It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
To be specific: There's a new lower chassis, and a new chassis top with haptic touchpad. On my older framework I could buy just the chassis top to get the new touchpad. Crazy that they could make that work.
I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations nerding out over the new devices and shouting out specific team members who did the designs. Really hope the company is doing well.
> That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
It's sorta essential imo if they want to make good on their one value-prop: repairability and the good will that comes with it. If they start releasing a tonne of SKUs with a million different parts, they'll inevitably have to sunset parts at a clip that'll completely make useless their repairability claims.
I am a happy Framework laptop owner, but I paid a premium b/c I expect moves like this. If this would change, it would become just an over-priced laptop... might as well by another Thinkpad or Dell XPS.
That said, I'm super happy they apparently have the good sense to see this. Not all companies make moves in their best interests.
Parts are open source. Other people can keep making them. There's franken think pads from China that use a x61 chassis made 15 years after the release. I had a soup of them before I moved to framework for my daily drivers.
My heart sank when they said 13 pro and then to see that so much is backwards compatible was amazing. It's quite refreshing to see a company live up to their mission so well.
Yeah, really impressive to see that you can take a 13 and turn it into a 13 pro with just a few new parts.
I've just ordered my own 13 pro. I've been waiting for a laptop and this ticks all the boxes. I'd previously ordered a new dell xps laptop and ultimately returned it because the keyboard was busted. I would have kept it if I could have swapped the keyboard for a new one. The use of LPCAMM is also really nice. I've hoped to see this standard start taking flight and I'm happy to grab a product with it included.
I'm not in the market for a Windows or Linux machine myself, but the way this company operates I feel like supporting them with a purchase at some point regardless.. maybe their Desktop tower
Same, though the battery upgrade alone will be around $260 because of the new bottom cover, at that might just throw in the speaker upgrade as well for $19.
Not sure if I even want a haptic touchpad at all.
It's a matter of preferences. Actually I like trackpads that don't mind and have physical buttons. The separation between the surface that moves the pointer on screen and the surfaces that generate the clicks means that there are no misclicks and no involuntary pointer movements while clicking.
There is no accounting for taste.
For instance, I still prefer discrete buttons over tap-clicks or multi-finger-taps, but I would accept the mild annoyance of tap clicks over the pressing down the pad itself.
Haptic schmaptic, I just want my Framework's enormous trackpad to respect deadzones and stop detecting my palms. I had to entirely disable tap-to-click, because nothing else would work.
I might have to try their preinstalled Ubuntu images or something and see if there's some secret sauce in the input configs.
Not a huge fan of the "force touch" trackpads on newer macs, the old man yells at the clouds.
In all seriousness though I have used a pre force touch MacBook not too long ago and I prefer that experience a lot over the new one I have from work.
Though the larger size of these trackpads is something I really like and where neither the older MacBook nor the the current non-pro Framework 13 come close.
Nitpick: hot swap means without powering off. Not recommended for motherboards, batteries, RAM etc. The running electricity is the "hot" part, and without that it's just "swap".
I have a framework 13. It looks like eventually you'll be able to upgrade the chassis to the pro one, including the battery, for under 200? Am I reading this right? That's borderline unbelievable to me
This is great! Though in my case, since i have the very first generation they made, i probably need to upgrade every part of the thing so might as well just get a new one
>It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
Unfortunately, as is usual for them (edit: and it makes sense; I'm not blaming them), the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering (edit: or pre-ordering) yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping. But yes, this is amazing, and the new pieces are not things I was expecting from them. As soon as it's available, I'll be taking my relatively recent AMD mainboard and putting it in a new chassis+battery+keyboard+speakers+touchpad, possibly skipping the display (I don't care much about a touchscreen, but I do care about display quality, so I'll wait for comparisons to the current 2.8k display). My laptop will, at that point, be almost entirely in a Ship of Theseus situation: I think that only the bezel and some of the expansion cards will be from the original, first-generation laptop I bought from them. That mainboard runs a number of services for me, along with an older display. A second, newer one is waiting for RAM to be a reasonable price (since the RAM it was using is now on my current mainboard); I had planned to use it for some of my research, but maybe I'll end up putting it into this older chassis and have a spare laptop again.
That all this is possible is wonderful, and a credit to them in staying true to their stated ideals.
> Unfortunately, as is usual for them, the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping.
Why would you expect otherwise? I fully expect any OEM to place itself at the front of the queue for parts coming from its suppliers. If for some reason they sold parts before the laptops started shipping, I'd fully expect impatient customers would build complete machines from parts ahead of the shipping dates, which would wreak all kinds of havoc on logistics.
Yes, I really should have clarified: it makes sense, and I'm not blaming them. It's more just that, given their business model, and that they do intend to sell upgrade kits, I imagine that along with the people pre-ordering full laptops, there are quite a few of us who would be eager to pre-order upgrade kits or the parts to upgrade our current laptops.
Yes, black upgrade kit please. I have it linked and will be checking daily. For me with a 12th gen Intel, it will be worth it to have a new screen, battery, chassis and haptic touchpad. Hardware is just too expensive to upgrade, but the chassis would provide nice quality of life improvements.
Unfortunately, as is usual for them, the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping.
It's unfortunate that they can't sell you something that hasn't been manufactured? That doesn't yet exist?
HN is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to complain about.
I had meant they aren't available even for pre-ordering, and likely won't be until the laptops are either regularly shipping rather than shipping in numbered batches, or are on a high-numbered batch. This could be months after the actual laptops start shipping. This is a process I've been through a few times at this point. It also wasn't really meant as a substantial complaint about Framework, and more just a mention of an understandable annoyance: it makes sense that they'd prioritize getting full laptops shipped.
On the other hand, nrp, since you're likely to be in this thread: if you had pre-orders and/or batched shipments of parts/upgrade kits, I would likely be paying a deposit or even the full price today, rather than ordering in a few months. Even if that meant ordering a full upgrade kit with a new display, but getting the upgrade sooner, I'd probably still go for it.
But they are available for pre-order though? At least here in NZ. I just ordered the AMD version, but the Intel one is available too (except the Ultra X9 which is already sold out).
The opposite upgrade kit: people with a mainboard they'd like to keep, but who want all the other upgrades. The kit is listed, but isn't available yet.
It's kind of mind boggling to me that they have a tight chassis, AND it meets their buildable/ugpradeable/repairable goals, AND their backwards compatibility is reaching back five years now.
I think a number of people would have expected these to eventually require a trade-off. Especially coming from pc-building land, where we see new non-backwards-compatible CPU and RAM sockets every 6 or so years.
There's a version of this where Frame.work said, "Design tradeoffs mean the 13 Pro is a new platform that is largely not backwards compatible, but don't worry, the 13 series will still get 5+ years of support and parts" and everyone goes "Aw, well, I guess that's reasonable."
I really want to emphasize that it's looking like Framework is creating a laptop with _better_ backwards compatibility and build-ability than a desktop PC.
All this is to say that this is very very impressive!
Even more impressive than going back 5 years is going back all the way to the first version. While I'm a software engineer, I've worked in teams where we shipped hardware, and for a consumer product with lots of constraints including implicit expectations, going against the entire trend of the past 15 years and targeting a hard-to satisfy market segment, they far exceeded what I expected when they announced their first product.
At some point they will still likely have to force that cut-off, but yeah, it's great that they seem to be able to stretch it for longer than most people would have expected.
They could have done a much more minimal version and called it a day. Being able to swap individual components of the chassis into a 5 year old model is, to me, going way above and beyond.
Back in 2002 I took the HDD from one PC, put it in a different PC, worked just fine. The worst thing that could happen is that the other one already had another disk so I had to change /etc/fstab to say "hdb" instead of "hda" and vice versa. Didn't take long for that to get fixed by specifying UUIDs and having initramfs sort it out.
IDK why it's not working for you but this should all just work without bothering with any configuration, drivers, or whatever.
I was really hoping for 6 USB-C ports, dual NVMe, a flush bezel, a better webcam, and most of all, I was hoping for a cooling design upgrade that doesn't cause the computer to self-roast if placed on top of a sofa due to ventilation blockage. Bleh.
I saw the announcement video and I'm so relieved to hear actual honest language!
- Actually naming your inspiration as Apple
- Saying that thanks to machined body, the keyboard is actually slightly better. No overstatement, just an honest detail
- No: "This is our best laptop yet" (As if managing to not making it worse is something to be proud of)
- To the point, fast paced, clear communication
- Honestly stating that you're working hard on getting as good as "the gold standard, which of course is Apples track pad" and that you think you'll get there soon
- Clearly stating that the new memory standard is not magically your own invention somehow even though you're the first to use it
- Clearly stating the actual numbers of the battery in Wh and density AND also how many video minutes you get
- Clearly stating, not hiding but also not overstating that you started the company for the purpose of upgradeability
- Proving what you mean with examples before emphasising that "we really mean it when we say we have redesigned the computer from the ground up" (While absolutely fantastically letting the new motherboards upgrade last generation chassis!)
Result: I placed a pre-order, and kind of felt sad for this honest and clear language to apparently be rare.
As I love the idea of modular and repairable laptop, I've got some issues with it. I have Framework 13 AMD with Fedora (as Arch was almost unusable on it for me).
Connecting external hardware to it, especially dock stations and monitors - which work flawlessly with another laptops - sometimes works, sometimes not...
As soon as I saw the email announcement for the 13 Pro, my face fell. My assumption was that this was a brand new, incompatible chassis, and that my current 13 would be obsolete, and if I want to go further, I'd have to buy a whole new chassis in one go. Essentially a full laptop replacement, completely betraying the entire point.
And then I click through and see the compatibility table and my jaw drops. Amazing! Yes, it's a new chassis, but all the parts that matter will fit into my old chassis. And if I want to upgrade the chassis, I can even do that piece by piece as well, not all at once.
I'm also glad to see another Intel mainboard, and one with the new, actually-powerful iGPUs. A part of me has considered over time defecting to AMD, but I'm still just more comfortable with Intel, for some reason that probably isn't rational. My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6. But I know these days it's hard to reason about real-world performance just by core count, especially with the different flavors of cores we have now.
Another worry: the thermals of the original 13 chassis have never been great, and I'm concerned that the new mainboard will throttle a bunch under load when installed in the old chassis.
At any rate, I may not upgrade this year, given RAM prices. I have 64GB of DDR4 in my current laptop, and replacing that with the same amount of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X is probably more expensive than the rest of the laptop itself.
But maybe over the next few years I'll ship-of-theseus myself into a new laptop.
I had the same emotional ride. I'm glad they've kept to the "brand promise" of being able to upgrade an old machine.
I'm two years into my fw 13 and think I'll start by upgrading the chassis. I also bought 64GB of DDR5 (it was on sale, if you can imagine such a thing) - The trackpad, speakers and battery are the parts of the machine that I don't really love so will be happy to upgrade those.
I think if I can I'll keep the silver top cover - A bit of a "I had a fw before they were cool" statement
Looking at Intel's specs, it seems my current CPU has a base of 28W, boost up to 64W. The high end part Framework is selling for the 13 Pro has a base of 25W, boost to 80W.
So seems basically the same on the low end, with the new part boosting quite a bit higher. Presumably you get more perf per watt on the new CPU, but still.
I don't know what CPU you currently have but don't sleep on performance increases. If this new chip can do the same amount of work for less cycles, that's less time spent making heat.
The main problem with Framework 13 thermals is that if you just put it on top of a bed or sofa, the cloth blocks the bottom ventilation holes and the PC roasts itself with zero airflow. It's fine placed on top of a table, just not on a soft surface. I wish they would fix this glaring issue. Most normies are just going to place their laptops on the couch or bed without thinking about it.
Macbooks have a better design here. They are safe to put on top of sofas and beds. No ventilation holes on the bottom.
Search this thread for the “oh but it’s so expensive, I could just buy a new laptop from any other manufacturer every 3 years and it would be cheaper” posts - those are the normies.
Does anyone know whether the AMD chips are more performant? I like AMD more as a company, especially since I like healthy competition. I'd prefer an AMD chip if it's as efficient and performant as the Intel ones.
Absolutely don’t buy the AMD 300 series chips in the current Framework 13” lineup. Panther Lake is what you want. It’s a large leapfrog over what AMD has been offering for this product category.
You’ll get far better battery life for all use cases as well as performance that matches or beats AMD. Also, if you select the X7 you’re getting the best integrated graphics on the market that isn’t made by Apple - basically on par with the M5, and far better than the top option from Framework (HX370) while sipping battery by comparison.
I’m sure AMD will come back soon with a good answer to Panther Lake, but as of right now, it’s not what you want.
Don’t worry about AMD needing your charity, they aren’t going anywhere, they’re a more valuable company than Intel, and they’ll compete in this segment in the future. It’s just not the right buy right now.
My bet (I don't think there is any confirmation of it) is that the AMD board is still the one released last year. The main difference I see is that the new Intel board uses LPCAMM2 memory whereas the AMD board relies on usual socketed memory that has higher latency and is more memory hungry.
I think the term “throttling” has done some poisoning of the way we discuss laptops. It’s like a derogatory word that implies instability or something like that.
I wouldn’t think of thermal performance in laptops as “throttling,” think about it in terms of “how much power is this laptop manufacturer deciding to give the chip versus its maximum possible rating and what does that mean for me?”
Performance per watt has a massive diminishing returns curve so you often do NOT want a laptop manufacturer to push the chip to its limit.
Obviously, framework has a limitation that many other similar laptops don’t have by having one fan rather than two, but for these chips in particular I wouldn’t be very concerned as they just don’t consume enough power to create a lot of heat.
I don’t think you need to be concerned with the chassis cooling in the original versus the pro because I think most of the heat dissipation design is on the mainboard. Both versions of the laptop just have a big opening on the bottom for intake then spit out the exhaust out the back. The new chassis is unchanged in that regard.
This concept of “throttling” becomes more of a “design tradeoffs” discussion especially in the world of gaming laptops, which is why I don’t like using the term “throttling.”
Is the thin and light MacBook Pro-sized Zephyrus G14 “throttling” because its RTX 5070ti is being fed less power than a big thick Lenovo Legion? I say no, it’s just being tuned to the intended use case. No, you don’t get the “full power” of the GPU but even the thickest laptops generally don’t get that compared to desktop systems.
Some laptops do become unusable once they start thermal throttling. I have an Matebook X Pro (2020, the one with i7) which throttles to the point where I can't even properly write code in VSC anymore (I do only light web apps).
> My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6.
I was looking at benchmark comparisons between my i5-1240P which has 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, and the Ultra 5 325 which has 4 performance cores and 4 low-cache ultra low power efficiency cores.
This is my plan as well, start with the chassis and find a newer mainboard second-hand. I configured a 2TB SSD and 64 GB of LPCAMM2 RAM to see the price for the new 13 pro and it was doubled from about 1500 CAD to over 3200 CAD before tax. Upgrading the mainboard, when I have a perfectly functioning (and fast) 12th gen Intel i5, is out of the question for now.
If you ever decide to buy the whole new system, buy it without memory and storage from Framework and of course DIY instead of assembled. You can get them cheaper elsewhere. They aren’t Apple-level overpriced for memory but they are noticeably overpriced.
This advice is a bit more difficult with the current LPCAMM situation. In the US, besides Framework, I was only able to find a 32GB module from Adorama, seemingly a left over new stock Crucial module that I assume must be discontinued in Crucial-branded form, or eBay. But it is far cheaper than Framework’s price ($250) and seemingly still available.
(Interestingly, Adorama’s website says that it’s “trending.”)
You’ll save at least a little bit of pocket change buying your SSD elsewhere at the very least.
I'm really looking forward to having this as the go-to laptop to recommend to devs again. The original Framework chassis was really showing it's age next to e.g. a MacBook Pro or the new XPS 14.
Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.
Can't attest to framework, but after switching to an arch based syttem on my Quite low level HP Envy 13'' I get about 130% - 170% of time out of the system.
Yes, I am running mostly in dark mode now. Yes, I am using the terminal significantly more often now (80% of the time). But also I have always a browser, always Slack, WhatsApp, Obsidian and more often than not a few other things running on virtual screens.
Just the added battery life made this my daily driver. Yes - I so, so want to buy a framework. Still waiting for the multicolored international keyboards - and also the prices for memory just kill it for me right now. The system I would love to have is about 2k more than a few months ago. I just can't splurge that much right now.
Looking awful has not prevented local dimming from becoming quite common on laptops. Apple has been doing an okay job of it in the MacBook Pro for several years. Lots of Windows laptops have been very hit-or-miss about it, but at least with those you often have an OLED option. I've seen multiple Windows laptops from more than one OEM where opening a terminal window with light text on a dark background means you can easily spot a single line of text getting much dimmer toward the center of the dark window, and lighter near the perimeter where it's close to other light content. And that's for static content; as you mentioned motion can bring more problems as the backlight lags behind the LCD.
Wow. For as long as I can remember it was usually the opposite for me. Even after configuring TLP and looking for things to tune manually with powertop, I usually didn't get battery usage quite as low as I wanted. I thought it was still typical for Windows to be better.
Don't see why it wouldn't - as long as pstate etc. works it should be the same. I'd argue it's probably better given that modern desktops use far less resources in the background compared to Windows
I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.
A lot of office workers these days spend a lot of time in video calls.
So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding.
Linux is something of a second-class citizen for both GPU vendors and browser vendors. So for example if you're using Firefox and an nvidia GPU on Linux? No video encode/decode acceleration for you. The browser will silently switch to CPU decoding.
HW video decoding is now available and by default on in Chrome on at least Ubuntu with my Intel iGPU. I was also surprised when they turned it on under the radar. I saw this the other day debugging a problem and saw others see it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1ojydv9/comment/nm8...
Call me crazy, but most people working typically leave their laptops wired in to either a charger or a hub so they can have more monitors. I know some people will go through the effort of charging and pulling the cord, and charging later, but most people don't want to micromanage something they can forget about while working. If you're living on battery life for a work call, it would not matter if you're on Windows, changes are high your batterly life will self-terminate quicker than you realize.
Among Linux users, long battery life is for in-office workers (who leave their desk to attend meetings) in hybrid companies (where no meetings are laptop-free) in roles that sometimes involve back-to-back meetings.
There have been fairly recent changes to the linux kernel to better support panther lake in terms of power performance. I'd suspect a major reason for holding back is because ubuntu 26.04 has not been released yet and it is using kernel 7.0 which includes these power improvements. 24.04 does not.
By the time these laptops start shipping, 26.04 should be released and testing should be easy. I suspect no major differences from it vs windows.
7.1 includes even more performance improvements for panther lake. [1]
If I was releasing a laptop with Linux support as a key selling point, and the battery life was bad on Ubuntu 24.04 but good on the pre-release 26.04, then I'd advertise the good figures and write "tested on Ubuntu 26.04 beta, requires Linux 7.0 or later" in the footnotes.
I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.
I'm a long-time Linux user who might actually be in the market for a just-works upgradeable laptop[1] that comes with Ubuntu.
I already know that combinations of hardware and software can be stretched and tweaked to do really interesting things in really excellent ways. I don't need them to tell me that computer systems are flexible. That's just noise.
And I don't want them to tell me how their (unreleased) hardware might work in the future with some unreleased/beta software. That tends to be interpreted as speculation, or as lies and deceit.
I'd prefer to see benchmarks of how it works if it shipped today.
If those benchmarks are unsavory (as they may presently be) and thus omitted, then that's not ideal but it's okay.
I definitely don't want to feel as if I'm being lied to, in place of an omission.
[1]: I just want a 15" version. I'm not a fan of little screens. My eyes aren't getting any better.
I'd be surprised. Granted, not quite apples-to-apples, but I have the original Framework 13 chassis, 13th-gen Intel mainboard, original battery, and I've never gotten more than 5 hours or so, 6, maybe, at most, on Linux. Yes, the new 13 Pro comes with a larger batter, and maybe the new mainboard is more power-efficient, but 24h+ sounds way too optimistic.
Panther lake is substantially more efficient than your 13th gen and they increased the battery capacity by 35%. They claim 20h, not 24h, and that 20h is for video watching, not general use.
Keep in mind the Ultra 300 chips also only have recent support in the kernel. The battery life likely isn't great for now (as with previous gen Intels right after release).
It makes sense to me that for now the benchmarks would be Windows specific.
battery life for Linux is not some grand project, it's just support and setup of existing kernel drivers, typically at the distro level - which is why it's already there for some setups
They have a battery live stream from 100% to 0 linked on their product page which is broken. Hopefully they'll fix it and add both linux and windows version of the test.
I don't see why it wouldn't? I have a 16" MSI laptop with an 11th gen Intel processor (known for horrible battery life), I use Arch/Hyprland and it gets 5-6 hours with a battery degraded to 68%. Which is still in the ballpark of what most users said they got on Windows when this model was new.
Linux battery life is fine and on par with (or possibly better than) Windows these days if you don't do anything silly (I'm sure some distro and DE consume silly amounts of power just because, but it doesn't have to be that way).
Based on reports about Panther Lake, the new process, plus a 13" screen and large-ish battery, I believe the battery life claims.
Yes, it was not mentionned often in the list of complaints about the fw 13 because the chassis was good enough but my main gripe was that it felt flimsy.
Strangely it was not flimsy and held its own but it felt flimsy and to be honest I never was quite able to tell why. What one want for a premium laptop is the satisfying rigidity of a Macbook and it didn't have it.
So for me this new chassis is a banger release. It's amazing that I can just drop my "old" hardware in it and it would just work.
The LPCAMM2 memory is both the biggest plus for me, and the biggest challenge for it given how rare it is to find in stock, and the premium price over LPDDR5 and crazy prices of it.
This looks suspiciously like something I could buy : a lightweight well made Linux laptop, with long battery life.
I currently use a MacBook and won’t get near a windows machine.
Two questions
1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?
Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.
I want to say as a fw13 owner that people don't realize that the 3:2 screen ratio gives you extra vertical space compared to your typical notebook and the screen does not feel small at all. That was an excellent decision from their design team.
Agreed. I have a work MBP 14" and a Framework 13, and I didn't realize until just now that they weren't the same screen size. The Framework 13 is very comfortable to use.
As other comments have noted, we have Framework Laptop 16 for folks who want bigger screens, and we had some updates for that product today too: haptic touchpad option and an entry-level Ryzen 5 version.
We've been sending pre-release hardware to developers at a bunch of distros to make sure that the core use cases like suspend/resume work as expected out of the box. You can check our general Linux support at frame.work/linux
I’m not @nrp but I think I can safely answer this one:
> 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
They make a Framework 16, so a Framework 16 Pro now suddenly seems like a possibility, but I don’t think they’re going to make a 15-inch when they have the 16.
Are you guys thinking about pushing to improve the linux software experience at all? To me that could almost be another selling point, if Framework 13 came with some downstream patches that improved sleep, power management, multi-display and hi-dpi monitor handling, etc.
And secondly how healthy is framework as a company, and to what extent do you make money from consumers vs sales to big companies?
I don't know how relevant is the parent argument these days, but pfu see released HHKB with trackpoint. Even despite dropping their signature topre switches, I consider this one of the best purchases. My wrists can't thank me enough.
Hi! Congratulation on the launch, I hope the users will like these!
Please, I do have a question about Desktop: there have been numerous reports of noisy PSU fan and little feedback from FW [1], could you shed some light on the situation? Are you seeing noisy PSU yourself, are there plans for a fix or another PSU? I understand you wanted a separate, and thus reparable Flex ATX PSU, but maybe just one larger fan for the whole case would have worked better (c.f. Steam Machine)?
For those of us that, say, just got a new battery months before this was announced... a while ago (I forget when), there was talk of possibly sharing designs to enable repurposing them as power banks. Any word about that?
Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am also curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)
We're going to publish more Linux benchmarks as well. We have s0ix noted (7 days), and we're trying to make some more repeatable productivity-oriented workflows for Linux to use. We expect that Phoronix will publish some pretty thorough power efficiency tests too. We'll certainly be providing them with review hardware.
Thank you Nirav for everything you are doing for right-to-repair and better hardware. And, thank you for directly engaging with the community. I can't wait to update my 12th gen i5 FW 13 with a new chassis!
First off, Framework is maybe the most exciting company I've seen over the last 5 years. My Framework 13 AMD is a wonderful machine. Thank you to your and your team for the incredible work and commitment!
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
That's actually the part that I was getting confused by. Does everything with a yellow caution sign have to be upgraded together, or can that happen over time?
Reading it again, I'm assuming they're overtime and individual upgrades that can take place? If someone could confirm or deny that for me, I would appreciate it. I may just be overthinking this table.
Edit: yeah that's what I'm taking away after rereading this a few more times. Very impressed by the modularity on each of those parts.
Hey Nirav, congrats on the newest release and I'm really eyeing the 13 Pro.
A couple of questions:
1. How are the thermals? I've had mixed experiences with my 11th gen FW 13 throttling under load with the fan sounding noisy. It's fine if I'm alone but if I'm at a team gathering, it's noticeably loud.
1. Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is super efficient for video conferencing. That's a use case that Intel has specifically been optimizing for, so as long as you're using video conferencing software that leverages hardware encode/decode, which should be most of them at this point, the fan should stay off entirely.
2. We have one hand open on the lid for each generation of 13.
1. That's awesome! I assume RDP or VNC would be the same then, I use that for work primarily.
2. Huh. Well, I feel like an idiot! I always use two hands when opening the lid, muscle memory, I guess.
ps. one question you don't have to answer: for the wireless keyboard, did you guys consider something like a fingerprint sensor? I like the idea of having something like that akin to Mac's Wireless Keyboard but I don't know how much integration something like that would need.
I'm excited for the new speakers - that's been one of the biggest pain points on my 13.
- Is the Dolby Atmos configuration available for Linux as well as Windows? Or more generally, will the speakers sound as good on Linux as they do on Windows?
- Will we be able to get audio comparison samples between the old and new speakers?
