Does anyone use Framework laptops? What has been your experience?
I'm looking to get a new laptop for when I want to go work at a coffee shop or something.
I have seen the Framework laptops and like the idea of a modular computer you can upgrade or repair.
I'm a little hesitant though. The last laptop I tried was to buy a Pinebook a year or two ago. I got it, turned it on once and it worked fine, but then after that it would just get a black screen when I powered it on. Some posts online indicated that it might be because the memory card wasn't seated properly and it might fix the problem to reseat it. But the tiny screws on the bottom were really tight and I ended up stripping one of them while trying to open it up, so now I just have a laptop I've used once collecting dust.
I want to make sure I have an easier experience with my next computer. Can anyone attest to the reliability of the Framework 13?
Pinebooks and Frameworks are completely different. Framework is selling a mostly standard laptop, with support and expectations that it will work reasonably. Pinebook is explicitly, intentionally not: they're selling unusual devices, with no expectation that they'll work, and no customary support, with the expectation that users will explore use and support of the device. Pinebook isn't really trying to compete with traditional laptop manufacturers; Framework is.
As such, the Framework 13 is a real laptop. For me, it has been reasonably reliable, and while there are some nuisances, nothing has broken. There's real support, both traditional, and de facto official support through the 'community' forum, which unlike the community forums of most manufacturers has many employees on it quite extensively, including the CEO, responding with real information and giving real support. It appears that support via the forum is an official, major job responsibility of some employees.
I've been mostly fortunate enough to avoid the early reliability problems, despite having an 11th-gen laptop. There were some problems, but Framework has done a decent job of being refreshingly honest about them, and at least trying to deal with them decently, though sometimes somewhat oddly. These include problems with the plastic composition of the USB power cable, where they will replace the fraying cable out of warranty, and problems for users of the first generation of mainboards that would leave their devices turned off for long periods of time, where they came up with a fix involving precision soldering likely beyond the skill of most people who were having the problem.
I also feel that I've started to think differently about reliability with the Framework, as opposed to other laptops. With the Framework, every part is replaceable, and every part is for sale (even sets of replacement screws!). As a result, something breaking has a known cost, and a known process for repair, even if it is my fault it breaks, or it is the result of wear and tear. With another laptop, for example, I might worry about breaking the screen, because I won't know if the non-warranty price will be absurd, or the screen simply won't be available, or if the only replacement will be a new laptop or a sketchy aftermarket screen, or if the laptop will never be quite the same again. With the Framework, I know that breaking the screen is an accident that costs €200, after which the laptop will be the same as it was. I know that if I use the keyboard enough to wear it down, it will cost me around €50 and dealing with a large number of fasteners (replacing the screen is actually easy, replacing the keyboard is annoying enough that some people prefer to pay an extra €60 to replace the whole input cover).
As a result, I'm somewhat less demanding about how reliable any given part is, because repair is always an option and known expense. I also feel like I tend to use the laptop a bit more aggressively, and worry a biti less about breaking it. Other laptops might have sturdier parts, yes, but if those sturdier parts do break, they might be much harder to repair, and the laptop might never be the same.
As far as my reliability caveats:
I'd also note: the laptop is, despite its modularity and repairability, quite standard. I feel like many people have particular, often nonstandard requirements for laptops, without which they feel they are unusable. These seem to include that the laptop must have a trackpoint, must have physical touchpad buttons, must not have physical touchpad buttons, must have a touchpad made by Apple, must have a touchscreen, must not have a touchscreen, must have a high resolution screen, must have a low resolution screen, must have arrow keys in their preferred order... I feel like quite a few people hoped that the modularity of the laptop would allow them to have their preferred combination of specifics, but in reality, this largely hasn't happened, at least not yet: most parts still only have one, or a few, options, and those options are still largely standard, rather than the often peculiar parts people want. The community of people building alternative parts is still rather small. I also feel like many people with these sorts of requirements don't see them as alternatives that third-parties should develop, but absolute requirements for a laptop to be usable for anyone, and thus something the manufacturer should develop.
Thanks for the info! Sounds like this is more what I was looking for. As long as I can type up a paper away from home, I dont really care about any of those other features.
