My definition of “high end” in 2023 is a battery that last 14+ hours of general use, doesn’t sound like a 747 when I open two Chrome tabs side by side and won’t fry my nuts when I put it on my lap.
Fullack. Returned my framework laptop because of 3 hours battery life (streaming Netflix, measured multiple times), the 747 sound (customer support told me "works as expected"), and if I want to fry eggs I have other devices for that. I'd say "there's room for improvement".
I think that's a consequence of the gen 11/12 Intel chips used? I think the AMD versions would be much cooler and have better battery life (or so I hope!)
One data point I can contribute is that of two "cousin" HP laptops: Elite Book 845 G8 with an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5650U and 840 G8 with an Intel i7-1165G7.
These are 14" "Ultrabooks" with the same rated battery capacity, dimensions and almost the same components.
The AMD one has 64 GB of RAM and a very bright screen (advertised as 1000 nits). The Intel one only has 32 GB and a very dim, 6 bit screen.
They both lack a dedicated GPU.
Under Linux with the AMD one, while doing basic dicking around on the internet and light Rust dev with intellij, I get a good 5-6 hours without draining the battery fully. The screen set to the minimum or almost (it's more than enough in a bright apartment – around 50% is enough when outside if the sun doesn't shine directly on it). I haven't tried this computer under Windows while unplugged.
With the Intel one, in the same conditions as above, except setting the screen a good 2/3-3/4 (the screen is absurdly bad and dim, so I need to up the backlight) I only get around 4 hours. Under Windows, it seems similar. But under Windows, standby seems to drain less battery (not counting when it hibernates). The PC does not have the option to enable S3.
Both laptops have the "battery saver" function on, which means it only charges to about 80% of the rated capacity. "Linux" means Arch with the latest "zen" kernel and X11. Windows is up-to-date 11 22h2. I didn't bother doing any specific tuning for either OS.
One other data point is a newer model of the same PC with a 12th gen i5 part (1240p I think but really not sure). My colleague who has it complains that the fan is always on. However, he uses Windows, and even on my 11th gen I do find the fan tends to come on fairly often, while it basically never does under Linux.
it's a consequence of framework not having good power management/speedstep support, although supposedly it's gotten better recently.
Using AMD chips is also not a magic bullet if you don't implement power management properly - a 25W AMD chip and a 25W Intel chip notionally pull the same power (although there are always games).
I hate to be that guy. But why do you want a laptop for that? While my above list of requirements is basically implying a MacBook, if I wanted a really performant computer with a good GPU either internal or external for a high end use case, I would get a non-Mac desktop.
When I go into either one of my corporate offices (rarely) or a client’s office, it’s nice to be able to just plug my laptop in the night before and not have to worry about a finding any place to plug it in during the day, going back and forth between conference rooms, etc.
I also go home to see my parents for a couple of weeks sometimes and work from there.
And I realize this is a very esoteric case. But I also do the whole “digital nomad” thing half the year.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. My external GPU enclosure is extremely portable. My everyday backpack fits a laptop with external GPU and a weekend's worth of luggage very comfortably.
Damn Apple. Macs have no single drawback except repairability, not even vendor lock-in (you can flash Asahi). That’s it. I’m going for a Mac except the Framework I previously planned for. Single digit battery life shouldn’t be thing in 2023.
Can I use CUDA without an Nvidia graphics card? That was my point, just like Apple they’ve locked this functionality to their hardware. Which is fine, they developed it, it’s their right to do so.
I’m well aware of the limitations of discrete graphics on Macs.
The nice thing about an eGPU is your portable becomes much more portable, since portables with reasonable GPUs are heavy, big, and hot. The bad thing about eGPUs is they're ~$250 on top of the GPU cost, which is a little to close to a second desktop PC.
running Windows or Linux ? If I remember correctly they had issues anyhow with power leak on standby from the expansion cards but under Linux battery life was much worst anyhow
I’m not a fan. Thinkpads have had magnesium enclosures since 2000. I don’t like the framework design or philosophy. You’d have to be insane to buy an Intel laptop for the same money as an ARM Macbook. This reusable thing doesn’t make a bit of sense to me either. Do you really want to be using a 10 year old chassis with new parts? What’s the point of trying to save the environment when the other 8 billion could care less?
Unless you don’t want a Mac? I like my Mac, but prefer Linux for dev. Having a beefy AMD framework 16” that I can refresh in 3 years sounds great to me.
