Framework Laptop 12 review | Hacker News Reader

Framework Laptop 12 review

arstechnica.com

269 pointsmoelf383 comments

> A good laptop, but not a good value

Where "value" is purely monetary, I think that pretty succinctly sums up my experience/views on the Framework product line.

They make good laptops, but you can generally get more for fewer dollars. If you're shopping on price, you can probably just skip right over their entire product line.

That doesn't mean that their offering doesn't have value. It has value has a vote with your wallet for sustainable, repairable products. It has value as an easily repairable and customizable laptop. It has value in some esoteric use cases it can be customized into (e.g., 4xM.2 NVME slots).

Would love to see some reviews just get this out of the way up front and spend more words on the product itself.

Personally, I'm glad there's a company out there serving a market niche besides being the lowest cost, most value-engineered product. I don't mind paying a bit extra for that in exchange for the other value I get out of it.

(And all that said--at the high end specs their prices get a fair bit more competitive. The price to upgrade a laptop from 16GB -> 128GB on Dell's site is _more than an entire FW16 w/ Ryzen 9 + 96GB RAM_.)

I think the repairabilty makes it hard to even compare monetary value, since in theory, you'd be keeping the same body, while swapping out the mainboard. Is it cheaper to buy two other laptops compared to one laptop + mainboard? That's what, a 3-5 year timeline? Who knows what prices/capabilities/etc will be like then.

Yeah, I personally take that into account however I can see why someone may not.

Framework has released fairly consistent upgrades for the Framework 13, but there's no guarantee that they will continue to do so, will release upgrades for the Framework 16, etc.

I think in a few years when they've been in business for closer to a decade than not and released updates across the whole product line, it'd be pretty hard for anyone to make an argument that that _shouldn't_ be factored in.

Yeah, this is my experience with a Fairphone 4. It seemed pricey initially, but I have saved sooo much by being able to carry out simple repairs.

How often do you break your phone that you've save sooo much? Mine is at least 2 years older (I got it 2 years before the Fairphone 4 was released) and I've spend 0$ dollars repairing it.

In a laptop context the advent of soldered on RAM and SSDs has made this a more significant issue though.

That 1TB I thought was enough might not be, and suddenly I need to buy a whole new machine to upgrade.

Are the SSDs often soldered? I thought that was only the RAM.

Depends on the brand/model, of course, but I think for a 13"-sized laptop, it's pretty common to solder in the storage as well.

So you haven’t even changed the battery? That would be impressive durability.

Embarrasingly often! Things I've done specifically:

- Getting cement in the charger port

- Dropping the phone on its screen breaking it

With some phones both of those could be full replacements.

It could also be worth it to keep the same body and upgrade over the years, just to avoid the frustration of re-learning a new laptop keyboard layout.

Thinkpads have had similar layouts for decades. The keyboard mechanisms have of course changed, but the Emacs friendly dual ctrl and alt symmetric about the space bar have remained.

Also being the most Linux friendly laptop also means they have very long update lifespans and being well built tend not to break…though there are plenty of repair parts and spares.

>in theory, you'd be keeping the same body, while swapping out the mainboard.

I love the idea of Framework, but the upgradability seems questionable to me. I base this off my experience with desktops where I've rarely over the decades upgraded more than the hard drive and RAM. When I'm looking at upgrading the motherboard it seems I just end up going all the way and getting a new case/ps/etc at the same time. Maybe that's just me though?

Because the old machine is still useful intact. I don’t see a difference between laptop and desktop here. I agree I don’t see myself ever swapping in an upgraded motherboard.

I think there are some important differences. Desktops are a continually evolving space and a hobby all on their own, due to all the different cooling options and aesthetic upgrades available. And since a lot of these involve a case swap you might as well do the whole enchilada.

The niche created by Framework, in contrast, is all about reuse. It's just a different game.

There's kits that let you adapt the old motherboard into a server unit. It's a nice way to get a faster laptop while reusing your old components.

> Because the old machine is still useful intact

I do wonder how many people repurpose old laptops when they get a new one. I have three old laptops, two of which I haven't turned on since I transferred my stuff to the next one. My partner uses the third one to game sometimes, but she's recently gotten a new laptop of her own (her old one is ancient), so I expect she'll stop using that one as well.

My current laptop is a Framework 13 (from 2022) that has already seen some upgrades and repairs that wouldn't be possible on any of my old laptops. I expect this chassis and SSD to last quite a long time, with periodic mainboard and RAM upgrades.

Maybe I’m reading into this too much, but just the fact you even had to make repairs (plural) in a 3 year old laptop doesn’t speak highly of Framework’s quality. I’d expect to make exactly zero repairs in 3 years of owning any decently built computer.

Perhaps they dropped their laptop from great height? Something would render a conventional MacBook a write off. You cannot know that led to the repairs. Only that they were successful.

I've kept the same PSU for two motherboards and the same chassis for four motherboards. I've kept my main monitor across two motherboards and my second monitor across three motherboards.

If you're a Framework customer it's not entirely unlikely you buy a case for your older mobo and now you have a power efficient home-server (or something) at your disposal.

You can't upgrade the hard drive or RAM on modern laptops either.

You can upgrade SSD on most laptops other that Mac.

My Dell XPS13 came with a 1TB SSD, which recently was replaced with a 4TB one...

eh, while not fitting ragebait, plenty of Lenovos, Dells, and HPs have upgradable hard drives and not few have upgradable RAM and WiFi modules too. I'm writing this on a 2019 Lenovo P2 that I upgraded both the RAM and nvme on it.

Never seen a device with soldered storage that is a laptop and isn't an Apple.

And the reason why RAM is soldered is because they need the signal integrity to run "high performance" graphics on it, it's not (just) because the manufacturer hates you. This is why FW desktop has soldered memory too.

LPCAMM is coming, which is an interface with better signal integrity than SODIMM or whatever they're called, I hope it will bring RAM upgradeability back to office machines. I really only need to render videos and a slightly animated WM on my laptop so I don't care for HIGH PERFORMANCE AI IGPU when I have a desktop at home.

I bought the DIY FW13 a while back, and it took me 40 minutes from receiving the box to having it fully assembled, Fedora installed and a Youtube video playing. I bought the hi-res display a month or two ago, and the whole replacement took ~20 minutes. In between those two experiences, the whole upgradeability thing feels very very real for me. If anything, it's easier to work on than my desktop PC.

For the same money, one can also get a laptop that has a nice display right from day one. The FW12 looks interesting, but if I'm hoping to buy an upgraded screen down the road, and a better CPU, a backlit keyboard, a better camera, and maybe better speakers... then I am not taking advantage of upgradeability, I'm bending over backwards just to avoid buying a Lenovo Yoga or so.

Don't get me wrong — the real draw is repairability, not upgradability. Upgrades are just a fringe benefit for a nerd who likes tinkering, and proof that the repairability is real.

Specs aren’t everything.

If we’re talking Thinkpads, Framework has a better offering IMO, especially if you don’t get Lenovo edu prices. I think for a lot of IT departments the Frameworks are quite attractive, now. And that’s before they even really developed the business offering.

How’s Linux support on the cheap non-thinkpad Yoga? If it doesn’t boot, can you easily remove the SSD and protect your data before sending it in for a few weeks? Fixing a Framework yourself doesn’t void its warranty. In a deadline situation this can be quite existential.

You are seemingly also come from a place where the individual grand total is your measure, but if finances are limited, the progressive, as needed upgrade path may be more of a value in itself. Something something shoes.

I don’t think the "just buy a Mac" or the cheapest laptop possible crowds are the target audience. I can totally see something like the Framework 12 becoming the platform for eg. a school's FOSS based tech program with good maintenance scalability. Especially outside the US.

It's definitely been different on desktop for me. My computer's been ship of thesiussed twice over, but even when I changed the case,PSU,MB,CPU,cooler that one time the GPU and storage stayed. I've changed CPU 4 times and GPU 5 times over the past >15 years.

The main difference is the chassis is ~ 10% of the cost of a desktop. It's ~ 40% (?) of the cost of a Framework, so rolling it forward (with screen, speakers, mic, keyboard, webcam etc.) saves you a fair bit more value.

I haven't checked those %s but just using them notionally.

My case was 100$ and it's housed components worth maybe 4000$ over it's lifetime, I regret not getting one with dust filters now that it's been stickerbombed and has sentimental value.

But it's definitely more percentage value in a laptop with touchpads, wifi, keyboard, battery and display over a case that's just some bent metal and if you're fancy a glass panel.

Parent said nothing about upgradability, it was about repairability. Modularity supports both but I buy framework laptops for the repairability. I stopped buying laptops for real work a long time ago as they were to fragile and had to be sent back to the manufacturer for repairs. Having a modular (repairable) laptop means I don't need a desktop computer just to reliably have a computer.

In case you must send it in, with a Framework you can also remove the SSD (in like a minute) beforehand, so you don’t have to trust the manufacturer‘s repair contractor with your digital secrets/data integrity.

Back when I had a desktop computer (almost 20 years ago!), I would usually keep the case and upgrade motherboard, CPU, RAM, video, etc. Unless the case was holding back something I really wanted to do (like have more drive bays or PCI slots), I'd see no reason to replace the case. In fact, a case upgrade would be independent of the component upgrades. I had a very janky, cheap case for the machine I built for college; once I graduated and had a job and some income, I replaced the case without upgrading any of the components. And then a year or two later I think I upgraded the motherboard and CPU.

I'm pretty happy with the Framework 13 form factor (though, after 3 years of use, I'd still probably prefer a 16:9 or 16:10 screen over the weird 3:2 they ship with), and absent any future catastrophic damage to it, I don't see a reason to replace the chassis.

And I've already upgraded a few things in it: I have a newer mainboard (well, to be fair, I got it due to a warranty repair where they decided it was cheaper for them to upgrade me to the 2023 model), and I upgraded the built-in speakers and the webcam. I'm thinking about upgrading the screen as well at some point. In two years I'll probably replace the mainboard and RAM (not that I want to replace the RAM, but I have DDR4 now, and I'll presumably need DDR5).

You were way over complicating the cheapest part of a build. A good keyboard, mouse and display cost way more than a case and I almost never upgrade those when upgrading a PC

Maybe you were an Intel user and couldn't be bothered upgrading to a new motherboard every CPU release?

I bought my desktop PC about 20 years ago, and since then, I've never upgraded more than two components at once. It is literally Theseus' ship. But I put some effort into keeping it future proof, like buying memory compatible with the next generation motherboard, better modular PSU with power for future video card etc. It is actually quite fun game, especially when your vendor return policy is generous enough to not worry if something won't fit or won't work together.

Your mental idea of "desktop pc" probably doesn’t consider monitor, speakers, keyboard, touchpad, camera and most importantly battery. It isn’t mobile, wear risk of damage is limited. The case of a desktop pc is merely an afterthought, in a laptop it’s protection and interface, basically the thing. A desktop pc is usually also rather overpowered, since heat/energy demands and high component costs are of less concern, where laptops are often defined by compromise between physics, costs and tech at a certain time. Why would you bother upgrading an overpowered desktop CPU/RAM for slightly better energy efficiency, where in a laptop a „node size jump“, or even new ISA can mean double battery life, or less thermal throttling.

And it isn't just about upgrading for better specs. I'd wager the majority of people's laptop replacement cycle is triggerd by a single part dying (screen, hard disk, keyboard, hinges, PSU), the device being out of warranty, and the store quoting more for the fix than a new device would cost. Being able to purchase the $50 part online and do the repair yourself will probably save the average person thousands over a 3-5 year span.

Most laptops I know have lasted 5-7 years and then been replaced. It's totally unclear to me that a single part would have changed any of those replacements.

I'm curious if you have a different experience where you ditch a laptop after less than 3 years because a single part has broken as you imply.

I did that once when I created a pressure mark on the screen via mishandling, bought a replacement only to find that it didn't fit due to some kind of nuance in the model name - never found the correct part.

I passed it down to family and bought a new laptop, as my attempt at repairing also damaged the plastic parts which were holding the bezel in place.

Overall every laptop I had suffered mechanical damage of some sort and occasionally it was just something I had to live with, as I didn't want to chance e.g. soldering.

With my Framework I know any regular repair is a 30min job, as I assembled and disassembled it several times already.

You can get AppleCare for at least 4 years now, not sure if you can extend beyond that.

Also, while I can repair laptops myself, I for sure don't want to.

For me cheap storage is the only sell and even that I can mitigate with tiny flush external SSD stick and/or NAS.

Why would I care when I can get at least 4 years worth of AppleCare from Apple?

Here you can mostly dyi the repair. So you are not stuck waiting for Apple's appointment and repair schedule which would be a week at the minimum that you are grounded. Plus easy upgradeability ..

I don't really want to DIY, I want quicker turnaround from Apple (which generally can pull off same day repairs if you ask).

I am happy to pay more money given the companies goals, and that extra money is an investment to me. If I didnt buy it they have one less sale, and I won't have contributed to making the world have more companies like framework. I have hope others are doing the same despite them not being the cheapest.

If they stop delivering, ill not buy their next thing, and ill be sad.

I think monetary value can be accomplished by streamlining a second hand marketplace. If you've purchased a device the vendor can keep track of what and when. It should be relatively simple to put the known device or part back in the shop. Depending on the part and age they can also buy back and refurbish parts. A standard discount on an upgrade if you return the old part. Etc

One could even allow other manufacturers to offer parts and do certification for a fee.

It should be possible to push down prices and make update paths more appealing.

https://community.frame.work/t/community-market-category/522...

And note that if the price is a pain point, you're free to order the Framework DIY without RAM and NVMe and get them cheaper elsewhere. Should bring it closer to the competition price point.

I don't really understand the repairability appeal of the Framework. Hasn't that already been a selling point for the business line laptops of HP, Lenovo and Dell for years? They all offer premium business laptops with removable RAM, SSD and battery and very detailed maintenance guides. Part availability is good too.

What’s the current procedure for getting HP or Lenovo or Dell to sell you replacement monitor? What about just a chassis if you drop yours and get a dent? Even a spare battery? If you’re not buying one of their premium business laptops, you’re kind of SOL.

How about in five years from now when all of that is still fine, but you just want to replace the mainboard.

What about when framework comes out with upgrades down the line? The great thing is because they’re so modular you can just buy that and slap it in without having to buy an entirely new machine.