As an additional source of first-hand experience, Louis Rossman gave his thoughts on the laptop after two years of use as a daily drive. Louis is one of the biggest supporters of right-to-repair and "fix-it-yourself" ideology.
Here's his video discussing the first-gen laptop. The video is not too long but the summary is: good quality but don't expect to have a smooth transition from other high-end models like a thinkpad (darn those keyboards are nice).
edit: there are trade-offs but these are worth it in my mind and he discusses these.
Aside from having followed the company's development, I haven't heard a lot of opposition to the product's quality and plan to purchase one when my current laptop dies. From all I've seen or heard about it, this laptop seems to be the sweet-spot between configurable and high quality.
I somewhat disagree with him on this point: I expect Rossman simply has a personal preference for Thinkpad keyboard feel. I feel like laptop key feel is mostly matter of personal preference beyond a certain point, with the exception of bad butterfly switches. When people dislike the key feel on a particular laptop with a decent keyboard (and again, with that important exception), I think they largely just want the keys to feel the same as the keyboard they prefer; it's not a matter of quality, and they're unlikely to be happy unless the keyboards are changed to be made by the same manufacturer, in which case some other set of people will be unhappy. In general, keyboards on modern laptops also tend to be more constrained than older ones, because of size and weight restrictions, so keys on a good ~2020 laptop keyboard are never going to feel as good as the keys on a good ~1990s or ~2000s laptop keyboard.
I personally find the key feel on the Framework to be amongst the best I've used on a modern laptop. It is better to my preference than my Thinkpad X1 Yoga (2nd gen?), though that did have the key retraction mechanism to muddle things a bit. It is probably about the same as my ~2012 retina MBP, maybe a bit better for me. It is far better than my Dell XPS 13 that had bad, Apple-butterfly-style keys; those were so horrible that I couldn't do extensive typing without an external keyboard, and were a major motivation for my buying the Framework; I plan to never buy a laptop with such low key travel again.
But all of this is really a matter of taste and familiarity. I'd also note that I play the piano, which may influence my preferences on key feel as well.
So the keyboard in the framework is decent? That’s interesting. I have noticed that most keyboards aren’t terrible and, as an owner of an xps13, I couldn’t agree more on their terrible design.
It is. For the most part, it's a reasonably conservative modern laptop keyboard. I think the real risk with laptop keyboards on anything but very cheap laptops, and the cause for such concern over laptop keyboards, has been the very risky and often disastrous attempts at ultra-thin, low key travel keyboard designs that allowed for very thin, clean laptop design, but needed to be designed with extreme skill and care, and even then were often mediocre and unreliable. Framework didn't go this direction: their laptop is not designed to minimize thickness as a primary concern, and prioritizes key travel in some choices, for example, in the raised screen bezel, and the keyboard area being lowered. As such, they just needed to not skimp on the keyboard, and they didn't.
There are some oddities around the layout. The full-height left and right keys, combined with half-height up and down, was a bad choice, and one that many people have noticed has been changed on the Framework 16 keyboard. A change from this layout to one with half-height left and right, and additional physical pgup/pgdn or home/end keys, could be done without even requiring replacement of the input cover itself, just the keyboard, and I hold out some hope that this will be available eventually. They're not that much of an imposition, but I do find myself annoyed by them, especially knowing that the space could have been used for two more quite useful keys.
I have an ISO keyboard, so means I have two areas -- left shift and return -- with the unusual stepped keys, which rather than having the normal space between adjacent keys filled with the metal input cover, have a lowered region of the key extending all the way to the adjacent key. These do admittedly look rather weird, and will occasionally elicit comments from people looking at the keyboard. However, I understand the design choice: the method allows the same input cover to be used for both ISO keyboards and ANSI keyboards (where there is a lowered region between return and ), and allows the user to switch between ISO and ANSI keyboards while changing a minimum of components. I don't notice these at all when typing. However, I'm also a good touch typist, and primarily typing with Dvorak on a QWERTY-keycap keyboard, so looking at the keyboard while typing would be detrimental to me. It's possible that someone who looked at keys extensively would find the design made it harder for them to target the return key, in particular.
I just bought a used T480 and I'm not really that impressed. The key feel is nice but there is noticeable deck flex, I can't give it top marks as a result.
