It's a 100% replacement for free ChatGPT/Gemini.
Compared to the paid pro/thinking models... Gemma does have reasoning, and I have used the reasoning mode for some tax & legal/accounting advice recently as well as other misc problems. It's worked well for that, but I haven't tried any real difficult tasks. From what I've heard re. agentic coding, the open weight models are ~18-24 months behind Anthropic & Google's SOTA.
Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B should just fit into 128 GB with a Q4/5 and may be a bit smarter. There's apparently also a similar sized Gemma 4 model but they haven't released it yet, the 26B was the largest released.
You need a relatively beefy phone to run this stuff on large amounts of text, though, and you can't have every app run it because your battery wouldn't last more than an hour.
I think the real use case for apps is more like going to be something like tiny, purpose-trained models, like the 270M models Google wants people to train and use: https://developers.googleblog.com/on-device-function-calling... With these things, you can set up somewhat intelligent situational automation without having to work out logic trees and edge cases beforehand.
Never paid an LLM provider and I have no reason to ever start.
[0] https://frame.work/products/desktop-diy-amd-aimax300/configu...
The only downside is that I suspect the Framework would be a decent bit quieter under load (not that this thing is abnormally loud). As well as you're limited to a single M.2 2230 internal SSD slot in this (I believe Micron recently launched a 4 TB model, but generally you'll max out at 2 TB without using an external enclosure).
I don't have anything against the Framework, I'm sure it's a great machine, but the Z13 is an incredible portable all-in-one device that can handle everything from general PC use to gaming to tablet/entertainment to LLMs & high perf.
I put my boards in mini itx rack mounts personally so framework is the only option.
Disappointing if you compare it to anything else from 2026, but fairly impressive for something that can run locally at an OK speed.