Has anyone tried Qwen 3.6 35B A3B on the 370 version with plenty of ram and if so what's the best tokens per second you can get, with the ideal quant, like maybe the U GGUF at 4 bit
Q4_K_S Qwen3.5 30B-A3B runs at around 29 t/s for me on the 370 version with 64 GB of RAM, running llama.cpp without any tweaking. I haven't tried Qwen3.6 yet, but could download it tomorrow; since I have a 128GB FW Desktop at home, I tend to use that remotely rather than my laptop directly, which preserves my battery.
Really happy to see the new chassis for the 13 Pro! I own the 16 myself, and have been really happy with it, and am excited to see the haptic touchpad + unibody modules hit the marketplace. Those address the largest build quality issues I had with the device.
You probably can't comment on this, but just to note it, I would be very excited to see the 16 get a similar Pro chassis.
What's the sleep situation? I have an ancient Dell with S3, which is totally fine, and a Mac for work, which is fine, but the modern standby situation, as summarized by people who are mad about it, sounds bad.
Now that you have a custom touch-screen. How long until you release a tablet (Surface-pro-like) form factor? I'm still using my 2017 Surface Pro because the form factor is amazing, but no one has come up with anything to compete with it.
I know it's not the most ideal form factor for a repairable device, but I can dream.
And no brightness impact either, right? (I think that was in the LTT video.) We always ordered thinkpads without touchscreens, but it sounds like just leaving it off in software might actually be sufficient...
The touchscreen is backward-compatible with the old/regular FW13, so I imagine the regular FW13 screen is forward-compatible with the Pro. (Of course, I don't know if they'll sell that configuration or if you'd have to cobble it together from the marketplace.)
200g is weight of a smartphone, there's no way touch weighs that much.
Framework 13 Pro screen seems to have plastic surface as before, not glass-laminated (which I guess could add 200g, but it's not a requirement for laptop touchscreen)
I have two Dell xps 13, two generations apart, the newer one is touchscreen the other (older) isn’t. Guess which one weighs 1.3kg and which weighs 1.1kg.
You're blaming the touchscreen for a lot here, when the explanation is likely a lot more pedestrian. Change in case molding, change in PCB size, slight change in battery size...
If they're two generations apart, then 200g difference could be hiding anywhere, but touchscreen (I really doubt it adds even 20g).
e.g. 30g in larger heatsinks, 80g in glass-laminated screen, 20g in larger battery, 40g in more stiffer chassis. 30g in aluminium top case instead of carbon fiber :)
I thought I would never use one either, but whenever I use my SO's laptop with touchscreen, I keep touching the screen for "quick actions" like pausing video or starting apps or moving things around. I don't use it when I need precision, but when I need to just do one thing quickly where I don't need accuracy, I actually find it really handy.
Touchscreen is one of those things that sound nice, but in my experience are not so useful. At least not for my typical use (programming, writing, even CAD design). Before having a framework 13 I had a dell xps 13 with touchscreen for about ten years. I never really had a use for it. But hey, the rest of the specs of the screen alone make it still a nice upgrade possibility for the future :)
I looked into it a little and it does seem like LPCAMM2 just can't provide that memory bandwidth through a single socket and dual socket would be overly complex to wire up. Bummer :-(
Ultra X7 358H is the config we've used for most of our battery life tests, and efficiency should be very similar on the X9 config. We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
> We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
The reason I asked was mostly that, in my experience, touch displays tend to be glossier / less matte than non-touch ones.
I preordered a 13 Pro with Ryzen, which I'm already very excited about. Reading between the lines of your video announcement, though, it seems like the Intel experience might be more optimal (you pointed out Intel's new low power efficiency cores and Dolby sound being tested with Intel).
If I want the best battery life and sound possible with Linux, should I switch my preorder to Intel?
What I am also curious is around memory management. On the Intel, I can get at most 64Gb RAM for now, 96Gb in the future. On AMD I can get 128Gb right now. Do they differ in how they can share RAM with the GPU? Do either need me to specify how much is vRAM and how much is available to the CPU, or are them both unified, similar to how Apple Silicon does it?
I love it, I've been waiting for years to buy a Framework, but my current laptop has so far refused to die. I think it's now finally old enough to justify upgrading.
Will the new keyboard colour schemes come to other locales? I love the orange/black/grey but probably not enough to learn American English.
Question: did the hints given at https://frame.work/nextgen include any secret messages you want the public to know about? Maybe the secret was missed during the run up to today?
Hey, love that thing and I am considering to sell my current laptop to get one, but I wanted to first know if the laptop features pen/stylus support? I guess not, as it is not using a full glass cover like the 12 and otherwise it would have probably been advertised, and can we expect in the future an upgrade path towards that (by replacing only the panel or the whole top part maybe?)
And anyway the performance of this CIX chip is really bad compared to the Snapdragon X2 or current x86 chips. Jeff Geerling has geekbench results here:
I didn’t realize they were selling it on another site, thanks for the link! (Framework has the RISC-V board on their shop, so I was expecting to see the MetaComputing one there too.)
And yeah… what I really want is some Oryon cores in a Framework 13 motherboard.
I have the 13" with AMD 7040 and eGPU worked fine, but I switched back to a SFF desktop as I couldn't git hot-swapping to work reliably and bandwidth loss over thunderbolt was a little more than I was happy with. But functionally/mechanically it worked
I just realised that the credit card I used to place my preorder will expire next month. Will there be an option to update my card details when I need to pay the full amount?
Yes, you'll get notified when your batch is getting ready to ship, and you can update your payment information. You can also update the default payment method in your user account any time.
It looks like not (you'd assume they'd have called it out if it was). I really don't understand the utility of a touchscreen without a 360 degree hinge.
Response from the support (according to the Framework forum):
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro Touchscreen supports touch input but does not currently support stylus input. Like other Framework Laptop 13 models, it opens with a maximum hinge angle of 180 degrees and is not designed for pen or convertible-style use.
There's no reason they couldn't use smaller capacity modules. SOCAMM has better area efficiency and z height, both highly relevant for thin and light laptops.
The form factor is only a tiny part of the RAM module price. DRAM already isn't compatible gen to gen so you might as well go with the most optimized form factor
I agree, competition and economies of scale are much larger factors. Custom RAM SKUs for a single manufacturer with no competition will obviously cost more than an industry standard part. And you'll be locked to buying RAM upgrades from framework themselves.
I'll take this opportunity to report on my Framework Laptop 13 experience. I've had it for over a year.
The case is warped in multiple places. One USB C module doesn't accept a power charge reliably. It can overheat and shutdown. If the case flexes a little the trackpad stops responding - it needs to be on a flat surface. Power brick died.
On the plus side, my partner had one and when she threw it away she gave me her parts and I was able to swap some out. That was cool.
Adding to the review thread: I bought a Framework 13 in 2021. I'm sold on the ideal, I really like the chassis and the keyboard, and I _love_ the screen ratio. I replaced several parts and own every type of connector. I really liked my 13!
I just had my mainboard die, and I was advised there currently isn't another mainboard in stock that works with my old DDR4 RAM. They don't have any newer DDR5 RAM in stock apparently either, so I was out of luck and ended up buying a Lemur Pro last week.
In my experience, the Framework hardware is great but very flakey and frequently needs replacing.
Support is awful; they'll repeatedly ask you to do things you've already done (and shown proof of), they can take days to get back to you, and are generally unhelpful. They also didn't think to mention to me when I said I needed to buy a new laptop and their parts were all out of stock that they had a new machine coming out in the next week, which is insane to me. I would've been an easy convert. Sometimes I think it's bots doing the support, but if that was the case, they'd reply back faster.
Time will tell whether I'll return back to the ecosystem, but the support experience (and the hardware being poor enough that I frequently need support) is putting me off for now.
I was really sold on the idea of a repairable laptop and the Linux support was excellent. I like the laptop a lot and it happily replaced the old-skool Macbook that had served me so well over the years.
However, I had a screen die on me and that's when I found that their product support was truly appalling (even worse than Apple!) - They took ages to reply and then asking endless irrelevant questions in a very arrogant tone (version of BIOS, operating systems etc) - in the end, I gave up and bought the replacement screen myself.
In general, coming from a MacBook, I’ve had more quality issues with the framework, but fixing them has always been possible with a little digging. I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning how to take apart and fix my gear, but I’m also the sort of person who darns holes in his socks, so ymmv.
I contacted their support because my charging cable frayed and I thought I was still in warranty. Turns out I'd miscalculated and I was a year out but they replaced it for free anyway.
Their support has been very responsive and helpful every time I've contacted them so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't have helped the GP.
How do you even warp these things? Had mine for 3y, sturdy as hell.
So sturdy in fact that the only piece I've had to replace is the charger, what's the point in swappable parts now right? /s
I really want to love this thing but at least in the UK, matching specs it comes out as more expensive than the MBP - even worse when you factor in potential discounts/sales which framework doesn't offer.
I’d just keep in mind that you’re comparing a niche product from a startup breaking into a notoriously competitive market who are also doing the harder task of making these slim devices user upgradeable to a product from one of the largest companies in the world, with a CEO that is well known for being a master of supply chain, and with all of the economies of scale.
And they’re miraculously within 10-20% of each other.
To nuance this, the more you go up in specs, the more macbook become more expensive than comparable framework. Try to compare with a 64GB framework or 2TB framework for example.
One benefit of framework is you may not need to get storage, and just go use the one in your current laptop, saving around £200. And you might even try to source the RAM on your own to save a few more. But I admit that is somewhat difficult these days haha.
We should also consider that repairability, upgradability and open hardware/software support don't come for free and are features that are worth paying for.
Ah ofc I forgot. But iirc not everything works and battery life will probably suck, no? So not really a consideration in this case of price comparison. It is an option though :)
Personally I also can't stand the exterior design, albeit overall hardware of MBP is good. Guess if I land an old MBP this is what I'd do with it.
AFAIK Asahi development needs some hypervisor features for reverse engineering macOS drivers that only exist on M1-M3 and were removed on M4+. So yeah, it may be several years until they get support (or never, if nobody steps up to do it).
Dumb comparison, because buying a Framework is a single transaction where I exchange money for a computer, and buying a Mac is an entrypoint to “The Ecosystem” where Apple wants to squeeze me for $<pricing_tier>/month forever.
I've bought two Apple products in my life, both Macbook Pros, one in 2014 and one in 2021. I have a Pixel phone, zero transactions in the App Store all-time, pay $0 to Apple on any kind of subscription basis. Not disagreeing with the nature of their incentive structure, but if they're intentionally crippling their hardware division somehow to squeeze me for money, they're really bad at it.
Buying a Mac is also a single transaction. Yes, they have lots of other services they want to sell you on but you're in no way obliged to take them up on it.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Music-dot-app is a great example. Check out all the ways it tries to upsell you even if you just want to play local files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anrB6fP1WeQ&t=65s
- opens to a full-page Apple Music subscription service ad on first run.
- search functionality defaults to “Apple Music” instead of “Local Library” (or “iTunes Store”) even when the user has no active subscription.
- Apple Music subscription upsell banner ad along the bottom of the search results screen, that stays on screen as you scroll the results pane.
Check out at the end when he demos Music-dot-app's Settings pane changing to include CD-ripping settings when and only when a CD drive is available, something they could also do and chose not to for Apple Music subscription service when the user isn't subscribed.
macOS seriously never nags you about services. Service nags aren't classy. You can credibly accuse Apple of plenty of things, but having a lack of class isn't one.
My last (and first, and only) iPhone was even worse. At one point the Settings app had no fewer than three paid-service nags at the top that I had to scroll through to even get to the first actual setting.
Image Playground isn’t a service, it’s a free local image generation model. But I’ll grant you that the News+ thing is kind of annoying. I wouldn’t call it a nag, though - it shows in the Settings anpp after you buy a new device that includes free months, while they’re still valid, then it goes away forever.
It's really not, though. You don't even need an Apple account to set up a Mac.
I pay $3/month to Apple in exchange for full-quality backups of decades of photos, but I could easily stop doing that, or switch to another provider, if I wanted to. (I don't, because $3/month is extremely fair for what I get.) I've never paid for any other Apple service and likely never will. The OS never, ever nags me about services - compare that to Windows!
Whilst you don't "need" an Apple account to setup a Mac, using a Macbook without an account may not be viable for a lot of people.
First and foremost, you cannot install any applications through the primary method of app installation, which is the App Store.
You also cannot use certain applications like iMovie (which is pre-installed) without an Apple Account.
MacOS will always prompt you in the Settings to sign in with iCloud. Opt into Betas, including Public and Developer Betas are not possible without an iCloud account.
The Apple land is miles better than the Microsoft land, which you aptly point out though.
I've never seen it stated anywhere that the App Store is the primary method for macOS. Well, I could be wrong, maybe Apple does mention it somewhere, but pretty much every popular app publisher still publishes their .dmg file directly on their own website, much like most Windows developers.
At least I've never had to use the store in my 15+ years of using MacBooks, and I can't see myself using one anytime soon, unless Apple starts forcing you to (in which case I'll just stick to using homebrew).
Can you though? Its been a few years since I've been on apple, but being able to get anything but icloud native support in other apps was basically non-existent. Compared to android where it gives you a plethora of choice out of the box.
Yes - they're already on my computer, so any full-disk backup service will back them up by default. There's an option to purge them from disk and download from iCloud on demand, but you don't need to use it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111762
It's different on mobile (iOS/Android) where individual apps need special support for cloud providers. On a mac everything is just a file for most apps, so all the cloud providers work by default.
What kind of accessories? You can use cheap generic USB-C docks/hubs, depending on your needs. (macOS doesn't support DP MST so depending on # of screens you want to attach, you may need a more expensive dock, though it still doesn't have to be Apple-specific).
If anything brakes on the Framework, you get all the docs you need to attempt a repair yourself, also spare parts are available, also, you can upgrade SSD/RAM/Mainboard and ports.
Apple: Every repair is Mainboard replacement and costs 70% of the used value of the Notebook. Upgrades are impossible. Have a nice day!
Also very sad that the M5 dominates the X7 358H in singlethreaded performance, not to mention the M5 Pro that dominates it in both single- and multithreaded performance.
Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook, so you should choose a price you want to spend and then evaluate if you prefer a Framework or a Mac at that price point. If your available spending power is too low for a Framework, you’re not getting a Framework — and, separately, if you want a Framework for some reason specific to the Framework and can afford one, then the price of a Mac isn’t relevant unless a Mac can satisfy that same reason.
It's specifically aimed at Framework, though, not PCs in general.
Framework is very much a premium brand (where the premium experience is centred on repairability/upgradeability), and don't have the economies of scale Apple do. It's natural that they'd end up being more expensive.
Yeah, I’m assuming just the one of the various tiers here that’s in the same bucket as MacBooks, and that we’re generally talking devices that are specialty-capable; such as media production or Linux development or gaming or what have you. If you lump the entire “portable screen bigger than nine? inches and with an in-box physical keyboard and pointer controller” market together, you’ll disregard ‘glorified word processors’ that cost a couple hundred bucks (before the RAM underproduction grift) in their own specialty niche. Framework isn’t competing there, right? (I could have missed something..)
It was 2012 when I realized a midrange Macbook (not Pro or Air) was actually cost competitive with my PC laptop, and switched. There have been some configurations since then!
I bought a Thinkpad P16s with 64 GB of LPDDR5x ram in October 2024 for just over $1100.
64 GB of LPDDR5x will add $849 to the price of a Framework 13 Pro. Thats insane. I would love a future Framework 16 Pro but that will probably run $3500 for the configuration that I would want if memory and storage prices don't come down.
You need to consider the upgradability aspect too - the next time you want to upgrade, you just need to buy a new mainboard, which would be considerably cheaper than buying a whole new laptop.
I've wanted to get a Framework for a long time now, but their lack of shipping to Israel (and active prevention of using Freight forwarders) has prevented me.
If they were willing to sell me the 13 Pro, I'd sell my Yoga Pro 7 in a heartbeat to replace with a 13 Pro
how would they compare over 10-15 years though. with one you are able to swap out the motherboard when you want an upgrade and with the other you have to buy a completely new device.
then when it comes to repairing broken parts they are on opposite ends of the scale where apple actually go out of their way to make it harder for you to do that and its probably more expensive as well since only apple certified repair shops have access to certain parts
Comparing it to a MacBook misses the point. The reason to buy the framework is modularity, repairability, customisability. You can upgrade your CPU, add specific ports you want, change ram. You can't do any of that with a Mac.
In his presentation, Nirav compared it twice to a MacBook. Even saying they want to build the MacBook of the Linux world iirc. While I also agree with you, it’s still a valid comparison.
It's not just a valid comparison; for some of us, it's the only comparison that matters. Upgradability and repairability are really nice features, but the machine still needs to otherwise be an upgrade over the one it's replacing.
If the Framework Pro holds up in reviews and works as well with Linux as claimed, it'll probably replace my M2 Air as a daily driver. If they add Dvorak as an option so I don't have to rearrange the keys myself, that will make the choice a slam dunk.
Yeah, it is a valid comparison, and assuming the quality is close to par with a macbook, I think it would be worth the extra cost.
I'm someone who doesn't want to go through a new laptop every other year. I've got an M1 mac right now. I've owned it for 5 years and could easily see myself getting another 5 years of use out of it. Only problem is, the hard drive is small, I can't upgrade it. It only has 16 GB RAM, which is fine for now, but I can't upgrade it. One of the 2 USB C ports gave out on me. I can't repair it.
If I had a laptop that I could repair and upgrade that also ran Linux? I would absolutely pay $2k for it - as long as the quality is good - because I think I would save money in the long term by making a laptop like that last a long time.
I use thinkpad (T14s now, X1 Carbon and X220 in the past). The hard drive is just m.sata and very easy to upgrade. You really can't upgrade the disk on a Mac?
What I miss is a keyboard with dedicated keys for Home, End, Insert, Delete, PageUp, and PageDown. Sadly, this is still something only ThinkPads get right.
I really would like to give other laptops a chance but the substandard keyboards of most laptops are always holding me back.
yeah, why don't vendors just copy the damn thinkpad layout? It's a _pro_ line-up, we deserve a keyboard where _pros_ can directly use the keyboard shortcuts in their _pro_ apps :)
I wonder if the 13 pro uses qmk or similar for its keyboard firmware, I think the framework 16 does, so maybe? Being able to re-arrange on the hardware level the Fn-key related layer would make it the perfect laptop keyboard for me.
Otherwise, it rubs me the wrong way to pay 3 000€ for a premium device with a rather frustrating keyboard layout. But oh well, paying even more for macbook pros that have an even worse keyboard makes the pill easier to swallow I guess.
the chassis upgrade is welcome and it is nice to see the company grow enough to start creating custom hardware, and supporting standards that should keep things modular without sacrifice.
at the same time, there is a decent level of risk with using "new" standards before the industry catches up. lpcamm2 is great and should allow faster memory while "upgradable". the issue is with only having one slot which forces you to replace memory instead of adding to it. this is working with the assumption of having a single slot, which i am happy to be proven wrong on.
the current timing is a shame but at least when one needs to shell out so much money after all, might as well get better performance and hardware along with it.
Judging by the graphics used in the launch event, it may actually be miniLED. Perhaps they aren't mentioning this so people don't compare their max 700 nits full screen brightness to other vendors' >1000 nits full screen brightness.
This page is confusing and maybe even misleading. They write "Linux first". Few paragraphs later they write: 20 hours, Netflix 4K streaming, 250nit brightness, 30% volume, Windows 11. Why didn't they stream Neflix on Ubuntu they ship with?
Overall it looks awesome. I just bought Thinkpad T14s upgrading from the same model of older generation, I wish Framework would expand its sales coverage, probably would buy it without second thought if it was available in my country without overseas shipping and customs tax hurdles.
They should have tested something else, like a raw H265 4K video or something.
Can't imagine "pro" users would be amazed by the battery life of watching netflix.
Is there an option for a keyboard with dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End/Insert/Delete keys? I looked at a bunch of designs and didn't find any. If this is a developer-focused laptop, how can the keyboard be so developer-unfriendly? This is why I keep getting Lenovo laptops, they don't compromise on these keys.
Has anyone made the jump from a Mac to Framework as a daily driver? This is the first model to get my attention as a possible candidate for a full switch to Linux.
I did last year after deciding that Apple's software just isn't for me anymore. I've always had a Linux desktop around (and used to daily drive Linux on a laptop years ago) so I was happy to consolidate on my preferred platform.
Biggest gripes I had are:
A) battery life (both during use and standby just kinda sucking on Linux in general compared to os x, not exactly framework specific but I did get used to how amazing my m1 pro for longevity)
B) the case looking nice but feeling a little flimsy
C) the speakers are pretty bad (though I did get turned on to easyeffects and there is a profile for the 13 which helped a bit)
D) macs completely spoiled me trackpad wise
It seems like they are taking a stab at all of these in some way and I'm excited to see how it goes, especially with so much being backwards compatible.
All the same gripes from me. None enough to be a deal breaker, but every once in a while I'll do something on my GFs macbook pro and be blown away by how solid it feels.
I was pleased to see that The Verge's coverage of the event [1] was very positive on the feel of the laptop (even saying they got the hinge feel right like on the macbook which was the first thing I noticed being "not quite right" with the framework when I got it). I'm optimistic that this will be a big step in the right direction.
I use a MacBook Pro at work and a Framework 13 for personal use. The biggest downside to my Framework 13 is the low battery life; I’ve been getting only about 5 hours on Windows 11. Other than that, I like my Framework 13.
I am very excited about the Framework 13 Pro and it’s dramatically improved battery life. It’s unfortunate regarding RAM prices, though; I only paid $96 for 32GB of DDR5 RAM back in December 2023 when I ordered my Framework 13 (I bought my RAM on Newegg). It’s much more expensive today. I’d like to upgrade, but I can’t afford it at today’s RAM prices. With that said, because the RAM is still modular in the Framework 13 Pro, I could settle for a lower configuration and wait until a later date to upgrade the RAM.
You could do what I'm considering doing, which is sell my old Framework at market price. The 64GB of RAM that I bought for $200 at the same time you did is now worth almost $800 on Amazon new.
Yeah, last June. I switched from an M1 Air to a 13”, 7640U.
I’m running Fedora. Other than some h265 and heic codec/file format issues, (I’ve had to convert videos and photos to more open codec/format), it’s been a great machine.
I miss the battery life of the M1 but I enjoy the comfort of knowing I can upgrade storage or fix anything I want when needed.
Other than personal web browsing, I do web development and tinkering with music creation (Bitwig).
I don’t think I’ll ever buy another Apple machine. I want to use devices that are repairable, support those companies, and use software that is open source or multi-platform without continuing subscriptions.
Now that I’m personally invested in Linux, I’d like to contribute to desktop app projects that are open source since now, I am also a user.
I have gradually been moving my digital life away from Google and Apple/iCloud.
I switched my main home computer to the Framework 13 (albeit on Windows) in 2021, after multiple weeks with my MBP sent away for AppleCare. I had some minor electrical issues with the original 11th gen Intel motherboard, but the 13th gen Intel board I've since upgraded to has been perfect.
It's by far the best primary computer I've owned. The tradeoffs in battery life, speaker sound quality, and so on didn't matter much for my use case, so I was happy to take them; but this new model seems to fix those issues too, so I think it'll appeal to a much wider audience.
I was a Mac guy for 12+ years and switched to Linux on desktop + Framework about 2 years ago.
It takes time. On many dimensions, the Framework running Linux is laughably worse. I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
That being said, running Linux is very fun and can be productive if you choose a well-supported distribution and desktop environment. I landed on KDE Plasma and Fedora/Kununtu. It has been my daily driver and I see no reason to go back.
My gateway to Linux was buying an old Thinkpad T580 and messing around Arch Linux. If you’re on the fence, this may be a good place to start.
> I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
In the days of S3, I never thought about it either. Ironically it's on my Mac that I have to remember to hibernate if I won't use my laptop for a week or whatever, because it'll die if I don't. It just happens to be that it was on a Mac on which I first tried "modern standby" features.
Anyway I feel you. This big battery life improvement is what has convinced me my next laptop can be a Framework.
I’ve been on Fedora Gnome but wonder if I’d like Plasma. I know that I can try it on a USB stick and I’ve also read that other people have made sure to install their operating system and their files on different partitions to make distro switching easier.
I did. I keep my charging cable close, or basically always attached. Battery life is abysmal. No idea why, had other Linux-based laptops before. Battery life was never good, but never this bad.
I never used a Mac for my personal machine, but I've always used them as my work machines. I purchased the first generation of the Framework 13 AMD laptops And it's been my personal machine ever since. It's a damn fine machine and I love having full control over the components in my machine without some OEM nonsense for repairs that manufacturers like Dell try to pull (wouldn't accept non-OEM batteries for me in the past).
The battery life is the biggest negative compared to a MacBook, but that seems to be better now (though I doubt it, or anyone, can compete with the power/performance that Apple is putting out now).
The issue with my advice to you though is that I prefer Linux. And I would be running Linux at work if I could. Mac OS is fine, but I do prefer Linux as my main operating system.
If I didn't specifically want to run Linux, though, I would probably be using a MacBook, despite their lack of repairability.
All that said, I really love my framework and I don't intend on buying another machine any time soon, especially because I can upgrade my Framework 5 years from now (hopefully).
1) Reliable sandbox
2) Nixos makes it easy for agents to research, debug and patch every aspect of the system, even applying kernel patches for the sake of debugging
3) CLI-oriented toolchains. Claude spent around 17 hours trying to set up xcode publishing and in the end just told me to press the button once Organizer pops up.
4) Containers
I wouldn't try selling MacBooks to anyone. It's the worst popular device in terms of ergonomics, paired with OS that is incredibly hostile to developers and power users
I have a MacBook Air M2. I bought a framework 13 last year right before the RAM shortage. I really wanted to love it but ended up returning it due to really bad battery life performance (NixOS). Still on the MacBook today, but heavily considering the new framework
I was on a Macbook Pro (multiple models for many years) and jumped to the 12th gen intel framework. It is fantastic laptop, just showing its age a bit (mostly battery life as I still have the smaller battery and 12th gen intel wasn't that great for battery).
I upgraded the screen and speakers, nothing else really needed changing throughout the years.
I was so tired of the bad docker performance on macOS that I went to a framework with Linux. Linux on a laptop (Fedora/Gnome specifically) worked so much better than I expected too.