It’s the key feel and really nothing else. Not worth the premium but I haven’t seen any other laptop with a similar feeling when typing. I usually opt to take a keyboard and plug that in rather than using the terrible one in most laptops…which kind of defeats the purpose.
Let me swap in that keyboard in the framework and I’ll never change to another brand.
I've had a Framework 13 for about a year and it's as solid as any other laptop I've owned from a reliability and functionality perspective. The "right angle" USB end of my laptop charger frayed after about a year of heavy use and I replaced it with a $9 USB cable. The power block was still in perfect shape, so it was an easy fix.
Swapping ports is a game changer. I swap in a mini SD reader when I'm doing a lot of camera work and have cards to pull data from. I switch which ports are on which side when adjusting my desk setup.
I've tossed perfectly healthy laptops in the past when an irreplaceable battery died. I'm so glad to know that when my battery (or keyboard, or trackpad) gives up the ghost I can just fix the broken part.
It's a real laptop, not a tinker toy like the Pinebook.
My kid has been running the framework 13 for a couple of years.
It gets a little hot under the cover when he games, with the fan on full blow loud mode.
The 16 is a better choice for gamers me thinks.
You are comparing tinkerers toy with the real deal here.
Pinebook is rather Raspberry Pi without official support combined into laptop-like package. It is great for what it is, but if you don't know anything about what it is, it will be really hard to use it "normally".
Framework on the other hand is your standard laptop but made with upgrade/modding/setup ability. You want more storage? Buy new SSD and switch them. You wat more RAM, just buy another/bigger stick and put it in. You want faster wifi? Just get new wifi card. You wante AMD CPU insteadof Intel? Heck, you can buy the whole motherboard and keep the rest! And we are not even speaking about all the different availabke IO yet...
So - Pinebook for someone who knows, has time and lives to tinker with borderline functionabke product, Framework for somone who just want to use their laptop while also thinking about future (of the machine and also of the planet/environment, as Framework tries to put resources to perfect use by letting you upgrade the laptop instead of you buying a whe newone in oneor two years time).
If I wanted to buy a new laptop, it would be Framework. Their idea and dedication would be worth the money. Pinebook is good as educational thing (about electronics) or as a project (like having a kit car to race on track on weekends whike having normal car for your everyday rides).
On the one hand, I wholeheartedly support the philosophy Framework has on repairs and upgrades, but I do wonder a bit about whether, in reality, it causes more consumption, at least for people like me, by making
I've had my Framework for a year. I've already replaced the hinges, and the top cover, generating those as waste unless I can find someone who wants them. I'll likely buy the upgraded battery in a month or two (though I can use the old one for other purposes myself), and the new HDMI expansion card. I'm already looking at the new mainboards and considering an AMD one when it is in general availability and has better Linux support.
At this point, after a year, with another laptop, I wouldn't have consumed as much stuff, because those options simply wouldn't have been there. And I wouldn't have considered upgrading a perfectly good laptop after one year, because that would have meant buying and becoming familiar with using an entirely new laptop, whereas with Framework, nothing external would change. There's the point that at least some of the parts can be adapted for other things, so that they don't become waste, but that doesn't mean I'm not still buying things I wouldn't consume otherwise.
Over the long term, will Framework's approach, in part intended to reduce waste and needless consumption, actually cause someone like me to consume more, by making less of that consumption needless?
Well, seeing how many people stand in front of Apple stores every single year when new products drop(many of them not that much better than last year's ones), I wouldn't consider yourself as being more resource wasteful. At least your parts can still be reused, unlike Macbooks - you have to buy whole new Macbook for the old one to be (re)used as second hand one and that means more resources than buying mainboard or just new hinges...
If I have bought Framework (I have no need for laptop right now) I wouldn't upgrade mainboard until a few years passed. I'm not that rich to do it every year. But I would probably buy more RAM or better wifi or bigger SSD through the life of the chassis. I won't be able to do that with many laptops nowadays, meaning I would have to spend more money on the whole new laptop...