That’s the appeal

Dell Latitude and Lenovo Thinkpad parts are pretty easy to come by on eBay. I’ve bought a handful of different parts from drive caddies, OEM batteries, hinge assemblies, keyboards, and trackpads without much drama. Dell Latitude service manuals are top notch with detailed procedures and diagrams. Dell has a decent track record of maintaining their firmware for a reasonable number of years after release.

Lenovo parts are easy enough to buy direct these days, at least for recent/current models.

eBay is not first party support. And it’s certainly not first party support 5 years later like Framework still offers for the Laptop 13.

To a point, but new mainboard means new laptop for all of those brands. With Framework it's a five minute process to get a new CPU.

While HP's service guides have been good, even on their non-business models, the actual serviceability isn't great. You have rubber feet that can't be re-applied after removal, and good luck getting replacement parts as an average consumer (I haven't even been able to get a first-party battery for my HP Envy x360). Not every laptop is going to a corporation with an IT department and direct procurement connections.

RAM, SSD, and battery are also the very minimum in terms of serviceability on a laptop, they've been traditionally user-serviceable. It's components like the touchpad, display, ribbon cables, etc. that haven't been traditionally easy/possible to replace.

The consumer laptops are not built for easy repairability. EliteBooks are very servicable, only 4 or 5 captive screws and you can easily access all the internals.

Having specific lines be easily repairable doesn't influence how Framework laptops interact with the rest of the market. It's very much not just businesses (or individuals buying business-line devices) that should be able to repair their laptops, and they're not advertising themselves exclusively to businesses.

Also, my biggest issue with my HP Envy x360 is not getting inside. It's annoying to have to buy new (third-party) replacement feet after removing them (and shouldn't be done by HP regardless), but it's not a big problem. And the service guide is quite good. It's the fact that I haven't been able to buy a new first-party battery, I can't buy a new screen, mainboard, or trackpad if I end up needing one.

Sure I can (and have) upgraded the RAM and SSD, and replaced the battery with a third-party one (well actually two, the first one didn't have some ID chip, and would show a warning screen on every boot). But the RAM and SSD are just upgrades, and batteries are consumables. I can't reasonably repair damaged or failing parts if the screen cracks, if coffee gets spilled in the keyboard, if a port gets damaged. Only 4 parts are listed as available (pen tip, RAM, AC adapter, and Wi-Fi card), and only the AC adapter is in stock.

No indeed it doesn't change anything about Framework the company. But I still fail to see why I would buy a Framework over a HP EliteBook, Lenovo ThinkPad or Dell Pro laptop. The only reason I can imagine is upgradability: you can upgrade the CPU by buying a new mainboard. But that doesn't really appeal to me. The mainboards are very expensive and it only leads to more e-waste. From a sustainability perspective it's better to have 2 fully functioning laptops in use compared to 1.5 laptops with expensive parts collecting dust in a cabinet.

My previous laptop was HP, and servicing it was fairly unpleasant. It required removing around 30 screws of multiple sizes to get access, where the Framework requires 5 screws, which are captive. By the third time I needed to service the HP, the part I needed was no longer available directly from HP, and the 3rd party price was too expensive to sink into an aging laptop.

Some of the business lines are better, but the ultrabook styles that Framework is competing with can be pretty difficult to work on because the internals are so optimized for performance in a small space. The big manufacturers also tend to change the internals enough between models/versions, that if you want to fully gut and swap the insides, or maybe just replace the keyboard, the chassis is incompatible. Framework is designed to service over a longer period of time.

There is a tradeoff, because the super-optimized layouts of the big manufacturers are often superior. But for me at least, the Framework is good enough, and when I do need to make changes, it's a better experience. I'm also voting with my wallet for the change I want to see, even though the cost is probably a slightly worse laptop.

The HP EliteBook series are very easy to repair. Only 4 captive screws and you can access all the internals. Has been like that for years.

Even that is slowly dying out. Lenovo sells many expensive business grade laptops with soldered on RAM for example.

They have laptops with soldered RAM but also a lot without. The classic 14" ThinkPad (now called T14) has non-soldered RAM. The EliteBook 8 G1 14" also non-soldered RAM if you get the non-Lunar Lake edition. Same for the Dell counterpart.

Repairability sounds good in theory but in practice outside of two year warranty period I'm fine if I have to replace the device because of failure, but I got 4-5 out of most of my devices. Like my 2018 Intel MBP was the worst laptop in terms of thermals/battery etc. It's still going with a family member I handed it over to. I don't think I've had a laptop die on me in last 12 years of using laptops, I usually keep them around after upgrade or pass them off to family.

And the upgradable internals sound like more of a hassle than a benefit - especially since buying a different device will be cheaper and probably a better experience since they don't have to engineer for replaceability.

Theoretically you'd get the option to plug in stuff not available in other laptops like strix halo - but then they still don't offer that in laptops. So meh.

Kind of with you on this. I just installed Arch on my wife’s old 2013 MacBook Pro. Works like a charm.

My work laptop (Fedora Linux, Dell XPS)is over 5 years old. I haven’t bothered to replace it, but will next year just because. The old one will become a retro gaming device for the kids.

I broke some of my devices, and some have battery become useless, and the price of changing is just not worth it, but overall? They last really long time. I even have some shitty 7 years old Chromebook still working okay passed to a family member, and Macbooks in general last very long.

And upgrading laptop components after 5 years just doesn't sound like a good value proposition.

Not sure how your family is using it. But I find that a laptop using as a desktop has a much longer lifespan than a laptop using as intended ( a traveling work station ). Things like moisture, accidental drops, keyboard issue is much more common.

That's true I use laptop in that mode maybe 20% of the time and 80% it's plugged in.

I guess Framework is maybe too new for us to be able to come up with figures here, but monetary value is hard to measure for a product where the intention is you don't ever fully replace it.

Sure, I might have spent a few hundred more on my Framework 13 back in 2022, but if I'd bought a Dell XPS 13 instead, I probably would be fully replacing it with a new machine in 2026 or 2027. But with the Framework, I'll instead only buy a new mainboard and RAM. My "next laptop" will cost ~$1000 for the same specs as something that would cost ~$2000.

So sure, it's going to take me a bit longer to realize the savings, but there still will be savings, and I appreciate the sustainability aspects too.

Exactly my thinking too with my FW16.

It has value has a vote with your wallet for sustainable, repairable products.

The author of the fine article’s strategy of used Thinkpads is more sustainable because reuse is among the most sustainable practices and there is an abundance of Thinkpad repair parts and spares machines.

Of course, Thinkpads are not terribly upgradable. But upgrading is often the opposite of sustainable…in many cases CPU’s, etc. are fast-fashionesque.

I actually get a lot of value out of the repairability. It lets me buy a cheaper computer upfront without having to worry about whether i can upgrade later on.

How many times have I thought, maybe i should get 2tb just in case, and then end up using 500gb. With framework, I'll buy the 1TB and the cost to upgrade is very low if I ever need to.

Same thing with memory. Maybe i need 16, maybe 32, maybe 64. I tend to buy more than i need out of fear. I just don't have that fear with framework.

Oh, and don't even get me started with repairs. If my screen breaks, i know the time to fix is however long their shipping lead time is, since the repair itself will take me 15 minutes.

In general, i think that value depends on how you see a computer. $1000-2000 is a lot to spend on something you use for fun. It's really not much to spend on something you use every day for work. And it's even less if your company is paying.

I want a fully clear case, but apparently that's too brittle and isn't possible? This is what the Framework people say. They have keyboards like this, but won't make a full shell in this style.

I'd kill for a fully transparent phone or laptop shell.

I'd pay $1000 more for this aesthetic. Double if it's in the florescent neon colors of 90's /00's Nintendo / Apple designs.

This: https://imgur.com/a/DedpbHQ

The repair-ability has been a huge thing for me as a father of young kids. I've only had to do it once when a toddler jumped on the laptop screen, but it ended up being a fairly cheap repair instead of what had hitherto been a full laptop replacement.

There's a frustrating tendency for reviewers to miss, or just ignore, the point of a product in their review. I wish they'd give a rating based on how well it fits into its niche, not how well it fits the needs of the average reader.

As an example, I recently bought a car, and went with a small crossover SUV because I wanted something that could handle light off-road duties on the weekend. One of the reviews deducted points because the car's clearance was too high and it meant the car didn't hug the road. The clearance is the point of that car. The manufacturer literally took one of their other models, raised it an extra 9cm, and stuck some minor cosmetic bits on.

In the same way, nobody buys a Framework laptop because it's competitive on price. This review does acknowledge that, sort of, but I think it discounts that someone might not be able to afford a Laptop 13 but might still pay a small premium for a Laptop 12 because they like the ethos or they benefit from the customisable design.

Is that group a bit enough niche for profitability? I'm not sure, but I think the review should either directly ask that question or put it to the side.

I’d add that the potential to support other architectures is also a benefit. At the moment the framework 13 chassis supports risc-v [0] [1] with rumors about an arm variant.

Beyond practical repairability and sustainability, I appreciate the possibility of swapping out a mainboard for another with a completely different arch

[0] https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard

[1] https://store.deepcomputing.io/products/dc-roma-risc-v-mainb...

One of the versions that the author compares the Framework 12 to with respect to value is the Framework 13… so, it’s not like they are ignoring the Framework repairable design philosophy.

Here is the “ugly” part of the Ars summary (as in good/bad/ugly):

It's just too expensive for what it is. It looks and feels like a lower-cost laptop, but without a dramatically lower price than the nicer, faster Framework 13.

The monetary value comes in the long term (5+ years).

Other Brands Notebooks are not upgradable, not repairable and the most frustrating part are the batteries - which framework offers an original replacement for.

"Modern" office notebooks don't have to be that powerful. I'm still using a T480s which will only render unusable as soon as the battery dies with no <100 bucks replacement parts available.

I think buying a framework is an investment for people planning to keep the device for 5+ years and/or want to support the right to repair movement.

I'm really suprised and impressed they managed to ship such a great device and keep their promises for so long even if it is not the besteht bang for the buck (short term). Keep up the great work.

I really liked the idea of Framework making inter-changeable parts available for their laptops-- allowing the purchaser to keep the laptop running / upgrading as long as they wish. I also liked not having to buy parts with the laptop that I will be replacing anyway (SSD, RAM). Unfortunately, Framework now includes wifi even with the bare bones laptops, so some e-waste from replacing that.

But, the premium paid is high. And, their warranty support was, in my opinion, not a good experience. The expansion cards, which are just USB dongles internal to the computer, are gimmicky and waste space that could be used for something useful, like a slot for a second SSD, or larger battery.

I ended up sending back the Framework 13, I recently purchased, because of the warranty support experience for a mechanical issue with a single expansion card (usb dongle). Framework support had me jump through hoops for a week, repeating tests, asking me to answer the same questions again and again, and finally, "now do everything again and make a video and upload it to youtube" [actual request from Framework]. All for a part that retails for $9. The experience spooked me, and I sent back the laptop for a refund during the 30 day return window.

The Dell I replaced it with has an inferior screen*, a slightly inferior keyboard, vastly inferior CPU cooling (the Dell thermal throttles under heavy load), but Dell was half the price, and it arrived at my door 8 hours after I ordered it. And, unless things have changed, Dell warranty support was always excellent.

Hopefully Framework fixes the issues with their warranty support process. I hope they succeed.

* Dim screen on Dell mitigated by using the money I saved on the laptop price, to buy a portable 13" e-ink monitor which is vastly superior to the Framework display when working outdoors.

this same lack of critical thinking is why you can't search for decently-rated dumb tvs, because they lose points for not being smart.

sigh.

I really love the lavender — VAIO-core! I do wish I could get the other modules in lavender too, but I understand why they wouldn't want to fractally-complicate their stock keeping for those items.

> the Laptop 12 can only fit a single DDR5 RAM slot, which reduces memory bandwidth and limits your RAM capacity to 48GB

According to this post from a Framework team member, a single 64GB SODIMM will work too and just didn't exist yet at the time Intel wrote the 13th Gen spec, so they only advertize 48GB: https://community.frame.work/t/64gb-ram-for-framework-12-sin...

> Old, slow chip isn't really suitable for light gaming

I wish the reviewer would specify what phrases like “light gaming” mean to them. My FW12 is in a later batch that won't ship for a few more months, but I'm coming from a ThinkPad T470s where I already do “light gaming” (mostly TBoI Repentence and Team Fortress 2 with mastercomfig medium-low). I can't imagine the 13th Gen graphics would be worse in that regard than my old laptop's 7th Gen.

Not having Thunderbolt seemed like kind of a bummer to me too, but then again my T470s has it and I can't think of a single time I ever actually used it for anything. I tried one of those external GPU enclosures once, and it was kinda cool just to see that such a thing was possible, but I've never been one to want to tether a laptop with a thicc cable lol

TF2 will absolutely run smoothly. I’ve been playing Persona 5 on my Framework Laptop 12.

> a single 64GB SODIMM will work too

Wait, are 64GB DDR5 SODIMMs finally out? I’ve been monitoring that for ages but almost lost hope.

seems so!

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/memory/#ff=ddr5_sodimm&Z=6...

Note that they are CSO-DIMMs, and may not be compatible with all products. In our limited testing, they do work on Framework Laptop 12.

No there are vanilla 64GB shipping now too, e.g. Crucial CT2K64G56C46S5.

I stand corrected! Those should work.

> I already do “light gaming” [...] Team Fortress 2

The system requirements for TF2 are 1GB RAM, a single-core 1.7GHz CPU and a graphics card with 64 MB of VRAM [1] - the game is 18 years old.

If a review told me a laptop exceeded those specs, it wouldn't tell me much :)

[1] https://www.5kgamer.com/game/team-fortress-2

TF2 won't actually run on a system like that, the system requirements on Steam are a bit of a meme. It's 18 years old but it's also been updated for 18 years.

Yep, last year's 64-bit update is a great example of something that unquestionably breaks the old system requirements: https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/April_18,_2024_Patch

If you open "properties" and then "Betas" in Steam, you can download old 32-bit versions of TF2 and play on dedicated servers. There's also a recompile of the leaked source code available, so I think 32-bit clients with a TF2 addiction will be okay for a while longer.

The wiki has updated requirements: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Team_Fortress_2#Sys...

Even these feel a little suspect (minimum Intel HD Graphics 3000? no way) since I had to do some tweaking to avoid my framerate tanking on Intel 7th Gen iGPU when playing the PvE mode (Mann vs Machine, waves of robots on the other team far larger than any PvP match would ever be), and/or when other players use cosmetics or weapons with flashy particle effects:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Team_Fortress_2/Par...