I'm hopeful I can pre-order this new model as well.
I’ve been a MacBook guy for almost a decade now, but I’ve been watching Framework since their first announcement. This is the most appealing Framework device I’ve seen.
The new display, battery life, the new Intel chips, and LPCAM2 memory all look great. I love my M1 MBP but Apple’s software quality has been rough the past year especially. I think this is also the first time the Framework 13 has officially supported Thunderbolt? Depending on how macOS 27 turns out I may seriously consider the 13 Pro as my next laptop. I’d slap Fedora Workstation on it and call it a day.
I was lucky enough to be at the event and I can say the 13 Pro feels great in the hand. Overall chassis stiffness, typing (I guess due to the increased chassis stiffness), and the new touchpad all feel premium. Between that and the battery life, I think this really has a chance to win over a lot more current MBP users.
Why no trackpoint support yet? I saw it being requested a lot of times already. Really tired of using ThinkPads, would love to change to anything else, but trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me from switching.
Man, I want to get a Framework, but I'm held back by the lack of trackpoint. Yes, I know it's not going to happen officially, but I just can't see myself using a laptop without one. So, until someone figures out some mod or 3rd-party part I'm sticking with Thinkpads.
Dell Precision used to have track points. Now the only holdout is Thinkpad. I sometimes wonder how much the track point itself keeps that product line successful.
That being said, thinkpads are almost as upgradeable as frameworks. The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
I'd bet a bunch of money that it's barely used anymore.
Only benefit of trackpoint nowadays is that you don't move your hand. Otherwise, it's all downsides compared to modern trackpads, especially haptic ones like here. It's less precise, less ergonomic. Nowadays I'd rather move my hand a few centimeters off, than put regular strain on my forearm and struggle being precise with the pointer.
And most thinkpad users, employees of big companies, don't care at all about the trackpoint. I'm pretty sure it's only kept for the thinkpad brand and to keep the vocal minority of us geeks pleased.
> The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
Hm, I wish they had scores for the X230 and older; I'd like to see how they compare. IMO they're better, if nothing else because you can replace RAM, SSD and battery without unscrewing the entire bottom.
I don't think the difference between half the bottom and entire bottom would make a difference according to ifix it. It's more about:
1. Is it possible
2. Is it documented
3. Do you need proprietary parts
4. Without solder
They write their own software. And firmware. Other OEMs can just beg their tier 1/2 suppliers to get their shit together and put components to sleep properly by making windows, drivers, and firmware work well together.
Also things like lpddr5x, ssd controller built into the SoC with cache in unified ram (instead of running a whole ass separate computer with its own ram on an m2 stick) etc
Great point about the storage. That is another place where the repairability meme is really not helping. Moving the storage controller up into the host SoC is a good idea and the PC world should adopt it.
Apple's storage controller is not even a PCIe peripheral internally, so it's saving power and latency cutting out that interface, even when it's active.
I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around how this could work for PCs today.
I'm guessing Intel/AMD could integrate a single SSD controller that OEMs could use for a specially socketed SSD?
I'm not familiar enough with SSD controllers - but what limits would this introduce. I'm thinking they can't be totally generic - with any NAND chips, any layout, 1-4 chips and TLC or QLC NAND - any capacity etc. It strikes me it would be limiting - you would become restricted to a a small subset of SSDs, maybe not forwards compatible with newer NAND chips etc.
I'd think only the minority of PC Laptops would make sense to have this - ones with soldered SSDs - and I don't know many of these. So Intel/AMD would need a big push to integrate any controller. Maybe Windows ARM laptops, if the controller makes a big enough difference, will do this. I'm curious now if any Snapdragon devices are doing this already.
Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby": the CPU is running in a low power mode (not powered off like "old" S3 sleep), can be turned on periodically and can turn on other devices even when the computer is "sleeping".
My Zen2 based Lenovo laptop has 6-7 hours of battery when doing basic tasks in both Windows and Linux, but sleep on Linux lasts a week while on Windows it's empty in 24 hours.
> Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby"...
And that is OK, as long as they provide a way for you to disable it. I do not want my laptop to be doing things when I put it in sleep mode. Nothing at all. Save battery life above all else when sleeping. But Microsoft does not appear to provide a way to do that. At least none that I can see.
Macs have that too, just implemented well. In addition, CPUs with connected standby don’t have the normal sleep so even on linux they run in connected standby. Maybe its less buggy in your case? Consider yourself lucky, lots of people encounter problems with sleep on linux
I was looking into hibernation on my Framework 13 with Ubuntu. Debian doesn't support it with SecureBoot enabled. Now you might say "just disable SecureBoot", but that is a whole new concept to understand.
I've found suspend performance has improved since upgrading to a kernel that supports the AMD 7640U NPU cores. I have no concrete evidence of that though.
I'm happy to accept poorer sleep performance to have a repairable laptop and Linux OSS (with good support), but I wouldn't say its problem free.
Trying to reduce idle power use of a simple esp32 based project I did a while back... Yeah it is indeed tricky. Apple having full control of their hardware supply chain, firmware and software helps a ton. And PC standardization issues do no good either.
On the other hand framework is actually in a good position to do something about it. Similar to valve. I think they do have more control than a regular PC vendor when also using Linux ad they have a very limited portfolio of devices and can actually upstream software fixes.
I think it's just a vertical integration thing. They know what's in the machine and they can make sure that their suspend path puts every peripheral to sleep. Linux has no idea what's in your machine and there may be some device in there somewhere that freaks out if the machine goes to sleep without saying goodnight. Even a 50mW draw will destroy the suspend power budget. Chromebooks have similar vertical integration with respect to ChromeOS and they also enjoy long sleep life. Hypothetically an integrator like Framework can also guarantee this but I can't vouch for it being true, and they would not have any control over Ubuntu updates after the laptop is delivered to the customer.
Just to beat my favorite dead horse, this is why the insistence on SO-DIMMs "BEcAuse it's rEpAIrAble" has wrecked the reputation of a lot of laptops. DDR on a stick is fundamentally hostile to sleep power draw. Soldered-down LPDDR memory has always been massively superior for energy savings, and LP-CAMM finally solves the issue.
How does soldering memory help reduce sleep power consumption vs. using a socket? What is different other than how they are physically connected to the board?
It's not the form factor itself that is the problem. LPDDR is more efficient for various reasons and cannot be on a DIMM. It physically will not work with a socket. That is the problem that LP-CAMM solves: LPDDR but still removable.
Did I not? I'm trying my best here. The question is sort of off-target, though. What I am trying to say is: 1) DDR uses more power than LPDDR; 2) LPDDR cannot work on a DIMM socket, because of its lower voltage signals, and other reasons; 3) SO-DIMMs always contain the higher power DDR; QED) if you insist on SO-DIMMs, then you have to spend more energy.
Rohansi was basically asking 'why', you keep on reiterating that DDR uses more power than LPDDR, but fail to answer why this is the case. Is it clock speed? Is it voltage? Is it a protocol/specification difference? 'various reasons' is not an answer.
There is no physics based reason why it couldn't work. If the industry really wanted to do it they could. But they don't. The primary reason is LPDDR just has too many pins. A DDR5 SODIMM has 262 pins and is an unwieldy beast. LPDDR5 has 644 pins.
LPCAMM2 really shows the trade-offs. It adds a lot of bulk and cost, and repairability hasn't been valued high enough by the market to cover that overhead for most consumers. That's why Micron exited the market they played a big part in founding.
LPDDR is very different from DDR so I don't really feel like diving into it in this tiny box. It has its own oscillators so the CPU doesn't have to clock it while asleep; it adaptively refreshes less often according to temperature; during self-refresh the cells are charged to a lower voltage that wouldn't really work for high-speed I/O but works fine for retention.
Well to be fair they only kind of quasi-exist for consumers right now. As far as I can tell Crucial was providing the only consumer accessible lpcamm2 modules on the market right now.
Crucial is certainly the only option that comes up looking on amazon or newegg right now. Lenovo has some OEM modules but they are obviously marketed as replacement parts to just their laptops, not sure how the warranty and support for them would be outside a lenovo product.
But the Crucial brand was unceremoniously sacrificed by Micron to the AI gods at the beginning of this year. So will these lpcamm2 modules even be available once current stock runs out? The 64gb module is already sitting at $1000 on newegg.
Samsung is making lpcamm2 modules but no telling when those will actually hit the market and be accessible.
As a heavy fractional scaling user, as long as the display has enough DPI, it's a non-issue. At my last job I was happily running 1.35 scaling, and I run my TV at 1.5 scaling. Make sure you're using a sane compositor, which excludes DWM; most Wayland compositors should run just fine.
Well I'd argue it'd help you to make designs that don't require perfect pixel alignments to look good, the same way developers should run crappy 10 year old computers. But that's the sadistic way. Anything graphics-related does require 1:1 display.
However, to be fair, that's only at lower DPIs smudging's an issue. Anything retina-ish and integer scaling loses all meaning. I'm typing this on a 15" 4K laptop on 1.75 scaling with HN set to 120% zoom. At those DPIs, it does not matter at all. I adjust most websites zoom level because a lot of them think the content must breathe, while I think I should not fiddle with my scroll to read a paragraph.
Which is something like 2/3rds successful in my experience (I use this daily), and requires tons of fiddling to get things looking even mostly reasonable (lots of misalignments and funky padding otherwise). And lots of applications don't respect it and you're stuck with too-small controls when it fails. Which makes it a noticeably-worse success rate than fractional scaling, afaict.
I still use it because the end result on some of my most-used applications is nicer, and it seems to be slightly-noticeably better performing (on a high framerate screen). So it's good enough for my tastes. But it really isn't anything I'd call "successful".
Oh my god, yet _another_ "developer-focused" laptop with full-sized left/right arrow keys, which are an absolutely miserable experience to actually use.
How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
( Yes, I know they used full-sized keys for a while, I moaned and cursed them at the time as well.)
Sorry, I've never seen this perspective, why do you want the smaller ones? The small arrow keys on my MacBook are one of my least favorite parts of the keyboard.
You want the smaller ones so you can easily locate the arrow key cluster without having to look. The empty space above the left and right arrow keys is a good tactile indicator that your fingers are on the correct location.
I agree with you that having full height left-right and half-sized up-down is a pain, because of the inconsistency.
The problem I have with laptop keyboard is that the arrow key height is too small, and the cluster itself is too crowded to sit my fingers on comfortably when using arrows. I want the arrow cluster to have full sized keys.
Real developers use hjkl, which, if this keyboard uses QMK like their previous ones, you can just remap to actual arrows (with a modifier key). I am only slightly joking.
I'm amazed looking at the upgrade kit. It's everything you need to go from the old 13" to the Pro; including chassis, display, battery, keyboard etc - listed at $255. That's an instant buy from me.
Same... I bought a 13 last year, super happy with it but was kind of sad after seeing this release because this new design is just so much better and addresses all the concerns I had with the machine... until I saw this.
Fuck I do love these guys! Give me a little hope in humanity.
Will definitely buy this new chasis as soon as I can!
Everything about this is what I've been looking for in a Linux laptop. (Also, how refreshing is it to not have to think hard about how much RAM you might need over the next few years because you know you can always upgrade it later?)
Nice upgrades, but no mention of ECC RAM, the single thing that I wanted from an upgrade for a decade? Why do chip makers refuse to take our money? :-P
I'm open to being wrong, but so far as I understand it ECC mostly lives at the controller level and shares the same DRAM chips across all forms of server memory (including non-ecc), which is why we see price increases across all sectors including consumer.
Those DRAM chips being the bottleneck that would require hard to build new silicon fabs to increase supply.
Yes. Easily. If you proclaim up front that a device is "Linux first", it seems reasonable to suggest that maybe you should tell us about its performance on Linux.
In my experience, Linux support on Framework is worse than on a typical ThinkPad, and they don't have much interest in contributing to the ecosystem like System76 does. They still make good products, I'm just very unimpressed with the Linux marketing.
For me it’s very much “it just works” with pretty much every distro I try. I had to configure zero hardware. How much better am I supposed to expect it to be?
They financially sponsor Linux/OSS projects and give them laptops to test on. What more do you want them to do?
They don’t have a zillion employees like Lenovo who is the #1 volume computer company in the world.
Finally, IMO, System76 is a much worse example because they aren’t focusing on the things Linux needs to grow. Linux doesn’t need contributions like their their silly Ubuntu reskin distro to be popular on the desktop. Instead, Linux needs a company making compatible hardware that is good, attractive hardware that will stop people from buying a MacBook instead.
The System76 lineup is a complete mess of white label Clevo systems. They have no business offering 8 different laptop models. That just tells potential customers “wow, buying a Linux laptop is a lot more complicated than buying a Mac!”
I agree with you, it would have been nice if their speakers had dedicated hardware to drive them instead of the magical dolby software.
All laptop speakers sound like shit on Linux. I'm sure people will reply with their anecdotal evidence, or pretend that it's not that bad once you have a good EQ. But we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I've spent hours trying to get multiple laptop speakers at least half as good as they sound on Windows. No success. And I'm talking thinkpads, dell xps, the usual linux go-tos, not some exotic stuff.
Maybe you have very niche needs, but for most of us speakers on laptops are never great and they're not really there for that. Reminds me of people shopping for high performance scooters. I mean, you're riding a scooter... it's not meant for that.
If you are an avid Linux user, you should know that this kind of Criticism is not on point.
Battery life? Should they share all possible config combinations? Should they share the most power-saving setting (and then be blamed for sharing numbers that almost no one gets to reproduce?)
As a Linux user on an AMD FW my battery life is good enough (7ish hours of work), and I never felt I need to tune it further from the OOB Fedora Kinoite.
They should share the battery life numbers of default shipping configuration while running Linux with whatever settings they want. Then publish the configuration and settings. Same as every other manufacturer.
Are you sure? On every device I could quickly reach (Gentoo, NixOS, Pop OS, all with vanilla/default pipewire configs), `ps aux |grep -i pulse` only turns up pipewire-pulse.
That is a problem that Linux has, but this is actually one time that it really isn't. Pipewire is flat-out better than pulse, while including sufficient compatibility that it really does just supersede the thing.
These are cool laptops. But, after getting a decent config (32gb ram, 1tb ssd, 7 series chip), the price is ~$2300. At that point, a MacBook Pro seems like a better choice. I'd not want to develop on anything less than that config. The selling point seems to be the Linux + Framework brand + highly customizable machine you can actually own
I've always wondered if these laptops can scale beyond the enthusiast group. If so, how?
So I got a 13" MacBook Air recently. It didn't require me to log into iCloud, but I did cause I wanted some things synced, which is free cause I'm not uploading photos. I don't buy anything from the Mac App Store cause why. The OS lets me run anything I want on it. The hardware technically doesn't care what OS it runs, though nothing else really works unless you count Asahi. In what way am I locked into generating them more money?
I am sure many will jump in here to talk about the upgradability story, but for me personally I do not think of Macbooks as a serious alternative either way. Even if I could get over not being able to replace my hard drive or RAM, I would still have to be OK using a proprietary OS I can't control, designed by people who just want to keep extracting my money ultimately.
Having something called an "App Store" on my personal laptop I can't remove.. I'd deal with having 4gb of RAM before I lived that reality.
Man, this looks really, really impressive. It basically solves every issue we could find to the framework 13. Can't wait for the reviews.
Accepting the prices of the ram shortage era is still painful, but even with the 64gb option, here in France it's still a great deal compared to similarly configured premium thinkpads or macbook pros.
I really wish they'd do a tablet / MS Surface alternative. After the Laptop 12 the experience should be there. The demand is real and the current landscape looks dire. Alone the people who say they'd love an iPad Pro with a real OS on it.
I'll be excited to buy one of these (or the newer iteration) if component prices ever return to pre-2025 levels. AUD$800 for 32GB RAM is insanity (which is of course not within their control, but my purchasing impulses are - at least for now).
Is Framework open to an OLED panel option in the future? I have an eye disease that makes extremely high contrast and extremely deep blacks very helpful to me, since it means I can get good contrast with less total light. I can still read LCD displays well enough, but as my eyes worsen, that may not be true.
Since Framework has a great track record with display upgradability, just an indication that there is serious interest in OLED options in the future would be enough to sell me.
So if anyone at Framework is reading this: is there any opposition inside framework to OLED? Any fundamental constraints that make OLED panels unlikely for the next several years?
Finally a haptic trackpad. Unfortunately not having one was a dealbreaker when purchasing my laptop last year, but next upgrade I'll be able to consider them again.
Part of me was hoping there would be some sort of official arm mainboard announced, I know there's the third party version but they don't seem to sell the main board only.
> How is ubuntu support for touchscreens these days?
GNOME supports multitouch gestures, and the GTK4 toolkit is overall very touch-native. It strikes a nice balance between overpadded and touch-accessible, IMO: https://www.gnome.org/
My only issue with Chrome on touchscreen was the lack of 1:1 scroll/zoom gestures. As a Firefox user it was something that I got used to, but I just updated Chromium and apparently that's been fixed now too.
Besides that, it all works about as well as you'd expect it to. You can drag the window around by the tab bar and tap-and-hold to pull up a context menu.
Come on lol. I have a couple steam decks and both are really clunky.
Most applications are not built using GTK4 nor Qt6 for that matter.
On my steam deck the keyboard never pops up by itself so I have to use a key combination and it feels like I am moving a ghost mouse around the place (rather than proper touch screen support)
I ran gnome on the deck for a while but anyway the on-screen keyboard provided by the gnome sucked so bad that I gave up (sucked as in, it groups all the keys around the center of the screen tightly together and very small)
I also have an M1 iPad Pro. No comparison because those issues simply don’t exist on iOS.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm running it on the desktop with a drawing tablet, Magic Trackpad and oodles of apps, and it's not noticeably different from the stability of iPadOS.
My touchscreen laptop is closing in on being a decade old (i7 6600u) and the worst thing I can say about the experience is that it VSyncs down to 30fps during more taxing animations (just like my iPad does).
> Any gesture functionality is dependent on the software you are running. This includes both, the application (e.g. Firefox) and the desktop environment (e.g. GNOME). The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
I love Linux but no need to embellish the current state imo
I am glad that it is working really well for you though
> The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
Yeah no. All of this depends on everything up to the application.
A gtk2 application will have no support for anything. A GTK3 application running on xwayland will have poorer support as well. And anyway most applications just treat the touchscreen as an invisible pointer as it says there.
Just to give an example of some basic thing that doesn’t work reliably: you can’t reliably use a long press gesture. In most apps that will be equivalent to holding the left click (aka does nothing but a long click). On iOS you will get a contextual menu to select/format text or whatever. (You can find a real report of this issue here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/crLHZhHkuM - “how do I right click using the touchscreen?” from barely 6 months ago)
Your claim that this is an equivalent experience to an iPad is just false.
I’ve been around long enough to remember setting up TouchEgg, the situation is better now but still not equivalent at all.
Anyway originally I wanted to reply to provide balance to your take so casual readers wouldn’t install Linux on their tablets and expect iPadOS. I think that has been sufficiently achieved by this comment chain, readers can choose which side to take :-)
A laptop without a unified memory model is categorically incapable of being the "ultimate developer laptop". Framework already have Strix Halo machines, I don't know why they felt the need to hamstring this thing with Intel.
Hilariously, those AMD chips are way behind the Intels in terms of memory.
First off, I believe that Intel has its memory far more "unified". AMD typically has a stricter VRAM/RAM 'tradeoff' setting that does not exist on Intel in the same way to my knowledge. (See how on Strix Halo systems, there is a thing about "allocating" 96 GB to the GPU, which seems to be needed sometimes but prevents the CPU from accessing that memory.)
Secondly, the Panther Lake board has LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 memory at 7467 MT/s, while the AMD boards are stuck with DDR5 SODIMMs at a meagre 5600 MT/s. In other words, the Intel board gets a third more memory bandwidth!
I’ve got the Framework desktop with strix halo. You can reserve memory for the GPU, but it’s straightforward at least on Linux to have the GPU dynamically grab memory as needed. I’ve got my VRAM set to 512MB and regularly use 120GB+for AI stuff.
Really? Because I did look through the entire spec list they provided and didnt see any non-Intel. Didnt get to the order screen since it was behind a waitlist sign up. I agree, that is better then nothing.
It's now new, it's the motherboard they already ship with the regular FW13. Because the bits are mostly interchangeable, they just let you order the FW13 Pro with the AMD motherboard.
Awesome, thats good news. I have a FW Desktop with the 395+ in it and have generally been impressed with it. Hoping that will eventually make its way into these machines.
I will guess for linux. Most out of the box linux laptops I saw were intel based. I guess open source support of intel is best among others in the industry. Even in my current thinkpad first thing I did was to replace its wifi module from realtek to intel (realtek was always hanging/dropping connection etc).
Assuming you're referring to Apple Silicon's memory bandwidth, that is not necessarily because the memory is on-die. The bandwidth comes from having more channels to access memory. This gives the SoC a wider bus to increase throughput vs. your typical x86 system with two channels. For whatever reasons Intel/AMD decided that two channels is all the typical consumer chips can support now so it's on them.
You mentioned Strix Halo, which also has off-die memory. Strix Halo does have a real advantage from its wider memory bus (four channels for 256 bit instead of 128 bit), but Strix Point is equivalent-ish to Intel's platforms like Panther Lake or Arrow Lake in terms of memory setup.
In fact, Intel also had Lunar Lake, which had on-package memory. However, it was still limited to 128-bit dual-channel, so there weren't really many performance benefits; it did however help with power efficiency.
Well, Intel was kind of in the dumps because their process fell behind. They didn't bet on EUV and got leapfrogged by TSMC and Samsung who did use ASML's EUV technology.
They eventually got on the EUV train and were the first customer to receive ASML's current state of the art machine which they call high-NA EUV. Intel's 18A process is the first to use this machine as part of the manufacturing process, Panther Lake uses this process so now they're right back to being SOTA.
All the news about them (stock price movements, theories about them going bankrupt, Panther Lake, etc...) for the last 2 years has essentially been people betting on whether or not they can successfully incorporate SOTA ASML machines into their manufacturing.
Apple Silicon had a process node advantage over the Core 100 and 200 series due to having a better allocation with TSMC.
Now Intel's process node is also SOTA and on par with TSMC 2nm so they should be more or less equivalent and the only differences down to what set of compromises they make in the design of the chips.
Your FW's Keyboard breaks? Original price you paid, bonus: you can just buy the newest model.
You want to upgrade anything in your MBP? "You know, with how thin, lightweight and fast they are, it's physically impossible to make them user-serviceable"
On the FW? They gave you the one tool you needed when you purchased your laptop.
No Ryzen options? Also no 1600nits display for working outside. Battery and display brightness are the only reasons I'm sticking with Macbook Pro.Sad it's not a priority for any other manufacturer. Because that's all you need, quality display, battery and remote access.
Intel got a lot of attention during the keynote, but the Ryzen AI 300 series mainboards are available if you want them. It's one of the first few choices in the configuration flow.
I would be really interested in a podcast with the CEO where he goes a bit into the trade-offs of backwards and forwards compatibility. I can not imagine that their planning was so immaculate that there aren't any regressions that a clean slate design could have cleaned up. Nevertheless, amazing job for putting this together it looks like a phenomenal product!
Depending on how good that haptic trackpad is, this could be a real Macbook Pro competitor. 32GB of RAM on my M1 Pro is starting to feel a bit cramped.
It's unfortunate that I am unable to access these new products because Framework does not ship to Japan. I have an original Framework 13 that's CPU fan has been making death noises. There is also a broken screw mount in the base.
I didn't do shipment forwarding. I just bought the product and later moved to Japan. Also, Framework supposedly blocks shipment forwarding.
It's odd, because I remember them advertising a Japanese keyboard layout in the past. They must not see a large enough market to justify the costs.
Same problem here in NZ - they only ship to AUS, despite lots of people here being keen on their laptops. I know multiple people who have made it a point to time a trip to AUS with buying a Framework so they can pick it up while they're over there.
this looks exciting. We are allowed to choose between Windows, macOS and Linu at my job so I might consider this when we are due for an upgrade in a year or 2. Feels wrong to discard our M2 Pro machines when they are perfectly capable of my relatively minuscule workloads at the moment, it only slowed down once when I had a memory leak in Safari from a AWS tab
The expansion card system seems like something I would actually really like, especially as a hardware engineer. But the more I thought about it I couldn't really think of any compelling expansion cards that were worth the effort. So I figured I would look at what was in their store to see what other people thought up, and there isn't really any 3rd party store that I could find.
Please make a standalone case with a usb port for the keyboard trackpad! I would love to have it for when I connect the laptop to an external monitor. I hate the mouse, but I love the trackpad right under the keyboard.
Just wish they'd give the FW16 the same treatment, at least in terms of the build. You shouldn't choose a laptop based on looks but thats hitting exactly what I want, minus the 16" screen
I really like what Framwork has been doing, but I have an honest question: is 20 hours of Netflix 4k streaming at 250nit and 30% volume a spec to show off? I genuinely don't know.
I thought most modern laptops have dedicated video decode hardware that is fairly easy on battery. At only 250nit though...that seems dim by today's standards. I'm happy to be wrong though!
I think the pro is enough of an upgrade that it would pay for itself over the course of a year or so. It'd be practical and responsible for you to switch.
(Now you have to validate the next person's justification when it comes up again.)
Is there a side by side comparison for their products anywhere? I'd like to compare this to the current 16 specs. And are they planning a "Pro" version of the 16?
I don't have plans to buy a laptop in the near future, but its nice to have this as an option. I like the idea of a bespoke Linux machine I could use.
AMD Ryzen AI 400 is built on TSMC 4nm and Panther Lake is on Intel's 18A so Intel is literally a generation ahead for this product cycle and wins hands down...
But is the GPU good for anything? I'm used to Intel being completely crap and AMD actually being able to run games if you can live without 8k and 400 fps.
But that's bad in my book. I'm happy with 720p on low detail once in a while if it's a laptop. What I remember is Intel GPUS being unable to do even that.
If they caught up with AMD iGPUs, that's great. I don't do desktop replacement laptops, I prefer the ones I can hold in one hand, the dGPU is in my desktop.