> What’s the point of trying to save the environment when the other 8 billion could care less?
“What’s the point in doing things you personally care about if there isn’t worldwide consensus?”
If the parts are made to fit the chaos and the design is reusable, what does it matter of the chaos is old?...unless say it's greatly worn and the integrity is impacted....but then you can buy a replacement part.
Their pricing on the 13 is fair for the components they offer. I'm not in the market for a new laptop, still rocking a 2015 mbp...but if I need a new one, I hope they're still around.
Come on they’re dumping metric tons of industrial waste into the oceans every day but here we are sorting cans from cardboard. It’s just virtue signaling. It’s totally meaningless.
That it’s now law is just a mind game. They get you to habitually say yes to a series of nonsense tasks and arbitrary rules so later you don’t question when they march your children off to a pointless war
Because my two previous laptops were still working fine when their plastic body started to crack and it was heartbreaking to have to toss them away. I managed to changed the plastic body of the second one but the the keyboard broke, then the battery, then the HDD. Now the motherboard has died on me. It was all for nothing. It was a pain to dissassemble each time, fearing to lose screws and to break the old plastics.
I don't know about the rest of the world but for people like me who care about their stuff to be sturdy/long-lasting/repairable, who feel responsible of what they buy and to stop littering the world with trash, I don't how Framework could have done better. I have the second generation, I don't care about you price for specs. It does make noise when compiling but hey at least I get the performance, the rest of the time with my terminal editor, dev server, and many tabs browser ? Not especially noisy and it is never slow.
It's all I wanted and I got it.
Plus I can dream of replacing the motherboard in 10 years with a super low consumption cpu, if all my money isn't going to buying food made very expensive by climate change that is.
If that is your definition then a Framework 13 is probably not the laptop for you.
It does fit my needs perfectly though - a usually on desktop but portable for travel notebook PC with 64G ram and 2TB ssd for under $1200. Very cheap compared to other laptops with the same specs and I really like it.
It's cheap because the DIY edition has no RAM/SSD and these are super cheap from 3rd parties currently while other laptop vendors take fat margins on them. Throw in that no SSD means no OEM windows license fee (I have free msdn anyways) and it's just so much cheaper.
So low end counts as "high end in 2023"? Also, you probably want to include weight in there, otherwise 10 year old thinkpads with powerbridge easily qualify: 188Wh give you lots of time. Also any silent laptop + power bank.
This is where buying "professional grade" does often save you. I have seen tons of Dell Latitudes and Lenovo Thinkpads that look like a black brick but are still going 5+ years later. They actually invested in thermals and it shows. (Written on a 7 year old Thinkpad).
I had to repaste the CPU in my old Thinkpad after a couple of years, but overall I got several years of hard use out of it (including playing games on it in hot apartments) before I destroyed it with an unplanned rapid deceleration.
It's funny you should say that... I just bought a 6? year old Latitude E7470 for £189 last week.
I had one years ago and it was built like a tank. Also, the screen (2560x1440) is possibly the best I've had on a laptop and the keyboard has particularly deep and solid travel making it the best typing experience I've had on a laptop too.
So, best laptop I've had tbh.
It's only an i7 6600U so not mega powerful but I don't write 2M LOC apps anyway so it's fine.
Just waiting on 32GB RAM arriving (official support is 16GB but the chipset supports 32).
I agree 100%... business-class laptops (and printers for that matter) all the way.
Thixomolding is an incredible process, I'm glad it's becoming more utilized. It really is the best for lightweight, strong, and super thin parts like laptop chassis.
About 10 years ago I worked for a medical device company and we used thixo parts for a portable ultrasound system (think chunky laptop form factor). In my first few weeks, I had a proto part that needed a rework, so I chucked the thixomolded part into the bandsaw to chop it up, before the shop manager chewed me out for almost setting the shop on fire (who let this clueless engineer into my shop...etc etc). Magnesium dust is stupid flammable and burns incredibly fast and hot.
There were only a handful of vendors in the world at that time that had the capability to mold the size of parts we needed, it's a vastly different process to casting other metals, in part due to the hazards of the material itself. Warning to all overly ambitious framework owners: careful if you decide to chop or drill into that case!
> before the shop manager chewed me out for almost setting the shop on fire
In his defense, an engineer should have known this. In your defense, we all have blind spots - we might know 98% of the obvious things and still get caught by a handful of them. That’s why supervision is so important!