They actually had a blog post on exactly this issue some time ago. I have a Framework (which I love) but must say my respect for the company really went up to see them engage the topic head on.
https://frame.work/gb/en/blog/we-are-not-sustainable
While I can't comment on Framework, if you're looking at Linux laptops I can point you in the direction of System76. They are the creators of the Ubuntu-based distro Pop!_OS, of which I am a fan. I have a System76 Lemur Pro (lemp10, so ~3 years old), though I would not recommend it. It's very lightweight, if that's your thing, but it feels a little flimsy. It also has problems with the second NVME waking from sleep (it doesn't, you have to reboot -- I just don't have one in the slot). Some people have reported battery swell after a year or so, though I haven't had that problem. It's a fine machine, probably 8-10+ hours of battery life (on a full charge with nothing running, it sometimes reports 14-18 hours of battery left -- currently I have 50% battery and it's reporting over 6 hours left), but it has downsides because it's really just a rebranded Clevo machine. Maybe the newer models are better.
But I do recommend looking into them. They may have options that are nicer than the Lemur Pro. They use Coreboot for BIOS, which is nice if you're an open-source enthusiast. Because the machines are setup by System76 with custom BIOS, they work really well with Pop!_OS. It's also nice to support a company that's trying so hard to bring a viable Linux laptop to market. Their prices are a little steep, but I've heard their support is top notch. Fortunately, I got my Lemur Pro as a gift, so it's just been an experimental machine for me.
For my primary laptop, I use an HP Dev One (discontinued, sadly), which was a collaboration between HP and System76/Pop!_OS. I'm actually very happy with this machine, as the build quality is excellent, has user-replaceable parts (and two SODIMM slots!), and just overall is extremely polished for a laptop that was designed and sold as a Linux machine. Firmware updates are even delivered through the repo, rather than having to flash it yourself. I'm sad that HP nixed the project, because I really don't have much negative to say about it and now others don't get to have one.
I really do like the ethos of Framework and would love to handle one. Unfortunately, I don't know any real open-source enthusiasts in my life, so the only person who would ever try one out is me. But between my Dev One and Lemur Pro, I'm pretty well set for laptops for some years to come.
Looks like you can still find some Dev Ones on eBay if you, or anyone else, is interested. It really is a nice machine.
I have a pang12 from System76. I really like the company, but the pang12 has been a terrible computer. I’m on my third, and still have issues with the awful trackpad, potato webcam and general incompatibles with a lot of Linux distros.
I'll throw in my System76 experience with the disclaimer that it was a while ago: I purchased a Gazelle Professional (gazp9) in 2013 and used it until 2020. It felt flimsy back then, too: spongy keyboard and the occasional shutdown due to overheating. But to its credit, it kept chugging along until 2019 or so, when a broken hinge effectively turned it into a desktop. Hey, 6–7 years isn't too shabby!
I'm not sure that I would buy a System76 laptop again: I like the keyboard on my Thinkpad Carbon too much. But I'm happy to have supported them, and I would have regretted not giving them a try. System76 eased me into Linux laptops, and the fact that the hardware was designed for running an open-source OS gave me a lot of peace of mind — drivers for everything, and it all worked out of the box.
I also purchased a System76 laptop. I’ve got a Galago Pro from around 2020. I appreciate that it came with an okay GPU for its price at the time of purchase. But otherwise I’ve been unimpressed. I know they’re just rebranded Clevo laptops, but still I want to highlight the build quality is bad compared to other laptops I’ve owned. The battery life is worse than mediocre. The screen bezels are lazy/cheap (5mm on each side except over an inch on the bottom edge? Looks bad and they should have just gone 16:10 instead).
It does still all work. And I do still like that it has FOSS firmware. But today if I wanted to prioritize repairability I’d go Framework and otherwise I’d get a MacBook.
MacBooks just feel so luxurious. The build quality of the newest MacBook Air makes you question how every other manufacturer is doing such a terrible job. The rub is, of course, the inability to repair/upgrade them. And the fact that 8GB of RAM is still standard and it costs $200 to bump it up to 16Gb, while you can spend $150 to put 64GB in a non-Apple machine. It was $1700+ for my partner's M2 Air 16GB/1TB. But it truly is a beautiful laptop. Now I kinda want one...
Apple sells 1st-party refurbs on their website which will let you get a >10% discount on a laptop from this year. It'll include an Apple warranty, a box, and all of the original accessories. Having seen a couple refurbished MacBooks up close they look absolutely brand new and I'm sure the accessories are new as well. And, if anything, they've been vetted to not be lemons.