> I do wish I could get the other modules in lavender too

Since we're in plastic/budget territory, is it absurd to consider a color matching sticker/wrap over the basic modules?

Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1? I get that Framework focuses on making repairable machines, but does that prevent them from making a fanless, hi dpi, good performing, long battery life machine?

I wouldn’t expect parity with an M4 machine, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think they should be competitive with the much older M1.

I have the same complaint with Lenovo (I usually buy ThinkPads). Where are the fast, fanless, hidpi, long battery life laptops?

Competitive along which lines? Performance, yes, impossible. Battery life? Yes, impossible. Anything else? Definitely!

Hm, aside from it working reliable, performance and battery are my top priority, though.

IMO the Desktop is their real "killer app." Apple comes nowhere close to competing with it on a price/performance perspective.

> Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1?

Kind of unreasonable. I mean which Intel or AMD cpu can be run fanless and perform well?

On the topic of displays, my understanding is that they "kind of use what they can get". That's how there can be a 13 display with rounded corners in a straight edge case.

What you're asking are the things I'm looking for, though still every time I go into their forum I see enough thermal, fan noise issues and AMD firmware bugs, that I'm still on the fence on buying one.

I wish them luck with the 12, for me sounds like a model for "true believers" because it doesn't seem to compete well enough with run of the mill chromebooks (or an Air) that are more established in the students segment.

Intel's T variants in the Core series can be passively cooled. They have pretty good burst performance in case you need it. I don't know if there are laptops using them (I only have fanless desktop systems with these CPUs).

Besides, at least in Linux, lots of kernel options can tweak Intel/AMD CPUs to make them mostly silent.

The problem is that manufacturers don't put much thought into building good cooling systems.

Lenovo, for instance, has so many SKUs that it's really random. A few are great, but some sound like a hairdyer or rev up too aggressively.

Apple gets this. By having a small product line, they usually polish all those details.

> I mean which Intel or AMD cpu can be run fanless and perform well?

I don't follow CPU news and have no idea what lake they're at now, but I'd be surprised if Intel and AMD didn't have a chip competitive with an M1 by now.

When I google "fanless amd intel laptop cpu" I find this old thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31142209 which does suggest some fanless machines exist. That's from 3 years ago so surely there are even more options today, no?

To put it simply, I don't think we'll get anything closer to the M1 on the x86 architecture.

You'll have to wait for Framework to offer a Snapdragon instead of Intel/AMD but they haven't announced anything yet.

The first-generation Intel Ultra lineup is comparable to the M1 and M1 Max. See: https://nanoreview.net/en/cpu-compare/intel-core-ultra-7-165...

Intel's integrated graphics aren't as good, but they are similar in terms of power consumption & CPU performance.

Compared to M4, well, that's a different beast entirely. I'm not sure what's the latest there.

It isn't the chip which determines whether it's fanless. Basically every modern chip supports power capping and then the power cap is determined by how much heat the machine can dissipate.

What that really determines is multi-thread performance. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of one core? No problem. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of all the cores? For that you have to lower the clock speed quite a bit. Which is why you see AMD chips on older TSMC process nodes getting better multithread performance than Apple's fanless ones.

The cost/benefit ratio of adding a fan is extremely attractive. The alternative way of doing it is to add more cores. If you have 8 fanless cores at 2 GHz, how do you improve multi-thread performance by 50%? Option one, clock them at 3 GHz, but now you need a fan; cost of fan ~$5. Option two, get 16 cores and cap them at 1.5 GHz to fit in the same power envelope, but now you need twice as much silicon, cost of twice as many cores $500+.

The number of people who pick the second option given that trade off is so small that hardly anybody even bothers to offer it.

Apple continues to do it because a) then they get to claim "see, they can't do this?" even when hardly anybody chooses that given the option, and b) then if you actually want the higher performance one from them, you're paying hundreds of dollars extra for more cores instead of $5 extra for the same one but with a fan in it.

Doesn't this miss differences between CPUs in their per-core efficiency?

The per-core efficiency of Apple and AMD CPUs on the same process node is pretty much identical. This has become harder to directly compare because they're now using alternate process nodes from one another, but have a look at this chart for example:

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cpu_performance_...

What do we see at the top of this chart? TSMC 3nm (M3/M4), followed by TSMC 4nm (Ryzen 7000U/8000U), TSMC 5nm (M1/M2), TSMC 5nm/6nm mixed (Ryzen 7000H), and then finally we find something made on an Intel process node instead of TSMC.

The efficiency has more to do with the process node than which architecture it is.

It's too bad they don't have Epyc on that chart. Epyc 9845 is on TSMC N3E and that thing is running cores at a >2GHz base clock at less than 2.5W per core.

You're linking to a multi-core benchmark. The story is a lot more in favor of Apple if you look at single-core efficiency, Apple is roughly 2-3x more efficient: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Lunar-Lake-CPU-analysis-...

And this benchmark doesn't even include M4, which is even more efficient.

> The story is a lot more in favor of Apple if you look at single-core efficiency

Your link is comparing the M3 against AMD chips with higher TDPs. Higher TDPs tank "single-core efficiency" because power consumption is non-linear with clock speed. Give a core near its limit three times the power budget and you're basically dividing the single-core efficiency by three because you burn three times more power and barely improve single-thread performance at all, and then that's exactly what you see there.

To have a useful comparison you have to compare the efficiency of CPUs when they're set to use the same amount of power.

Ofcourse, but that's the whole point right? At similar power levels, Apple M-series is a lot faster. The only way for AMD and Intel to compete on performance is by providing more power, but this obviously has a negative effect on efficiency. So with AMD/Intel you have to choose: efficient and slow or inefficient and fast. With Apple you can actually have it both ways.

> Ofcourse, but that's the whole point right? At similar power levels, Apple M-series is a lot faster. The only way for AMD and Intel to compete on performance is by providing more power

They're saying the exact opposite of that. Their claim is that all the extra power is only juicing performance a little bit, so at similar power levels the performance is not all that far apart.

OK, so I'm still curious about the underlying efficiency. Is there a better test of single core efficiency at the same TDP? Does Apple Silicon provide any noticeable improvement over other x86 or Arm chips in that scenario, or is it really just a straightforward function of process and node size?

Someone needs to run the same single core benchmarks on Intel and AMD while forcing those CPUs to only use 5 watts. In a few minutes of searching I was not able to find anyone doing power-limited single core benchmarks.

"The cost/benefit ratio of adding a fan is extremely attractive."

Depends on your metric. A fan makes noise, attracts dirt that needs cleaning, needs more space ...

I really love my fanless devices, even though they never will reach the speed of activly cooled ones.

Sure, and you can still find fanless devices, but then they'll typically be the ones not focused on multi-thread performance. And if you don't care about that, e.g. because you're offloading heavy workloads to a server or you just don't do anything compute heavy, then you can find a lot of fanless offerings with low core counts that are actually quite inexpensive. You can get some fanless Chromebooks for under $200.

It's a bit old at this point but the pixel slate chromebooks can be spec'ed with an i7 and 16GB of ram. I think they go for under 200 on ebay and are decent if you don't need compute heavy apps.

If someone besides Apple made a fanless laptop that had competitive performance with Apple's offerings (i.e. not a $200 Chromebook with a Celeron or a cast-off 5 year old smartphone CPU), I'd absolutely buy one. I got excited when the Qualcomm Snapdragon X was being discussed pre-launch, but then it came out with performance worse than the original M1 and it turned out that Qualcomm lied about giving it first-class Linux support. I really dislike Mac OS, but when I can't use a PC laptop in bed or on a couch or on my lap without it overheating, I'm not able to switch away. It's a shame that the entire PC industry is fine with selling laptops that will overheat when not used on a rigid flat surface.

I believe the Microsoft Surface Pro 7 is fanless. Sadly, the 8 and 9 have a fan.

I mean, you could just buy something that allows you to configure the TDP in software and then set it low enough that the fan doesn't run. You'd be sacrificing a non-trivial amount of multi-thread performance, but that's what the fanless Macbooks are doing anyway.

> The number of people who pick the second option given that trade off is so small that hardly anybody even bothers to offer it.

The number of manufacturers or the number of people? Apple was on the path to laptop irrelevancy before the M series, it doesn't seem clear to me at all that people don't care about noise and heat along with performance.

People generally have a priority between noise and heat vs. performance. If you don't do compute-heavy stuff then you might as well have something quiet. If you do, i.e. you're always waiting on the machine, how many of those people want to sacrifice a third of their performance to avoid having a fan?

But it’s not a binary choice:

Performance along which characteristics? How much performance does one need locally? At which point does heat/noise/energy cost become too much for a mobile workstation?

All of these are additional criteria that the M series laptops competes in (and in many cases wins), even amongst programmers who are some of the most compute performance sensitive consumers out there.

> thermal, fan noise issues

Anecdotal, obviously, but disabling Turbo-Core [0] on my AMD Framework 13 stopped all of my fan noise and heat complaints, with no noticeable performance impacts. It went from being so loud that my wife on the other side of the room would ask if my computer was okay to quieter than my ThinkPad, and from noticeably hot to just slightly warm.

Kind of ridiculous that it takes messing with an obscure system file to resolve it, but not any more ridiculous than issues I've had with other brands.

[0] It's `echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpufreq/boost` or something like that, and `echo 1` to turn it back on when you want that extra performance.

You might not have noticed, but your single-core performance will take a serious hit if you disable turbo boost. For the AMD 7480u, turbo boost frequency is 5.1Ghz vs 3.3GHz base clock frequency. If you disable turbo boost you lose 36% single-core performance.

Wouldnt something like this tool [0] be a cleaner solution?

[0]: https://github.com/FlyGoat/RyzenAdj

Quite possibly, I will check it out. Thank you.

> which Intel or AMD cpu can be run fanless and perform well?

For example, AMD Ryzen 7 8840U or 7840U can be configured for the same 15W TDP as Apple M1. At 15W, the overall performance going to be about the same as M1.

> I mean which Intel or AMD cpu can be run fanless and perform well?

Lunar Lake.

I'm confused.

The article shows a few charts where a Framework laptop is faster than M4 Air both in single and multicore CPU benchmarks.

Their office suite benchmarks puts it at almost 10 hour battery.

See Framework 13 Ryzen AI 9 HX 370.

To me, being able to run native Linux alone is worth its weight in gold, even if it was slower.

They didn't describe the full specs of their test rigs (that I saw) but a similarly spec'd Macbook Air is going to get better battery life than the equivalent Framework 12 or 13 based on the 10 hours they quoted for the 12. (The 13 gets even less). And saying that the best possible CPU framework offers in a 13 inch format beats the consumer line of Macbooks.. sometimes.. you would really need to like/need Linux. At which point, get the cheapest Macbook Air M4 you can and then just use the money you save to get a decent NUC.

Why would I get Air M4 if I want to use Linux?

There are many different methods through which one can develop against/on Linux. For example, I have a pretty low spec'd Macbook Air and several different test machines at home that I do remote development against. I prefer a low-heat, high battery life, good performing machine like the Air over a power hungry, loud, and constantly overheating workstation. But, those are my preferences -- some people want to have a single interface through which they do all their work, and the most powerful Linux laptop money can buy. If that's the case, Framework is great!

> The article shows a few charts where a Framework laptop is faster than M4 Air both in single and multicore CPU benchmarks.

Every single chart in the article showed the M4 MacBook Air beating the Framework 12 by a large margin.

I don't know what charts you were looking at.

I think the parent comment is referring to its parent's question "Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1?"

That the Framework 12 is not extremely lagging behind the M4 (subjective comparison) might lead one to believe that it would be competitive with an five year old M1 Air. Taking a quick look at "Cinebench R23" from 2020 [0], Macbook Air M1 comes in at 1,520 and 7,804, which compares favorably to 2025's "Cinebench R23" in which the Framework 12's i5-1334U scores 1,474 and 4,644.

The answer is it isn't competitive performance-wise. Given the M1 seems to have some native Linux support through Ashai, the Framework's advantages over the 5 year old MBA M1 seem to be user accessible hardware changes, touchscreen and longer hinge throw.

0. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/hands-on-with-the-ap...

Does Asahi actually maintain the Macbook's performance and battery advantage when running Linux though?

The performance is great, and now there's a fully stable userspace graphics driver stack. Peripherials basically work. The battery life under load (i.e. development) is serviceable, not terrible, but in my (limited, "I turn on my laptop after some amount of time" testing) it's not even close to macOS especially when turned off. This is with a 13" M2 Air.

It's a really good Linux laptop if you can find a M2 somewhere, IMO.

Except the M1 Air has no fan and will be dead silent doing that.

The framework won’t.

Once you get used to an inaudible laptop you really don’t want to go back. There’s nothing wrong with a fan you literally can’t hear without putting your head up against the laptop.

I would do anything to get rid of the hairdryers in my life pretending to be laptops.

You may have confused the lower/higher is better? I think the Air is missing from a few charts though.

No, but perhaps you may have. Please take a look:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Frame...

And for battery life:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Frame...

I think the person to whom you're replying may not have realised you're talking about one of the Framework 13s, not the Framework 12.

This is why humans can't be trusted to read article. Often they produce hallucinations. Use LLM. Much more reliable.

> but does that prevent them from making a (...) hi dpi (...) machine?

It pretty much has that though? 1920x1200 at 12.2" is 185.59 PPI. Standard DPI (PPI) is 96. HiDPI to my knowledge isn't properly defined, but the usual convention is either double that or just more than that - the latter criteria this display definitely clears, and the former (192 PPI) is super super close, to the extent that I'd call it cleared for sure.

It's pretty hard to not clear at least the latter criteria on a laptop anyways. You'd see that on 720p and 768p units from like a decade or two ago.

The baseline of 96ppi is nominal only. Form factor and intended distance from screen matters a lot. In the laptop form factor, you’re aiming for more like 110–125 as 1×. Apple laptops range from 221–254ppi as 2×.

186ppi is designed for 1.5×, an uncomfortable space that makes perfection difficult-to-impossible, yet seems to have become unreasonably popular, given how poorly everything but Windows tends to handle it. (Microsoft have always had real fractional scaling; Apple doesn’t support it at all, downsampling; X11 is a total mess; Wayland is finally getting decent fractional scaling.)

There's PPI and then there's PPD. If they want more PPD (which is what's field of view and thus viewing distance and display size dependent), that's fine, but then it's not PPI they should be complaining about.