Personally, I don't understand aluminum chassis. Sure, it feels more premium, but it comes with quite a bit more weight than plastic, and I much prefer less weight over "feel" when it comes to a laptop.
Plastic. Never again will I allow a laptop to be unusable after some time because of a cracked chassis that couldn't handle mechanical and thermal stress correctly. Never.
It manages heat better, with the entire chassis acting as a heatsink. Also unlike plastic, under repetetive heat/cool cycles the tolerances won't change like plastic will.
Hey let's make a very versatile laptop with tons of options for consumers, and let's not offer the other Standard Canadian French keyboard, let's just have the old one Windows forces on people.
I would love to go framework and the specs here look pretty awesome but 5g modem is a must have for me and they dont really have an option for that. I am guessing due to the antennas.
I wonder if they'll ever make a "Toughbook" type of laptop. Those things are very interesting, since you can shove drives in and out of them and it matches the spirit of what this is.
All four ports support Thunderbolt 4 - if you scroll down to "Interfaces" on the product specs page there's a graphic showing everything that's supported.
They aren't equivalent. The "shape" of the port is the same, it's (USB) Type-C. Though as far as I know most of the time you can use USB4 peripherals with TB4 ports.
Framework is cool, but Lenovo and Dell have been selling repairable enterprise laptops with Linux support for years. Some Precision/XPS laptops even have replaceable graphics cards.* It feels like they don't get nearly as much attention.
* Some will even work with graphics cards from newer laptops using the same chassis; for example, the Precision 7530 (8th gen Intel + Pascal GPUs) can be upgraded with Precision 7540 (Turing) GPUs. This isn't officially supported, though, and may not apply to later models.
So can we finally update the firmware for the Sandisk SN7100 and 850X SSDs under Linux? Last time I've checked you couldn't even download the firmware for WD 850X using a plain browser. You had to use their "special" Windows software.
In case anyone's curious, my basis for comparison is an old Dell M6600 that's magnesium and has been awesome in terms of rigidity and durability. I still use it regularly even though it's going on 15 years old! (Mainly because I haven't found a newer laptop that's similarly maintainable that I actually like). Also wish it had an option for more RAM, even if the cost is astronomical at today's prices.
I would have liked the option of non-touch display, and although the display is variable rate (30-120Hz) it's not going to be as optimal as the 1-120Hz panel in the Dell XPS 14 getting it to 40+ hours (https://x.com/dhh/status/2040139744445673938).
It’s a niche box within its own niche (Linux). Perhaps they’ll do a pivot to eco friendly slippers. I admire their manifesto, but can’t see them surviving. You can get a last year’s decent Thinkpad for $400-600 with parts galore. This thing, you buy it on principle only.
why is it so hard to find a simple keyboard layout diagram, the first full view of the keyboard I could find was flashing between different color options making it hard to see what the keys are, the first thing I think of for a “developer laptop” is what the keyboard is, feels like it should be more front-and-center (I might have just missed it though, on mobile)
As I understand it, 64 GB modules are largest LPCAMM2 modules yet released with 96 GB being announced only a couple months ago. 128 GB might be possible on the Ultra 5 325 once either sufficiently large LPCAMM2 modules have been release or if the motherboard was redesigned to support dual LPCAMM2 modules, the Ultra X7 358H and Ultra X9 388H only support 96 GB. Support for 256 GB would likely require a desktop processor, or a redesign from Intel to support a quarter terabyte of memory on a mobile processor.
Finally! Glad they will now offer something which doesn't have a bending frame.
... but I wish they would make something with a bit more screen estate without being heavy and bulky. Their 16" is just too big. I really like the Dell XPS 14 and MBP 14", which I think is the right trade-off between screen size and portability.
You can always order the pro parts along with a regular display from the regular Framework 13. Some assembly required, but the bits are all interchangeable, so you can have your non-touch display.
Alternatively, you can also "not touch" the touch display :)
sigh. I wish I knew. I've got Framework 13 (Ryzen AI 300 series) and it's battery life is absolutely awful. Won't even survive a weekend in sleep. My old, dying Dell was better.
This is the next Framework I will buy, unless AMD's AI 400 series is better.
I await a Linux-based battery test for both active work and overnight suspend consumption. I don't think suspend battery drain is vendor-specific though; AMD and Intel both shat the bed compared to Apple due to hardware decision-making.
edit: I missed this.
>7 days Standby without charging, Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
This is awesome. I like my 2 year old framework and this new RAM looks really interesting, I need to learn more.
However, the 358H processor + 64GB RAM + 1TB NVMe is $2700. Wow. Even if I sold my current AMD 7840U with 64GB of RAM it would still be quite an investment.
The biggest question I have, which is probably easily searchable: How well will this run local LLMs? Seems the RAM is fast enough.
I have to agree the keyboard layout is a noticeable bummer. The only actually impactful one I can find on this laptop on my side for now. So, props to the team still!
I hope you’re being sarcastic because if not you’re delisional to expect ECC ram in a laptop. You’re going to pile up software updates that you should absolutely reboot for long before a comic ray causes a meaningful bit flip. ECC is only worthwhile in servers and is a waste of money otherwise, especially since “pro” for laptop = prosumer device.
If you don’t reboot your laptop in years where ECC matters I’m not sure how to help you.
Hard for me to justify an Intel or even AMD chip now when not just Apple but even Qualcomm are trouncing them on single core performance. The Snapdragon X2 Elite performance cores are faster than any Intel or AMD core ever made, full stop.
Unfortunately Linux support isn't fully baked yet, but people are working on it.
It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
To be specific: There's a new lower chassis, and a new chassis top with haptic touchpad. On my older framework I could buy just the chassis top to get the new touchpad. Crazy that they could make that work.
I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations nerding out over the new devices and shouting out specific team members who did the designs. Really hope the company is doing well.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSxgCEpkiKM
> That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
It's sorta essential imo if they want to make good on their one value-prop: repairability and the good will that comes with it. If they start releasing a tonne of SKUs with a million different parts, they'll inevitably have to sunset parts at a clip that'll completely make useless their repairability claims.
I am a happy Framework laptop owner, but I paid a premium b/c I expect moves like this. If this would change, it would become just an over-priced laptop... might as well by another Thinkpad or Dell XPS.
That said, I'm super happy they apparently have the good sense to see this. Not all companies make moves in their best interests.
Parts are open source. Other people can keep making them. There's franken think pads from China that use a x61 chassis made 15 years after the release. I had a soup of them before I moved to framework for my daily drivers.
That's not open source. That's like decompiling closed source software years after support ended, in order to make a patch.
My heart sank when they said 13 pro and then to see that so much is backwards compatible was amazing. It's quite refreshing to see a company live up to their mission so well.
Yeah, really impressive to see that you can take a 13 and turn it into a 13 pro with just a few new parts.
I've just ordered my own 13 pro. I've been waiting for a laptop and this ticks all the boxes. I'd previously ordered a new dell xps laptop and ultimately returned it because the keyboard was busted. I would have kept it if I could have swapped the keyboard for a new one. The use of LPCAMM is also really nice. I've hoped to see this standard start taking flight and I'm happy to grab a product with it included.
I'm not in the market for a Windows or Linux machine myself, but the way this company operates I feel like supporting them with a purchase at some point regardless.. maybe their Desktop tower
Same, though the battery upgrade alone will be around $260 because of the new bottom cover, at that might just throw in the speaker upgrade as well for $19. Not sure if I even want a haptic touchpad at all.
Haptic trackpads are the secret sauce that make MacBooks so pleasant to use. You probably want one.
It's a matter of preferences. Actually I like trackpads that don't mind and have physical buttons. The separation between the surface that moves the pointer on screen and the surfaces that generate the clicks means that there are no misclicks and no involuntary pointer movements while clicking.
The MacBook software is so good that I’ve never had issues with misclicks or movement despite your palms sitting on it while typing.
Long ago I installed Linux on a MacBook and found it unusable because of clicks and movement while typing. It’s probably improved these days though.
It is so incredibly "weird" to press on a MacBook (non Neo) trackpad when it is off, it's like touching a dead thing.
I had palm rejection work perfectly in my 2015 laptop; for my 2022 laptop, I had to switch to Fedora for the latest software.
There is no accounting for taste. For instance, I still prefer discrete buttons over tap-clicks or multi-finger-taps, but I would accept the mild annoyance of tap clicks over the pressing down the pad itself.
Haptic schmaptic, I just want my Framework's enormous trackpad to respect deadzones and stop detecting my palms. I had to entirely disable tap-to-click, because nothing else would work.
I might have to try their preinstalled Ubuntu images or something and see if there's some secret sauce in the input configs.
Is the software that makes them so pleasant to use available on Linux?
Not a huge fan of the "force touch" trackpads on newer macs, the old man yells at the clouds. In all seriousness though I have used a pre force touch MacBook not too long ago and I prefer that experience a lot over the new one I have from work. Though the larger size of these trackpads is something I really like and where neither the older MacBook nor the the current non-pro Framework 13 come close.
Me, neither! I just had someone suggest to me yesterday that I was "holding it wrong" for preferring a real click mechanism on my trackpads.
So you if you want the newer bottom you have to upgrade the battery is what you're saying ?
More like the reverse: if you want the new battery you need a new bottom.
The new battery is physically larger, so the old bottom cannot accommodate it.
Oh right but if I want to keep everything but the chassis I can, correct ?
This page has more details, https://frame.work/laptop13pro?tab=upgrade-to-pro. You can keep everything, but they are selling some of the new parts as a kit.
Nitpick: hot swap means without powering off. Not recommended for motherboards, batteries, RAM etc. The running electricity is the "hot" part, and without that it's just "swap".
> I also just really admire the CEO for doing these semi-scripted public presentations
+1. The less-scripted plus the lack of the pretending-reality-distortion personality is such a breeze.
I have a framework 13. It looks like eventually you'll be able to upgrade the chassis to the pro one, including the battery, for under 200? Am I reading this right? That's borderline unbelievable to me
if you count all parts, bottom, keyboard, cover, battery its more like 500 to 600.
This is great! Though in my case, since i have the very first generation they made, i probably need to upgrade every part of the thing so might as well just get a new one
>It's so cool that every individual upgrade they did here can be hot-swapped back to the older designs. That's a huge extra lift that they didn't have to do.
Unfortunately, as is usual for them (edit: and it makes sense; I'm not blaming them), the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering (edit: or pre-ordering) yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping. But yes, this is amazing, and the new pieces are not things I was expecting from them. As soon as it's available, I'll be taking my relatively recent AMD mainboard and putting it in a new chassis+battery+keyboard+speakers+touchpad, possibly skipping the display (I don't care much about a touchscreen, but I do care about display quality, so I'll wait for comparisons to the current 2.8k display). My laptop will, at that point, be almost entirely in a Ship of Theseus situation: I think that only the bezel and some of the expansion cards will be from the original, first-generation laptop I bought from them. That mainboard runs a number of services for me, along with an older display. A second, newer one is waiting for RAM to be a reasonable price (since the RAM it was using is now on my current mainboard); I had planned to use it for some of my research, but maybe I'll end up putting it into this older chassis and have a spare laptop again.
That all this is possible is wonderful, and a credit to them in staying true to their stated ideals.
> Unfortunately, as is usual for them, the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping.
Why would you expect otherwise? I fully expect any OEM to place itself at the front of the queue for parts coming from its suppliers. If for some reason they sold parts before the laptops started shipping, I'd fully expect impatient customers would build complete machines from parts ahead of the shipping dates, which would wreak all kinds of havoc on logistics.
Yes, I really should have clarified: it makes sense, and I'm not blaming them. It's more just that, given their business model, and that they do intend to sell upgrade kits, I imagine that along with the people pre-ordering full laptops, there are quite a few of us who would be eager to pre-order upgrade kits or the parts to upgrade our current laptops.
Yes, black upgrade kit please. I have it linked and will be checking daily. For me with a 12th gen Intel, it will be worth it to have a new screen, battery, chassis and haptic touchpad. Hardware is just too expensive to upgrade, but the chassis would provide nice quality of life improvements.
Unfortunately, as is usual for them, the parts and upgrade kits aren't available for ordering yet, and likely won't be for some time, until the actual laptops are shipping.
It's unfortunate that they can't sell you something that hasn't been manufactured? That doesn't yet exist?
HN is really scraping the bottom of the barrel for things to complain about.
I had meant they aren't available even for pre-ordering, and likely won't be until the laptops are either regularly shipping rather than shipping in numbered batches, or are on a high-numbered batch. This could be months after the actual laptops start shipping. This is a process I've been through a few times at this point. It also wasn't really meant as a substantial complaint about Framework, and more just a mention of an understandable annoyance: it makes sense that they'd prioritize getting full laptops shipped.
On the other hand, nrp, since you're likely to be in this thread: if you had pre-orders and/or batched shipments of parts/upgrade kits, I would likely be paying a deposit or even the full price today, rather than ordering in a few months. Even if that meant ordering a full upgrade kit with a new display, but getting the upgrade sooner, I'd probably still go for it.
But they are available for pre-order though? At least here in NZ. I just ordered the AMD version, but the Intel one is available too (except the Ultra X9 which is already sold out).
The opposite upgrade kit: people with a mainboard they'd like to keep, but who want all the other upgrades. The kit is listed, but isn't available yet.
Isnt that the entire value proposition of the company?
It's kind of mind boggling to me that they have a tight chassis, AND it meets their buildable/ugpradeable/repairable goals, AND their backwards compatibility is reaching back five years now.
I think a number of people would have expected these to eventually require a trade-off. Especially coming from pc-building land, where we see new non-backwards-compatible CPU and RAM sockets every 6 or so years.
There's a version of this where Frame.work said, "Design tradeoffs mean the 13 Pro is a new platform that is largely not backwards compatible, but don't worry, the 13 series will still get 5+ years of support and parts" and everyone goes "Aw, well, I guess that's reasonable."
I really want to emphasize that it's looking like Framework is creating a laptop with _better_ backwards compatibility and build-ability than a desktop PC.
All this is to say that this is very very impressive!
Even more impressive than going back 5 years is going back all the way to the first version. While I'm a software engineer, I've worked in teams where we shipped hardware, and for a consumer product with lots of constraints including implicit expectations, going against the entire trend of the past 15 years and targeting a hard-to satisfy market segment, they far exceeded what I expected when they announced their first product.
Its backwards compatible to the first version??? How did they do this.
At some point they will still likely have to force that cut-off, but yeah, it's great that they seem to be able to stretch it for longer than most people would have expected.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where most companies pay lip service to their stated value proposition, while racing to the bottom.
Remember "Microsoft loves linux" ?
As in sells a ton in azure. I am pretty sure they still love that.
They could have done a much more minimal version and called it a day. Being able to swap individual components of the chassis into a 5 year old model is, to me, going way above and beyond.
Doing the bare minimum isn’t how brand loyalty is built.
Sadly brand loyalty isn't as valuable as one would think in a world where price and shiny-looking features tend to dominate
Every day feels like a day closer to, if not already at, a day where discerning customers are the minority.
That doesn’t negate how impressive it is
Yes, saying you will do X and then doing X is more impressive than just doing X.
Isn't it sad that we are surrounded by so many broken promises that that is remarkable
Planning is just very hard.
No, the statement is universal.
Yes but it's truly impressive to see it. It shows it can be done.
An 11th gen CPU/mobo that came out in 2020 can be dropped straight into this new chassis.
Or the newest display be can be dropped into your 2020 laptop/chassis.
I wish they booted them up in that video. Its one thing being able to plug parts in but its another for them to all work together.
Based on my experience upgrading my FW. There's probably drivers and bios updates needed to do the transfer
Back in 2002 I took the HDD from one PC, put it in a different PC, worked just fine. The worst thing that could happen is that the other one already had another disk so I had to change /etc/fstab to say "hdb" instead of "hda" and vice versa. Didn't take long for that to get fixed by specifying UUIDs and having initramfs sort it out.
IDK why it's not working for you but this should all just work without bothering with any configuration, drivers, or whatever.
> shouting out specific team members who did the designs
Inside the case somewhere on mine there was a list of all the names of the people who worked on it. Was pretty cool.
yeah.. but.. it cost more overall. i can kust buy a brand new laptop every 3y and its cheaper if i stick to other brands.
I was really hoping for 6 USB-C ports, dual NVMe, a flush bezel, a better webcam, and most of all, I was hoping for a cooling design upgrade that doesn't cause the computer to self-roast if placed on top of a sofa due to ventilation blockage. Bleh.
I saw the announcement video and I'm so relieved to hear actual honest language!
- Actually naming your inspiration as Apple
- Saying that thanks to machined body, the keyboard is actually slightly better. No overstatement, just an honest detail
- No: "This is our best laptop yet" (As if managing to not making it worse is something to be proud of)
- To the point, fast paced, clear communication
- Honestly stating that you're working hard on getting as good as "the gold standard, which of course is Apples track pad" and that you think you'll get there soon
- Clearly stating that the new memory standard is not magically your own invention somehow even though you're the first to use it
- Clearly stating the actual numbers of the battery in Wh and density AND also how many video minutes you get
- Clearly stating, not hiding but also not overstating that you started the company for the purpose of upgradeability
- Proving what you mean with examples before emphasising that "we really mean it when we say we have redesigned the computer from the ground up" (While absolutely fantastically letting the new motherboards upgrade last generation chassis!)
Result: I placed a pre-order, and kind of felt sad for this honest and clear language to apparently be rare.
As I love the idea of modular and repairable laptop, I've got some issues with it. I have Framework 13 AMD with Fedora (as Arch was almost unusable on it for me). Connecting external hardware to it, especially dock stations and monitors - which work flawlessly with another laptops - sometimes works, sometimes not...
As soon as I saw the email announcement for the 13 Pro, my face fell. My assumption was that this was a brand new, incompatible chassis, and that my current 13 would be obsolete, and if I want to go further, I'd have to buy a whole new chassis in one go. Essentially a full laptop replacement, completely betraying the entire point.
And then I click through and see the compatibility table and my jaw drops. Amazing! Yes, it's a new chassis, but all the parts that matter will fit into my old chassis. And if I want to upgrade the chassis, I can even do that piece by piece as well, not all at once.
I'm also glad to see another Intel mainboard, and one with the new, actually-powerful iGPUs. A part of me has considered over time defecting to AMD, but I'm still just more comfortable with Intel, for some reason that probably isn't rational. My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6. But I know these days it's hard to reason about real-world performance just by core count, especially with the different flavors of cores we have now.
Another worry: the thermals of the original 13 chassis have never been great, and I'm concerned that the new mainboard will throttle a bunch under load when installed in the old chassis.
At any rate, I may not upgrade this year, given RAM prices. I have 64GB of DDR4 in my current laptop, and replacing that with the same amount of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X is probably more expensive than the rest of the laptop itself.
But maybe over the next few years I'll ship-of-theseus myself into a new laptop.
I had the same emotional ride. I'm glad they've kept to the "brand promise" of being able to upgrade an old machine.
I'm two years into my fw 13 and think I'll start by upgrading the chassis. I also bought 64GB of DDR5 (it was on sale, if you can imagine such a thing) - The trackpad, speakers and battery are the parts of the machine that I don't really love so will be happy to upgrade those.
I think if I can I'll keep the silver top cover - A bit of a "I had a fw before they were cool" statement
The thermals hopefully won't be a problem, since the new Intel chips are quite efficient.
Looking at Intel's specs, it seems my current CPU has a base of 28W, boost up to 64W. The high end part Framework is selling for the 13 Pro has a base of 25W, boost to 80W.
So seems basically the same on the low end, with the new part boosting quite a bit higher. Presumably you get more perf per watt on the new CPU, but still.
I don't know what CPU you currently have but don't sleep on performance increases. If this new chip can do the same amount of work for less cycles, that's less time spent making heat.
The main problem with Framework 13 thermals is that if you just put it on top of a bed or sofa, the cloth blocks the bottom ventilation holes and the PC roasts itself with zero airflow. It's fine placed on top of a table, just not on a soft surface. I wish they would fix this glaring issue. Most normies are just going to place their laptops on the couch or bed without thinking about it.
Macbooks have a better design here. They are safe to put on top of sofas and beds. No ventilation holes on the bottom.
Normies don’t buy framework laptops.
Search this thread for the “oh but it’s so expensive, I could just buy a new laptop from any other manufacturer every 3 years and it would be cheaper” posts - those are the normies.
normie absolutely love the expansion io slots.
“wait so i can have TWO ethernet ports???”
i have been responsible for at least three fw16 sales because I got one first, and this was the biggest thing i heard
Nah. Normies needing Ethernet ports buy usb c to Ethernet adapters at Walmart or Best Buy.
Does anyone know whether the AMD chips are more performant? I like AMD more as a company, especially since I like healthy competition. I'd prefer an AMD chip if it's as efficient and performant as the Intel ones.
Absolutely don’t buy the AMD 300 series chips in the current Framework 13” lineup. Panther Lake is what you want. It’s a large leapfrog over what AMD has been offering for this product category.
You’ll get far better battery life for all use cases as well as performance that matches or beats AMD. Also, if you select the X7 you’re getting the best integrated graphics on the market that isn’t made by Apple - basically on par with the M5, and far better than the top option from Framework (HX370) while sipping battery by comparison.
I’m sure AMD will come back soon with a good answer to Panther Lake, but as of right now, it’s not what you want.
Don’t worry about AMD needing your charity, they aren’t going anywhere, they’re a more valuable company than Intel, and they’ll compete in this segment in the future. It’s just not the right buy right now.
This is a great answer, very helpful. Thanks!
My bet (I don't think there is any confirmation of it) is that the AMD board is still the one released last year. The main difference I see is that the new Intel board uses LPCAMM2 memory whereas the AMD board relies on usual socketed memory that has higher latency and is more memory hungry.
I think the term “throttling” has done some poisoning of the way we discuss laptops. It’s like a derogatory word that implies instability or something like that.
I wouldn’t think of thermal performance in laptops as “throttling,” think about it in terms of “how much power is this laptop manufacturer deciding to give the chip versus its maximum possible rating and what does that mean for me?”
Performance per watt has a massive diminishing returns curve so you often do NOT want a laptop manufacturer to push the chip to its limit.
Obviously, framework has a limitation that many other similar laptops don’t have by having one fan rather than two, but for these chips in particular I wouldn’t be very concerned as they just don’t consume enough power to create a lot of heat.
I don’t think you need to be concerned with the chassis cooling in the original versus the pro because I think most of the heat dissipation design is on the mainboard. Both versions of the laptop just have a big opening on the bottom for intake then spit out the exhaust out the back. The new chassis is unchanged in that regard.
This concept of “throttling” becomes more of a “design tradeoffs” discussion especially in the world of gaming laptops, which is why I don’t like using the term “throttling.”
Is the thin and light MacBook Pro-sized Zephyrus G14 “throttling” because its RTX 5070ti is being fed less power than a big thick Lenovo Legion? I say no, it’s just being tuned to the intended use case. No, you don’t get the “full power” of the GPU but even the thickest laptops generally don’t get that compared to desktop systems.
Some laptops do become unusable once they start thermal throttling. I have an Matebook X Pro (2020, the one with i7) which throttles to the point where I can't even properly write code in VSC anymore (I do only light web apps).
> My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6.
I was looking at benchmark comparisons between my i5-1240P which has 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, and the Ultra 5 325 which has 4 performance cores and 4 low-cache ultra low power efficiency cores.
The 325 is still faster multicore than the 1240P.
This is my plan as well, start with the chassis and find a newer mainboard second-hand. I configured a 2TB SSD and 64 GB of LPCAMM2 RAM to see the price for the new 13 pro and it was doubled from about 1500 CAD to over 3200 CAD before tax. Upgrading the mainboard, when I have a perfectly functioning (and fast) 12th gen Intel i5, is out of the question for now.
If you ever decide to buy the whole new system, buy it without memory and storage from Framework and of course DIY instead of assembled. You can get them cheaper elsewhere. They aren’t Apple-level overpriced for memory but they are noticeably overpriced.
This advice is a bit more difficult with the current LPCAMM situation. In the US, besides Framework, I was only able to find a 32GB module from Adorama, seemingly a left over new stock Crucial module that I assume must be discontinued in Crucial-branded form, or eBay. But it is far cheaper than Framework’s price ($250) and seemingly still available.
(Interestingly, Adorama’s website says that it’s “trending.”)
You’ll save at least a little bit of pocket change buying your SSD elsewhere at the very least.
I'm really looking forward to having this as the go-to laptop to recommend to devs again. The original Framework chassis was really showing it's age next to e.g. a MacBook Pro or the new XPS 14.
Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.
> Having mainline Linux on a system with 24h+ battery life in a 13" case is pretty damn impressive.
Does it have such battery life on Linux? The benchmarks, apart from suspend battery life, are for Windows.
Can't attest to framework, but after switching to an arch based syttem on my Quite low level HP Envy 13'' I get about 130% - 170% of time out of the system.
Yes, I am running mostly in dark mode now. Yes, I am using the terminal significantly more often now (80% of the time). But also I have always a browser, always Slack, WhatsApp, Obsidian and more often than not a few other things running on virtual screens.
Just the added battery life made this my daily driver. Yes - I so, so want to buy a framework. Still waiting for the multicolored international keyboards - and also the prices for memory just kill it for me right now. The system I would love to have is about 2k more than a few months ago. I just can't splurge that much right now.
unless you screen is OLED, dark-mode has no or zero impact on battery usage, maybe even non-significant impact on OLEDs
HP Envy does have OLED screen options. I'd assume it's what they have, if they thought dark mode was relevant.
Don't most LCD screens have localised dimming of the backlight these days?
Not laptops. Local dimming zones look awful when you have a white cursor moving around, so it's mostly still just a TV-feature
Looking awful has not prevented local dimming from becoming quite common on laptops. Apple has been doing an okay job of it in the MacBook Pro for several years. Lots of Windows laptops have been very hit-or-miss about it, but at least with those you often have an OLED option. I've seen multiple Windows laptops from more than one OEM where opening a terminal window with light text on a dark background means you can easily spot a single line of text getting much dimmer toward the center of the dark window, and lighter near the perimeter where it's close to other light content. And that's for static content; as you mentioned motion can bring more problems as the backlight lags behind the LCD.
