New 12-inch laptop form factor with 360 degree hinge (ie "tablet mode") and a touchscreen. No price announced, but it is aimed at students: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/frameworks-laptop-12...
New mainboard upgrade options for Framework 13 models: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/framework-gives-its-...
I _really_ hope they launch an AMD version (perhaps with an iGPU) soon after that. That and preferably with Libreboot support. This would make it the ideal portable laptop for me and thus I'd be able to (finally!) replace my X220T.
The 13th-gen Intels had miserable battery life and heat issues under load. If you could manage that, all four USB-C ports were full Thunderbolt ports equally capable of driving displays, PD, and USB 4 throughput.
The AMD line had considerably better performance-per-watt but rougher firmware support (and early on, really broken Linux kernel support that required Fedora or other rolling kernel release distros). It also couldn't deliver the same "every port does everything" promise that the Intel boards did, with some ports not supporting displays or USB 4, which significantly reduced the value of the expansion-card model to kind of a novelty.
On the 12, if it's likely also going to have a smaller batter than the 13, going only with 13th-gen Intels means it likely will be either a further step back in battery life vs. the 13 or throttled to extend the battery.
Both chips were Q1 '23, so the timing's not a great excuse. They were in HP's 2023 EliteBook G10 840 (1334U) and 845 (Ryzen 5 PRO 7540) laptops, and the 845 was better on both single- and especially multi-thread Cinebench R23, _much_ better in GPU loads and gaming, _and also_ lasted longer on battery.
I think Framework mostly just wants to target an education market with a mainboard experience that's lower maintenance than AMD has been for them. Fewer USB-C restrictions, less firmware drama.
Still hard to get excited about it being the _only_ available option, though.
Combined with properly prepared HW taking less power in modern standby than in S3, but it requires hardware/firmware/driver/userland confluence to work well
It feels odd having a load of closed source EFI stuff and then putting linux on top of it. Sure linux injects a bunch of firmware into hardware later in the boot, but it's still progress
I've been burned by a small SBC that had poor support, but on laptops/desktops never felt limited.
But people always sound so excited to libreboot their personal computer... Am I missing out or is it just nerd cred?
Still would like an end to end open source UEFI bootchain, most groups end when they hit the 60% of stuff they need for their limited use cases : - |
The other things is bug-fixing. The way it currently works is that bugs often only get fixed for one version and other issues like that.
Getting this stuff open and having upstream heavy fixing of bugs will imporve the ecosystem.
The other things is performance. Faster boot times are quite nice.
The other things is being able to better play with more advanced boot security concepts, booting with Bluetooth/NFC verification and so on.
And once its open, and you can more easily work with it, and its more available, hopefully more people do more interesting work with it.
That said, its not an absolute priority for me, but its just a better long term solution. So companies that push it are a big plus.
A laptop tablet hybrid that I can actually repair would be great. Would use tablet mode for image editing and hand-written notes.
I've been looking at a Raspberry Pi 5 paired w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch screen or a Movink 13 --- will probably stick with that since I prefer Wacom EMR (and have a big investment in it in terms of devices and styluses).
Nowadays i don’t do much heavy computing on my personal laptop and i have an external 34” display anyway.
So yeah, a 12” would be very interesting.
Also i have fond memories of coding everyday on my 10” netbook when i was 16 :P
The 12" form factor tho..
Linux on arm is very mature, but windows on arm not completely.
That being said, other companies could very well develop and sell boards for the frameworks laptop. So much so that iirc sifive did release a risc-v laptop board to use in the frameworks laptop case.
Meanwhile properly SBSA compliant chips aren't targeted at mobile market at all and thus often lack certain features or are too energy hungry.
There are a lot of more or less weird, very dedicated, very opinionated subcultures in the PC hardware world.
wut? Gamers love to pay extra for a tiny bit of less noise. Noctua and expensive water cooled systems are widespread in the gaming community.
Entirely passive (I THINK / recall there was no pump), heat based circulation, with just TONS of radiator surface and an unwieldy design. However for that entirely custom solution they could theoretically scale up with additional size.
Still, if someone's going _that_ overboard, the heat's getting dumped somewhere.
'Industrial Chilled Water' as in a connection to an external (to the room, maybe even building) pump, and an external cooler (usually evaporative cooling, could be mega radiators in the shade too) like you see at industrial sites.
ARM has nothing to do with being fanless or not, that's just whether or not you're happy with what 15w can get you or not.
Not many people are, which is why ARM laptops with fans are just if not even more common than ones without.