This might sound like a nitpick but I really don't mean it to be. These are proper well defined concepts and terms, so let's use them.

I wasn't thinking about the difference between PPI and PPD, so thanks for the clarification.

The bottom line is that I work with text (source code) all day long and I would rather read from a display with laser printer quality than one where I can see the pixels like an old dot matrix printer. Some displays are getting close to 300 DPI which is like a laser printer from 35 years ago.

I can definitely appreciate that. I just think it's important that people argue the right thing. It provides insight to the variables and mechanisms at play, and avoids people falsely giving rhetorical checkmates to each other, like I kind of did to you.

The brief version is that if someone has a screen real estate concern, they need to look for the PPI, but if they have a visual quality concern, they need to look for the PPD.

Maybe it will be elucidating if I describe a scenario where you will have low PPI but high PPD at the same time.

Consider a 48" 4K TV (where 4K is really just UHD, so 3840x2160). Such a display will have 91.79 PPI of pixel density, which is below even standard PPI (that being 96 PPI, as mentioned).

Despite this, the visual quality will be generally excellent: at the fairly typical and widely recommended 40° degree horizontal field of view, you're looking at 3840 / 40 = 96 PPD, well in excess of the original Retina standard (60 PPD), which is really just the 20/20 visual acuity measure. Hope this is insightful.

But nobody knows what baseline PPD is (47) and you can't actually specify a laptop screen in PPD, you can only specify it in PPI. So I think it's reasonable and maybe even preferable to use PPI here.

I can understanding finding it reasonable, it's just not getting at the heart of the problem.

It also introduces an element of uncertainty: as you say, you can't specify a laptop screen's PPD since that's dependent on viewing distance. But that's exactly the problem: it's dependent on viewing distance. Some people hunch over and look at their laptops up close and personal, others have it on a stand at a reasonable height and distance. To use PPI is to intentionally mask over this uncertainty, and start using ballpark measures people may or may not agree with without knowing.

To put it in context, for this display, "Retina resolution" (60 PPD), i.e. the 20/20 visual acuity threshold, is passed when viewed from 47.09 cm (18.54 inches, so basically a feet and a half). I don't know about you, but I think this is a very reasonable distance to view your laptop from, even if it's just 12.2" in diagonal. It corresponds to a horizontal field of view of 32°.

You could say it masks over the uncertainty in some ways, but it doesn't introduce that uncertainty. Asking for a laptop with 100PPD doesn't even make sense.

> the 20/20 visual acuity threshold

The acuity threshold for random blobs of light.

The threshold for sharp edges is much finer, and the things we put on computer displays have a lot of sharp edges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperacuity

> Asking for a laptop with 100PPD doesn't even make sense.

Won't deny, since again, PPD depends on your field of view.

Yes, if you shop for "resolution and diagonal size", you may as well shop for PPI directly. This just doesn't generalize to displays overall (see my other comment with a TV example), as it's not actually the right variable. Wrong method, "right" result.

> The threshold for sharp edges is much finer, and the things we put on computer displays have a lot of sharp edges.

And the cell density is even finer. It was merely an example using a known reference value that lots of people would find excellent; I didn't mean to argue that it's the be-all end-all of vision. It's just 20/20.

PPI doesn't generalize across different types of display but it works pretty well within a category of monitor, laptop, tablet, phone. For TV you probably just assume it's 4K and figure out the size you like.

It's wrong but it's wrong in a way that causes minimal trouble and there's no better option. And if you add viewing distance explicitly, PPI+distance isn't meaningfully worse than PPD+distance, and people will understand PPI+distance better.

Eh, I suppose. Just the criteria of "is it hidpi? yes/no" readily mislead GP for example (i.e. it definitely is, just still "not hidpi enough"), so I felt it would be helpful if the mechanism at play was clarified. Maybe I came off too strong though. Felt it would be clearer to use the correct variable at least, than to try and relativize PPI.

I guess, but even without measuring pixel inches/degrees it feels clearly wrong to me to say that proper 1x on a 12 inch laptop screen is only 960x600. 1280x720 or 1280x800 makes more sense to me, and then there's no confusion because 1920 is a clear 1.5x resolution.

For what it's worth, it's a pretty small diagonal size. Netbooks used to be about this size, and those had exactly such low resolutions on them. Conversely, you'd see 1280x720, but especially 1366x786, more on regular variety laptops (~15"), and if you crunch the numbers for these (using standard ppi), it maps pretty much exactly right. So we've come a long way on Windows/Linux/BSD land, even if there's much more to go.

3840x2160@15.3" for example would be a nice even 3.0x display scale, at 287.96 PPI, and 128 PPD at 30° hfov to match the line pair resolving capability of the human eye [0] rather than the light dot resolving of 60 PPD, although of course still far from the 10x improvement over it via hyperacuity that you linked to earlier.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity#Physiology

I accuse those 15 inch laptops of being below the bar. 15 inch should be 1600x900.

If 960xwhatever is okay at 12 inches, then 1366x768 wouldn't even be the baseline resolution for 15 inch laptops, it would be the baseline resolution for 17 inch laptops. That just sounds silly to me.

Assuming the laptop screen is just 20% closer goes a long way here to figuring out a good resolution. And it gives 720p to 12/13 inch laptops at 1x.

Yeah the focus really should be on multipliers. Is it a clean multiple of the typical “normal” DPI resolution for that screen size? You’ve got a great screen. No? It’s a compromise. Simple.

1.5x looks ok mostly (though fractional pixels can cause issues in a few circumstances), but across platforms nothing is handled as well as 2x, 3x, etc is. I have a 1.5x laptop and wish it were either 1x or 2x.

The appropriate display scaling multiplier for this screen is 200% (2x), which is exactly why I regarded it pretty much clearing even this bar. On Windows at least, you can only alter display scaling in 25% increments (this is also why application designers are requested to only feature display elements with pixel dimensions that are cleanly divisible by 4), and so the closest fit for this laptop's PPI will be exactly the 200% preset option.

Using a lower preset than this is trading PPI for screen real estate. I don't think that's reasonable to introduce into the equation here. Yes, you match the relative size of display elements by virtue of (potentially!) being closer to the screen, but in turn you put more of the screen into your periphery, just like with a monitor or a TV. I don't think that's a fair comparison at all. An immersive distance (40° hfov) for this display is at 37.1 cm (a foot and a bit) - I think that's about as close as one gets to their laptops typically already. This is pretty much the same field of view you'd ideally have at your monitor and TV too, so either you use this same preset on all of them, or we're not comparing apples to apples. Or you just really like to get closer to your laptop specifically, I suppose.

Nah, look at laptop norms for the last decade and it’s clearly targeting 1.5×, not 2×. Even more so given how small it is: you’ll aim for a lower scaling factor because otherwise you can’t fit anything on the screen.

Windows' "real fractional scaling" gives me clipped window borders, maximized windows bleeding onto other screens, and fuzzy-looking applications. I'm curious if Apple's downsampling method works better, because I am not impressed with Microsoft's method.

Yes, it does. It always renders internally at 2x which means that's all applications have to support. Then it downsamples the final framebuffer to the resolution of the display.

> Apple doesn’t support it at all

Apple's HiDPI is "2x scaled" on Retina and >= 4k displays. But you can still pick a virtual resolution that isn't exactly 0.5x your display's native resolution, and it will look great.

For example my external monitor is 3840x2160, and has a default virtual resolution of "1920x1080", but I run it at "2304x1296". My 14" MBP display has a default virtual resolution of "1512x982", but I run it at "1352x878". Neither looks scaled, neither has a slow display, weird fonts or weird graphics. I never even really think about it. In other words, light years beyond the experience on Ubuntu and on Windows.

You omitted the next word in your quote, where I mentioned what Apple does—downsampling.

Your displays are high enough resolution that you may not notice the compromises being made, especially if you don’t get an opportunity to compare it with real fractional rendering, but the compromises are real, and pretty bad at lower resolutions. Pixel-perfect lines are unattainable to you, and that matters a lot in some things. And you might be shocked at how much crisper and better old, subpixel-enabled text rendering is on that same display.

Apple was in the position to do it right, better than anyone else. They decided deliberately to do it badly; they bet big on taking typical resolutions high enough that downsampling isn’t normally needed (though they shipped hardware that always needed such downsampling for some years!), and isn’t so painful when it is needed; and they’ve largely got away with it. I still disagree with them.

As for 1352×878, what on earth is that number, for a native 3024×1964 panel!? 2.237. It’s like they’re gloating about not caring about bad numbers and how terribly inconsistent they’re going to make single-pixel lines.

> Your displays are high enough resolution that you may not notice the compromises being made, especially if you don’t get an opportunity to compare it with real fractional rendering, but the compromises are real, and pretty bad at lower resolutions. Pixel-perfect lines are unattainable to you, and that matters a lot in some things. And you might be shocked at how much crisper and better old, subpixel-enabled text rendering is on that same display.

Do you have a test case where I can see this in action?

Nothing handy, sorry. For comparable results, you’d need to use an old version of Mac OS X. Up to 10.13, I think, if you can ensure subpixel text rendering is active.

Sorry, what I mean is, is there an image or PDF I can bring up that will show me imperfect lines on these displays?

As for rendering of text, there is definitely antialiasing in play. Subpixel rendering is no longer used, but I don't think you need it at these resolutions anyway. I'm not even sure what the subpixel arrangement is of my display (is it neat columns of R -> G -> B, or larger R and B with smaller but more numerous G? At 250-some PPI, the pixels are too small to notice or care!). But, I agree that if I was using my old 1920x1200 monitor I would miss it.

I run my Framework 13 with 1.4 fractional scaling (on Wayland) and honestly I think it looks pretty good.

Yes.

"Repairable" is a bit of a fool's errand. It really hinges on availability of spare parts, supply chain, etc. They will never sell enough of this niche product to nerds to make that a long-term reality.

An old MBP is far more repairable because so many were made there will never be a shortage of parts on eBay.

While an emphasis on repairability is noble, the false prophet of brick-like pluggable USB modules ain't it.

The newest Apple laptops all have easily replaceable ports that do not require replacing the logic board, so that novelty is even more useless.

I'm far more likely to buy a RAM stick off the shelf and install it in a Framework than I am to desolder the RAM from a Macbook.

Similarly, if I spill orange juice on a Framework, I can just buy a new keyboard and install it in a minute. If it were a Macbook, I'd probably throw away the whole thing, since I'd have to disassemble all of it to get to the keyboard, and it would take me hours, if I even managed to not break something.

So, "Macbooks are more repairable than Frameworks" is quite the take.

But are you really going to repair it?

Or, upon spilling the juice, realize you can get a Surface Go on sale at Walmart (which this seems to be a clone of) for a bit more than a replacement keyboard and your time (which is way more than a minute) and toss it in the trash anyway.

The kind of people who buy Framework laptops would repair them, yes.

Yep, I definitely 100% would, immediately.

It really doesn't seem like you're trying to engage constructively here.

Framework sells keyboards for the Framework 13 for ~$30. I can find a Surface Go on sale for as low as $500.

No, I don't think anyone's going to throw out a $500-$1000 device because it needs a $30 part and maybe 15 minutes of work (steps here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Framework+Laptop+12+Input+Cover...) and they could instead replace their laptop with a tablet for a mere $470 more.

> It really doesn't seem like you're trying to engage constructively here.

So I'm not allowed to disagree? For the record: I think the Framework laptop, while a noble cause, is a foolish endeavor as executed and they will be out of business in 5 years.

I'm assuming you've stocked spare parts because by the time you need a new keyboard, there is a chance they will be out of production (or out of business) and those parts, now rare, will be fetching $100s on eBay.

> So I'm not allowed to disagree? For the record: I think the Framework laptop, while a noble cause, is a foolish endeavor as executed and they will be out of business in 5 years.

:shrug: people said the same thing when I first bought my laptop 4 years ago. Parts are readily available today, and I expect them to be so in a year.

If nine years after I bought the laptop I can't get a replacement keyboard, I'll be a bit disappointed that the project failed, but the laptop will easily be net-positive from a cost benefit perspective long before that

I'll take the other side of that bet!

You're allowed to disagree with many aspects of repairability.

When you suggest that a surface go on sale is "a bit more" than a replacement keyboard, you're just wrong. That's not an opinion.

Also with the framework 16 replacing the keyboard actually is a minute. https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Framework+Laptop+16-Inch+Keyboa...

> But are you really going to repair it?

Yes

> But are you really going to repair it?

Yes.

I've upgraded and repaired my framework laptop several times over the years. I've very familiar with opening it up and disassembling it.

Replacing the keyboard if I damaged it would absolutely be something I would do.

FrameWork is not openly hostile towards right-to-repair, and do not actively sabotage repair efforts. Try calling Apple and ask for spare parts or circuit diagrams. Anything you find is either leaked, cloned/copied or trash-picked. It barely qualifies as spare parts.

They don't have circuit diagrams, but they do sell some replacement parts and do have repair manuals online that are geared towards supported repairs.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/122003

They only reluctantly offered those things after their hand was forced https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/17/22787336/apple-right-to-...

Wow. The process to replace a keyboard is pretty much insane.

If you go to the Framework website you can still find spare parts for their first gen laptops, because one thing they did is make sure that the latest gen parts are still compatible with their first gen.

Also, on a Mac if the memory or storage dies, you need to replace the whole motherboard, that isn't true in a Framework laptop. You can't even say that those parts will be difficult to get in the future because they're off the shelf parts.

I will not even start on the fact that replacing other parts that commonly break in a laptop like the screen or the keyboard are hard to do in a MacBook (needs to disassemble almost the whole laptop) vs doing it in Framework that is much easier and probably takes 20 minutes even without experience.

>"Repairable" is a bit of a fool's errand. It really hinges on availability of spare parts, supply chain, etc. They will never sell enough of this niche product to nerds to make that a long-term reality.

I don't think that's the case - there are plenty of people who realise that eWaste is a problem, and I've lost count of the number of times I've been asked why a laptop can't just have a "new CPU" fitted to speed it up when everything else works. In reality this means a new system board, but Framework does this.

>An old MBP is far more repairable because so many were made there will never be a shortage of parts on eBay.

That's not comparing like with like. I've done a -lot- of fixing of old (2012-era) macbooks and secondhand parts are always a crap shoot. Plus there are lots of minor changes between otherwise identical-looking parts which mean they don't fit (such as the higher-DPI screen connector between 2011 and 2012 for otherwise identical-looking parts which are indistinguishable until it doesn't quite fit.