I'm eyeing the M2 air with the upgraded SOC/24GB of RAM/1TB of SSD for ~$1800. But I'll wait out the M3 refresh that I expect for the Air in a few months.
Personally I always liked the build of the older Thinkpads. I love the feeling and I used my T430 for years, upgrading it beyond its original capabilities to a include a quad core i7, 16GB of RAM, an SSD, a 1080p IPS panel, and the extended battery. But the battery life on the new MacBooks is finally where laptops should have been for the last 20 years. All of the "up to 10 hours" lies are finally done. I'm primarily a desktop user, so if I'm buying a laptop it's specifically because it's portable. Seeing my System76 laptop get 50 minutes of battery life is depressing. Combined with the objectively high performance of Apple's chips, the unified memory, and the crazy high memory bandwidth, there's no other option. Not all PC manufacturers are going to target the premium market, but for the ones that are they need to start getting control of their supply chain. They can't compete without doing that.
While I've never bought a refurb from Apple, I've only heard good things. Still, I'm doing well enough that I would buy new just to be sure. With the current gen M2, you can actually score some deals lately. A coworker just got an M2 Air/10-core SoC/16GB/512GB for $200 off at B&H and it was tax-free because of the B&H credit card. Pretty crazy deal. But yeah, at this point in time if I was in the market for an Air, I'd wait for the coming M3.
I had a ThinkPad X250 for years, I upgraded everything including a 1080p IPS panel, and that was just such a special little machine. While older ThinkPads are so great for Linux geeks, they're just missing so much in terms of screens, battery life, processing power. And the new ThinkPads eschew everything that made older ThinkPads great. I'm with you in thinking there is no competition with Apple right now. They make the absolute best laptops on the market by a huge margin. I am impressed by the build quality of my HP Dev One, which is really just an EliteBook with all Linux-compatible parts, but it's still many steps down from a MacBook.
I probably should have just went for a Macbook a year ago when I got my Dev One ($950 for the laptop, $200 for 64GB of RAM from before prices dropped, $140 for a 2TB NVME), but I wanted to go all-Linux in my computers. For now, there's no way I could sell getting yet another laptop to my partner, and it's not even necessary for me. But man, are they amazing pieces of technology.
The Framework is a very cool project for the person who values modular repairability. But if you want the best laptop you can get, it's a MacBook.
I was considering a System76 Lemur 2-3 years ago when I was looking to buy a Windows/Linux laptop, but ultimately decided against it for a couple reasons. The main one was due to reports I’d been reading of spotty QA from their ODM Clevo, and the other is due to System76 laptop designs being somewhat behind the curve — even now the current model Lemur still has a barrel jack positioned as the primary charging port (would rather that space be used for some other port), and they still use screens with a 16:9 aspect ratio when most higher end laptops are now using 16:10, 5:4, or 3:2.
Thanks for the suggestion! I'll look into it.
It looks like others are chiming in with similar negative experiences with System76 hardware, so while I still think they're worth keeping an eye on, you'll probably want to spend your money elsewhere at this point.
Fair enough. From the other responses it sounds like the Framework is a pretty good choice other than maybe poor battery life, so I'll probably end up going with that.
This topic from earlier this year might interest you:
https://tildes.net/~comp/164n/framework_laptop_users_whats_your_build
I bought a Framework two years ago. I wasn't using it very much since my circumstances kept me at home with my desktop. Since becoming a student I've started using it again and I have some thoughts, but first if you're looking for a reliable laptop then Framework is decent, but the battery life is kinda sketchy (especially if you put Linux on it like I did. Linux is known for not being very well optimized for batteries).
My laptop is an earlier version which I bought in July of 2021. This edition of the laptop has the faulty CMOS battery that has since been completely revised on all new Frameworks and is no longer an issue if you buy new. My laptop also has had some problems with the I/O, namely my USB-C Expansion Card has stopped working. This isn't a real issue on paper since all expansion slots are USB-C anyways, and I'm sure that by now they have revised their expansion cards to be more reliable.