Also there's a single ARM SoC that isn't garbage at this power/performance bracket on the open market, and it's embattled with legal troubles (Qualcomm vs. ARM over Snapdragon X Elite). And while the X Elite CPU is great, the GPU and software for things like video deciding are bad and break regularly
On the plus side I'm hoping that it's the existence of framework that have convinced lenovo to stop soldering components in their new laptops, that's what put me off buying one and why I went with a framework.
You’d think they could make their most popular pages static for now and serve them out of the CloudFlare cache, though.
The four hinges must stay synchronized under lift force from the user, but I haven't seen that being a problem on a Let's note, so it's probably good.
I was planning on ordering the 7840U version to where I'm staying in a trip to the US, but now it feels a bit of a let down to order a last-gen model since the new one might not arrive in time for my trip in mid-April.
I wonder how writing on the touch screen feels?
Their website was hugged to death, so I can't confirm.
Physically pressing down a diving board is just asking for frustration. Sometimes I miss the separate left, right, and middle click buttons under the trackpad like the old days.
I also have a 13.5" 3000x2000 laptop and it uses 200% scaling, fractional is blurry. Initially I was trying to use Ubuntu but the extend monitor scaling was so bad (Chromium, VS Code), just decided to stick with Windows for this device.
Even Surfaces have been using 1440p at 12'' since 2016, and 2880 x 1920 since 2018! Why would Android & Apple tablets at much smaller screen size have higher DPIs, if 1080p was perfect? Do you expect to put Android tablets closer to your face than x86 tablets for some reason?
Sigh... since when has DPI started _decreasing_ again? I refuse to accept this trend, in the same way it was stupid back in the 2000s when LCDs became a thing.
The human hardware isn't getting any better, so we must accept that there exists some upper bound beyond which improving resolution isn't a selling point for most people, especially given the necessary tradeoffs in battery life, processing power, memory usage, and input latency it entails. Now consider that this ceiling may have been hit 20 years ago, and that the continued dominance of 1920x1080 may not be because manufacturers are lazy, but because most people are happy enough with it.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that 1920x1080 is still the majority resolution, and that's among an audience that's inordinately populated by technological enthusiasts. The fact that people are seemingly dead-set on sticking to 1920x1080 despite--as you point out--the availability of alternatives only further strengthens the argument that the majority of consumers just don't particularly value higher resolutions.
If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years (which exceeds the number of laptops by far), and even friggin' eink notepads.
"The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken. "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit (as trivially disproven as todays arguments about 60fps), and remind me of the discussions I had when forced to use 60fps 800x600 TN screens (pure hell on earth) after having used 1280 at 90hz for ages with CRTs, all in the name of "progress".
The hardware survey doesn't occur while games are running. It's recording the display setting of your desktop, which would put you and everyone like you in the 4K bucket.
> If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years
I have a rather new high-end phone. Its native resolution is 2400x1080, and that 2400 is only there because phones have a particularly long aspect ratio compared to other devices.
> "The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken.
1920x1080 is a wildly popular resolution. You appear to be frustrated that the market hasn't spoken in your favor.
> "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit
You appear to be hallucinating arguments that I haven't made.
Since the pandemic. I have a still functioning Galaxy S8 in my drawer, which shames modern phones with its 570ppi density.
If you put the phone in battery saver mode, lowering resolution is one of the things it does.
And, to give an idea of what are we talking about, even in such power saving modes these much smaller and older phones still have more pixels than a 1080p screen.
Even if you use today's prices, the cheapest iPad has almost double the resolution. No, 1080p at 12'' it is not plenty dense. You do not put this smaller thing as far from your face as a 24'' monitor.
Hopefully that's upgradeable someday in any case.
Fractional scaling isn’t great. Windows handles it the best by a large margin (it’s really quite respectable; honestly I’d just call it “not ideal” rather than “not great” if restricting to Windows), and has done for many years. macOS doesn’t even try, but rather downsamples from the next integer, which guarantees it will be atrocious, much worse than a lower-resolution integer-scaled panel for many purposes. Linux can be finicky, but is slowly getting there, though downsampling is still common. (Me, I’ve been using Linux/Sway at 1.5× for the last five years.)
You’d get much better results by increasing density by a third in each direction: 2560×1600 is 252ppi, excellent for a 2× scaling factor. (The effective resolution is thus 1280×800.)
Skimming Google, there are pretty much are no laptops 12" and higher resolution than 1080x1200 that's current nor made by Apple.
And let's not get started on 12'' Android tablets...
But yes, considering that Framework's Chromebook is/was expensive (over $1k) for the class doesn't give a lot of faith that the 12in model would be any different. Though that was equipped with a 2k screen and had a 12th gen i5, so I genuinely wonder what kind of meetings happened to ship out a premium Chromebook (a segment that does not exist)