>While an emphasis on repairability is noble, the false prophet of brick-like pluggable USB modules ain't it.

That's adaptability and means you can get the IO you need. The computer could be entirely non-repairable and have this, or it could be framework where everything is available brand new as a spare part if you need it.

>The newest Apple laptops all have easily replaceable ports that do not require replacing the logic board, so that novelty is even more useless.

I think you might be misinformed here. Lots of stuff is now serial locked and won't work even if you swap it over. And that's not counting some of the terrible low-level engineering stuff which people like Louis Rossman highlight (such as placement of higher-voltage lines right next to direct-to-cpu lines in display connectors). And I'm sure you know about the simple voltage controller that fails that Apple won't allow the original supplier to sell to anyone else.

Even replacing the battery in my 2022 MBP (which I'm using now and absolutely love) would be a trial compared to the framework. One of the USB ports has always been dicky and I've just left it as is precisely because this is a can of worms.

Watch some dosdude1 repair videos of examples of how much work and skill is needed to do something such as upgrade the storage in a MBP/Air. And compare this to the framework. They are several orders of magnitude different in terms of skill level.

I had a usb dock that surged, destroying the dock and my touchpad. A $25 replacement from framework, and under 5 minutes to swap things out, and I was good as new!

Lenovo X9 Aura is pretty great. 80 Wh battery which gives you 6-10 hours of usage, 15’’ 120 Hz 3k OLED screen, new 3 nm Intel CPUs. Only half as fast as my M4 but less than one third the price, with an upgradable SSD and a customer-replaceable battery. My only gripes are the soldered 32 GB of RAM and that they only put one USB C connector on each side, otherwise a tremendously good machine for that price. I think it has a fan, haven’t noticed it yet though.

What? You can get an M4 MacBook Air with 32 GB of RAM for $1400, and from googling the X9 Aura is the same price. How is that "less than one third the price"?

I have the MBP M4 Max with 48 GB and 2 TB drive, which is around 5.500 € here. That’s what I compare it to, it has around 40.000 points on Geekbench, the X9 around 20.000 and it was around 2.000 €. Not sure how the other M4 compare. And sure the MBP or the Air is of course the better machine if you want to run MacOS, for a Linux laptop the Aura is the best option now though.

6-10 hours? That’s considered good in the PC world?

I guess. MBP is in the same ball park, it uses around 5-8 W when idle with the screen on, it’s just that the 16’’ model has a 100 Wh battery so naturally it lasts longer. On Windows the Lenovo apparently lasts as long as a MacBook but I use it on Linux where power management isn’t as well optimized, it idles at around 9 W.

I don’t get these comments in general, sure the MacBook is much better, and I use one as well. I still prefer native Linux on my machine sometimes and the Aura is probably the best Linux laptop I ever owned.

> Where are the fast, fanless, hidpi, long battery life laptops?

Does the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 13 Aura Edition not meet these requirements? (It does have a fan but runs fairly cool according to reviews.)

They don't make the CPU or the hardware.

And M1 laptops are what about three years from the vintage list? They'll be e-waste at the end of this decade even while other laptops fail to match it.

How is a device that is still functional e-waste? I have an M1 which I got near launch and don't see myself throwing it out by the end of the decade.

It's lifespan is practically defined by how long it gets security updates after Apple obsoletes it, and your ability to install other operating systems when that ends - there is only Asahi Linux, and Asahi is still figuring out M1 support.

But that’s not really the point is it.

If PC vendors can’t match some important specs from multiple years ago on an Apple laptop, isn’t that kind of a problem?

Sure you can get a faster laptop than an M1. But can you get one that’s faster and silent at all times?

You can get a bigger battery. Or screen or whatever. But all those trade off some other desirable quality.

Has anyone matched the full package? Speed + size + weight + battery life + noise + specs?

Shouldn’t framework be able to match that, especially if you’re willing to give some on the weight or cost? If not, why?

The only way Framework is going to match that is if they take charge of the operating system and probably the CPU design too so they can eke out every bit of performance - which is certainly possible these days, a lot of companies are doing exactly that - but I believe it requires billions in investment!

Exactly that is what I think, and I do think it is just not possible.

I’m searching for a new laptop, I want unix, so either linux or macos. I was looking at framework, system76, tuxedo and slimbooks, and mac air. I want an ANSI keyboard, which seems an oddity in Europe (there is English iso, which viscerally hate)

If you want thunderbolt ports, and some good specs, mac air is cheaper. And I’ve heard with arm processors you can tun linux at almost native speeds… I’m almost decided for Mac Air…

If somebody wants to add something to make me change my mind, you are more than welcome.

BTW I’m replacing a 2016 Macbook pro, which was buggy as hell, and I learned to really hate it. Also I’m not a fan of MacOs… but !4$ I cannot beat it.

In The Netherlands ANSI is the most common keyboard layout, so you might want to look there if you really want/need ANSI. Only Apple and Logitech are outliers and insist on ISO.

Doesn’t NL have a Keyboard like Germany, Span, Italy or France? So you all use Ansi? That is my place in the world!!!

Thanks. I will search in that direction.

Yes we all use ANSI. Only difference with US keyboards are Alt Gr key instead of right Alt, and a € sign on the "5" key. I think both are not really dealbreakers.

Thank you! I'm now searching to buy online a laptop and get it delivered!

I bought an asus OLED zenbook 14 with the ryzen chip, slapped pop OS onto it and it ran with no issues since.

In a lot of ways it's better than the M2 max macbook pro I had before (better screen for one). It was also, uh, 1/6th the price.

I‘m looking zenbook 14 prices, pretty much same as Mac Air. Also my problem is that ASUS does not offer ANSI Keyboard here.

Hah, my problem with ASUS is that they don't offer proper ISO keyboards in Europe. (Their left Shift key is short, but the Return key is wide.) I really don't know what they are doing with their keyboard layouts.

And that's actually the reason why I'm lurking in this thread; I want a 2-in-1 and didn't get the X13 Flow due to its keyboard.

The MacBook Air is undoubtedly good hardware, even good value, but from experience I personally just hate the Apple software ecosystem/wardship so much, it’s a dealbreaker. The pretentious presentation while neglecting practical details, the inflexibility you will sooner or later fight… it’s a special kind of hell. You strictly don’t have options on their devices. Asahi is a nice effort, but still too limited. The happy Apple users I know, have adapted their expectations, bought fully in. I am honestly never sure, if they are merely fantasizing about productivity, or actually (just) work. For me, after the honeymoon phase, it always ends in deep frustration. IMO with Apple you have to embrace the "yes, daddy“ mentality, be gaslit into overstating the good, while disowning the bad, or you will end up angry.

The Apple M-series laptops get a performance boost by putting the RAM inside the CPU, which makes it completely impossible to upgrade RAM. That is the antithesis of what Framework is doing. Apple are the kings of disposable hardware that costs way more than the competition for no good reason. You want 32GB? You're going to pay a lot for it. Oh, now you need 64GB? Too bad, throw out that old laptop and get a new one.

RAM is on the package not inside the CPU. Maybe possibly some performance boost from that but the benefit is mainly improved packaging.

The fact is that the CPU and the RAM are in the same package. Yes, essentially the RAM is on the CPU for the purpose of this conversation about upgradeability. You cannot upgrade the RAM in any M-series Apple computer, not even desktops.

There is a lot you can fault Apple for, but we're literally talking about a 4 year old CPU that is still unmatched by their competition. People often argue "how much is Apple ahead of the competition" if at all, right? Guessing you're in the "not at all, it's all PR bullshit" camp, which is fine.

This is the one undisputed example though where we can put a definitive number on it. So far Apple is 4 years ahead of their competition on this very particular metric (High performance, low energy, fanless CPU)

>a 4 year old CPU that is still unmatched by their competition

It isn't all that high performance compared to other laptops, but sure.. fanless and low power it has. I just would rather plug in a laptop to get my workload done in 1/2 of the time it would take on an M1 laptop.

The Dell laptop we got runs at 55W (Intel Core i9-13900HX) and is faster than the M1 Ultra 20-core at 60 Watts, which you can't even get in a laptop format. The benchmarks don't lie. That intel CPU is as fast as the fastest M4 16-core CPU, and the M4 runs at 90W (so far as I can tell from a google search).

>Guessing you're in the "not at all, it's all PR bullshit" camp, which is fine.

I'm guessing you're in the "reality distortion field" camp. Nevermind, I know you are.

We understand that if you are willing to compromise on the fan and power efficiency, you can get a great machine like your Dell. People with your preferences are well served! The frustration is that there's nothing similar to even an old M1 laptop from other manufacturers. Why not? Apple has shown there's a big market for small, efficient, silent laptops with good displays in the $2500+ range.

Other people in this thread have mentioned a Lenovo Aura as coming pretty close and it does, except for the fan! Is it really that hard to eliminate the fan and get performance / watt numbers like Apple was getting 5 years ago?

In Apple's quest for thinness and quiet they have made lots of undercooled devices that overheat and thermal-throttle and just plain die. That Dell replaced a MBP which replaced another MBP that had to have the motherboard replace 8 times before Apple forced us to sue them in a class action (and we won). If only they had just cooled the thing properly.

>there's a big market for small, efficient, silent laptops with good displays in the $2500+ range.

Yeah, it's called "apple fanboys", people with more money than sense who fetishize slimness and quiet over computing.

The Dell costs less than half the price of a $2500 fanless Apple laptop, so it's really no wonder Apple is forever at ~15% market share - most people prefer to not spend their money on Apple hardware. Price/performance is not what Apple is known for, they are a luxury brand, a status symbol. And that's great if that's what you need, Apple makes a laptop for you.

Assuming everything you say is correct, there are a lot of people with more money than sense. Why is Apple the only company to chase that market?

Apple’s margins are the envy of the industry. Their stores have revenue per square foot numbers that few other retailers can match. Why isn’t there a Dell store across the street from every Apple store? Why doesn’t HP have a machine that goes toe-to-toe with every SKU that Apple sells?

> Apple makes a laptop for you

And, unfortunately, only Apple is making a laptop with those characteristics. My laptop is a ThinkPad because I need Windows and it’s not a very nice computer to use. There’s lots of Linux and Windows people out there who want Apple-like hardware. Some companies copy the superficial aspects, but none copy the internals.

I guess ultimately what I was trying to get at this whole thread is that Framework could make an M1-level machine, right? They just choose not to.

Nobody wants to run Windows on ARM. The software base just isn't there. Framework could make a fanless ARM-based laptop, but few people want those.

We were stuck with a perfectly good x86 MBP that Apple no longer supports, and we had the choice of buying an M-series Apple or buying the Dell. We went for the far cheaper and more powerful option, with a far larger softtware base. Most people do the same.

Apple stores are a place for fanboys to spend money, the stores are part of the corporate luxury persona. Dell and other PC manufacturers don't need retail stores in the age of the internet. And again, Apple is a luxury brand charging luxury prices, it's no wonder fanboys spend a lot of money at their stores, their identity and self-worth depend on it.

No, nobody wants Windows on ARM. At least not until Microsoft gets something like Rosetta up and running.

This whole thread has been about wanting an x86 version of the M1. Intel and AMD have made some great CPUs that should be capable or running fanless and be competitive with five year old Apple computers, right? Since they are older CPUs now, they should be very inexpensive as well.

I don't own an macOS device, but anytime a family member asks me what to get, I tell them to get a Mac because they can go to the mall and either take a class or schedule an appointment for one-on-one help. That's the real value of the Apple store.

I have a hard time taking the luxury brand charge against Apple seriously. The Apple Store is a luxury store in the same way that Applebees is a luxury restaurant compared to Burger King. Nothing they sell is hard to get, nothing is significantly more expensive than what the competition sells (especially if you value in in-store support and resale value), and everything they sell is extraordinarily common, at least in the US. Nobody sees an iPhone or MacBook Air and thinks "oooh! fancy!".

The exception is probably AR device, which is kind of ridiculous.

> In Apple's quest for thinness and quiet they have made lots of undercooled devices that overheat and thermal-throttle and just plain die.

That's a good description of their last few Intel models. M1 does okay, even when it's fanless.

> Yeah, it's called "apple fanboys", people with more money than sense who fetishize slimness and quiet over computing.

Computers get more powerful every year. Not everyone needs to get sustained 100% out of their CPU.

So don't be an asshole about wanting other features.

And the whole point of the request is they're not an apple fanboy.

If you look next to you, you might find Dunning and Kruger

Your low-effort troll should get you banned. If all you do is make an ad hominem attack, then you're the asshole.

There isn't any CPU that is competitive with the Apple M series. Maybe regulators will force Apple to sell the M series chips to competitors, if not, it is what it is.

Good point. They don’t really seem to care about actual user needs — their products feel more like they’re built around what’s easy to implement. I would’ve loved to see a Snapdragon motherboard focused on battery life and quiet operation too.

Our company bought about 4-5 Framework 13s, and boy were they a bad experience. All sorts of driver issues, random crashes, USB ports not working right, etc.

Just about all of them had some kind of issue, which is really fun when your PM has a USB port not work randomly.

Ended up going back to HP laptops, 30% cheaper for the same specs and they just work consistently.

Would love to hear a hobbyist perspective, Frameworks are not a good choice for a business but I would be interested to hear if the replaceable parts / ports provided value for someone. My gut feeling is that something that can't be replaced easily in the Frameworks will die and it'll just end up being cheaper to replace the whole laptop.

The first run of Frameworks had a weak hinge on the monitor, which isn't an uncommon problem with other brands of laptop. With Framework, you can easily replace the hinge, but that's unlikely with most other brands, and you'll need to pay to replace the entire monitor.

Another example, I didn't need an HDMI port anymore, and wanted an extra USB-C instead. Just a few bucks to swap with Framework, but impossible with other laptops.

I did have an issue with one of my USB ports on the Framework however. It was solved by removing the module and updating the bios firmware. Can't say I've ever had that happen with another laptop. I agree they're probably not ready for business use yet, where cost is the primary measurement.

It seems that the swappable modules would also make it easy for someone to install e.g. a keylogger, though.

You can lock the modules with a button and also screw them in from the inside.

Not saying it's perfect but it's a far cry from just swapping a module.

If they are close enough to do that without me noticing I already have a ton of problems to fix instead of worrying about my Framework's module security.

You could simply be in a coffee shop or library.

I have one as a developer laptop running Linux. It works fine, battery life is bad. (On AMD 7640U Framework 13).