I'm using CachyOS on my framework and after switching from windows gained about 30%-50% battery life depending on exactly what I'm doing.
Wow. For as long as I can remember it was usually the opposite for me. Even after configuring TLP and looking for things to tune manually with powertop, I usually didn't get battery usage quite as low as I wanted. I thought it was still typical for Windows to be better.
Are you running a DE or just a lightweight WM?
I’m running a Hyprland-based setup, so more WM/compositor than full DE, with a small bit of tuning in Arch’s power settings.
Don't see why it wouldn't - as long as pstate etc. works it should be the same. I'd argue it's probably better given that modern desktops use far less resources in the background compared to Windows
I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.
A lot of office workers these days spend a lot of time in video calls.
So to get the best battery life you need, for example, your browser to use GPU-accelerated video encoding and decoding.
Linux is something of a second-class citizen for both GPU vendors and browser vendors. So for example if you're using Firefox and an nvidia GPU on Linux? No video encode/decode acceleration for you. The browser will silently switch to CPU decoding.
This translates into worse battery life.
HW video decoding is now available and by default on in Chrome on at least Ubuntu with my Intel iGPU. I was also surprised when they turned it on under the radar. I saw this the other day debugging a problem and saw others see it too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Ubuntu/comments/1ojydv9/comment/nm8...
HW decoding works fine. But some distros (looking at you Fedora) have legal issues around providing it out of the box.
Call me crazy, but most people working typically leave their laptops wired in to either a charger or a hub so they can have more monitors. I know some people will go through the effort of charging and pulling the cord, and charging later, but most people don't want to micromanage something they can forget about while working. If you're living on battery life for a work call, it would not matter if you're on Windows, changes are high your batterly life will self-terminate quicker than you realize.
Among Linux users, long battery life is for in-office workers (who leave their desk to attend meetings) in hybrid companies (where no meetings are laptop-free) in roles that sometimes involve back-to-back meetings.
But these people would already have a company-provisioned laptop.
I thought the idea was the Framework is the company-provisioned one. Or are they letting people do corp work on personal laptops?
I don't want to maintain state on two laptops
With the right tooling, the state is minimal and gets synchronized between laptops.
CPU decoding/encoding for video means warm chassis + spinning fans. Fan noise is very annoying with video calls.
Firefox has had GPU video decoding in Linux on by default since 2023 for Intel and 2025 for AMD from what I've read
> I bet they don't publish Linux numbers because it depends on which desktop you use etc.
They ship with Ubuntu on it, which would be quite natural choice for such benchmark. Also they do do the standby test on Ubuntu for some reason.
Can't help but suspect there's a reason why Linux numbers are not given. :(
There have been fairly recent changes to the linux kernel to better support panther lake in terms of power performance. I'd suspect a major reason for holding back is because ubuntu 26.04 has not been released yet and it is using kernel 7.0 which includes these power improvements. 24.04 does not.
By the time these laptops start shipping, 26.04 should be released and testing should be easy. I suspect no major differences from it vs windows.
7.1 includes even more performance improvements for panther lake. [1]
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Enabled-Intel-FRED
If I was releasing a laptop with Linux support as a key selling point, and the battery life was bad on Ubuntu 24.04 but good on the pre-release 26.04, then I'd advertise the good figures and write "tested on Ubuntu 26.04 beta, requires Linux 7.0 or later" in the footnotes.
I definitely /wouldn't/ rely on just Windows figures for a machine that's otherwise advertised as "Linux first". If the battery life was the same on both, I'd prominently mention that.
I'm a long-time Linux user who might actually be in the market for a just-works upgradeable laptop[1] that comes with Ubuntu.
I already know that combinations of hardware and software can be stretched and tweaked to do really interesting things in really excellent ways. I don't need them to tell me that computer systems are flexible. That's just noise.
And I don't want them to tell me how their (unreleased) hardware might work in the future with some unreleased/beta software. That tends to be interpreted as speculation, or as lies and deceit.
I'd prefer to see benchmarks of how it works if it shipped today.
If those benchmarks are unsavory (as they may presently be) and thus omitted, then that's not ideal but it's okay.
I definitely don't want to feel as if I'm being lied to, in place of an omission.
[1]: I just want a 15" version. I'm not a fan of little screens. My eyes aren't getting any better.
They have a 16" version btw.
I'd be surprised. Granted, not quite apples-to-apples, but I have the original Framework 13 chassis, 13th-gen Intel mainboard, original battery, and I've never gotten more than 5 hours or so, 6, maybe, at most, on Linux. Yes, the new 13 Pro comes with a larger batter, and maybe the new mainboard is more power-efficient, but 24h+ sounds way too optimistic.
Panther lake is substantially more efficient than your 13th gen and they increased the battery capacity by 35%. They claim 20h, not 24h, and that 20h is for video watching, not general use.
Keep in mind the Ultra 300 chips also only have recent support in the kernel. The battery life likely isn't great for now (as with previous gen Intels right after release). It makes sense to me that for now the benchmarks would be Windows specific.
Ubuntu 26.04 hasn't been released yet and that's likely what they'll test on. It includes kernel 7.0 which has a bunch of the panther lake support.
DHH has been posting specific support for Framework, so maybe Omarchy/Arch is one of the main options.
Genuine question, what is it about DHH that makes you think he can move the needle on battery life for Linux?
My understanding is that he's a giant in the enterprise software space, I don't see how that would give him any clout in the hardware space.
battery life for Linux is not some grand project, it's just support and setup of existing kernel drivers, typically at the distro level - which is why it's already there for some setups
https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046677012878708834
he mentioned good numbers before, but of course you may want to wait for reviews
They have a battery live stream from 100% to 0 linked on their product page which is broken. Hopefully they'll fix it and add both linux and windows version of the test.
I don't see why it wouldn't? I have a 16" MSI laptop with an 11th gen Intel processor (known for horrible battery life), I use Arch/Hyprland and it gets 5-6 hours with a battery degraded to 68%. Which is still in the ballpark of what most users said they got on Windows when this model was new.
Linux battery life is fine and on par with (or possibly better than) Windows these days if you don't do anything silly (I'm sure some distro and DE consume silly amounts of power just because, but it doesn't have to be that way).
Based on reports about Panther Lake, the new process, plus a 13" screen and large-ish battery, I believe the battery life claims.
DHH has been using omarchy with pantherlake getting 16+ hours
Yes, it was not mentionned often in the list of complaints about the fw 13 because the chassis was good enough but my main gripe was that it felt flimsy.
Strangely it was not flimsy and held its own but it felt flimsy and to be honest I never was quite able to tell why. What one want for a premium laptop is the satisfying rigidity of a Macbook and it didn't have it.
So for me this new chassis is a banger release. It's amazing that I can just drop my "old" hardware in it and it would just work.
Rigid = premium-feeling
Strong = won't break
My Framework 13 is robust but isn't the most rigid-feeling. If I one-hand hold the laptop by the front edge it presses the touchpad clicker.
The LPCAMM2 memory is both the biggest plus for me, and the biggest challenge for it given how rare it is to find in stock, and the premium price over LPDDR5 and crazy prices of it.
Featute/performance wise the latest 13s are great for anything work related (I have this small AMD one), but the battery life is pretty awful.
I’m happy to answer questions folks have around the product (later today).
This looks suspiciously like something I could buy : a lightweight well made Linux laptop, with long battery life. I currently use a MacBook and won’t get near a windows machine.
Two questions 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens ) 2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?
Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.
I want to say as a fw13 owner that people don't realize that the 3:2 screen ratio gives you extra vertical space compared to your typical notebook and the screen does not feel small at all. That was an excellent decision from their design team.
Agreed. I have a work MBP 14" and a Framework 13, and I didn't realize until just now that they weren't the same screen size. The Framework 13 is very comfortable to use.
As other comments have noted, we have Framework Laptop 16 for folks who want bigger screens, and we had some updates for that product today too: haptic touchpad option and an entry-level Ryzen 5 version.
We've been sending pre-release hardware to developers at a bunch of distros to make sure that the core use cases like suspend/resume work as expected out of the box. You can check our general Linux support at frame.work/linux
I’m not @nrp but I think I can safely answer this one:
> 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
They make a Framework 16, so a Framework 16 Pro now suddenly seems like a possibility, but I don’t think they’re going to make a 15-inch when they have the 16.
Framework 16 is way too bulky. I would like a laptop with a similar form-factor to ThinkPad P1.
But Thinkpad P1 is 15.6"? That's very close to the Framework 16.
Thinkpad P1: W 361.8mm x D 245.7mm x H 18.4mm
Framework 16: W 356.58mm x D 270.00mm x H 17.95mm
The Framework 13 roughly matches 14" laptops from other manufacturers. It's really a 13.5", and has a taller aspect ratio than typical.
> will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
Seconding this question, though I would also be very interested in learning whether they're planning a 14" version.
Are you guys thinking about pushing to improve the linux software experience at all? To me that could almost be another selling point, if Framework 13 came with some downstream patches that improved sleep, power management, multi-display and hi-dpi monitor handling, etc.
And secondly how healthy is framework as a company, and to what extent do you make money from consumers vs sales to big companies?
Any plans to have a keyboard with a trackpoint and thumb buttons? I Don't need a trackpad.
If you add this then you'll have a new customer for life.
The trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me chained to Thinkpads.
Same here. I wonder if a third party could offer a keyboard with a trackpoint, now that the keyboard is an individually upgradeable part.
+1 to that.
I don't know how relevant is the parent argument these days, but pfu see released HHKB with trackpoint. Even despite dropping their signature topre switches, I consider this one of the best purchases. My wrists can't thank me enough.
I won't consider a laptop without one.
*patent argument
Apologies for the edit in a separate comment. But the typo was so misleading, I decided to fix it.
same
Hi! Congratulation on the launch, I hope the users will like these!
Please, I do have a question about Desktop: there have been numerous reports of noisy PSU fan and little feedback from FW [1], could you shed some light on the situation? Are you seeing noisy PSU yourself, are there plans for a fix or another PSU? I understand you wanted a separate, and thus reparable Flex ATX PSU, but maybe just one larger fan for the whole case would have worked better (c.f. Steam Machine)?
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/noisy-psu-fan/74751
Thanks!
For those of us that, say, just got a new battery months before this was announced... a while ago (I forget when), there was talk of possibly sharing designs to enable repurposing them as power banks. Any word about that?
Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am also curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)
All the battery life stats use Windows for testing. How does the equivalent Linux performance compare?
We're going to publish more Linux benchmarks as well. We have s0ix noted (7 days), and we're trying to make some more repeatable productivity-oriented workflows for Linux to use. We expect that Phoronix will publish some pretty thorough power efficiency tests too. We'll certainly be providing them with review hardware.
Thank you for supporting Phoronix. They are the #1 review I keep an eye on for linux laptops.
Thank you Nirav for everything you are doing for right-to-repair and better hardware. And, thank you for directly engaging with the community. I can't wait to update my 12th gen i5 FW 13 with a new chassis!
Always depends on your configuration but I've not had issues with arch or fedora getting comparable battery life to Windows in a long time.
First off, Framework is maybe the most exciting company I've seen over the last 5 years. My Framework 13 AMD is a wonderful machine. Thank you to your and your team for the incredible work and commitment!
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
This should answer most of your first question: https://frame.work/laptop13pro?tab=upgrade-to-pro
That's actually the part that I was getting confused by. Does everything with a yellow caution sign have to be upgraded together, or can that happen over time?
Reading it again, I'm assuming they're overtime and individual upgrades that can take place? If someone could confirm or deny that for me, I would appreciate it. I may just be overthinking this table.
Edit: yeah that's what I'm taking away after rereading this a few more times. Very impressed by the modularity on each of those parts.
Hey Nirav, congrats on the newest release and I'm really eyeing the 13 Pro.
A couple of questions:
1. How are the thermals? I've had mixed experiences with my 11th gen FW 13 throttling under load with the fan sounding noisy. It's fine if I'm alone but if I'm at a team gathering, it's noticeably loud.
2. Does the lid open with one hand?
1. Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is super efficient for video conferencing. That's a use case that Intel has specifically been optimizing for, so as long as you're using video conferencing software that leverages hardware encode/decode, which should be most of them at this point, the fan should stay off entirely.
2. We have one hand open on the lid for each generation of 13.
1. That's awesome! I assume RDP or VNC would be the same then, I use that for work primarily.
2. Huh. Well, I feel like an idiot! I always use two hands when opening the lid, muscle memory, I guess.
ps. one question you don't have to answer: for the wireless keyboard, did you guys consider something like a fingerprint sensor? I like the idea of having something like that akin to Mac's Wireless Keyboard but I don't know how much integration something like that would need.
I'm excited for the new speakers - that's been one of the biggest pain points on my 13.
- Is the Dolby Atmos configuration available for Linux as well as Windows? Or more generally, will the speakers sound as good on Linux as they do on Windows?
- Will we be able to get audio comparison samples between the old and new speakers?
Has anyone tried Qwen 3.6 35B A3B on the 370 version with plenty of ram and if so what's the best tokens per second you can get, with the ideal quant, like maybe the U GGUF at 4 bit
Q4_K_S Qwen3.5 30B-A3B runs at around 29 t/s for me on the 370 version with 64 GB of RAM, running llama.cpp without any tweaking. I haven't tried Qwen3.6 yet, but could download it tomorrow; since I have a 128GB FW Desktop at home, I tend to use that remotely rather than my laptop directly, which preserves my battery.
Really happy to see the new chassis for the 13 Pro! I own the 16 myself, and have been really happy with it, and am excited to see the haptic touchpad + unibody modules hit the marketplace. Those address the largest build quality issues I had with the device.
You probably can't comment on this, but just to note it, I would be very excited to see the 16 get a similar Pro chassis.
Does the Dolby treatment carry into Linux with comparable performance, or does "best sound" require Windows?
What's the sleep situation? I have an ancient Dell with S3, which is totally fine, and a Mac for work, which is fine, but the modern standby situation, as summarized by people who are mad about it, sounds bad.
Now that you have a custom touch-screen. How long until you release a tablet (Surface-pro-like) form factor? I'm still using my 2017 Surface Pro because the form factor is amazing, but no one has come up with anything to compete with it.
I know it's not the most ideal form factor for a repairable device, but I can dream.
Not quite the same form-factor, but they've gotten pretty close to a tablet with the Framework Laptop 12.
https://frame.work/au/en/laptop12
I would love a good Linux tablet with long battery life, repairability be damned.
I’d prefer a non-touchscreen. Touchscreen does add about 200g of weight. Is that likely to be an option?
This is an in-cell touchscreen and we didn't add cover glass. That means there is no weight impact to having it.
And no brightness impact either, right? (I think that was in the LTT video.) We always ordered thinkpads without touchscreens, but it sounds like just leaving it off in software might actually be sufficient...
Awesome! Thanks! I’d still prefer a non-touchscreen (I have no use for it) but this is good to know.
The touchscreen is backward-compatible with the old/regular FW13, so I imagine the regular FW13 screen is forward-compatible with the Pro. (Of course, I don't know if they'll sell that configuration or if you'd have to cobble it together from the marketplace.)
> Touchscreen does add about 200g of weight.
200g is weight of a smartphone, there's no way touch weighs that much.
Framework 13 Pro screen seems to have plastic surface as before, not glass-laminated (which I guess could add 200g, but it's not a requirement for laptop touchscreen)
I have two Dell xps 13, two generations apart, the newer one is touchscreen the other (older) isn’t. Guess which one weighs 1.3kg and which weighs 1.1kg.
I’ve literally never used the touchscreen.
> two generations apart
You're blaming the touchscreen for a lot here, when the explanation is likely a lot more pedestrian. Change in case molding, change in PCB size, slight change in battery size...
If they're two generations apart, then 200g difference could be hiding anywhere, but touchscreen (I really doubt it adds even 20g).
e.g. 30g in larger heatsinks, 80g in glass-laminated screen, 20g in larger battery, 40g in more stiffer chassis. 30g in aluminium top case instead of carbon fiber :)
> two generations apart
Maybe that's the reason, not the touchscreen?
Wait, so they get _heavier_ each generation?
I don’t buy it.
So you'd rather buy the far-fetched conclusion that it's the touch screens fault?
Weird.
A bigger battery is the more likely cause.
Exactly. Why would I touch my screen? My hands are on the keyboard, I'm not lifting them.
I thought I would never use one either, but whenever I use my SO's laptop with touchscreen, I keep touching the screen for "quick actions" like pausing video or starting apps or moving things around. I don't use it when I need precision, but when I need to just do one thing quickly where I don't need accuracy, I actually find it really handy.
But I wouldn't pay (much) extra for it.
Developing applications for touch devices is much nicer on a laptop with a touchscreen.
It’s not something I do. Hence - can I have one without a touchscreen?
I guess not. A touchscreen is cheap anyway, compared to many other components.
Touchscreen is one of those things that sound nice, but in my experience are not so useful. At least not for my typical use (programming, writing, even CAD design). Before having a framework 13 I had a dell xps 13 with touchscreen for about ten years. I never really had a use for it. But hey, the rest of the specs of the screen alone make it still a nice upgrade possibility for the future :)
You magnificent bastard, you know just how to suck money out of my wallet. And it's not even Christmas yet :-)
16 hours after "being happy to answer questions", most questions are left unanswered. :(
Why is the AMD version not available in LPCAMM2, and can we expect to see an LPCAMM2 version in the near future?
Probably because it's not really a brand new AMD motherboard?
I'd expect/hope to see whatever comes after Strix Halo in a Framework motherboard. That's when you should be looking for LPCAMM2 for AMD.
Not sure fhe Halo series will be LPCAMM compatible. The framework with the Halo chip is soldered.
I looked into it a little and it does seem like LPCAMM2 just can't provide that memory bandwidth through a single socket and dual socket would be overly complex to wire up. Bummer :-(
Hi nrp, what's the battery life like on the more high-end CPUs (Ultra X7 358H, Ultra X9 388H)? Are you also planning to offer a non-touch display?
Ultra X7 358H is the config we've used for most of our battery life tests, and efficiency should be very similar on the X9 config. We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
Thanks!
> We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
The reason I asked was mostly that, in my experience, touch displays tend to be glossier / less matte than non-touch ones.
What’s the display color accuracy like outside of sRGB? How much of adobe or P3 does it cover?
This is a 100% sRGB panel. We did look at expanded colorspace, but kept 100% sRGB to optimize for power consumption.
Will you produce a keyboard with full size up/down arrows?
I preordered a 13 Pro with Ryzen, which I'm already very excited about. Reading between the lines of your video announcement, though, it seems like the Intel experience might be more optimal (you pointed out Intel's new low power efficiency cores and Dolby sound being tested with Intel).
If I want the best battery life and sound possible with Linux, should I switch my preorder to Intel?
I'm also curious about these.
What I am also curious is around memory management. On the Intel, I can get at most 64Gb RAM for now, 96Gb in the future. On AMD I can get 128Gb right now. Do they differ in how they can share RAM with the GPU? Do either need me to specify how much is vRAM and how much is available to the CPU, or are them both unified, similar to how Apple Silicon does it?
for the current moment, Intel seems to be ahead of AMD for both power efficiency and iGPU performance. Panther Lake is really, really good.
There's no mention of Wi-Fi. Is the network card integrated to the new intel mainboards ?
Wi-Fi is an M.2 2230 like on each of our products. We're using Intel's BE211 module for Wi-Fi 7.
I love it, I've been waiting for years to buy a Framework, but my current laptop has so far refused to die. I think it's now finally old enough to justify upgrading.
Will the new keyboard colour schemes come to other locales? I love the orange/black/grey but probably not enough to learn American English.
French Canadian in black with the orange/grey/black please!
Question: did the hints given at https://frame.work/nextgen include any secret messages you want the public to know about? Maybe the secret was missed during the run up to today?
Hey, love that thing and I am considering to sell my current laptop to get one, but I wanted to first know if the laptop features pen/stylus support? I guess not, as it is not using a full glass cover like the 12 and otherwise it would have probably been advertised, and can we expect in the future an upgrade path towards that (by replacing only the panel or the whole top part maybe?)
Is the keyboard for the 13 pro the same?
The upgrade kits I'm seeing on the marketplace have a keyboard included.
Would it be possible to have a input cover pro, bottom cover pro, batteries pro, speakers pro and use my existing keyboard?
The keyboard is mechanically the same, but it's a new SKU because we had to move the flex tail locations to support the haptic touchpad.
Thanks for answering my question--the haptic touchpad + improved speakers alone are worth me going all in on the upgrade kit :)
I'm so excited, I was dancing after the announcement!
Tagging along: will they ever get QMK?
One pain point is writing at night the keyboard backlight has only one bright white color.
Will it be possible to change the backlight color to, f.ex. dark red?
Any word on availability for that 12-core ARM mainboard? Also for the record I’d really love a Snapdragon X2 (or later) option someday…
It's a third party mainboard right?
https://metacomputing.io/products/metacomputing-aipc?variant...
And anyway the performance of this CIX chip is really bad compared to the Snapdragon X2 or current x86 chips. Jeff Geerling has geekbench results here:
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/arm-mainboard-for-fra...
I didn’t realize they were selling it on another site, thanks for the link! (Framework has the RISC-V board on their shop, so I was expecting to see the MetaComputing one there too.)
And yeah… what I really want is some Oryon cores in a Framework 13 motherboard.
What would it take you to ship to Norway?
They do as of a few days ago!
https://frame.work/no/en
Do these laptops, either the Intel or the AMD version, work with eGPUs on Linux?
I have the 13" with AMD 7040 and eGPU worked fine, but I switched back to a SFF desktop as I couldn't git hot-swapping to work reliably and bandwidth loss over thunderbolt was a little more than I was happy with. But functionally/mechanically it worked
How well does the haptic trackpad stack up against the ones found in macbooks?
I just realised that the credit card I used to place my preorder will expire next month. Will there be an option to update my card details when I need to pay the full amount?
Yes, you'll get notified when your batch is getting ready to ship, and you can update your payment information. You can also update the default payment method in your user account any time.
Will the hinges be 360 like the laptop 12? I wonder how useful the touchscreen will be without it.
It looks like not (you'd assume they'd have called it out if it was). I really don't understand the utility of a touchscreen without a 360 degree hinge.
This is my main question as well. Either stock or with some sort of separate hinge kit, that would completely seal the deal for me.
Response from the support (according to the Framework forum):
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro Touchscreen supports touch input but does not currently support stylus input. Like other Framework Laptop 13 models, it opens with a maximum hinge angle of 180 degrees and is not designed for pen or convertible-style use.
Pretty disappointing honestly.
Any plan for a 75% keyboard?
Qmk support for the keyboard, like the Laptop 16 has?
I would love to buy one and know a bunch of others. Wonder if shipping to Japan is in the works?
Yeah, waiting for that too. They should expand the regions instead of new models. Availability is really limited.
Why LPCAMM and not SOCAMM2? What is the status of SOCAMM for laptops and would it be possible to do a SOCAMM for NVMe?
Socamm is all about data centre capacity. It starts at 128GB and you can only order it in bulk(?) from data centre providers.
On the other hand I can go to a local store and buy a stick of 32GB lpcamm2.
There's no reason they couldn't use smaller capacity modules. SOCAMM has better area efficiency and z height, both highly relevant for thin and light laptops.
There's a big reason they shouldn't do that though: Laptops have already standardized enough on LPCAMM2 for the modules to be widely available.
The form factor is only a tiny part of the RAM module price. DRAM already isn't compatible gen to gen so you might as well go with the most optimized form factor
I agree, competition and economies of scale are much larger factors. Custom RAM SKUs for a single manufacturer with no competition will obviously cost more than an industry standard part. And you'll be locked to buying RAM upgrades from framework themselves.
SOCAMM is a jedec standard nvidia is already shipping in several products.
Thanks Nirav, always appreciated :)
P.S. The printer gag was cruel, just saying.
No silver option?
There are silver pro parts on the marketplace, although I'm not sure if they're more aimed at converting a standard 13 to a pro:
https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop13pro-input-cover-ki...
https://frame.work/gb/en/products/laptop13pro-bottom-cover-k...
https://frame.work/gb/en/products/top-cover-cnc?v=FRANGKHA01 (not specifically a pro part but listed as compatible)
Any blue-sky thinking like 256GB RAM support?
I have a feeling that laptops don't keep up with the today's dev workflows.
The ram is an Intel chipset limitation, I don't know that they can do anything about it. Even AMD only goes up to 128GB now.
what’s the screen like compared to the previous fw13 options? i’m considering an upgrade (screen-only, from the first gen one)
and by the way, it’s a world where it’s hard to be a fan of any company any more and the fact that you guys remain exceptional gives me hope
for the love of god when are you going to start selling in Japan?
Why is this not offered with a decent keyboard? Proper key caps and meaningful travel.
I'll take this opportunity to report on my Framework Laptop 13 experience. I've had it for over a year.
The case is warped in multiple places. One USB C module doesn't accept a power charge reliably. It can overheat and shutdown. If the case flexes a little the trackpad stops responding - it needs to be on a flat surface. Power brick died.
On the plus side, my partner had one and when she threw it away she gave me her parts and I was able to swap some out. That was cool.
Adding to the review thread: I bought a Framework 13 in 2021. I'm sold on the ideal, I really like the chassis and the keyboard, and I _love_ the screen ratio. I replaced several parts and own every type of connector. I really liked my 13!
I just had my mainboard die, and I was advised there currently isn't another mainboard in stock that works with my old DDR4 RAM. They don't have any newer DDR5 RAM in stock apparently either, so I was out of luck and ended up buying a Lemur Pro last week.
In my experience, the Framework hardware is great but very flakey and frequently needs replacing.
Support is awful; they'll repeatedly ask you to do things you've already done (and shown proof of), they can take days to get back to you, and are generally unhelpful. They also didn't think to mention to me when I said I needed to buy a new laptop and their parts were all out of stock that they had a new machine coming out in the next week, which is insane to me. I would've been an easy convert. Sometimes I think it's bots doing the support, but if that was the case, they'd reply back faster.