I'm wondering what the properties of thixomolding parts are like compared to casting compared to having the part machined out of a solid piece.
One thing I personally noticed with these types of "cast-looking" parts is that they tend to fail in a brittle way and there's really not much ductility. I've seen many notebooks with Mg alloy casings that shatter when dropped, and I've always preferred the Apple unibody machined aluminum for this reason - if it's bent or drops, it tends to retain its integrity much better. Granted, aluminum doesn't tend to have all that much ductility before it too, breaks, but I've found it more robust.
Mag itself is not very ductile, and more prone to fractures than most AL alloys, with the tradeoff being overall higher yield strength. Depending on the magnesium alloy used for thixo, this can be mitigated somewhat, but you are correct in that almost every "casting" process will give you a less ductile part than the same alloy machined from a solid billet. So much of a metal's material properties come from it's crystalline structure, and how it's melted, formed, and tempered. Thixo tries to get the best of both worlds by using a slurry that is both a solid (containing the proper microstructures for desired material properties) and liquid to ease the injection molding.
Machining from a billet of material guarantees consistent crystal structure, and is usually the go to when strength/appearance is a larger consideration than cost or weight. Billets can be formed very precisely and consistently, without consideration of the final product
The fastest way to learn how to make machinable parts is to machine them yourself :). DFM is often a hard-earned skill.
Unfortunately maker-spaces (the only kinds of places where you could get cheap access to good 3+ axis CNC mills) seem to have gone out of fashion. CNC mills in general cost about 5 digits just for the machine, and usually that again for the tooling.
I think the closest one can get to learning some DFM without working on a machine would be watching machinists on YouTube. Back in the day NYC CNC was great, but I think they post more hype content these days.
I'm far from an expert on the topic, but I spent a decent amount of time designing for and then fabricating stuff on CNC machines over the last couple years. To my knowledge, operations are cheap while setups are expensive: if you can design a part around a fixed orientation in a machine, it saves a lot of operator time.
You can get into cnc the diy route for between ~$2k and ~$8k depending on the amount of rigidity you want. There are conversation kits available for common import mills to make the process relatively easy but the control and wiring isn't for the faint of heart.
I built one out of a PM-833TV and it's taken years to get working well, and I probably should have just bought a used HAAS at this point, but if you build it You Will Learn one way or another.
Words of wisdom I wish I'd had: spend the money on decent over specced servos with ethercat. Don't skimp or you'll end up having to just redo stuff and it'll cost a lot of money. Do not buy stepper motors period.
It's "kind of high end" as it uses steel beams (not aluminium) for rigidity, so it's capable of driving some really powerful gear... fairly cheaply. :)
The US$2k you mention above would indeed be the practical lower bound.
Not sure why this is downvoted. Carving away styrofoam is a great way to see what the real world form of something will be, especially considering there's a good chance you can fish it out of your trash. And, a hot glue gun mean you can put pieces back!
For getting an idea, I like to play with clay, then move to CAD once something is fairly decided, with foam/cardboard mockups to get "real world" size feel. Then, a desk full of 3d printed mini versions, and then whatever final version.
> Tangentially, I wish there was some online resources for learning how best design for manufacture for things like laptops and cases.
You are effectively asking for a disclosure of shop secrets. Even in cases of completely no-name factories, there will be so much of clever things nobody would put on a paper.
One factory owner went nuts when we were going with inspection for a client in 2009, just because we clicked seemingly innocuous looking jig which was putting threaded inserts into mould. It later came out that nobody else anywhere had anything like that, and most factories rely on laborious process of manually putting inserts into the mould.
There is so many unobvious things which 99% of people without actual manufacturing experience routinely overlook in ubiquitous items around us.
I once been openning up dozens of laptop samples, and one in 100, from a noname factory had seemingly no ribs in its bottom cover, and seemingly nothing restraining it flexing, and sliding. Then, after days of hair pulling, the secret cracked.. nuts, and screws inside were not meeting
orcompletely, but were suspended with preloaded fasteners, which used those few free millimetres of free travel for it.
This case looks great. Love that we have replaceable graphics on this one.
I’m most excited for the ortholinear keyboard attachment. That makes it a must-buy for me, since after switching to a Kinesis Advantage I just can’t type on a staggered layout anymore.
In the pic, the ortholinear keyboard is not the full width of the 16", so it wouldn't be anymore split than your tiny planck. A full-width ortholinear with excessive keys would be another story.
