug, but expected behavior. It’s just not what I have come to expect from a modern computer, and portable Macs haven’t behaved that way since about 2005.

my only datapoint here is that I have a Thinkpad X1 running Debian that doesn't cook, and keeps a charge, but I have no idea how I pulled that off

Is this going to sleep? Or hibernate? I found that most notebooks(under Windows) are horrible at "sleeping", but if you enable hibernate, then the notebook can last days, without losing charge. (Dell, HP, Asus, etc.)

Another counterpoint, I have that same not-suspending-thus-cooking-in-my-bag issue often with a thinkpad P14s running windows 10 (intel i7-1270p) .

However, my (5+ yrs old?) T480s running linuxmint never does it (i5-8250u). YMMV

I think the expectation for battery life for most these days is closer to what can be found on e.g. M-series MacBooks or in the x86 world, HP Dragonfly and some ASUS Zenbooks, which range between 14 and 22 hours.

Battery life is inherently a trade off against performance and weight.

It's also a trade off against competence, because you can kill the battery right quick if drivers don't idle things properly, but even after you address that you still have the other thing.

Which makes 16+ hour battery life an odd choice for most people. Who uses their laptop for 16 contiguous hours with no opportunity to charge? It could have been lighter or faster.

Naturally Framework has the potential to make it flexible: Have a dual-use bay where one of the options is a second battery, and then if you want it you take the weight/battery life trade off in favor of battery life, and if not the machine can be lighter.

Long battery life isn’t so much about contiguous use as it is about not needing to think about charging as often and being able to not carry a laptop charger brick on excursions. It also lets you still have “normal” laptop life left over after periods of high-intensity usage.

Also generally speaking more efficient laptops are cooler which is generally a quality welcome in a device sometimes used in a person’s lap.

Yea, the Framework's battery issue for me is mostly that there is almost literally no point I could ever trust not having a power outlet nearby with the cable. I've had times where the computer, while fully shut down, loses 30% of the battery life in a few hours.

Sure, it's the bulk of a Macbook Air, but I often leave that open, with the screen on, running VMs for work all day without it being plugged in. I expect that any time I open it, I'll have at least 30-60 minutes of use before I need to plug it in. My Framework, more often than not, tells me it's about to emergency shut down as soon as I log in.

> I've had times where the computer, while fully shut down, loses 30% of the battery life in a few hours.

Did you report this issue to Framework? Do other users have similar issues?

> being able to not carry a laptop charger brick on excursions. It also lets you still have “normal” laptop life left over after periods of high-intensity usage.

This is just the same trade off. For a given level of efficiency you could have put in a smaller battery and offset the weight of a second battery / charging brick that you would then only need when you need many hours of battery life.

> Also generally speaking more efficient laptops are cooler which is generally a quality welcome in a device sometimes used in a person’s lap.

That isn't really part of the trade off either. The faster ones generally don't have worse performance per watt -- they're often better because they have more cores with lower clock speeds. You get 100% more cores with 75% more performance for 50% more power consumption. For the same load they generate less heat. See also "race to idle".

They only generate more heat in absolute terms if you put more load on them than the slower alternative would have been able to handle.

Me. Road trips. Bad weather. Airports without charging options. 16h would be a bad day but it isnt outside the possible. Also, power outages and when i just forget to charge overnight.

I'd disagree that its a tradeoff of weight. The macbook air is an incredibly light weight laptop yet still pushes 18hrs battery life on the 13" model, even the 14" pro at 22 hours is still lighter than most laptops.

The weight isnt the problem. It's the poor optimisation of hardware and software.

I have an 11th gen and have terrible battery life. Always have. I would not describe the Linux support from Framework as sterling but bad battery life remains the same between my Linux and Windows sides if a little better on Windows.

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