I currently couldn't recommend them to anyone except users (developers?) who want to run Linux specifically. Otherwise a Macbook is going to be a much better computer at a better value, or just get any boring Windows laptop provider.

Pros compared to Macbook: - Runs Linux - amd64 makes some legacy software work easier - Easy and commodity prices to get 96gb of RAM and 2tb SSD.

Macbook pros: - Massively better battery life - Snappier/faster in general usage - Much more polished than Linux

I evaluated Thinkpads as well but trying to find one with the right configuration that wasn't too expensive or worse than the Framework was pretty hard.

The replaceable parts definitely add value as someone who's had one for 4 years now or something like that. It's probably got more new parts than old, some for performance improvements, others for damage because I'm not especially gentle.

I don't really think it's tremendous value if you're purely talking about laptop per dollar. I probably could've bought two similarly performant laptops for the amount I've spent on the Framework over the years, maybe two and a half. But it is incredible peace of mind to know that the same machine I already have will keep working even if some part of it breaks, I don't have to worry about reinstalling or losing anything or losing the stickers I have on the thing or whatever else. The old mainboard I upgraded from is now a home server with a nice 3D printed case. There's way less e-waste, one thing going wrong doesn't make the whole device a brick. And there is just a genuinely enjoyable novelty to how easy it is to take apart.

It's a hobbyist device through and through. It's for people who like using desktop Linux, because they feel empowered by being able to fix their problems, with the occasional side effect that sometimes they'll have to.

Thing is, the major part the motherboard will cost you the price of a competitive laptop.

I want to love framework, but their prices just don’t justify the switch for most people.

Hobbyist here, and while my issues have been fixed, I had a pretty bad experience. I had the 12th-gen Intel model I bought in 2022, and moderate amounts of load would trigger thermal protection and throttle all CPU cores to 400MHz. The throttling could last for seconds, or several tens of minutes, or even require me to power down the laptop for a while and come back to it later. (This was even though temperatures would always drop out of the danger zone in under a second.)

After nearly two years (two years!) of back and forth with support, including a mainboard replacement that didn't fix the problem, they finally upgraded me to the 13th-gen Intel mainboard, and the problems immediately went away.

Right now I'm struggling with a keyboard issue; a few of the keys intermittently don't register presses. I have a new keyboard that I ordered that I hope will fix the problem, and need to install, just haven't gotten to it. (I'm not sure if this is a result of a defect, or of one of my cats walking on the keyboard and possibly damaging it, so I'm not ready to blame Framework for this one.)

Aside from that, I haven't had driver issues, random crashes, or any problems with the USB ports. But I assume you're talking about Windows; I use Linux, so that's not an apples-to-apples comparison.

> My gut feeling is that something that can't be replaced easily in the Frameworks will die and it'll just end up being cheaper to replace the whole laptop.

The mainboard is of course the most expensive part, but it's still gong to be cheaper to replace it than the entire laptop. I don't believe there are any available replacement parts to the laptop that cost more than the full cost of the laptop.

> A good laptop, but not a good value

One of my mentors had the great sentence: "I dont buy laptops- they suck, because they are tailored to transport. I buy desktops- and connect them via internet to flat transportable terminals. And desktops can be upgraded, merged, reused and send to the closet as server at the EOL-"

And he was kind of right. For almost all purposes, even for gaming in a way- a remote desktop is kind of superior. Yes, stadia is dead- but for everything else- this shall do.

Using Steam Streaming/Moonlight-Sunlight/Tailscale is a dream for remote gaming.

You are absolutely right- forgive me, im kind of out of touch with the whole steam revolutionizing gaming on linux.

I think the comment about the "transporttax" on hardware, ergonomic and cooling still holds up though even in a world where things like steam-deck exist.

Even more so, if you may have lightweight ar-headsets one day, with a glorified cellphone + mouse and keyboard.

Nah, it’s ok for browsing the internet and for „slow“ games but for anything else it sucks

One could argue, that the "reusability" of the laptopbricks, in a desktop-server blade like structure is the biggest argument for the framework as a laptop though.

I am of the same mind. Desktop for heavy lifting and a mid-range Chromebook (technically a chrultrabook now) for browsing w/ a lightweight yet modern feel.

I do think the plunge to leveraging a desktop/server across devices does require an understanding of ssh/rdp and tailscale/reverse proxies though, which is why it isn't as popular as it could be.

Reliability of Internet is also a problem

Maybe you live somewhere with crazy-stable, ultra-low-latency internet covering every little nook and cranny you could ever care to find yourself in, but I doubt this is the case for most of the world. Until we realize this utopia globally a remote desktop setup is simply not flexible enough.

I'd be a lot more into Framework if they had come out with a single other GPU option than the Radeon 7700S that's been the only GPU option available since the brands launch. The 7800M and 7900M have both been out over a year or more, and Framework has made zero mention of when or even if those models would ever be available as upgrades for Framework devices. I don't even really play games, but for my video editing workloads, more GPU cores and VRAM make a world of difference, and the RTX 3070 level of performance out of the RX7700s that's thus far the only GPU option for Framework devices just doesn't cut it. There's just no way I'm spending $2500+ USD for a laptop that has worse performance than devices costing half as much at this point.

They just aren't really delivering on the promise of "Future upgradeability" in any kind of meaningful way so far, and I just can't see the value in purchasing what's undeniably a wildly overpriced machine based on promises that have yet to be delivered upon. They've had plenty of time to communicate when, or even if, new GPUs are coming, yet there's been absolute radio silence from the on this front.

Personally I think they need to focus more on actually delivering on the fundamental promise of the brand, that being future upgradeability, than on releasing new devices, as until they can demonstrate they are committed to delivering on their promises, I won't be buying any of their devices.

They already released several updated mainboards for the 13 and 16 with newer Intel and AMD chips.

Why would you buy a 12 inch laptop for video editing?

I was this close to buying the newest generation Framework, but in the end, could not justify the price when I found a far better bang for my buck and respectable self-repairability with a refurbished Gen 5 T14. It's even surprisingly thin and light.

We need more 10"-12" sized laptops. I regret selling my netbook in hopes a device with a bit better specs would come.

Agreed. I miss my old 12" Powerbook, and a ~2010-ish-era 11" MacBook Air.

Then again, you end up with underpowered hardware; I don't think something in an 11" MBA form factor would have the beefiness I require these days.

> "A sturdy, thoughtful, cute design that just can't compete in its price range."

People will pay untold thousands for a Mac, but God forbid when a PC manufacturer charges more than $599 for a laptop. If you're whining about the price, Framework isn't made for you. Go buy that Acer that you really want. The Framework is Sam Vimes' expensive boots that are made to last[1], and I've happily paid in full to get a pair.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

> People will pay untold thousands for a Mac, but God forbid when a PC manufacturer charges more than $599 for a laptop.

The article compares the FL12 to laptops of the same price range, including other framework laptops to note that it falls short.

The FL12 has worse performances and battery life than an M1 Air, for more than an M4.

The point of the article is that the 12 should either be a lot less expensive or it should be a lot better. It's not whatever nonsense you're dreaming of.

The core philosophy of Framework is repairability and modularity. Yes, you are paying extra for those things, and so people who do not value them, should probably not buy Framework. These comments are full of the old cliche of judging a fish in a tree climbing contest.

Repairabilty and modularity come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is going to value those tradeoffs and therefore shouldn't buy a laptop where those are the priority. But some people do value those things, and telling them to "get a MacBook" is just silly.

You can repair a Mac by handing it (and possibly your wallet) to Apple and letting them replace entire large subsystems to remedy the issue and pair the new parts. A few years back (pre-Apple Silicon) I got a new top case, keyboard, battery, and trackpad because the button in the trackpad had failed. Pretty good deal on a laptop that was nearly 3 years old, in fairness.

To repair (or upgrade) a Framework, you buy the part and install it. That's worth something to me!

Incidentally, I also have a last-gen ThinkPad P14s Gen 5 AMD and it's a flimsy POS. Already needed a new motherboard and battery and spent three weeks sitting at the service center while they rounded up the parts. Wish I'd bought another Framework 13.

I really don't understand this argument about price. It seems extremely competitive on price to me. Am I crazy or am I really seeing 48 GB and 2 TB for $1500? For $1500 you get a 16 GB 512 GB macbook air.

This is a key part of our product value prop. Our memory and storage upgrade pricing is much lower than most other laptop makers, and you can find your own on the open market for even less. Other laptop makers can preserve their overall margin by overcharging on those upgrades, which lets them price their base SKUs more aggressively. We accepted the tradeoff of not gouging on upgrades.

I got my wife an entire-ass Framework 13 7840U /and/ put 32GB RAM and a 2TB SSD in it for less than the cost of the uplift to go from base RAM to 32GB and base SSD to 2TB from Apple at time of preorder. That was the day I stopped being an Apple customer. Maybe for the $300 Walmart laptop folks it's too expensive, but hardly for Mac refugees.

MacBook Air and MacBook Pro actually have very competitive pricing, even if you take into account the expensive upgrades. I'd buy the Windows/Linux equivalent at the same price in a heartbeat.

it’s really hard not to just buy a MacBook Air at this price level.

Linux support

Sorry but this is not a real value for certain people.

We saw that there was a gap in the market for laptops that treat Linux as a first-class OS target, and we design our products with that audience in mind. That there are other people in the world who don't need Linux is totally ok.

thanks nirav :) looking forward to my sage 12 for linux-based couch surfing

My kid is a bit young, but this is the laptop he'll be getting in a year or so to replace the garbage Chromebook he's currently using (which has steadily gotten flakier since purchase).

First class Linux support is requirement #1; Framework's repairability on top of that means there's not even anything else to consider. It will be the third Framework in our house. My wife is happily using the second, having easily switched to Ubuntu from Windows 10(?) when the video cable connection in her Dell XPS flaked out and made the screen useless.

First-class Linux support is the reason that half the regulars in my local Linux Users Group have Frameworks. It's probably the most common laptop brand I see in my tech circle, and anecdotally I can say that it has eclipsed thinkpads in my specific community.

I mean certain people still run wordperfect. You're never going to attract everyone.

Depending on the features you need, you can probably pick up an M1/M2 for a decent price nowadays that could work well enough:

* https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/overvie...

No external display support under Linux.

I have a 4k display plugged into my Asahi M1 (hdmi port).

Your MacBook air m1?

Or a mini?

> it’s really hard not to just buy a MacBook Air at this price level.

Works fine for me. How else do you think the studios/minis run it?

Huh, when did this happen? I thought external display was still not supported on MacBook air m1s?

Ed: according to

https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m1/#soc...

MacBook air still have no external display support?

I imagine this is actually a usb-c issue rather than straight-up no display support

So, you are not running Linux on a MacBook air m1, I take it - when you say it works fine for you?

The market doesn't profitably support running desktop Linux on a laptop outside of a business/development setting, in which case it's the IT department buying the laptop and I don't get to choose. Which means "this Dell or this Thinkpad". Chromebooks don't count because they are just Google data-hoovering appliances not real laptops.

Unless one wants to run Windows or Linux

The pricing is crazy, they need to halve the prices to be competitive with Apple and Lenovo on the high-end and ASUS on the low-end.

I guess that’s just the cost you have to pay for repairability and extension.

I've been using my framework 13 for a while now and it's been a great laptop - part of what pushed me over was their mission of making devices lives longer, my hope is and was that maybe the vote of confidence they survive long enough to build up to a model the Apple fans here would want or at least not complain about.

I'm not sure that will ever happen. I own a Framework 16 (and am pretty happy with it), because I value repairability a lot. But the level of repairability and modularity that Framework is targeting comes with tradeoffs. This is simply the reality. Size, build quality/sturdiness, thermals, and more are going to take a hit when you have the extreme level of repairability and modularity. Framework laptops are probably never going to be the right solution for every kind of customer. And Macs are probably close the furthest thing on the opposite of the spectrum. Every choice is designed to tweak the design, aesthetics, battery life, etc. almost always at the expense of repairability. Someone who likes the part of the pareto frontier that Macs operate on is almost definitionally never going to be a Framework fan.

For me, they are great, and I plan to continue to support them. But not everyone is interested in the tradeoffs inherent in their philosophy, and that's also fine.

Yeah that's all true, I certainly don't need them to ever get to that point, but if they do it'll be because people bought into the mission first. Be the change and all that.

How has the build quality stood up so far? My concern with these has always been that laptops do generally get banged up a bit when travelling around, and if half of it is snap fit and designed to detach instead of being all glued together like typically, then it has a higher likelihood of falling apart when you really don't want it to.

Might still be worth it if they keep producing spare parts for a decade or more, every single time my laptop's battery goes dead it's a after the manufacturer has stopped production of that model entirely and it becomes impossible to buy a new one lol.

I have a Framework 16 which is probably even easier to deconstruct than the Framework 13. It's been back and forth across the continent a number of times.

It's very firmly put together. The thought had never crossed my mind that I needed to worry about parts coming off of it. E.g., the screen bezel is inside the laptop when it's closed, pretty firmly set inside the top lid so it wouldn't catch on anything anyway, and has some decently strong magnets given it's a tiny piece of light plastic.

And if something happens that _would_ take the bezel off, in all likelihood it would just snap right back into place. Since it's designed to come off, it should come off relatively cleanly rather than breaking where it was glued, snapping off some tiny plastic clips, etc that would render it destroyed.

If anything I'm _less_ delicate with this than other electronics. Not that I want to plan on burning money, but knowing that something as extreme as "I managed to shatter the screen" is a ~$300 part and probably 15 minutes of my time to fix rather than "buy a whole new laptop" definitely takes some of the anxiety away. A new touchpad or keyboard are like $50 and 30 seconds to replace. A destroyed USB-C port is $8 and 15 seconds.

It's been good. I'm not the most abusive laptop owner, I don't travel a ton, but I dropped it off a barstool onto hard tile and it survived. My nephews ran around with it arguing and fighting for longer than most electronics survive before I noticed my laptop was the carrot on the stick causing the trouble, they didn't manage to snap the screen backward or crack anything. As far as just chucking it in a bag or in the passenger seat of my car and going about my day, it's been excellent.

I kind of have this desire to replace some pieces on it just to do it because that's the thing, but I haven't had a genuine upgrade need yet. They did do an upgraded model recently and I was excited to see if I wanted to I could just buy the new guts and go. Hopefully that's still the case the next upgrade cycle when I'll likely bite :D

In theory this sounds good but in practice I'm not convinced there's a lot of value in the extension aspect.