I was also having issues with my charger. It comes in three parts, the outlet connector, the power brick, and a USB-C to USB-C connector that plugs into the laptop. The USB-C connector seemed a little cheap and the wire deteriorated after a year of use until it stopped working entirely. The good news is that you can buy pretty much any USB-C to USB-C connector and use that to charge instead, which is awesome unless your USB-C expansion card also broke like mine did. In that case, you need to find a wire that will actually fit into the expansion slot, which surprisingly took me a while to find (they do sell a replacement wire on their website, but it's still the same quality and would cost me ~$30. You can get better quality for cheaper).
All of this is to say that I would still recommend the Framework despite its early flaws. The company behind the product is very much committed to doing good. If I had the means then I could totally fix all the current issues I have with my laptop and it would basically be perfect, which counts for a lot especially since so many laptop manufacturers want you to throw out your tech as soon as it starts to break.
I've had my Framework for about a year and don't regret it at all. It's not quite as premium feeling as a MacBook, but it's not super flimsy either. As someone else said, the battery life is it's biggest drawback (though they do have a larger capacity battery I haven't tried yet). But even with the battery, I can get several hours of work done on a single charge.
My biggest reasons for buying it were the modularity, repairability, and out of the box Linux support.
Thanks for the input. I'll keep the battery thing in mind, but I imagine I would be working in places with an outlet available so hopefully that wouldn't matter too much.
I've seen at least five comments saying something about the battery, but not one gives a number of hours. Of course it depends on what precisely you do, but to have some idea of whether it's in the vicinity of 2 hours (bad), 4 hours (average linux laptop when new), or 8 hours (ARM territory).
One person mentioned it lasted a working day for them, which sounds futuristic to me, allegedly the M1 can do that (and obviously phones and oversized phones) but I've not seen one in the wild. If Framework does that, that'd be wild, so I don't expect it but if people could just mention some number.. xD
I almost included that information in my comment, but since so many different variables affect battery life, I left it out. But since you asked, my average is somewhere between 4-6 hours of constant usage. 6 hours if I'm just doing some light work (web browsing, emails) with the screen brightness turned all the way down and my backlight keys off. 4 hours if I'm streaming video and or have the screen brightness at a reasonable level in a bright room.
In my experience, the standby power drain is slightly overblown, but still an issue. If I leave my computer suspended but not plugged in, it might lose around 30% overnight. But as others have mentioned, this is highly dependent on what expansion cards you use. I have an HDMI expansion card, which is supposed to be one of the culprits that draws power in standby.
Hope this helps!
That sounds wild to me. I love the concept and beliefs Framework has, but as it stands, I own one of the earlier alleged-to Arm M-line machines (base M2). Mainly as it’s the only true "plug-and-play“ Unix experience one can buy at a retailer – in simple terms, it does what I'm used to, and does so (mostly) without the need for troubleshooting.
Which I keep charge-limited to 85% when I have an outlet or dock available nearby, and as an example unplugged at around 5pm yesterday… and opened today at 8am to 84%. I’m aware there’s some discrepancy to how accurately the battery "level“ can even be read, but the direction is pretty clear. Basically negligible loss in suspend/sleep.
Reading this, I can only really seriously consider a Framework machine if they ever offer Arm chips, and (I don’t know about the current situation) have somehow achieved a mostly frictionless state of Linux support* – I don’t think I can live without Unix command line tools and have no clue how to use Windows.
Do they like, accept donations?
*At least regarding hardware/driver issues. I can tinker in software, but I would prefer not to on a daily driver/work machine, and things like battery/display/audio have to just work, non-negotiably.
Yeah, there's really no beating ARM as far as battery life goes. I absolutely agree that it's a big issue with the Framework for a lot of people, it's just one that I'm content to work around for the time being. My comment about the issue with standby battery drain being overblown was just that I've read elsewhere people complaining that their battery discharges completely after a couple of hours on standby, and I can only imagine that that's an over exaggeration or there's something else at play.
That said, I will admit that I don't take my MacBook Pro's battery life for granted, and I do know exactly what you mean about putting it to sleep at 5pm and opening it the next morning without seeing a drop in battery percentage left. It's quite nice to not to have to even think about the battery with that machine.
As far as Linux support goes, though, my experience with Fedora has been great. I think twice in the last year and a half, I've had issues with a kernel update breaking my system, but I just boot into the previous kernel and continue with my business for a couple of days until the rest of the updates catch up. Then I'm able to boot back into the latest kernel no problem. No real troubleshooting needed. Coming from Arch Linux on a Dell Precision, it's given me some peace of mind.