Time will tell whether I'll return back to the ecosystem, but the support experience (and the hardware being poor enough that I frequently need support) is putting me off for now.
More for the review thread;
I was really sold on the idea of a repairable laptop and the Linux support was excellent. I like the laptop a lot and it happily replaced the old-skool Macbook that had served me so well over the years.
However, I had a screen die on me and that's when I found that their product support was truly appalling (even worse than Apple!) - They took ages to reply and then asking endless irrelevant questions in a very arrogant tone (version of BIOS, operating systems etc) - in the end, I gave up and bought the replacement screen myself.
I'll buy a Thinkpad next time.
To compare anecdotes, I’ve had mine for 3 years, and it’s still working great. Haven’t had any issues with it.
Depending on how warped the case is, it might or might not help, but i was having the same issues with the trackpad and it was an easy fix for me. Steps here: https://guides.frame.work/Guide/Touchpad+Rubbing+Fix+Guide/1...
In general, coming from a MacBook, I’ve had more quality issues with the framework, but fixing them has always been possible with a little digging. I’ve enjoyed the experience of learning how to take apart and fix my gear, but I’m also the sort of person who darns holes in his socks, so ymmv.
I had to fight support for multiple times over the las 3 years of having mine due to repeated issues, breach of statutory warranty and so on
I was just at an event.
The vibe I got was the quality is really bad, BUT the people who like Framework and believe in it gladly just buy another one.
Not for me though. Within 6 months we’ll see similar specs from other oems at 50 to 70% of the price
That's rough. Did you contact their support about it? I measure a lot of companies by how they handle recovering from stuff like this.
I contacted their support because my charging cable frayed and I thought I was still in warranty. Turns out I'd miscalculated and I was a year out but they replaced it for free anyway.
Their support has been very responsive and helpful every time I've contacted them so I'd be surprised if they wouldn't have helped the GP.
Hopeful that's no longer an issue with the Pro version, being made of a machined single-piece aluminum block.
How do you even warp these things? Had mine for 3y, sturdy as hell. So sturdy in fact that the only piece I've had to replace is the charger, what's the point in swappable parts now right? /s
I really want to love this thing but at least in the UK, matching specs it comes out as more expensive than the MBP - even worse when you factor in potential discounts/sales which framework doesn't offer.
Framework 13 Pro: £2064 (Ultra X7 358H, 16GB, 1TB, default ports, no adapter)
Framework 13 Pro: £2264 (Ultra X7 358H, 32GB, 1TB, default ports, no adapter)
MacBook Pro 14: £1699 (M5, 16GB, 1TB, no adapter)
MacBook Pro 14: £2099 (M5, 32GB, 1TB, no adapter)
MacBook Pro 14: £2199 (M5 Pro, 24GB, 1TB, no adapter) - added as I think it’s an even better deal
I’d just keep in mind that you’re comparing a niche product from a startup breaking into a notoriously competitive market who are also doing the harder task of making these slim devices user upgradeable to a product from one of the largest companies in the world, with a CEO that is well known for being a master of supply chain, and with all of the economies of scale.
And they’re miraculously within 10-20% of each other.
To nuance this, the more you go up in specs, the more macbook become more expensive than comparable framework. Try to compare with a 64GB framework or 2TB framework for example.
One benefit of framework is you may not need to get storage, and just go use the one in your current laptop, saving around £200. And you might even try to source the RAM on your own to save a few more. But I admit that is somewhat difficult these days haha.
We should also consider that repairability, upgradability and open hardware/software support don't come for free and are features that are worth paying for.
Does MBP run Linux? That would be the selling point for me ... But I guess I am not in a big group.
Also MBP is not really repairable at all.
> But I guess I am not in a big group.
Big enough that they specifically targeted that exact group with this laptop.
Probably a small group but worth more money.
M1 and M2 models run Asahi Linux, M3 and M4 don't run anything natively I think (but not entirely sure).
M1 and M2 run Linux but don't expect usable battery life, Thunderbolt output or a few other niceties.
Ah ofc I forgot. But iirc not everything works and battery life will probably suck, no? So not really a consideration in this case of price comparison. It is an option though :)
Personally I also can't stand the exterior design, albeit overall hardware of MBP is good. Guess if I land an old MBP this is what I'd do with it.
How is Thunderbolt or display port alt mode support?
Practically, if you have AppleCare you don't need to worry about repairability.
Yes, see https://asahilinux.org/
Would be super interested if any person on this planet uses this as the main driver.
Yes its much less annoying than macos on my m1 macbook.
I do.
I do, for work at least. Works nice aside from the lack of USB-C monitor (mine has a HDMI output so not a huge deal for me.)
In the dev branch now! https://asahilinux.org/2026/02/progress-report-6-19/
I will attempt to use Asahi as my daily driver once this is officially released.
Not the M5.
It eventually will. But OP never asked about M5 specifically.
No, but OP was comparing the pricing of brand new laptops, so it was implied that they wouldn't be M1/M2 hence not supported by Asahi.
AFAIK Asahi development needs some hypervisor features for reverse engineering macOS drivers that only exist on M1-M3 and were removed on M4+. So yeah, it may be several years until they get support (or never, if nobody steps up to do it).
Eventually in this context might be 4+ years from now.
I would love a MBP that ran Linux. I am not a fan of MacOS (though it's one of my two daily drivers).
What I really want is for other hardware vendors to catch up. I like Apple hardware but hate their software.
On macbook you could emulate windows. Inside windows emulate linux. And it would still be much faster than this framework
Name checks out.
Dumb comparison, because buying a Framework is a single transaction where I exchange money for a computer, and buying a Mac is an entrypoint to “The Ecosystem” where Apple wants to squeeze me for $<pricing_tier>/month forever.
Peep the margins on “Products” versus “Services” and you will understand what Apple's incentives are and why just selling me hardware isn't it: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/fy2026-q1/FY26_Q1_Consol...
I've bought two Apple products in my life, both Macbook Pros, one in 2014 and one in 2021. I have a Pixel phone, zero transactions in the App Store all-time, pay $0 to Apple on any kind of subscription basis. Not disagreeing with the nature of their incentive structure, but if they're intentionally crippling their hardware division somehow to squeeze me for money, they're really bad at it.
Buying a Mac is also a single transaction. Yes, they have lots of other services they want to sell you on but you're in no way obliged to take them up on it.
I don't want to use a computer whose greatest aspiration is to be a sales funnel even if I am personally strong-willed enough to say no when nagged.
You’re imagining a “greatest aspiration” that doesn’t exist. macOS has an iCloud login button in the Settings app and that’s about it.
Sorry, but you're wrong. Music-dot-app is a great example. Check out all the ways it tries to upsell you even if you just want to play local files: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anrB6fP1WeQ&t=65s
- opens to a full-page Apple Music subscription service ad on first run.
- search functionality defaults to “Apple Music” instead of “Local Library” (or “iTunes Store”) even when the user has no active subscription.
- Apple Music subscription upsell banner ad along the bottom of the search results screen, that stays on screen as you scroll the results pane.
Check out at the end when he demos Music-dot-app's Settings pane changing to include CD-ripping settings when and only when a CD drive is available, something they could also do and chose not to for Apple Music subscription service when the user isn't subscribed.
you are arguing with people who do actually use Macs by providing some random videos on youtube. How does that make sense?
macOS seriously never nags you about services. Service nags aren't classy. You can credibly accuse Apple of plenty of things, but having a lack of class isn't one.
My screenshots directory says you are wrong: https://i.ibb.co/cKjL8qcG/Screenshot-2025-02-18-at-09-07-06....
My last (and first, and only) iPhone was even worse. At one point the Settings app had no fewer than three paid-service nags at the top that I had to scroll through to even get to the first actual setting.
Storage almost full: enable iCloud Backup!
Try Apple Music, first month free!!
Activate your Apple News+ free trial!!! https://i.ibb.co/Cp275qQ9/news.webp
Image Playground isn’t a service, it’s a free local image generation model. But I’ll grant you that the News+ thing is kind of annoying. I wouldn’t call it a nag, though - it shows in the Settings anpp after you buy a new device that includes free months, while they’re still valid, then it goes away forever.
It's really not, though. You don't even need an Apple account to set up a Mac.
I pay $3/month to Apple in exchange for full-quality backups of decades of photos, but I could easily stop doing that, or switch to another provider, if I wanted to. (I don't, because $3/month is extremely fair for what I get.) I've never paid for any other Apple service and likely never will. The OS never, ever nags me about services - compare that to Windows!
Whilst you don't "need" an Apple account to setup a Mac, using a Macbook without an account may not be viable for a lot of people.
First and foremost, you cannot install any applications through the primary method of app installation, which is the App Store.
You also cannot use certain applications like iMovie (which is pre-installed) without an Apple Account.
MacOS will always prompt you in the Settings to sign in with iCloud. Opt into Betas, including Public and Developer Betas are not possible without an iCloud account.
The Apple land is miles better than the Microsoft land, which you aptly point out though.
I've never seen it stated anywhere that the App Store is the primary method for macOS. Well, I could be wrong, maybe Apple does mention it somewhere, but pretty much every popular app publisher still publishes their .dmg file directly on their own website, much like most Windows developers.
At least I've never had to use the store in my 15+ years of using MacBooks, and I can't see myself using one anytime soon, unless Apple starts forcing you to (in which case I'll just stick to using homebrew).
> or switch to another provider
Can you though? Its been a few years since I've been on apple, but being able to get anything but icloud native support in other apps was basically non-existent. Compared to android where it gives you a plethora of choice out of the box.
Yes - they're already on my computer, so any full-disk backup service will back them up by default. There's an option to purge them from disk and download from iCloud on demand, but you don't need to use it: https://support.apple.com/en-us/111762
ah fair, I was thinking on the iphone, but in fairness this is a thread about a laptop
Even on an iPhone you can back up your library to Google Photos or other services. You just can’t do so directly through Apple’s Photos app.
It's different on mobile (iOS/Android) where individual apps need special support for cloud providers. On a mac everything is just a file for most apps, so all the cloud providers work by default.
You're also locked into their ecosystem for repairs, accessories etc. all of which are more expensive than anywhere else.
What kind of accessories? You can use cheap generic USB-C docks/hubs, depending on your needs. (macOS doesn't support DP MST so depending on # of screens you want to attach, you may need a more expensive dock, though it still doesn't have to be Apple-specific).
What $/month are you forced to buy for a Mac?
If anything brakes on the Framework, you get all the docs you need to attempt a repair yourself, also spare parts are available, also, you can upgrade SSD/RAM/Mainboard and ports.
Apple: Every repair is Mainboard replacement and costs 70% of the used value of the Notebook. Upgrades are impossible. Have a nice day!
Also very sad that the M5 dominates the X7 358H in singlethreaded performance, not to mention the M5 Pro that dominates it in both single- and multithreaded performance.
Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook, so you should choose a price you want to spend and then evaluate if you prefer a Framework or a Mac at that price point. If your available spending power is too low for a Framework, you’re not getting a Framework — and, separately, if you want a Framework for some reason specific to the Framework and can afford one, then the price of a Mac isn’t relevant unless a Mac can satisfy that same reason.
> Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook
Unrelated, but never thought I’d see this kind of sentiment
It's specifically aimed at Framework, though, not PCs in general.
Framework is very much a premium brand (where the premium experience is centred on repairability/upgradeability), and don't have the economies of scale Apple do. It's natural that they'd end up being more expensive.
> not PCs in general
Yeah, I’m assuming just the one of the various tiers here that’s in the same bucket as MacBooks, and that we’re generally talking devices that are specialty-capable; such as media production or Linux development or gaming or what have you. If you lump the entire “portable screen bigger than nine? inches and with an in-box physical keyboard and pointer controller” market together, you’ll disregard ‘glorified word processors’ that cost a couple hundred bucks (before the RAM underproduction grift) in their own specialty niche. Framework isn’t competing there, right? (I could have missed something..)
> Everything that isn’t a MacBook will be more expensive than a MacBook
Imagine telling this to someone in 2010 or 2015.
It was 2012 when I realized a midrange Macbook (not Pro or Air) was actually cost competitive with my PC laptop, and switched. There have been some configurations since then!
Back then I’d probably tell you how they hold their value and were cheaper in the long run anyway.
No one was willing to hear it back then, but some guy named Buffett knew what was up :)
This is largely driven by RAM prices, which is a real shame.
I bought a Thinkpad P16s with 64 GB of LPDDR5x ram in October 2024 for just over $1100.
64 GB of LPDDR5x will add $849 to the price of a Framework 13 Pro. Thats insane. I would love a future Framework 16 Pro but that will probably run $3500 for the configuration that I would want if memory and storage prices don't come down.
You need to consider the upgradability aspect too - the next time you want to upgrade, you just need to buy a new mainboard, which would be considerably cheaper than buying a whole new laptop.
At least it's available in the UK
I've wanted to get a Framework for a long time now, but their lack of shipping to Israel (and active prevention of using Freight forwarders) has prevented me.
If they were willing to sell me the 13 Pro, I'd sell my Yoga Pro 7 in a heartbeat to replace with a 13 Pro
how would they compare over 10-15 years though. with one you are able to swap out the motherboard when you want an upgrade and with the other you have to buy a completely new device.
then when it comes to repairing broken parts they are on opposite ends of the scale where apple actually go out of their way to make it harder for you to do that and its probably more expensive as well since only apple certified repair shops have access to certain parts
> the other you have to buy a completely new device.
You can sell the old Macbook and recoup a lot of the original investment.
Comparing it to a MacBook misses the point. The reason to buy the framework is modularity, repairability, customisability. You can upgrade your CPU, add specific ports you want, change ram. You can't do any of that with a Mac.
In his presentation, Nirav compared it twice to a MacBook. Even saying they want to build the MacBook of the Linux world iirc. While I also agree with you, it’s still a valid comparison.
It's not just a valid comparison; for some of us, it's the only comparison that matters. Upgradability and repairability are really nice features, but the machine still needs to otherwise be an upgrade over the one it's replacing.
If the Framework Pro holds up in reviews and works as well with Linux as claimed, it'll probably replace my M2 Air as a daily driver. If they add Dvorak as an option so I don't have to rearrange the keys myself, that will make the choice a slam dunk.
Yeah, it is a valid comparison, and assuming the quality is close to par with a macbook, I think it would be worth the extra cost.
I'm someone who doesn't want to go through a new laptop every other year. I've got an M1 mac right now. I've owned it for 5 years and could easily see myself getting another 5 years of use out of it. Only problem is, the hard drive is small, I can't upgrade it. It only has 16 GB RAM, which is fine for now, but I can't upgrade it. One of the 2 USB C ports gave out on me. I can't repair it.
If I had a laptop that I could repair and upgrade that also ran Linux? I would absolutely pay $2k for it - as long as the quality is good - because I think I would save money in the long term by making a laptop like that last a long time.
I use thinkpad (T14s now, X1 Carbon and X220 in the past). The hard drive is just m.sata and very easy to upgrade. You really can't upgrade the disk on a Mac?
not since like 2015, they're soldered on to the mainboard
On top of it, intel chips are not competitive with apple silicon. Why buy a laptop that's 30% slower and uses more energy for the same price?
30% slower than a M5 is a M3/M4. I will take that, thank, and not concern myself with MacOS or the thousand cuts of leaving x86.
To be able to run any OS you want.
Can it run macOS?
See https://github.com/kholia/OSX-KVM
For now, yes. But probably not for the next macos release.
To avoid having to use Mac OS, and suffering the whims of Apple.
If you're even making this comparison, buy the MBP or keep looking.
Same in Germany, it ends around similar Apple and Thinkpad prices.
For reference, comparing against a budget laptop:
Leno 14.1": £300.19 (i7-8650U, 16GB, 1TB) Leno 14.1": £341.59 (i7-8650U, 32GB, 1TB)
https://aliexpress.com/item/1005010289025003.html
What I miss is a keyboard with dedicated keys for Home, End, Insert, Delete, PageUp, and PageDown. Sadly, this is still something only ThinkPads get right.
I really would like to give other laptops a chance but the substandard keyboards of most laptops are always holding me back.
yeah, why don't vendors just copy the damn thinkpad layout? It's a _pro_ line-up, we deserve a keyboard where _pros_ can directly use the keyboard shortcuts in their _pro_ apps :)
I wonder if the 13 pro uses qmk or similar for its keyboard firmware, I think the framework 16 does, so maybe? Being able to re-arrange on the hardware level the Fn-key related layer would make it the perfect laptop keyboard for me.
Otherwise, it rubs me the wrong way to pay 3 000€ for a premium device with a rather frustrating keyboard layout. But oh well, paying even more for macbook pros that have an even worse keyboard makes the pill easier to swallow I guess.
Absolutely. What I had hoped was a proper 75% layout with proper full sized up and down arrow keys.
the chassis upgrade is welcome and it is nice to see the company grow enough to start creating custom hardware, and supporting standards that should keep things modular without sacrifice.
at the same time, there is a decent level of risk with using "new" standards before the industry catches up. lpcamm2 is great and should allow faster memory while "upgradable". the issue is with only having one slot which forces you to replace memory instead of adding to it. this is working with the assumption of having a single slot, which i am happy to be proven wrong on.
the current timing is a shame but at least when one needs to shell out so much money after all, might as well get better performance and hardware along with it.
My main gripes:
- There's zero mention of the display technology, just "2.8K Touchscreen Display"
- The optional HDMI ("3rd Gen") adapter is only 4K 60hz, when the host chip has integrated Thunderbolt 4 which can output 4K 240Hz
In the announcement video, he says the display is "LTPS LCD" (I don't actually know if that's good or not)
They would have definitely advertised if it was something special like mini-LED but it seems to be a pretty standard display.
Judging by the graphics used in the launch event, it may actually be miniLED. Perhaps they aren't mentioning this so people don't compare their max 700 nits full screen brightness to other vendors' >1000 nits full screen brightness.
This page is confusing and maybe even misleading. They write "Linux first". Few paragraphs later they write: 20 hours, Netflix 4K streaming, 250nit brightness, 30% volume, Windows 11. Why didn't they stream Neflix on Ubuntu they ship with?
Overall it looks awesome. I just bought Thinkpad T14s upgrading from the same model of older generation, I wish Framework would expand its sales coverage, probably would buy it without second thought if it was available in my country without overseas shipping and customs tax hurdles.
> Why didn't they stream Neflix on Ubuntu they ship with?
It's not exactly impressive to say you can stream 20 hours of 540p video. Netflix DRM is awful for Linux users.
Though I agree it would have been better to show a benchmark of youtube or similar for Linux.
I bet the linux drivers are not fully done yet and will mature after release.
Netflix doesnt support 4k streaming on Linux.
They should have tested something else, like a raw H265 4K video or something. Can't imagine "pro" users would be amazed by the battery life of watching netflix.
4k on linux is not possible due to drm I think?
Is there an option for a keyboard with dedicated PgUp/PgDn/Home/End/Insert/Delete keys? I looked at a bunch of designs and didn't find any. If this is a developer-focused laptop, how can the keyboard be so developer-unfriendly? This is why I keep getting Lenovo laptops, they don't compromise on these keys.
I agree, ThinkPad T14 series has the perfect keyboard that I genuinely miss on my corporate HP laptop.
There are enough keys there, just configure some to your liking. That’s a software problem.
You certainly can't remap the Fn key on the software side. If the keyboard firmware allows to remap the Fn-layer it would be a dream :)
Not really. PgUp, PgDown are missing. It is possible to configure software combination that would emulate them. But emulation is emulation.
Has anyone made the jump from a Mac to Framework as a daily driver? This is the first model to get my attention as a possible candidate for a full switch to Linux.
I did last year after deciding that Apple's software just isn't for me anymore. I've always had a Linux desktop around (and used to daily drive Linux on a laptop years ago) so I was happy to consolidate on my preferred platform.
Biggest gripes I had are:
A) battery life (both during use and standby just kinda sucking on Linux in general compared to os x, not exactly framework specific but I did get used to how amazing my m1 pro for longevity)
B) the case looking nice but feeling a little flimsy
C) the speakers are pretty bad (though I did get turned on to easyeffects and there is a profile for the 13 which helped a bit)
D) macs completely spoiled me trackpad wise
It seems like they are taking a stab at all of these in some way and I'm excited to see how it goes, especially with so much being backwards compatible.
All the same gripes from me. None enough to be a deal breaker, but every once in a while I'll do something on my GFs macbook pro and be blown away by how solid it feels.
I was pleased to see that The Verge's coverage of the event [1] was very positive on the feel of the laptop (even saying they got the hinge feel right like on the macbook which was the first thing I noticed being "not quite right" with the framework when I got it). I'm optimistic that this will be a big step in the right direction.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/gadgets/915508/framework-announces-...
I use a MacBook Pro at work and a Framework 13 for personal use. The biggest downside to my Framework 13 is the low battery life; I’ve been getting only about 5 hours on Windows 11. Other than that, I like my Framework 13.
I am very excited about the Framework 13 Pro and it’s dramatically improved battery life. It’s unfortunate regarding RAM prices, though; I only paid $96 for 32GB of DDR5 RAM back in December 2023 when I ordered my Framework 13 (I bought my RAM on Newegg). It’s much more expensive today. I’d like to upgrade, but I can’t afford it at today’s RAM prices. With that said, because the RAM is still modular in the Framework 13 Pro, I could settle for a lower configuration and wait until a later date to upgrade the RAM.
If you live near a Microcenter, you can get 64GB for "only" $560 vs the $850 price on Framework's website.
Is it a LPCAMM2 module though?
You could do what I'm considering doing, which is sell my old Framework at market price. The 64GB of RAM that I bought for $200 at the same time you did is now worth almost $800 on Amazon new.
Yeah, last June. I switched from an M1 Air to a 13”, 7640U.
I’m running Fedora. Other than some h265 and heic codec/file format issues, (I’ve had to convert videos and photos to more open codec/format), it’s been a great machine.
I miss the battery life of the M1 but I enjoy the comfort of knowing I can upgrade storage or fix anything I want when needed.
Other than personal web browsing, I do web development and tinkering with music creation (Bitwig).
I don’t think I’ll ever buy another Apple machine. I want to use devices that are repairable, support those companies, and use software that is open source or multi-platform without continuing subscriptions.
Now that I’m personally invested in Linux, I’d like to contribute to desktop app projects that are open source since now, I am also a user.
I have gradually been moving my digital life away from Google and Apple/iCloud.
I switched my main home computer to the Framework 13 (albeit on Windows) in 2021, after multiple weeks with my MBP sent away for AppleCare. I had some minor electrical issues with the original 11th gen Intel motherboard, but the 13th gen Intel board I've since upgraded to has been perfect.
It's by far the best primary computer I've owned. The tradeoffs in battery life, speaker sound quality, and so on didn't matter much for my use case, so I was happy to take them; but this new model seems to fix those issues too, so I think it'll appeal to a much wider audience.
I was a Mac guy for 12+ years and switched to Linux on desktop + Framework about 2 years ago.
It takes time. On many dimensions, the Framework running Linux is laughably worse. I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
That being said, running Linux is very fun and can be productive if you choose a well-supported distribution and desktop environment. I landed on KDE Plasma and Fedora/Kununtu. It has been my daily driver and I see no reason to go back.
My gateway to Linux was buying an old Thinkpad T580 and messing around Arch Linux. If you’re on the fence, this may be a good place to start.
> I never thought about battery life while the lid is closed until my Framework.
In the days of S3, I never thought about it either. Ironically it's on my Mac that I have to remember to hibernate if I won't use my laptop for a week or whatever, because it'll die if I don't. It just happens to be that it was on a Mac on which I first tried "modern standby" features.
Anyway I feel you. This big battery life improvement is what has convinced me my next laptop can be a Framework.
I’ve been on Fedora Gnome but wonder if I’d like Plasma. I know that I can try it on a USB stick and I’ve also read that other people have made sure to install their operating system and their files on different partitions to make distro switching easier.
I did. I keep my charging cable close, or basically always attached. Battery life is abysmal. No idea why, had other Linux-based laptops before. Battery life was never good, but never this bad.
I never used a Mac for my personal machine, but I've always used them as my work machines. I purchased the first generation of the Framework 13 AMD laptops And it's been my personal machine ever since. It's a damn fine machine and I love having full control over the components in my machine without some OEM nonsense for repairs that manufacturers like Dell try to pull (wouldn't accept non-OEM batteries for me in the past).
The battery life is the biggest negative compared to a MacBook, but that seems to be better now (though I doubt it, or anyone, can compete with the power/performance that Apple is putting out now).
The issue with my advice to you though is that I prefer Linux. And I would be running Linux at work if I could. Mac OS is fine, but I do prefer Linux as my main operating system.
If I didn't specifically want to run Linux, though, I would probably be using a MacBook, despite their lack of repairability.
All that said, I really love my framework and I don't intend on buying another machine any time soon, especially because I can upgrade my Framework 5 years from now (hopefully).
I did. Linux obliterates Mac in agentic workflows.
In which way? Also, out of curiosity, are you running local LLMs? How's the general experience?
1) Reliable sandbox 2) Nixos makes it easy for agents to research, debug and patch every aspect of the system, even applying kernel patches for the sake of debugging 3) CLI-oriented toolchains. Claude spent around 17 hours trying to set up xcode publishing and in the end just told me to press the button once Organizer pops up. 4) Containers
Containers are great. But on MBP I have rancher, and a beautiful mirror-like screen, and that enormous trackpad which can fit my momma's fat ass.
No technical argument will fit with the mindset of an average dev preferring MacBook.
Tough sell, I can buy a Magic Trackpad and use it on any machine I want.
The /s should have been obvious.
I wouldn't try selling MacBooks to anyone. It's the worst popular device in terms of ergonomics, paired with OS that is incredibly hostile to developers and power users
Don't worry, they don't need help selling it
I have a MacBook Air M2. I bought a framework 13 last year right before the RAM shortage. I really wanted to love it but ended up returning it due to really bad battery life performance (NixOS). Still on the MacBook today, but heavily considering the new framework
I'm on the same Mac as you. Have you tried Asahi Linux? I am running Asahi Remix with Gnome and couldn't be happier.