Mine is split in the sense of having the main keys in the middle of the keyboard on your strong fingers (like the old typematrix which was the first ortholinear keyboard I ever used) it’s not in separate modules like a kinesis or ergodox obviously. I don’t know if that would work on a laptop without it being excessively wide.
For my personal mix of tendon and joint problems actual separation isn’t helpful because some pronation is actually good for me. But obviously that’s going to vary.
On the Framework 16, there is unused space on each side of the centered keyboard w/o number pad. With a split keyboard module, that unused space could simply be moved to the center.
I really love my Framework. I love that I can hack it (I made a Yubikey adapter so I could always have it inserted: https://www.stavros.io/posts/making-a-security-key-for-the-f...), I love that I can trivially repair any component that breaks, and it feels great as well, it's very light and solid.
The only issues I have with it is battery life (though I have the battery set to charge to 70% max, which leaves a lot on the table), and the fact that Intel processors heat up very easily.
I really hope Intel and AMD get their shit together and release a processor as efficient as Apple silicon, I don't want to end up using my MacBook more than my Framework.
I wonder if it was easier or thinner to do that way, or if it was a deliberate design choice for a more minimal appearance.
Personally I don't mind seeing fasteners. After swapping LCDs on my old Thinkpads a couple times, I stopped replacing the screw covers and embraced one fewer step for future maintenance.
Amazingly enough, we didn't go in with this as a design goal from the start. The Framework Laptop 13 has exposed fasteners on the Bottom Cover, and we went in assuming we'd go the same direction. As we designed the Input Module system, it became clear that the best way to design it was installing everything directly down into the Bottom Cover, meaning you don't need to flip the system over to unscrew anything. The result is a Bottom Cover that is super clean.
PCIe is too physically large, Oculink is too thick and doesn't have enough pins for power, and Thunderbolt has protocol overhead and throughput limitations.
It seems to me that oculink port is still a good option for side module, although it's unrealistic. I hope ltt lab create custom gpu module from the desktop 4090: built-in power, water cooling and of course rgb :)
Yeah, sorry, no. Thunderbolt does have overhead and limitations, but imo those limitations don't justify making a new standard, even if it's more open than the others. Maybe you could say more about those limitations and convince me?
For instance, Thunderbolt bandwidth is limited to 40 Gbit/s. The Framework adapter for GPU is PCIE x8, which gives 128 Gbit/s.
(not affiliated with the Framework company, only as a owner of two 13" Framework laptops; so I might be wrong/incomplete about the limitations implied by the OP)
There are companies putting nonstandard PCIe ports on the outsides of laptops, and compared to that an internal custom port is much less egregious. 40Gbps is just not enough to run a GPU without significant performance loss. Especially when 40Gbps is actually 32Gbps of PCIe and on older controllers there's an arbitrary limit of 22Gbps.
I really hope thunderbolt 5 in asymmetrical mode can devote the entire 120Gbps of outgoing data to PCIe, and doesn't have some stupid limit like 64Gbps.
And when a new standard amounts to "arrange the pins like this", it's not a very big deal.
Me and many of my friends all have zombie Frankenstein desktops that perfectly illustrate why the Framework laptop both does and doesn't make sense.
I can understand why people with money to burn might not understand the limitations of trying to make a modular architecture work over the long term. Back in the day, dropping in an SSD represented a massive, relatively inexpensive upgrade. But, a desktop has cross-compatibility and flexibility primarily afforded by its massive size and weight. I'm not convinced these sorts of cross compatible upgrades will continue to surface into the future. And especially not on a laptop/mobile form factor.
Now, my desktop's IO ports are 2/3 fried. Its memory, motherboard, CPU, GPU, OS and hard drive are hopelessly outdated. It will never make sense to meaningfully upgrade it, upgrade would mean wholesale replacement of everything. I could keep the case and the CPU cooler, big whoop.
> I'm not convinced these sorts of cross compatible upgrades will continue to surface into the future
They've already outdone every other laptop manufacturer: you can swap a new 13th gen system board into an original 11th gen Framework.
My friend's wife has a Framework, and she suffered a liquid spill which reached the system board. He ordered parts, did the swap, and she's back in action for less than half the cost of a new laptop. If it were Dell or Lenovo, you'd be trying your luck with used eBay parts. The housing would have ~20 tiny plastic clips that you break one or two of every time you open it up. (Or adhesive, ugh.) It's just a sketchier proposition.