My desktop is 11 years old. It's an i5 3.2ghz quad core, 16 GB of memory, SSD machine that I built from individual parts for ~$850 in 2014. It has been running 24/7 since then. It handles 4k and 1440p dual monitors without issues for all of my programming / video editing needs. The only thing it doesn't do is run modern games.

I only say all of that because I've never upgraded individual parts on it. Every X years I build a new machine that lasts. I've been doing that for around 20 years now. The only thing I replaced once (not this machine) was a PSU that got nuked by lightning and not having a surge protector.

Personally if I were going the laptop route I'd much rather get something 80% as fast as the framework but at half the price (or less). There's a ton of laptops in the $600 range that crush my desktop in specs. Things like a Ryzen 7 7730U (16 threads @ 4.5ghz) with 32 GB of memory, 1 TB+ SSD, reasonable display / ports etc..

To use Cursor's new language, I think it's aimed at the "price insensitive".

I plan on buying one of these for my dad. He is older and isn't really technical. Having a machine I can easily repair for him is worth the cost.

Yea...you can get a nearly identically specced ASUS for $300. This is a compromised low-end laptop at mid-end pricing.

I wish Framework made a small laptop with inverted-T arrow keys. I *hated* the full height left and right keys on my old touchbar MacBook Pro, and rejoiced when they wisely fixed that mistake.

I don't need to go to a 16, the only laptop they sell with the proper arrow key arrangement. I need something small and cheerful as a secondary Linux laptop, and ugh, the 12 and the 13 come so so close, only to trip right before the finish line.

As much as I like the ideals Framework is espousing, I'm seriously considering just making a folding shell for a Raspberry Pi 5 (maybe Pi 500) and a second gen Wacom One 13 (stylus w/ touch screen) and a battery.

Unless you're working with MCUs etc. and want the GPIO pins, you'd get far more value out of a reasonable ASUS or Lenovo model.

The SD card is a big bottleneck on the Pi.

There is an M.2 hat for the Pi 5 that allows using an NVMe SSD instead of the SD card.

Like dropping a racing engine into a Hindustan Ambassador. Makes no sense.

If you get a chance to use one first hand you see the performance impact is more than noticeable.

I see you're a person of taste. You nicely paired a bad analogy with your incorrect assumption.

You should! That sounds like a great project.

Just saw a kickstarter for something like that recently, a laptop built around a CM 5 with even GPIO broken out. Argon 40 something.

Probably this one (not launched yet) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/argonforty/upton-one-th...

Yep that's the one, I have to say it's kinda tempting on one hand, but on the other the Pi 5 is still about 4x slower than this already slow Framework 12 with a GPU that barely qualifies being called that so using it would be pretty painful I imagine.

I was thinking of posting one of those Ask HN things re what ppl thought were the best laptops for linux in 2025, i.e. a Thinkpad, a Framework, a System76...or a MacBook running utm...

For anyone considering the 16, mine has had some teething issues (1. motherboard failed and I was sent a replacement 2. keyboard/touchpad started having a issue losing connection which I still need to submit a ticket for). The USB A port also feels like it's gonna break at some point (the rest seem fine). The linux experience has been about the same as on a Dell XPS 13 with the consistent issues being poor battery life and an inability to sleep properly. If I were to do it again I would get the 13 not the 16 but would still give it a shot.

> The Core i5 version of the Laptop 12 lasted around 10 hours in the PCMark Modern Office battery life test, which isn't stunning but is a step up from what the fully specced versions of the Framework Laptop 13 can offer. It will be just fine for a long flight or a full day of work or school.

This is the key. Framework 12 is a model aimed at schools and corporations. I wouldn't be surprised to see a ChromeOS version of it appear for schools. Which is great if they can tap into that market.

It's a bit surprising to find so little in these comments and the original review talking about the youth first laptop use-case. Lots of schools require a touch screen, and kids are going to break parts even on a fairly rugged laptop.

All these people talking about MacBook Airs are missing the point. None of the schools around me have MacBook Airs as allowed laptops for kids BYOD and even if they did, I'm not sure they'd have a long life getting the kinds of hits and knocks that will happen being carried everywhere in high school by a 12 year old.

This laptop is obviously for this use case. I know of no other laptop that really covers this use case well. Typically laptops aimed at this segment are cheaper, but not rugged, not easy to repair, and not really very nice. I strongly suspect that I'll only have to replace the screen or keyboard once before the total cost of ownership works out compared to a normal laptop.

At the high end, what are some alternative laptops you would consider which are not Apple? (Preferably with full-sized arrow keys)

Couple months ago, I have replaced 3.5 years old HP Probook with XMG EVO 14. Specifically, I have ordered a configuration with Ryzen 7 8845HS, 64GB DDR5-5600, and no disks because I reused 4TB WD Red SN700 from the old laptop, and still have the second M2 2280 slot free should I need more storage.

Pretty good laptop, the screen is great even, colour-calibrated 2880×1800 IPS configurable to 60 Hz refresh rate. However, the up/down arrow keys are not full size, their height is smaller.

I've been considering getting a Framework for a long time now, but I think I'll just get a Thinkpad instead once I need to replace my current 5 year-old laptop.

Edit: Just noticed the full sized arrow keys part, don't think Thinkpads have that.

I can't believe companies are still squishing those arrow keys together. How could this terrible keyboard design drag for so long

Who needs arrow keys when you have hjkl?

I love the Galvatron color scheme! Feels techy yet nostalgic.

I was thinking BW2 Galvatron too — looks great.

After reading everyone's comments about price I expected it would be much worse. I might consider it after my current laptop dies.

I wish them the best, but if they can't compete with a MacBook Air on price despite Apple's huge profit margins, then maybe it's just not meant to be. People used to talk about paying the "Apple tax," but how many people are willing to pay the "Linux tax?" Mac OS is a similar Unix with the usual tools, and you can rent a VPS if you need Linux on an x86 sometimes. An MBA with an M4 will last 5+ years with a battery swap, and still probably perform better than whatever Framework releases in 2030.

I guess I'm not the target customer for this. I can see myself tinkering with a desktop, but I'd rather just have a laptop that runs fast and long enough, and stands up to abuse for 3-5 years.

$1500 for 48 GB and 2 TB? Am I missing something here?

Yes, Apple screws you on SSDs, so that 2 TB adds a lot. If you need it, and don't want an external SSD (2 TB costs $150), the Framework is cheaper with a slower CPU. Maxing internal storage on a Mac laptop is a bad idea if cost matters to you.

EDIT: I haven't felt the need to spec a programming laptop like that. 16/512 feels fast enough, and 32/512 would have room to bloat... er, I mean grow. But I don't use a local LLM, and I don't know whether the difference between a heavily-quantized thing that fits in 16 GB and whatever you can fit in 48 is significant versus the ones running on absurd data center CPUs.

Can you even buy 256 GB SSDs any more?

From the pics there this laptop does not have a matte surface on the screen? Looks like a glossy screen. One would hope matte is an option.

EDIT: Yes, it looks like matte is an option and they don't charge extra.

Framework Laptop 13 and Framework Laptop 16 are matte. Framework Laptop 12 has coverglass (non-matte) to get the durability needed for stylus support.

What do you all use for a modern web development machine. 16GB of ram is no longer enough, I will soon upgrade to a new MBA with 32GB, but I still fear that won't be enough. I was looking at the latest framework and you can get it with 96GB of ram for $2k, that's $3600-$3800 for a mac and it's a much larger mac than I want. A quick scan of Dell and Lenovo non workstation class laptops didn't show any with more than 32GB.

Memory used by various apps:

docker VM take 8Gb for simple supabase images

Firefox take 5-8GB

BasedPyRight takes 2GB

Nextjs server takes 2GB

If you need an 8gb docker image as part of your local web development stack, that’s a toolchain problem.

One of our vendors publishes a 70GB docker image as their SDK. It's awful.

That is horrendous. I'm assuming it contains some kind of giant dataset in its entirety?

No datasets. Most of the size is just apt packages and tools bundled into the layers. Around 5GB are "useful" things, and another 15GB are a couple of arguably justified tarballs (only one of which is needed).

That's even more infuriating. Just sheer incompetence wasting your valuable space and bandwidth.

The Thinkpad P15 workstation line of laptops support 128gb of memory. I've seen refurbished gen 1 at around 600 USD and 128gb of ram (has 4 slots) is another 250 USD on top. (Give or take, I'm converting from euros, and the US market doesn't VAT so it should be cheaper than that)

30 years ago we could play Doom with 4 MB of RAM.

Web development has devolved to the point where now you need 32 GB to view a Chinese take-out menu.

Firefox takes less than half a GB base plus your usage, so you might want to see which extensions are bloating it up.

Uninstall Firefox and stop developing junk in Next.js or any other vendor-as-a-service frameworks

Install htop/btop and be more conscious about what your machine is actually doing. Needing more than 32GB RAM to develop a website is absurd

Firefox is the only browser with manifest v2 support

My firefox is currently on 450mb on RAM, putting it in third place behind KDE's file indexer and one of the currently running electron instances.

If you use Linux, then you're not stuck pre-dedicating a big block of RAM to a VM to run docker in, you're just using whatever the container is using.

I've never got upvotes reciting this but won't stop doing: there's right amount of sluggishness that the majority wants, and both software bloat and debloat happens until it hits honey-like sublime-to-some lagging is achieved. Only software and technologies that are _buttery_ smooth, not ethanoly smooth, will survive, and nothing will ever solve the software sluggishness that frustrates some, which unfortunately include myself.

FWIW I didn't choose the docker or nextjs stack. Sometimes you have clients or work at a job that makes tech stack choices you don't agree with.

Switch from docker to one of the other alternatives and wi be less ram probably.

Since you mention "Docker VM" I'm assuming you're using a Mac?

If so my best advice is to not use Docker for day-to-day development; reverse-engineer the docker-compose.yml/etc and run what you'd run in containers locally.

As a web developer I've been getting away with doing this for almost a decade now. It's a one-time cost to review what containers the app needs and then map that to a native world (install Postgres/etc via homebrew, adjust the env vars, etc).

The only time I run Docker nowadays is when I actually need to work on the Dockerfile itself and need to test it locally.

Get a proper laptop where you can install sodimm memory and m2 ssds. A previous gen base model with decent screen Elitebook 8xx or Thinkpad T1x, 128gb ddr5 kit is 300€, 4tb ssd 200€ and you dont have to worry about upgrades. My 5yr old machine has 64gb/4tb, it was doable for a long time

I just wish somebody would make a quality, powerful 2in1 laptop model with a long commitment. Thinkpad X Yogas were the ones, but their price/perf is down the drain and you can't get one with DGPU.

There were some passable gaming models from others but with the usual QA issues of non-business products, and mostly one-off experiments/no refreshes.

Dear HA, tent mode in a laptop is great, please generate more enthusiast demand.

When are we getting a decent keyboard?

I would buy a Framework but the keyboard is as junk as every other laptop keyboard out there right now. The whole "MacBook" trend of laptop keyboards has ruined the entire industry.

I want the old style low travel keyboard we had which still had some travel, a dense layout and actual shape to the key caps.

I used to really like the keyboard on the old think pad t series, like the T60. But it seems that everyone is doing 'island' keys these days.

Just my own anecdote about the Framework 13: I also felt I paid a MacBook price, but was much happier paying for future repairability/upgradability. I am so sick of buying things that feel disposable that I would a pay a premium not to.

But I have a dream that Framework will change one thing that seems so trivial, and which would make my relationship with my Framework laptop and purchase decision so much simpler.

If they can't ship replacement parts for faults/design flaws outside of their supported regions, which is understandable even if frustrating, at least allow me to use freight forwarding! I'm now living in a country Framework don't ship to, and so every small fault I have ever had with their product is permanent. I had goodwill for years, but being stuck with their design fault with the backup battery system has tipped me to no longer recommending buying from them. Obviously most people don't move countries, so this won't be an issue for them, but it's the feeling that they didn't seem to try hard to find a solution. It's the opposite of what I felt early on when I found their excellent documentation on faults, and their BIOS updates which addressed every complaint (adjustable brightness of power LED, limit charging capacity to a percentage).

That feeling, and an effectively non-repairable laptop, are things I could have bought from anyone!

I should add that even now, I probably wouldn't recommend just going out and buying just any laptop over the Framework. They're still the company moving the most in the direction I like.

For people who just don't want to think about this stuff (generally not HN readers), I'd suggest trying to find the minimum Apple laptop which would get you by for a few years. Their base level computers feel like amazing value, but the prices to upgrade RAM and SDD are brutal at purchase, and it's impossible afterwards.

For anyone who I think would have the appetite, refurbished corporate laptops are very solid, quite repairable, and good value.

I think those both those options are actually very high bars to beat, so if Framework hasn't jumped straight to beating those yet, that's still not necessarily a terrible thing.

Am I the only one who thinks it's foolish not to have a darker color option? Or something more professional? These all remind me of kindergarten.

it's explicitly designed for younger people, they'd say Framework Laptop 13 is what you're describing

I see.

I dig this laptop a lot but two things have put me off:

1. No full AMD options. I don't trust Intel's thermals and performance for several years now. Maybe they have rebounded but I no longer care. For me it's "AMD or get away from me".

2. No backlit keyboard. There is no excuse for this in 2025! I can forgive a lot of things, lack of biometric auth included, but no backlit keyboard is a cardinal sin.

I don't care about price. At this point I am ready to pay extra for libre hardware that is 100% open/free source ready and even working best with it. I would easily pay Macbook prices for a machine. But going for Intel and for no backlit keyboard -- nope.

Hope somebody from Frame.Work is reading. AMD has better thermals! (Or had, a few years ago, again, haven't checked in a while.)

i run nixos on a framework 13 and it runs perfectly with all features working as i'd expect. running linux natively and knowing the good the company is doing good is priceless. will definitely be buying another someday.

Linux Mint, FW13, battery has a slow drain while off and dead most of times I go to use it.

It’s OK, but I’m not sure I would make the same selection today.

Their price is just too high.

"Interesting" product placement (already within their portfolio, compared to the Framework 13). Sadly, they didn't succeed in making their unique features (compared to their and the market's other offerings) really useful by:

1. Using substandard digitzer tech (something as performant and economical as Wacom EMR is needed). One cannot compromise here. I get that this might also be a licensing issue.

2. Making the device too big. 10.3 inch or smaller is better; the possibility of using the device in a train's or on a plane's fold-away tray table, just to be stashed away in a cross-body or small messenger bag after use, is still a killer feature. More real estate (by way of screens, ultraportable projectors, et cetera) can always be thrown into the mix later.