I was on a Macbook Pro (multiple models for many years) and jumped to the 12th gen intel framework. It is fantastic laptop, just showing its age a bit (mostly battery life as I still have the smaller battery and 12th gen intel wasn't that great for battery).
I upgraded the screen and speakers, nothing else really needed changing throughout the years.
I was so tired of the bad docker performance on macOS that I went to a framework with Linux. Linux on a laptop (Fedora/Gnome specifically) worked so much better than I expected too.
I'm hopeful I can pre-order this new model as well.
Did you try OrbStack on macOS before switching? Wondering if it would still bother you
The new container tool is also very nice on MacOS
Tried once, not very fond of my FW 13" Intel 13th Gen 2. Mac superior in both hardware & software.
DHH spoke about precisely that move at length in his Lex Fridman interview. Which incidentally is the only full episode i have ever watched.
I’ve been a MacBook guy for almost a decade now, but I’ve been watching Framework since their first announcement. This is the most appealing Framework device I’ve seen.
The new display, battery life, the new Intel chips, and LPCAM2 memory all look great. I love my M1 MBP but Apple’s software quality has been rough the past year especially. I think this is also the first time the Framework 13 has officially supported Thunderbolt? Depending on how macOS 27 turns out I may seriously consider the 13 Pro as my next laptop. I’d slap Fedora Workstation on it and call it a day.
I was lucky enough to be at the event and I can say the 13 Pro feels great in the hand. Overall chassis stiffness, typing (I guess due to the increased chassis stiffness), and the new touchpad all feel premium. Between that and the battery life, I think this really has a chance to win over a lot more current MBP users.
FYI, the existing Framework 13 Intel motherboards do support Thunderbolt 4: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/usb-port-definition-matrix-... There's an additional, optional retimer update that's officially Thunderbolt certified, but I haven't bothered with that because my Thunderbolt dock was already working: https://knowledgebase.frame.work/en_us/framework-laptop-bios...
Why no trackpoint support yet? I saw it being requested a lot of times already. Really tired of using ThinkPads, would love to change to anything else, but trackpoint is the only thing that keeps me from switching.
Man, I want to get a Framework, but I'm held back by the lack of trackpoint. Yes, I know it's not going to happen officially, but I just can't see myself using a laptop without one. So, until someone figures out some mod or 3rd-party part I'm sticking with Thinkpads.
Dell Precision used to have track points. Now the only holdout is Thinkpad. I sometimes wonder how much the track point itself keeps that product line successful.
That being said, thinkpads are almost as upgradeable as frameworks. The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
I wonder if Lenovo has telemetry of some kind that tells them how many people use the trackpad and how often compared to the trackpad / mouse.
I'd bet a bunch of money that it's barely used anymore.
Only benefit of trackpoint nowadays is that you don't move your hand. Otherwise, it's all downsides compared to modern trackpads, especially haptic ones like here. It's less precise, less ergonomic. Nowadays I'd rather move my hand a few centimeters off, than put regular strain on my forearm and struggle being precise with the pointer.
And most thinkpad users, employees of big companies, don't care at all about the trackpoint. I'm pretty sure it's only kept for the thinkpad brand and to keep the vocal minority of us geeks pleased.
> The latest t14 received a better score from ifixit than framework for repairability (first ever to get a 10).
Hm, I wish they had scores for the X230 and older; I'd like to see how they compare. IMO they're better, if nothing else because you can replace RAM, SSD and battery without unscrewing the entire bottom.
I don't think the difference between half the bottom and entire bottom would make a difference according to ifix it. It's more about: 1. Is it possible 2. Is it documented 3. Do you need proprietary parts 4. Without solder
same
Out of sheer curiosity, why do apple devices have astronomically longer battery life when sleeping? (How is the sleep so efficient?)
I was busy with work and didn't touch my personal laptop for a few weeks and it still had well over half the battery.
They write their own software. And firmware. Other OEMs can just beg their tier 1/2 suppliers to get their shit together and put components to sleep properly by making windows, drivers, and firmware work well together.
Also things like lpddr5x, ssd controller built into the SoC with cache in unified ram (instead of running a whole ass separate computer with its own ram on an m2 stick) etc
This is it.
Sleep is such a finicky thing which requires all parts of the system to do it right.
My desktop lost the ability to sleep because I guess the nvidia drivers have decided that you are wrong to want to put things to sleep.
Exactly. This is precisely why I stopped buying Windows computers and started buying System76. Well that and the support.
Looks like Framework has started heading this direction too, which is nice to see.
Great point about the storage. That is another place where the repairability meme is really not helping. Moving the storage controller up into the host SoC is a good idea and the PC world should adopt it.
Apple's storage controller is not even a PCIe peripheral internally, so it's saving power and latency cutting out that interface, even when it's active.
I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around how this could work for PCs today.
I'm guessing Intel/AMD could integrate a single SSD controller that OEMs could use for a specially socketed SSD?
I'm not familiar enough with SSD controllers - but what limits would this introduce. I'm thinking they can't be totally generic - with any NAND chips, any layout, 1-4 chips and TLC or QLC NAND - any capacity etc. It strikes me it would be limiting - you would become restricted to a a small subset of SSDs, maybe not forwards compatible with newer NAND chips etc.
I'd think only the minority of PC Laptops would make sense to have this - ones with soldered SSDs - and I don't know many of these. So Intel/AMD would need a big push to integrate any controller. Maybe Windows ARM laptops, if the controller makes a big enough difference, will do this. I'm curious now if any Snapdragon devices are doing this already.
Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby": the CPU is running in a low power mode (not powered off like "old" S3 sleep), can be turned on periodically and can turn on other devices even when the computer is "sleeping".
My Zen2 based Lenovo laptop has 6-7 hours of battery when doing basic tasks in both Windows and Linux, but sleep on Linux lasts a week while on Windows it's empty in 24 hours.
> Mainly because Microsoft wants to have "connected standby"...
And that is OK, as long as they provide a way for you to disable it. I do not want my laptop to be doing things when I put it in sleep mode. Nothing at all. Save battery life above all else when sleeping. But Microsoft does not appear to provide a way to do that. At least none that I can see.
Macs have that too, just implemented well. In addition, CPUs with connected standby don’t have the normal sleep so even on linux they run in connected standby. Maybe its less buggy in your case? Consider yourself lucky, lots of people encounter problems with sleep on linux
> lots of people encounter problems with sleep on linux
Yeah, because they buy a Windows laptop, slap Linux on it, and expect it to work.
OSX sucks even more by this metric; it won't even install!
I was looking into hibernation on my Framework 13 with Ubuntu. Debian doesn't support it with SecureBoot enabled. Now you might say "just disable SecureBoot", but that is a whole new concept to understand.
I've found suspend performance has improved since upgrading to a kernel that supports the AMD 7640U NPU cores. I have no concrete evidence of that though.
I'm happy to accept poorer sleep performance to have a repairable laptop and Linux OSS (with good support), but I wouldn't say its problem free.
Well if you buy a Linux laptop and slap Windows on it, sleep will most likely work. Unfortunately Microsoft got preferential treatment.
And the funny thing is that with Windows 10 they completely abandoned all the software that could take advantage of connected standby
Trying to reduce idle power use of a simple esp32 based project I did a while back... Yeah it is indeed tricky. Apple having full control of their hardware supply chain, firmware and software helps a ton. And PC standardization issues do no good either.
On the other hand framework is actually in a good position to do something about it. Similar to valve. I think they do have more control than a regular PC vendor when also using Linux ad they have a very limited portfolio of devices and can actually upstream software fixes.
I think it's just a vertical integration thing. They know what's in the machine and they can make sure that their suspend path puts every peripheral to sleep. Linux has no idea what's in your machine and there may be some device in there somewhere that freaks out if the machine goes to sleep without saying goodnight. Even a 50mW draw will destroy the suspend power budget. Chromebooks have similar vertical integration with respect to ChromeOS and they also enjoy long sleep life. Hypothetically an integrator like Framework can also guarantee this but I can't vouch for it being true, and they would not have any control over Ubuntu updates after the laptop is delivered to the customer.
Just to beat my favorite dead horse, this is why the insistence on SO-DIMMs "BEcAuse it's rEpAIrAble" has wrecked the reputation of a lot of laptops. DDR on a stick is fundamentally hostile to sleep power draw. Soldered-down LPDDR memory has always been massively superior for energy savings, and LP-CAMM finally solves the issue.
How does soldering memory help reduce sleep power consumption vs. using a socket? What is different other than how they are physically connected to the board?
It's not the form factor itself that is the problem. LPDDR is more efficient for various reasons and cannot be on a DIMM. It physically will not work with a socket. That is the problem that LP-CAMM solves: LPDDR but still removable.
You did not answer the question.
Did I not? I'm trying my best here. The question is sort of off-target, though. What I am trying to say is: 1) DDR uses more power than LPDDR; 2) LPDDR cannot work on a DIMM socket, because of its lower voltage signals, and other reasons; 3) SO-DIMMs always contain the higher power DDR; QED) if you insist on SO-DIMMs, then you have to spend more energy.
Rohansi was basically asking 'why', you keep on reiterating that DDR uses more power than LPDDR, but fail to answer why this is the case. Is it clock speed? Is it voltage? Is it a protocol/specification difference? 'various reasons' is not an answer.
There is no physics based reason why it couldn't work. If the industry really wanted to do it they could. But they don't. The primary reason is LPDDR just has too many pins. A DDR5 SODIMM has 262 pins and is an unwieldy beast. LPDDR5 has 644 pins.
LPCAMM2 really shows the trade-offs. It adds a lot of bulk and cost, and repairability hasn't been valued high enough by the market to cover that overhead for most consumers. That's why Micron exited the market they played a big part in founding.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/95078/lpcamm2-memory-is-finally-...
LPDDR is very different from DDR so I don't really feel like diving into it in this tiny box. It has its own oscillators so the CPU doesn't have to clock it while asleep; it adaptively refreshes less often according to temperature; during self-refresh the cells are charged to a lower voltage that wouldn't really work for high-speed I/O but works fine for retention.
TIL LPCAMM2 exists. What an awesome solution to allow memory replacements while meeting all of the other requirements for laptops.
Well to be fair they only kind of quasi-exist for consumers right now. As far as I can tell Crucial was providing the only consumer accessible lpcamm2 modules on the market right now.
Crucial is certainly the only option that comes up looking on amazon or newegg right now. Lenovo has some OEM modules but they are obviously marketed as replacement parts to just their laptops, not sure how the warranty and support for them would be outside a lenovo product.
But the Crucial brand was unceremoniously sacrificed by Micron to the AI gods at the beginning of this year. So will these lpcamm2 modules even be available once current stock runs out? The 64gb module is already sitting at $1000 on newegg.
Samsung is making lpcamm2 modules but no telling when those will actually hit the market and be accessible.
It doesn't meet all of them. AMD considered it for Strix Halo but said it didn't meet their latency requirements.
LPCAMM2 latency should be the same as soldered. The problem is that Strix Halo wants a L-shaped memory layout and LPCAMMs are straight.
I really wish this had a 4K display option. As someone who dislikes fractional scaling.
I'm clinging on to my older Thinkpad X1 because the 4K display is so good.
Doesn't it work perfectly with a 2880px-wide display with 2x scaling?
It just, just not enough real estate!
As a heavy fractional scaling user, as long as the display has enough DPI, it's a non-issue. At my last job I was happily running 1.35 scaling, and I run my TV at 1.5 scaling. Make sure you're using a sane compositor, which excludes DWM; most Wayland compositors should run just fine.
Glad it works for you. It runs fine, but details become blurry as they get spread across pixels,
I do UI design, so I find it important to see things in full fidelity (no pixel smudging).
Well I'd argue it'd help you to make designs that don't require perfect pixel alignments to look good, the same way developers should run crappy 10 year old computers. But that's the sadistic way. Anything graphics-related does require 1:1 display.
However, to be fair, that's only at lower DPIs smudging's an issue. Anything retina-ish and integer scaling loses all meaning. I'm typing this on a 15" 4K laptop on 1.75 scaling with HN set to 120% zoom. At those DPIs, it does not matter at all. I adjust most websites zoom level because a lot of them think the content must breathe, while I think I should not fiddle with my scroll to read a paragraph.
Forget fractional scaling, just keep scale at 100% and increase font and icon sizes.
Which is something like 2/3rds successful in my experience (I use this daily), and requires tons of fiddling to get things looking even mostly reasonable (lots of misalignments and funky padding otherwise). And lots of applications don't respect it and you're stuck with too-small controls when it fails. Which makes it a noticeably-worse success rate than fractional scaling, afaict.
I still use it because the end result on some of my most-used applications is nicer, and it seems to be slightly-noticeably better performing (on a high framerate screen). So it's good enough for my tastes. But it really isn't anything I'd call "successful".
on omarchy ill switch with super + / and use 1x, 1.6x and 2x when needed.
1.6x works surprisingly well now, that wasnt the case a couple years ago
Oh my god, yet _another_ "developer-focused" laptop with full-sized left/right arrow keys, which are an absolutely miserable experience to actually use.
How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
( Yes, I know they used full-sized keys for a while, I moaned and cursed them at the time as well.)
?
Sorry, I've never seen this perspective, why do you want the smaller ones? The small arrow keys on my MacBook are one of my least favorite parts of the keyboard.
You want the smaller ones so you can easily locate the arrow key cluster without having to look. The empty space above the left and right arrow keys is a good tactile indicator that your fingers are on the correct location.
> How is it that Apple is the only company these days() that consistently gets this right?
Thinkpads also do this right, and have a way better keyboard layout than macbooks actually :)
I agree with you that having full height left-right and half-sized up-down is a pain, because of the inconsistency.
The problem I have with laptop keyboard is that the arrow key height is too small, and the cluster itself is too crowded to sit my fingers on comfortably when using arrows. I want the arrow cluster to have full sized keys.
Real developers use hjkl, which, if this keyboard uses QMK like their previous ones, you can just remap to actual arrows (with a modifier key). I am only slightly joking.
The modern Thinkpad arrow cluster spoils me; most other laptops leave me reaching for a convenient pgup/pgdn key that doesn't exist.
I'd much rather see something like that, going back to Fn+up/dn makes me feel like a caveman.
I'm amazed looking at the upgrade kit. It's everything you need to go from the old 13" to the Pro; including chassis, display, battery, keyboard etc - listed at $255. That's an instant buy from me.
https://frame.work/sg/en/products/framework-laptop-13-pro-ch...
This doesn't sound quite right, I think they put a wrong price there.
Bottom cover alone goes for more than that, even without battery or speakers: https://frame.work/sg/en/products/laptop13pro-bottom-cover-k...
So does the screen: https://frame.work/sg/en/products/laptop13pro-display-kit
Agreed - $255 sounded too good to be true. Fingers crossed it doesn't end up too crazy, because that chassis looks good!
Same... I bought a 13 last year, super happy with it but was kind of sad after seeing this release because this new design is just so much better and addresses all the concerns I had with the machine... until I saw this.
Fuck I do love these guys! Give me a little hope in humanity.
Will definitely buy this new chasis as soon as I can!
For me, this was an immediate buy.
Everything about this is what I've been looking for in a Linux laptop. (Also, how refreshing is it to not have to think hard about how much RAM you might need over the next few years because you know you can always upgrade it later?)
Or, another way to think about this: "buy more ram when it becomes more affordable"
Nice upgrades, but no mention of ECC RAM, the single thing that I wanted from an upgrade for a decade? Why do chip makers refuse to take our money? :-P
A few years ago we were told only "Pro" parts have ECC: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37828168
to be fair, your money isn't as good as VC money for RAM at the moment
Are Nvidia using ecc ram? If not this should mean it is less supply constrained than regular ram.
I'm open to being wrong, but so far as I understand it ECC mostly lives at the controller level and shares the same DRAM chips across all forms of server memory (including non-ecc), which is why we see price increases across all sectors including consumer.
Those DRAM chips being the bottleneck that would require hard to build new silicon fabs to increase supply.
Do mobile CPU's and northbridges support ECC?
Handheld mobile no. Laptops could, but rarely/never do due to policy not technical requirements.
The whole page advertises how well this runs Linux, but then…
> The side-firing speakers are tuned with Dolby Atmos® to deliver clear, balanced audio on Windows
Don't forget literally all the battery values are specified as Windows 11.
Not literally all; they say
> 7 days
> Standby without charging
> Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
(I'm unimpressed with listing all the "active" battery life listings with Windows, mind; I just want us to be precise in our criticisms.)
I don't want "standby", I want suspend where the only power usage is keeping the ram alive...
Can you really blame them for that?
Yes. Easily. If you proclaim up front that a device is "Linux first", it seems reasonable to suggest that maybe you should tell us about its performance on Linux.
Yeah I mean I don't think they want to say because the numbers are going to be bad, and it's probably not within their power to fix it.
They should probably give the Linux numbers after the Windows ones at least tbf, even if they are bad.
I am much more likely to fault them for omitting important information specifically to hide a weak point of the product rather than out of laziness.
It's not a weak point of their product; it's a weak point of Linux.
In my experience, Linux support on Framework is worse than on a typical ThinkPad, and they don't have much interest in contributing to the ecosystem like System76 does. They still make good products, I'm just very unimpressed with the Linux marketing.
For me it’s very much “it just works” with pretty much every distro I try. I had to configure zero hardware. How much better am I supposed to expect it to be?
They financially sponsor Linux/OSS projects and give them laptops to test on. What more do you want them to do?
They don’t have a zillion employees like Lenovo who is the #1 volume computer company in the world.
Finally, IMO, System76 is a much worse example because they aren’t focusing on the things Linux needs to grow. Linux doesn’t need contributions like their their silly Ubuntu reskin distro to be popular on the desktop. Instead, Linux needs a company making compatible hardware that is good, attractive hardware that will stop people from buying a MacBook instead.
The System76 lineup is a complete mess of white label Clevo systems. They have no business offering 8 different laptop models. That just tells potential customers “wow, buying a Linux laptop is a lot more complicated than buying a Mac!”
I agree with you, it would have been nice if their speakers had dedicated hardware to drive them instead of the magical dolby software.
All laptop speakers sound like shit on Linux. I'm sure people will reply with their anecdotal evidence, or pretend that it's not that bad once you have a good EQ. But we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I've spent hours trying to get multiple laptop speakers at least half as good as they sound on Windows. No success. And I'm talking thinkpads, dell xps, the usual linux go-tos, not some exotic stuff.
Maybe you have very niche needs, but for most of us speakers on laptops are never great and they're not really there for that. Reminds me of people shopping for high performance scooters. I mean, you're riding a scooter... it's not meant for that.
If you are an avid Linux user, you should know that this kind of Criticism is not on point.
Battery life? Should they share all possible config combinations? Should they share the most power-saving setting (and then be blamed for sharing numbers that almost no one gets to reproduce?)
As a Linux user on an AMD FW my battery life is good enough (7ish hours of work), and I never felt I need to tune it further from the OOB Fedora Kinoite.
They should share the battery life numbers of default shipping configuration while running Linux with whatever settings they want. Then publish the configuration and settings. Same as every other manufacturer.
i.e. https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro/specs/#footnote-5
Well you know how it is on linux, one wrong move and pulseaudio needs restarting lol.
Who does still run pulseaudio when pipewire exists?
People using LTS releases, who do you know... actual work instead of just compiling your kernel over and over.
An LTS releases that are soo old usually run on servers, where pulseaudio is not really a thing.
My distro's compile farm compiles kernels for me (thanks guys!), and switched to pipewire years ago.
Edit: This is incorrect, as pointed out below.
Pulseaudio still does the device juggling etc on most systems even when there's a pipewire backend.
Wrong. Pipewire is pulseaudio-compatible, and the device juggling is done by wireplumber
Are you sure? On every device I could quickly reach (Gentoo, NixOS, Pop OS, all with vanilla/default pipewire configs), `ps aux |grep -i pulse` only turns up pipewire-pulse.
At least pulseaudio is pretty much dead now and we have pipewire.
https://xkcd.com/927/
That is a problem that Linux has, but this is actually one time that it really isn't. Pipewire is flat-out better than pulse, while including sufficient compatibility that it really does just supersede the thing.
Yeah pretty funny when apps are using alsa, pulseaudio and pipewire all on the same system!
These are cool laptops. But, after getting a decent config (32gb ram, 1tb ssd, 7 series chip), the price is ~$2300. At that point, a MacBook Pro seems like a better choice. I'd not want to develop on anything less than that config. The selling point seems to be the Linux + Framework brand + highly customizable machine you can actually own
I've always wondered if these laptops can scale beyond the enthusiast group. If so, how?
14" macbook pro with those specs is ~2100. 200 dollar delta for repair-ability seems acceptable to me.
I'd pay $200 to run Linux. The repairability is a bonus.
It's $200 cheaper than that for that configuration with Linux instead, only $2100.
Oooh, no contest then. I'm definitely getting one to replace my previous Framework.
This is a tough one because a macbook pro hooks you into the apple ecosystem and makes apple money. Let alone the macbook neo.
This is like the really cheap televisions that harvest your data for profit.
How can you compete/compare against vizio if it makes more on your data than on the television?
So I got a 13" MacBook Air recently. It didn't require me to log into iCloud, but I did cause I wanted some things synced, which is free cause I'm not uploading photos. I don't buy anything from the Mac App Store cause why. The OS lets me run anything I want on it. The hardware technically doesn't care what OS it runs, though nothing else really works unless you count Asahi. In what way am I locked into generating them more money?
But you can upgrade it later by swapping parts and not buying a new machine, so it should be cheaper in the long run.
I am sure many will jump in here to talk about the upgradability story, but for me personally I do not think of Macbooks as a serious alternative either way. Even if I could get over not being able to replace my hard drive or RAM, I would still have to be OK using a proprietary OS I can't control, designed by people who just want to keep extracting my money ultimately.
Having something called an "App Store" on my personal laptop I can't remove.. I'd deal with having 4gb of RAM before I lived that reality.
Man, this looks really, really impressive. It basically solves every issue we could find to the framework 13. Can't wait for the reviews.
Accepting the prices of the ram shortage era is still painful, but even with the 64gb option, here in France it's still a great deal compared to similarly configured premium thinkpads or macbook pros.
Ohh they finally ship to New Zealand. It's a shame they wouldn't last year, and I ended up with a Lenovo :/
From what I can ascertain, the new bigger battery is incompatible with the old chassis: https://frame.work/products/pro-battery-74wh
"This product can only be used with both the Framework Laptop 13 Pro Bottom Cover and Framework Laptop 13 Pro Input Cover."
I applaud that the mainboard and keyboard are backwards compatible, but I don't think the pro is quite as backwards compatible as some are thinking
They actually call out this specific incompatibility in the video here (at 2m44s): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JSxgCEpkiKM&t=2m44s
Mainly just a trade-off because of because of the bigger battery (but it sounds like they'll sell you the bottom chassis pieces as well).
Yup. Sounds right. Interestingly though, you can use the new input cover with the older frames.
I really wish they'd do a tablet / MS Surface alternative. After the Laptop 12 the experience should be there. The demand is real and the current landscape looks dire. Alone the people who say they'd love an iPad Pro with a real OS on it.
Here is a more explanatory video what's new and how it looks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnOpIQJnYWU
I'll be excited to buy one of these (or the newer iteration) if component prices ever return to pre-2025 levels. AUD$800 for 32GB RAM is insanity (which is of course not within their control, but my purchasing impulses are - at least for now).
Is Framework open to an OLED panel option in the future? I have an eye disease that makes extremely high contrast and extremely deep blacks very helpful to me, since it means I can get good contrast with less total light. I can still read LCD displays well enough, but as my eyes worsen, that may not be true.
Since Framework has a great track record with display upgradability, just an indication that there is serious interest in OLED options in the future would be enough to sell me.
So if anyone at Framework is reading this: is there any opposition inside framework to OLED? Any fundamental constraints that make OLED panels unlikely for the next several years?
Why do I need a touchscreen and Dolby Atmos as developer?
Finally a haptic trackpad. Unfortunately not having one was a dealbreaker when purchasing my laptop last year, but next upgrade I'll be able to consider them again.
Part of me was hoping there would be some sort of official arm mainboard announced, I know there's the third party version but they don't seem to sell the main board only.
How is ubuntu support for touchscreens these days?
How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness, and for native-feeling integration with ubuntu?
I am, naturally, a bit skeptical that touchscreen UI would be any good in linux.
It supports them via libinput.
Everything around actually a Linux device with a touchscreen sucks.
Like on-screen keyboard will be inconsistent depending on the framework of the app.
comparing to iOS which was built from the ground up around that input method is simply not fair lol.
> How is ubuntu support for touchscreens these days?
GNOME supports multitouch gestures, and the GTK4 toolkit is overall very touch-native. It strikes a nice balance between overpadded and touch-accessible, IMO: https://www.gnome.org/
(some of the newer Libadwaita widgets that GNOME is using: https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/wid... )
> How does it compare to an ipad in terms of fidelity / responsiveness
With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
> GNOME supports
I've heard that there's *support* -but is the experience of having a touchscreen on an ubuntu device actually usable and good?
For example some random GUI app you're likely to use on ubuntu is the experience not broken?
I guess Chrome is the first thing that comes to mind.
My only issue with Chrome on touchscreen was the lack of 1:1 scroll/zoom gestures. As a Firefox user it was something that I got used to, but I just updated Chromium and apparently that's been fixed now too.
Besides that, it all works about as well as you'd expect it to. You can drag the window around by the tab bar and tap-and-hold to pull up a context menu.
>With Wayland, it's borderline identical.
Come on lol. I have a couple steam decks and both are really clunky.
Most applications are not built using GTK4 nor Qt6 for that matter.
On my steam deck the keyboard never pops up by itself so I have to use a key combination and it feels like I am moving a ghost mouse around the place (rather than proper touch screen support)
I ran gnome on the deck for a while but anyway the on-screen keyboard provided by the gnome sucked so bad that I gave up (sucked as in, it groups all the keys around the center of the screen tightly together and very small)
I also have an M1 iPad Pro. No comparison because those issues simply don’t exist on iOS.