Is this the newer Intel model?
I currently own a ThinkPad Nano X1 Gen 1 which is a decent laptop in most ways but has lackluster battery life (similar numbers to what you’ve posted, maybe a bit worse), which had me considering an upgrade, but it sounds like the Framework 13 might not actually be an upgrade in that regard.
Sleep power drain sadly seems unavoidable for x86 laptops these days. My ThinkPad also has suffers this problem, though not quite as badly (would estimate 12-15% loss per night). Manufacturers really need to figure this out… MacBooks can sleep for weeks and still have 80%+ battery left so clearly drain doesn’t have to be bad.
I have a 12th Gen Intel. They did release a higher capacity battery that acts a bit as a bandaid. Are you running Linux or Windows on your Thinkpad? I've read folks might have a better experience on Windows and that a BIOS update is due out for the 12th Gen Framework that might help some for us Linux users, but I will have to wait to see if that's true.
On my Nano I’m dual booting Windows and Fedora. Linux might be slightly better due to being less “busy” (less random nonsense happening in the background) but they’re about the same in terms of battery life. I think Tiger Lake CPUs are just kinda weak in that regard.
I had the original Framework laptop (from Batch 2, so it was pretty early in the production run). Overall, I loved it. It’s easily one of the best laptops I’ve ever owned.
The first model they sent had a dead screen. I wrote to their support email and got a response from the CEO about four hours later. After some troubleshooting, they sent a replacement ASAP.
The (working) screen is fantastic (any time I use a 16:9 screen now it feels cramped) and the keyboard is one of the best I’ve ever used on a laptop.
My only complaints are that the fans spun up quite a bit on the original models and the battery life was middling at best.
They seem to have addressed both of those complaints though with a new thermal design for the subsequent generations and a larger battery.
I’m currently waiting on a 13-inch Ryzen model to show up.
For you new one, did you buy just a motherboard, or a full new laptop?
I ended up getting the DIY model again. I passed my original model on to a friend who needed a new laptop.
I've noticed many of the Framework owners here have commented on the battery life not being great, so I have a question for those people: Why don't you get a USB-C power bank and charge the laptop from that while you work? Certainly that would get you through a whole workday, and the framework is not picky about its charging source from what I've read. Power banks are cheap as hell these days, and you can charge the laptop+bank overnight each day. Or you could get a second battery for the laptop itself and quickly change it out during the day. It just seems like people aren't taking advantage of how flexible the framework platform is.
I think for most people, it’s just the added bulk that comes with doing that. It’s nicer if the internal battery lasts long enough on its own.
This is particularly pertinent to the 13” model, which is small enough to conveniently carry around without a bag (and thus, no power bank, cable, or charger brick).
Yeah that's a pretty good point in regards to the 13" and I can see how that'd sway someone's opinion. I guess I happen to fall into the camp that I'd rather deal with a little extra hassle and bulk in exchange for the much lower long term price than a MacBook and the exceptional repairability, but to each his own.
Yeah, that'd be my plan if I had more road warrioring to do. I'd also love to see Framework release the battery case they teased earlier this year, so I can upgrade my battery and turn the old one into a bank.
The battery isn't a super simple swap. You have to remove the bottom cover to get to it. Not difficult, per se, but now you have to take a screw driver with you, too. That said, I have carried an Anker power bank with me when I knew I might need it. My experience was that the power bank is powerful enough to charge the laptop in standby, but during use, it basically just maintains the battery where it's at, it doesn't actually charge the laptop. Which is fine, it still almost doubled my battery life, but it is something folks who plan on doing this should be aware of.
I have a 12 and there are issues with the expansion ports draining power even when asleep. For some reason this hasnt been fixed, perhaps it cant be? Its put me off buying another. Whats the point of a laptop with negligible battery life? https://community.frame.work/t/tracking-test-results-for-standby-battery-use-of-expansion-cards/23711/29
I've got money set aside for the time Framework decides to start selling its laptop to the Nordics.
The 16" Framework with the extra Graphics Module will be my next Widows gaming laptop, just because of the modularity and upgradability. The price isn't that bad when you take into account the fact that you can swap out and upgrade pretty much any component at home.