3. Choosing a wrong, or to be more precise obsolete, form factor. It needed to be a detachable for more modularity and flexibility. So, it's just another, admittedly very maintainable, premium-priced classic convertible. Its attached keyboard is a design-compromising dead weight and/or wasted space whenever not in use, very much like (the unused) maneuvering jets on older VTOL aircraft while in conventional flight.

4. The display is not of primary importance here, but there's no need to make it that bad. Top-notch, wide-color, flicker-free IPS displays do exist.

5. Sturdy but lightweight metal, not plastic.

And so the search for a well-designed, modular SFF general computing device continues. They nailed the colors tho, and hopefully continue to set an example in Linux support. I wish them plenty sales, I'm sure the machine will find its fans.

> 10.3 inch or smaller is better

Any good non-apple devices have that?

I don't know what use case you represent. Me, as a very picky sort-of-hater of all things that reek of smartphone, I'm looking at several devices to acquire:

1. Lenovo Legion Go 2: Windows (and possible Linux adaptability), Switch-like, will for some bizarre reason probably get an OLED display, might be at least Wacom AES compatible, pocket rocket with yet unkown but likely sketchy battery life, 8.8 inch. Not out yet.

2. 4th Gen Lenovo Y700 (AKA Legion Tab): Android (don't know how well de-Googleing etc. on Lenovo devices works), outstanding IPS display according to all the relevant ads and brochures, Snapdragon Elite, plenty memory, no 3.5 mm audio jack but mSD card slot and two USB-C ports, possible Wacom AES compatibility, etc. Display size also 8.8 inch, and also not out yet.

3. Samsung Galaxy Tab Active5 Pro: 10.1 inch, semi-rugged, Wacom EMR penabled, hot-swappable dual battery configuration, 3.5 mm audio jack, mSD card slot, USB-C 3.2, TFT LCD (120 Hz, 600 nits), Snapdragon 7s Gen 3, a measly 8 GB RAM, Android with Samsung's patented shackles (i. e. very hard to de-Google), corpo long-term support, etc. Essentially a slightly enlarged, but largely performative update of the Active5 below.

4. Samsung Galaxy Tab Active5, a classic example of corporate bean counting to the highest degree: 8.0 inch, semi-rugged, Wacom EMR, removable battery, 3.5 mm audio, mSD... but only USB-C 2.0, 8 GB of RAM, a rather weak processor, and rather meagre accessory support. Also available in a MIL-SPEC version with some extra goodies thrown in.

5. I'm also looking at some semi-rugged Dells and Panasonics. None have Wacom EMR capability. The only other established device makers that serve my use case at least in terms of display size are Chinese knock-offs with questionable support. Outside of that there's only the Steamdeck experience with integrated gaming controls, a form factor I have zero interest in, or small indie-engineered Linux hopefuls (e. g. the 7-inch version of Soulscircuit's Pilet UMPC)... which often suffer from poor energy management and therefore battery life, as well as "enthusiast-grade" support. ;)

No ARM64 option :-(

Looks fucking ugly. Even the logo is terrible. And the colours make you feel nauseous. Instead of nuthugging the compute power of these things, why not make something that looks and feels lovable. Is that so much to ask? Like the pixel phones, which are the ugliest, nastiest looking shitpile I've ever seen. And they slam it down the throats of people.

In nature, even supposedly ugly things look OK, but in the artificial industrial world, things look ugly and out of place. I don't know how they achieve this. But it must be something around, 'Oh, this part costs so much', or someone who has power over things he/she shouldn't have, so we instead create these horrendous-looking monster machines that suck our souls.

Does anyone else see the touchscreen as a straight-up downside? I don't want that, have no need for it, absolutely do not want anyone touching my screen, and it's just more shit that can break.

It looks fantastic aside from that, though.

I have a Framework 12 laptop running Ubuntu. I use it mostly for dev (so I don't care about gaming, Windows, etc.). I mostly like it, but I have two gripes:

- the touchpad is atrocious

- battery life is mediocre

How come you already have a Framework 12?

My bad! - meant to write 13

Thanks for the reply. I hope they listen to feedback and improve the touchpad and the battery.

"60 percent of the SRGB color space"

I never knew they made screens that bad anymore.

Is there a single person in the world that LIKES the half-height up/down keys?

..as much as the CTRL key being moved to the wrong place.

(Yes, I could map this elsewhere, but I use too many different machines.)

Define "wrong"? Ctrl-Fn-Super-Alt has been used for ages by everyone except IBM/Lenovo and Apple[1], and (for what it's worth) Fn left of Ctrl is explicitly not recommended by ISO[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fn_key#Fn_and_Control_key_plac...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_9995#Function_keys

And for Lenovo you can change it in the BIOS

When I started in computers, the CTRL key is where CAPS sits nowadays. At some point it moved.

To me, it makes no sense to me to make less-reachable the key that gets used the most. To reach the current CTRL key, I have to bend and twist my hand so that the pinky finger can reach the CTRL key. I never use the CAPS LOCK key, which is sitting under and adjacent to where the pinky rests.

Ah. Yes, OK, I sympathize with this sentiment but also feel it’s something of a lost cause for mass-produced keyboards. As far as Ctrl moving from one position to another, from what I can find it’s more that the two options coexisted for while, and eventually the current (and arguably worse) one outcompeted the other.

Specifically:

- The ADM-3A[1] (mid ’70s) had Ctrl above Shift and apparently no Caps Lock.

- The Lisp machines[2,3] (late ’70s to mid ’80s) had Ctrl below Shift and Rub Out above Shift.

- The IBM 3270 series (from the early ’70s onwards) terminals (those that were capable of lower-case input) are pictured in Wikipedia[4] with a Caps Lock above Shift and no Ctrl (which agrees with their input model) but I get the impression that IBM produced a bajillion keyboard variations for these.

- The Model F variants for the XT and the AT (first half of the ’80s) has Ctrl above left Shift, Alt below it, and Caps Lock below right Shift[5], as well as 5×2 function keys on the left and no separate arrow keys; the later Model M variants (1985 onwards) use the modern layout; yet once again, looking at the separate pages for the Model F and the Model M, I get the impression that IBM simply produced a bajillion different versions of them.

- The ANSI standard to which the appellation of “ANSI layout” refers is ANSI X3.154-1988, so presumably things had settled by then?..

[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Adm3aimage.jpg

[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space-cadet.jpg

[3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Symbolics-keyboard.j...

[4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM-3279.jpg

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_keyboard#Keyboard_layou...

What do you mean? Most laptops have

Ctrl | Fn | windows | alt

Which matches what one should expect from a desktop keyboard (Ctrl is the left-most key)

If most laptops = HP then yes. However my Lenovo has Fn | Ctrl...

Where "most laptops" = "everything except Lenovo and Apple", more or less.

Easily verified with a simple image search for "<brand> laptop keyboard" where "<brand>" is not Lenovo or Apple.

Which is probably also why Lenovo's BIOS has an option to swap the Fn and Ctrl keys.

Lenovo seems to be joining the rest of the world with Ctrl | Fn, based on the new ThinkPad I was issued at work a few weeks ago. I know the older Fn | Ctrl systems had a BIOS option to swap them, but I'm not sure if the new ones still have that.

Given how much more I press ctrl than fn, fn on the left drives me crazy on the few laptops that do it.

On keyboards with a sane layout, the ctrl key can be pressed with the meat of your hand rather than one of the fingers. This is harder on a laptop keyboard than it is with a proper desktop keyboard, but is still possible.

... as long as the keyboard has the proper layout, with ctrl in the far bottom left. One thing that Apple gets wrong and this keyboard gets right.

There aren't many laptops with Control key in the correct spelling and placement like how and where it is on HHKB, even most MacBooks except JIS builds get it wrong.

I do, but they should be paired with half height Page Up and Page Down keys. It's weird with the left/right keys as full size.

Ah, so in two rows pg up, up arrow, pg down left arrow, down arrow, right arrow I do like that layout, I have an old Dell Precision like that (though even its small keycaps are pretty big). My Framework 13 has the funny full-size left and right on either side of half-height up/down, which is kind of annoying, but you can get used to it, mostly.

Probably my preference over there is half-height inverted T, with just gaps above left and right: I'm happy to do Fn for page up/page down/home/end, and find this is the easiest layout to use by touch. Of course full-height is good too, but only if all four directions are going to be full height.

I like keyboards with those half-height keys. I don't use arrow keys much, so it's nice that they don't take up so much space that other parts must be compromised.

I really don't like this design though where the left/right keys are full size (or other designs where they put things like page up/down buttons above the left and right buttons). I don't mind that the arrow keys are a squished inverted T shape, but I really do think they should get to be an inverted T shape. When I do want to use arrow keys, I want to be able to easily locate them by touch without looking down at the keyboard.

The half-height keys are fine. I've used HP machines w/ them for years and gotten used to them.

Sharing the arrows w/ Home/End is awful, though. I don't know how anybody could live with having to use a modifier key to get those. I already combine modifiers with Home/End a ton. Having to add 3rd modifier (Ctrl-Shift-Fn-Left) to get "select from here to the top/bottom" sounds like painful hand gymnastics.

Objectively better than the mad man [<][>][^][v] arrangement of old Macs

I hate them, and will not buy a laptop that has them.

I can't tell you how much I need TKL. I'm so tired of seeing numpads and not navigation keys. Literally all day long I'm using shift-home, ctl-shift-end, ctl-arrow, ctl-shift-arrow, pretty much any combination. I need these keys.

> modular, repairable, upgradeable laptops

In terms of phones, I largely disagree with the conventional wisdom that repairable, upgradeable, Androids are better for the environment, more cost effective for the user, etc than iPhones. It's true you can't upgrade the battery yourself, but that's a different quality from whether the battery can be upgraded. And iPhones have a much higher resale value, so they're going to end up in landfills more slowly. I personally bought and use a used iPhone 11 that came with a replaced battery, and it's great! Old iPhones have a long useful life after trade in and resale, even if people buying new models here don't see it.

So I'd love to know how much this is the case for laptops like these as well.

For example, "repairable" is useful to the extent that repairs actually need to happen, and it seems to mean "self" repairable, though again that's a different dimension from whether a service center can do it. And whether you need self repairable is not a thing about longevity, environmental impact (since repair centers suffice for that), but rather convenience and possibly price. But price isn't the factor here because the thing is so damn expensive to begin with.

"Upgradeable" is useful if you want to.... improve a piece of it but not the chassis? Screen? How necessary is this? Do people really do that? I've been happy to use a laptop for half a decade or more, until finally upgrading everything all at once.

I also feel like Android phones stop getting OS updates (including security fixes) much faster than iPhones. You can root them and install a newer version of Android, I guess, but the vast majority of people won't do that.

Also, I haven't been on Android in a few years, so maybe I'm wrong and this isn't a problem anymore, but it certainly was in the past.

A Lot of improvement has happened on Android regarding this. I think Samsungs have 6 or 7 years of guaranteed software updates, as do Pixel phones.

It doesn't just mean self-repairable; you could still go in to a service center. It just wouldn't have to be an Apple approved one. And would be a lot cheaper due to the reduced costs of labor, and likely increase of third-party parts, particularly if they become modular / standardized. I had a friend who'd replace phone screens and batteries, but at some point it was no longer worth the hassle.

> It's true you can't upgrade the battery yourself, but that's a different quality from whether the battery can be upgraded.

And how many people end up upgrading the battery is yet another quality. I would suspect a small fraction of phones with upgradeable batteries actually gets battery upgrades. Having upgradeable internal components generally correlate strongly with recyclability... however once again, in my pessimistic estimation, only a small percentage of recycling actually amounts to anything.

I don't know, my guess would be that the majority of iPhones have their batteries upgraded. Apple currently still gives you money for trading in back to an iPhone 8! They probably upgrade the battery and put it up for sale in the developing world, I would guess.

I only paid $250 for my used iPhone 11, and that's not even as old as they go.

I imagine most of HN is shielded from the flourishing secondary market of old phones because they can easily afford the latest and greatest (counting even a couple years back). But at least where I live in Indiana, there's a pretty thriving ecosystem of yard sales and reuse, and people are not just going to simply throw away a functioning phone. An iPhone that's almost a decade old still has value, and there are repair shops that could put a new battery in it to keep it going for a little while yet.

If you don't think batteries get upgraded, what do you think happens? Do people really just throw their phones in the garbage?

Meta: the purple-lavender colour brings back memories of Sun's purple-blue logo:

* https://dogemicrosystems.ca/pub/Sun/media/logos/Sun-Microsys...

Maybe I'm just not the target market, but I wouldn't pay even half the asking price for this.

If I'm going to throw money away on overpriced underpowered laptops it's going to mnt's pockets. At least that's trying to be open hardware (reform).

I like the idea of framework but after using a MacBook for years and having an iPhone, there’s just no competition. Even if the performance could be the same, you just simply don’t have the ecosystem. I can mirror my phone on my Mac (securely). I have unified clipboard and notifications. Not to mention all the other apps that just work across all my Apple devices. Enterprise and commercial software support… I could go on. An I used to run a fully riced out tiled arch setup.

The counter argument is that Apple could, and should make their devices just as repairable and upgradable and we’d have the best of both worlds. I don’t entirely buy it, I think architectures like the Framework are a trade off, not a pure win. Google tried to build a modular phone but the project seems to have fallen apart (Ho, ho).

Sure they could but they have an edge like framework has an edge. If you value the idea that you can theoretically repair your laptop one day (which is an assumption that it will break) more than everyday usability and features… then that’s your choice. Outside of breaking a screen I’ve never one had a laptop just “break”. And for anything else well… there’s AppleCare.

Not everyone using a computer can afford Apple products and Apple service repair services. Good for you, but maybe start with your privilege as a difference.

What does this have to do with anything at all

Just a data point, but I've had three devices repaired by Apple. One was in warranty (just), the other two times they weren't but Apple did the repair for free anyway. You certainly can't rely on them doing the latter, it's at their discretion, but they often do anyway.

> I can mirror my phone on my Mac (securely). I have unified clipboard and notifications. Not to mention all the other apps that just work across all my Apple devices.

Can you provide examples of important work you perform with mobile devices that cause you to prioritize them so heavily? I don't use my phone for any important work, so for me, as a Linux user, choosing macOS as one's primary OS because of its integration with iOS is like someone choosing Windows as their primary OS because they have an Xbox with Game Pass.

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