By the way, check out reviews of the Framework Laptop for a first-hand illustration of this effect. They seem to be getting 40-50% lower battery runtimes than laptops with comparable specs. That's example the problem — of you design for modularity, you have to leave some optimizations on the table.
The battery impact for us at this point is likely more a factor of additional firmware and driver tuning that we need to do. We've tested to 10-11 hours in MobileMark 2018, but have actually seen video playback runtime (which should be a lighter load) drop below that due to some audio driver issues that we're working through.
There is certainly some impact to using DDR4 instead of LPDDR4, but we believe it is still the better choice for most consumers by allowing for greater product longevity at lower cost.
Doubtful, the Framework laptop is pretty much like any other USB-C-based laptop, except that it reserves some space inside the chassis so that the adapter dongles are flush with the case.