I don't know what to tell you. I'm running it on the desktop with a drawing tablet, Magic Trackpad and oodles of apps, and it's not noticeably different from the stability of iPadOS.
My touchscreen laptop is closing in on being a decade old (i7 6600u) and the worst thing I can say about the experience is that it VSyncs down to 30fps during more taxing animations (just like my iPad does).
There is a whole section on touchscreen annoyances from the Linux Surface project: https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface/wiki/Installa...
> Any gesture functionality is dependent on the software you are running. This includes both, the application (e.g. Firefox) and the desktop environment (e.g. GNOME). The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
I love Linux but no need to embellish the current state imo
I am glad that it is working really well for you though
> There is a whole section on touchscreen annoyances from the Linux Surface project
Taking a quick look, all of the things they list are basically reiterating what I've already said vis-a-vis Wayland:
> The driver can only provide a set of input coordinates to the applications. By default, the system will behave as if you've clicked at the point of a single touch, or mouse-button dragged when you single-finger drag.
Yeah no. All of this depends on everything up to the application.
A gtk2 application will have no support for anything. A GTK3 application running on xwayland will have poorer support as well. And anyway most applications just treat the touchscreen as an invisible pointer as it says there.
Just to give an example of some basic thing that doesn’t work reliably: you can’t reliably use a long press gesture. In most apps that will be equivalent to holding the left click (aka does nothing but a long click). On iOS you will get a contextual menu to select/format text or whatever. (You can find a real report of this issue here: https://www.reddit.com/r/kde/s/crLHZhHkuM - “how do I right click using the touchscreen?” from barely 6 months ago)
Your claim that this is an equivalent experience to an iPad is just false.
I’ve been around long enough to remember setting up TouchEgg, the situation is better now but still not equivalent at all.
Anyway originally I wanted to reply to provide balance to your take so casual readers wouldn’t install Linux on their tablets and expect iPadOS. I think that has been sufficiently achieved by this comment chain, readers can choose which side to take :-)
Cheers!
A laptop without a unified memory model is categorically incapable of being the "ultimate developer laptop". Framework already have Strix Halo machines, I don't know why they felt the need to hamstring this thing with Intel.
Where are you getting that this doesn't have a unified memory model? This laptop uses an iGPU with shared memory.
FWIW, the ordering page lets you also choose AMD Ryzen 350 / HX 370. It's not the Strix Halo chips you're hoping for, but it is something.
Hilariously, those AMD chips are way behind the Intels in terms of memory.
First off, I believe that Intel has its memory far more "unified". AMD typically has a stricter VRAM/RAM 'tradeoff' setting that does not exist on Intel in the same way to my knowledge. (See how on Strix Halo systems, there is a thing about "allocating" 96 GB to the GPU, which seems to be needed sometimes but prevents the CPU from accessing that memory.)
Secondly, the Panther Lake board has LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 memory at 7467 MT/s, while the AMD boards are stuck with DDR5 SODIMMs at a meagre 5600 MT/s. In other words, the Intel board gets a third more memory bandwidth!
I’ve got the Framework desktop with strix halo. You can reserve memory for the GPU, but it’s straightforward at least on Linux to have the GPU dynamically grab memory as needed. I’ve got my VRAM set to 512MB and regularly use 120GB+for AI stuff.
Really? Because I did look through the entire spec list they provided and didnt see any non-Intel. Didnt get to the order screen since it was behind a waitlist sign up. I agree, that is better then nothing.
It's now new, it's the motherboard they already ship with the regular FW13. Because the bits are mostly interchangeable, they just let you order the FW13 Pro with the AMD motherboard.
Awesome, thats good news. I have a FW Desktop with the 395+ in it and have generally been impressed with it. Hoping that will eventually make its way into these machines.
I will guess for linux. Most out of the box linux laptops I saw were intel based. I guess open source support of intel is best among others in the industry. Even in my current thinkpad first thing I did was to replace its wifi module from realtek to intel (realtek was always hanging/dropping connection etc).
Why?
Running local AI requires unified memory.
The iGP can access shared memory the same as with any modern system. I'm confused where you got this idea from.
There is a huge difference between on-die and off-die memory. Where that shared memory is located matters immensely.
Assuming you're referring to Apple Silicon's memory bandwidth, that is not necessarily because the memory is on-die. The bandwidth comes from having more channels to access memory. This gives the SoC a wider bus to increase throughput vs. your typical x86 system with two channels. For whatever reasons Intel/AMD decided that two channels is all the typical consumer chips can support now so it's on them.
On laptops right? Weve seen more channels for years elsewhere
Yes, on laptops, but even on most desktops now too. Higher number of channels is getting more limited to server systems.
Ah I see, thanks for breaking it down.
You mentioned Strix Halo, which also has off-die memory. Strix Halo does have a real advantage from its wider memory bus (four channels for 256 bit instead of 128 bit), but Strix Point is equivalent-ish to Intel's platforms like Panther Lake or Arrow Lake in terms of memory setup.
In fact, Intel also had Lunar Lake, which had on-package memory. However, it was still limited to 128-bit dual-channel, so there weren't really many performance benefits; it did however help with power efficiency.
I appreciate everyone's corrections here, my apologies. I clearly misunderstood the situation.
Macs or other competing systems don't have on-die memory.
(Except for the caches, which everybody has)
Nonsense, Apple has on package memory and the primary reason for that is overall packaging and layout not performance
It is much slower, but still possible to run on ram
There is no VRAM in this laptop so how is it not unified? The CPU and GPU both share the same memory.
Quick search shows LPCAMM2 at 7500MT/s is about 120GB/s, which seems about on par with M4 base and a bit better than DDR5.
BTW as an AMD fanboy and stockholder, Intel's latest generation of CPUs is quality.
> hamstring this thing with Intel.
Have you missed all the recent Intel news or something?
What are the news recently?
Well, Intel was kind of in the dumps because their process fell behind. They didn't bet on EUV and got leapfrogged by TSMC and Samsung who did use ASML's EUV technology.
They eventually got on the EUV train and were the first customer to receive ASML's current state of the art machine which they call high-NA EUV. Intel's 18A process is the first to use this machine as part of the manufacturing process, Panther Lake uses this process so now they're right back to being SOTA.
All the news about them (stock price movements, theories about them going bankrupt, Panther Lake, etc...) for the last 2 years has essentially been people betting on whether or not they can successfully incorporate SOTA ASML machines into their manufacturing.
Gotta be honest, I have. I'm still living in a world where AMD is superior, but that may not be the case today?
For laptops Lunar lake and Panther lake addressed many issues and brought x86 power consumption to Apple Silicon levels.
Is that true? Many other comments in this thread are saying Apple Silicon has something like 30% better efficiency/battery life.
Apple Silicon had a process node advantage over the Core 100 and 200 series due to having a better allocation with TSMC.
Now Intel's process node is also SOTA and on par with TSMC 2nm so they should be more or less equivalent and the only differences down to what set of compromises they make in the design of the chips.
Wish it supported coreboot. It seems hard to find modern hardware that does.
Some System76 SKUs have Coreboot now, e.g. https://system76.com/laptops/darter-pro
Macbook Pro 14" with M5, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD = $2,099.00
Framework Pro 13" DIY AMD Ryzen 7 350, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD = $2,049.00
Framework Pro 13" Pre-Built AMD Ryzen 7 350, 32GB RAM, 1TB HDD = $2,059.00
Your MBP's keyboard breaks? €730[1]
Your FW's Keyboard breaks? Original price you paid, bonus: you can just buy the newest model.
You want to upgrade anything in your MBP? "You know, with how thin, lightweight and fast they are, it's physically impossible to make them user-serviceable"
On the FW? They gave you the one tool you needed when you purchased your laptop.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47822483
CTRL+F keyboard on your link. Not found.
Why are you lying? That price is to replace the main board.
Give us the price of the Framework's mainboard if you want to compare that.
> Why are you lying? That price is to replace the main board.
They aren't lying. Apple's OEM keyboard repair will charge you for the entire topcase assembly, which can easily crest $500.
Contrast this with Framework or Thinkpad where a keyboard replacement is $20 and 5 minutes of screw work: https://www.ebay.com/itm/286053777254
The unevenly sized arrow keys still prevent me from buying any of it.
I am more hung up on not having ctrl/alt/super on the right side
Hear, hear!
You can get a new Asus P16 ProArt with 5070 for exact same price (AI 370, 2TB drive, 64GB RAM)
16" inch laptop with a tkl keyboard and an AMD chip - why don't we have more of them on the market?
No Ryzen options? Also no 1600nits display for working outside. Battery and display brightness are the only reasons I'm sticking with Macbook Pro.Sad it's not a priority for any other manufacturer. Because that's all you need, quality display, battery and remote access.
Intel got a lot of attention during the keynote, but the Ryzen AI 300 series mainboards are available if you want them. It's one of the first few choices in the configuration flow.
Cool, though I'd prefer a Framework 12 Pro (convertible, or even a detachable) with a Wacom EMR digitizer.
I would be really interested in a podcast with the CEO where he goes a bit into the trade-offs of backwards and forwards compatibility. I can not imagine that their planning was so immaculate that there aren't any regressions that a clean slate design could have cleaned up. Nevertheless, amazing job for putting this together it looks like a phenomenal product!
Depending on how good that haptic trackpad is, this could be a real Macbook Pro competitor. 32GB of RAM on my M1 Pro is starting to feel a bit cramped.
I've been super happy with my Framework desktop. And since getting that I've been craving replacing my MacBook... This looks super attractive
If Framework offered MacOS keyboard layout I’d switch without a thought.
> Watch a Framework Laptop 13 Pro battery go from 100% to 0%. Live.
Live stream is not available.
It's unfortunate that I am unable to access these new products because Framework does not ship to Japan. I have an original Framework 13 that's CPU fan has been making death noises. There is also a broken screw mount in the base.
I didn't do shipment forwarding. I just bought the product and later moved to Japan. Also, Framework supposedly blocks shipment forwarding.
It's odd, because I remember them advertising a Japanese keyboard layout in the past. They must not see a large enough market to justify the costs.
Same problem here in NZ - they only ship to AUS, despite lots of people here being keen on their laptops. I know multiple people who have made it a point to time a trip to AUS with buying a Framework so they can pick it up while they're over there.
I hope they ship to your region soon!
this looks exciting. We are allowed to choose between Windows, macOS and Linu at my job so I might consider this when we are due for an upgrade in a year or 2. Feels wrong to discard our M2 Pro machines when they are perfectly capable of my relatively minuscule workloads at the moment, it only slowed down once when I had a memory leak in Safari from a AWS tab
The expansion card system seems like something I would actually really like, especially as a hardware engineer. But the more I thought about it I couldn't really think of any compelling expansion cards that were worth the effort. So I figured I would look at what was in their store to see what other people thought up, and there isn't really any 3rd party store that I could find.
I did find this list: https://community.frame.work/t/list-of-company-or-individual...
According to it there are more 3rd party main boards than expansion cards. I kinda get it, but wow. End of an era I guess.
Don’t think I have ever came across a queue to buy a laptop before but congrats to the framework team.
This fixes a lot of things that had made me hesitant to buy Framework before.
Please make a standalone case with a usb port for the keyboard trackpad! I would love to have it for when I connect the laptop to an external monitor. I hate the mouse, but I love the trackpad right under the keyboard.
There is no such product in the market.
I wish it was easy to port Asahi Linux to macbook neo. That would be insane!
Just wish they'd give the FW16 the same treatment, at least in terms of the build. You shouldn't choose a laptop based on looks but thats hitting exactly what I want, minus the 16" screen
Glad they got a touchscreen but would really like to see a convertible/2-in-1
I really like what Framwork has been doing, but I have an honest question: is 20 hours of Netflix 4k streaming at 250nit and 30% volume a spec to show off? I genuinely don't know.
I thought most modern laptops have dedicated video decode hardware that is fairly easy on battery. At only 250nit though...that seems dim by today's standards. I'm happy to be wrong though!
It's beautiful. Just got a Framework 13 a few months ago, so I can't justify buying a pro just to get it in black... right?
I think the pro is enough of an upgrade that it would pay for itself over the course of a year or so. It'd be practical and responsible for you to switch.
(Now you have to validate the next person's justification when it comes up again.)
It doesn't come with any RAM? You have to add $140 for 8GB or "bring your own"...so the list price does not represent a working computer?
Without a mockup of what all the customizable parts will look like... it's hard to commit to a build.
I continue to admire Framework from afar. If I were to switch from MacOS to Linux, they'd be at the top of my list when shopping.
Trackpoint/nipple?
This is great - a Macbook Pro for Linux users, made of CNC milled aluminum, haptic trackpad, and 20+ hours of 4k video playback under Linux
The 20h figure is specifically for streaming 4k Netflix in the app on Windows. Netflix doesn’t even support 4K streaming on Linux as far as I know.
Good call out - but seeing 2.5W consumption at idle from people with it already on Linux so these numbers will hold (like Dell XPS 14)
Is there a side by side comparison for their products anywhere? I'd like to compare this to the current 16 specs. And are they planning a "Pro" version of the 16?
I don't have plans to buy a laptop in the near future, but its nice to have this as an option. I like the idea of a bespoke Linux machine I could use.
When my hard plastic chassis T470 from 2016 dies and cannot be repaired, I will for sure buy a Framework.
Anyone know much about the new top of the line Intel vs AMD CPU options? Which is more power efficient? Powerful?
Intel Core Ultra 3xx is mostly better than AMD Ryzen 3xx/4xx. This year you're better off with Intel.
AMD Ryzen AI 400 is built on TSMC 4nm and Panther Lake is on Intel's 18A so Intel is literally a generation ahead for this product cycle and wins hands down...
But is the GPU good for anything? I'm used to Intel being completely crap and AMD actually being able to run games if you can live without 8k and 400 fps.
Also how's Linux support for either?
Intel GPUs have never been that bad... In the past they were simply small because the expectation was they'd be paired with a dGPU.
The Core series has GPUs on par with or even slightly bigger than most of the Ryzen AI series (look up benchmarks and articles).
> they were simply small
But that's bad in my book. I'm happy with 720p on low detail once in a while if it's a laptop. What I remember is Intel GPUS being unable to do even that.
If they caught up with AMD iGPUs, that's great. I don't do desktop replacement laptops, I prefer the ones I can hold in one hand, the dGPU is in my desktop.
I love their intro video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GnOpIQJnYWU
Intel has really crushed it lately.
Are the mainboards and upgrade kits available for purchase now or just the whole laptop?
edit: I think I found it: https://frame.work/products/laptop13pro-mainboard-intel-ultr...
Too bad there's no second m2 slot for extra disk and no 5G WWAN support.
You can add extra disk via the removable slots, frame.work shop has various disk sizes.
Its not about size but being able to run a RAID1 setup for speed and redundancy. External USB storage doesn't help here.
Personally, I don't understand aluminum chassis. Sure, it feels more premium, but it comes with quite a bit more weight than plastic, and I much prefer less weight over "feel" when it comes to a laptop.
Plastic. Never again will I allow a laptop to be unusable after some time because of a cracked chassis that couldn't handle mechanical and thermal stress correctly. Never.
It manages heat better, with the entire chassis acting as a heatsink. Also unlike plastic, under repetetive heat/cool cycles the tolerances won't change like plastic will.
I have to buy it. This company deserve a support.
I'm happy to see they finally added a touchscreen. This will probably be my next laptop.
Beautiful laptop and then they stick a tiny 13" screen on there, I don't get it. 14" is the perfect size. Guess it just isn't the one for me.
It's a 13.5" screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio. It's very comparable to many consumer-style 14" 16:10 screens.
Hey let's make a very versatile laptop with tons of options for consumers, and let's not offer the other Standard Canadian French keyboard, let's just have the old one Windows forces on people.
You could get a blank keyboard, and nice transparent stickers.
Assuming the Qualcomm ARM lawsuits are what’s preventing the AArch64 debut…
I would love to go framework and the specs here look pretty awesome but 5g modem is a must have for me and they dont really have an option for that. I am guessing due to the antennas.
I wonder if they'll ever make a "Toughbook" type of laptop. Those things are very interesting, since you can shove drives in and out of them and it matches the spirit of what this is.
Blah why do they insist on those full height arrow keys.
Full?! I'm seeing half up/down keys.
I'm struggling to understand if this supports usb-c based thunderbolt
All four ports support Thunderbolt 4 - if you scroll down to "Interfaces" on the product specs page there's a graphic showing everything that's supported.
nice! Thanks! I had no idea USB4 and Thunderbolt were equivalent.
They aren't equivalent. The "shape" of the port is the same, it's (USB) Type-C. Though as far as I know most of the time you can use USB4 peripherals with TB4 ports.
LPCAMM2 looks interesting. How much is that RAM though :'(
I went on the configurator page briefly, like 400$ for 32GB IIRC.
They don't ship to where I am so I didn't stay long
Looks awesome, but any developer laptop should have an inverted-T layout for arrows.
Those might look cool, but they're a huge pain to use.
Framework is cool, but Lenovo and Dell have been selling repairable enterprise laptops with Linux support for years. Some Precision/XPS laptops even have replaceable graphics cards.* It feels like they don't get nearly as much attention.
* Some will even work with graphics cards from newer laptops using the same chassis; for example, the Precision 7530 (8th gen Intel + Pascal GPUs) can be upgraded with Precision 7540 (Turing) GPUs. This isn't officially supported, though, and may not apply to later models.
Can this drive a Studio Display XDR at 120 Hz? I wonder if anyone else is thinking about this and how to figure out compatibility.
Damn this is cool !!
I said it before, I'll say it again: I won't consider Framework until they ditch they're crippled cursor block or offer trackpoint.
I'll buy one on the day of release if they offer both options (my most recent¹ Lenovo is long overdue for replacement)
¹ I don't think I'll ever sell my X220, any I regret selling my X270. Everything after that was a disappointment.
Strix Halo version available for pre-order!
It's not? The only 2 options available there are last gen Strix Point (AI 300 series).
Congratulations! Incredible!
> with excellent Linux support
So can we finally update the firmware for the Sandisk SN7100 and 850X SSDs under Linux? Last time I've checked you couldn't even download the firmware for WD 850X using a plain browser. You had to use their "special" Windows software.
There's a github project that helps with this https://github.com/not-a-feature/wd_fw_update , or you can manually browse https://sddashboarddownloads.sandisk.com/wdDashboard/config/... to find and download your firmware, and install it with nvme-cli. I've done it quite a few times.
Thoughts on the chassis being all aluminum, vs. a magnesium alloy?
In case anyone's curious, my basis for comparison is an old Dell M6600 that's magnesium and has been awesome in terms of rigidity and durability. I still use it regularly even though it's going on 15 years old! (Mainly because I haven't found a newer laptop that's similarly maintainable that I actually like). Also wish it had an option for more RAM, even if the cost is astronomical at today's prices.
I would have liked the option of non-touch display, and although the display is variable rate (30-120Hz) it's not going to be as optimal as the 1-120Hz panel in the Dell XPS 14 getting it to 40+ hours (https://x.com/dhh/status/2040139744445673938).
The highest tier of this laptop comes with four performance cores and twelve efficiency cores? What kind of Linux-kernel-compiler wants four cores?
It’s a niche box within its own niche (Linux). Perhaps they’ll do a pivot to eco friendly slippers. I admire their manifesto, but can’t see them surviving. You can get a last year’s decent Thinkpad for $400-600 with parts galore. This thing, you buy it on principle only.
I wish they offered a Dvorak keyboard. Of all laptops, this is the most obvious one to do it.
They do offer blank keycaps, no labels, as an option…
Why are they advertising only Linux OSes but the battery life numbers are for Windows 11? Why not show the Linux numbers?
Well, this looks excellent.
64GB of RAM is £850? Insane timeline.
Let's all thank the AI industry for this.
Pre-ordered a Ultra X7 358H with 32GB as an upgrade from an M2 Air. I hope that I do not regret this.
Very cool upgraded version. How noisy or hot does it get?
I am getting this one for sure. The waiting is over.
I might be in love...
This reminds me of the legit coal smoke black PowerBooks of yesteryear. If they make a 16 inch model I’ll def consider it.
> Your country might not be supported yet.
:(
Only 2.8k non OLED display?
Who watches Netflix at 30% brightness? Another useless marketing blurb, really puts me off from reading the rest.
I do. Why not?
why is it so hard to find a simple keyboard layout diagram, the first full view of the keyboard I could find was flashing between different color options making it hard to see what the keys are, the first thing I think of for a “developer laptop” is what the keyboard is, feels like it should be more front-and-center (I might have just missed it though, on mobile)
The 20 hour battery rating is for Windows 11. How long does Linux last?
Blog post: https://frame.work/blog/introducing-framework-laptop-13-pro
> up to 64GB of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X
That's a non-starter. Why not 128GB or push boundary for 256GB?
> Why not 128GB or push boundary for 256GB?
As I understand it, 64 GB modules are largest LPCAMM2 modules yet released with 96 GB being announced only a couple months ago. 128 GB might be possible on the Ultra 5 325 once either sufficiently large LPCAMM2 modules have been release or if the motherboard was redesigned to support dual LPCAMM2 modules, the Ultra X7 358H and Ultra X9 388H only support 96 GB. Support for 256 GB would likely require a desktop processor, or a redesign from Intel to support a quarter terabyte of memory on a mobile processor.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/245720/...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/245527/...
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/245526/...
Because no one makes larger LPCAMM2 modules. But Framework's CEO says he expects higher density modules in the future: https://youtu.be/GnOpIQJnYWU?si=UBMfW7SsiNjwJ1fo&t=292
Last I checked, one kidney might not even suffice to pay for 256GB anymore.
Maybe because 64 GB is $849.
I was sure they’d deliver Panther Lake but didn’t think it would have LPCAMM.
I thought they’d either solder the memory or skip out on delivering the good integrated graphics from the X SKUs.
I’m stunned in a good way. This is a MacBook Pro killer for the nerdier end of Apple’s market.
The fact that you mostly can pick and choose your upgrades to Pro is really cool, too.
The mid-tier X7 board sold alone seems like a great value and it would be a pretty solid uplift to the old system.
What linux needs is a better logo, it's come so far ahead
I'm a "Linux I. 2nd hand ThinkPad" type of person, but have recently admired my [first] MacBook Air.
Does a Framework Laptop bridge the gap somewhat?
Finally! Glad they will now offer something which doesn't have a bending frame.
... but I wish they would make something with a bit more screen estate without being heavy and bulky. Their 16" is just too big. I really like the Dell XPS 14 and MBP 14", which I think is the right trade-off between screen size and portability.
This looks like it would fit my next purchase, but how does VRAM work in this scenario (I can’t find anything in the docs)?
Do people actually like touch screens?
That's a huge negative for me.
You can always order the pro parts along with a regular display from the regular Framework 13. Some assembly required, but the bits are all interchangeable, so you can have your non-touch display.
Alternatively, you can also "not touch" the touch display :)
I often see people talking about how MacBooks are better for local LLM usage. How would this compare?
75% keyboard?
No numpad
sigh. I wish I knew. I've got Framework 13 (Ryzen AI 300 series) and it's battery life is absolutely awful. Won't even survive a weekend in sleep. My old, dying Dell was better.
This is the next Framework I will buy, unless AMD's AI 400 series is better.
I await a Linux-based battery test for both active work and overnight suspend consumption. I don't think suspend battery drain is vendor-specific though; AMD and Intel both shat the bed compared to Apple due to hardware decision-making.
edit: I missed this.
>7 days Standby without charging, Wi-Fi connected on Ubuntu
Very nitpicky, but video files for ASCII animation while advertising developer laptop. Cmon man.
Those transparent bezel look incredibly good.
Now that RAM is unobtainium anyway, it seems like the case for very energy efficient laptops is more compelling vs inference-capable ones.
Please say that the new keyboard has QMK support?
It's the one thing I'm jealous of the Laptop 16 together with their key module that should let you design arbitrary layouts.
This is awesome. I like my 2 year old framework and this new RAM looks really interesting, I need to learn more.
However, the 358H processor + 64GB RAM + 1TB NVMe is $2700. Wow. Even if I sold my current AMD 7840U with 64GB of RAM it would still be quite an investment.
The biggest question I have, which is probably easily searchable: How well will this run local LLMs? Seems the RAM is fast enough.
No dedicated Home/End/PgUp/PgDn/Ins/Del? Meh.
No T-shape cursor keys?!? Lame. No love. No want. Go home.
Thinkpad FTW. Sorry.
I have to agree the keyboard layout is a noticeable bummer. The only actually impactful one I can find on this laptop on my side for now. So, props to the team still!
I get to choose 4 ports in a $2,000+ "developer" laptop? Is this a joke?
Most of the port options are decoys because it means 1 or 0 USB ports.
And no I'm not carrying around a satchel of modules like an old British lord.
I was hoping for a monitor update for the 16" laptop. But:
> 16" 16:1- Anti-glare matte display (2560x1600), 500 nits, no HDR
Sorry. That's just not going to cut it. These are 5-year-old specs.
"pro" in the name, without ECC ram is a travesty
Does the LPCAMM2 standard allow for a full-blown ECC interface, as opposed being limited to the on-die ECC that's part of the DDR5 spec?
I hope you’re being sarcastic because if not you’re delisional to expect ECC ram in a laptop. You’re going to pile up software updates that you should absolutely reboot for long before a comic ray causes a meaningful bit flip. ECC is only worthwhile in servers and is a waste of money otherwise, especially since “pro” for laptop = prosumer device.
If you don’t reboot your laptop in years where ECC matters I’m not sure how to help you.
- Intel CPU -> No thanks
- Touchscreen -> mmkay, but i don't really care
- Haptic touchpad -> I absolutely hate those. I want to click buttons. Buttons. Buttons.
Well, this is not for me i guess :(
Hard for me to justify an Intel or even AMD chip now when not just Apple but even Qualcomm are trouncing them on single core performance. The Snapdragon X2 Elite performance cores are faster than any Intel or AMD core ever made, full stop.
Unfortunately Linux support isn't fully baked yet, but people are working on it.