I remember the days of incremental PC upgrades being quite commonplace (the 286/386/486/Pentium era). It was sort of a golden time where a relatively poor kid (me) could save his pennies up to buy a small upgrade and keep a system going through various "Ship of Theseus" efforts. I think I managed such an upgrade cycle through 4 generations of CPU while keeping various peripherals in various states staggered across all of that. It also meant that if you had the right supplier you could cobble together barely working computers just able to boot the latest all floppy release of SUSE or something.
Today it seems that a decent computer (~$1000k) will simply just run most things perfectly fine for around 5-7 years, after which all the main bus and peripheral tech will have moved on. It's easier to junk that system and buy another one almost from scratch. The main benefit I can think of for still buying your own parts and putting it together (or having somebody put it together) is price/performance /customizability still leads. I was able to retire (give to my wife) an 8 year old desktop which is still perfectly fine for her needs, and buy an all new system, but thread what I wanted through a budget by ultra-specifying specific parts. I couldn't find a pre-built that was close, even after I just paid Microcenter to put it all together for me. This also turned out to be a good idea as they were able to on-the-spot substitute a few pieces based on compatibility and inventory.
Laptops are more vulnerable. They are more likely to need replacement fans, new display, new keyboard.
For a mainboard upgrade, it might make sense if two generations ahead is seriously better. For example, 13th gen i5 is outperforming the 12th gen i7. The i5 mainboard costs 450$ and the i7 1000$, so if you can wait for two new generations it would be worth it.
I disagree, I still upgrade my desktop like the Ship of Theseus, there are even over 10 yo hard disks in there.
My last upgrade was RAM to 64GB, before that the GPU (RX 470 to RX 6600), before that, the mainboard and CPU from some ancient Intel i3 to Ryzen 5 3600. And between all those upgrades, more and more SSDs were added.
Counterpoint - socket AM4 motherboards had an extremely long, upgradable life. Mine has 5 years on it and the 5800x3d I recently swapped in is still one of the fastest gaming CPUs there is. From a gaming standpoint it can handle any top of the line GPU.
For a second there I thought I was reading boomer news instead of hacker news. I kid, but honestly there are plenty of us that still upgrade our systems piecemeal. I'm always buying new parts. Partly because I like having the latest stuff, but also because I love handing down parts to my family members which end up being huge upgrades for them.
My desktop is 11 years old this year. I added a network card when the port on the motherboard broke and switched OS when the OS became no longer supportable. Audio output is no longer possible without also adding a sound card, given the audio ports are all fried. Memory and CPU aren't meaningfully upgradable without wholesale motherboard replacement. That's not happening piecemeal. If you have experienced these sorts of issues, you'll understand the challenges with using and maintaining hardware over the longer term. Piecemeal upgrade ceases to be a meaningful option on that time scale. It's not cost effective, and at some point you just need a new machine. Does that make sense?
If anything, I would think using something for as long as possible instead of buying and generating large amounts of e-waste puts me more in the Greatest Generation category. Otherwise, I'm sure I would love to have the latest and greatest all the time too, but on a stats basis, also not being able to afford it puts me less in the boomer category, and more in the younger generation category, no?
I find the battery life on my framework 13 really bad (ubuntu installed).
There's some issue where the battery drains fairly quickly in suspend which requires enabling "deep sleep" mode, but it still drains a lot faster than other laptops I've had.
And then the battery life in general isn't very good; I'd say ~2 hours at full brightness with some video streaming mixed in with normal browsing.
I wonder if that's the same experience other people have? And whether the 16 will have better battery life?
* I also did a long review covering different ways of optimizing CPU performance, evaluating idle and near idle power consumption, various power-testing (including writing a suspend battery logging tool that people may find useful, etc): https://github.com/lhl/linuxlaptops/wiki/2022-Framework-Lapt...
So I have to read forums threads with 300+ messages in order to maybe improve the battery life. Yeah, thanks, but no thanks. I'll just buy a macbook. 2-3 hours battery lifetime in 2023 is a sad sad joke. I'm sorry, but if this is the best this framework laptop company can come up with...
The 13th-gen Framework gets just under 12h on Windows 11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuw-YpbFkkM - for Linux, battery life will be up to how your distro does power management. The Ubuntu guide I linked has a read time of 7 minutes. If a Macbook suits your needs, you should buy that, but I don't think the bad faith characterizations you've made are very helpful to anyone.
The 13th gen apparently has dramatically better battery life, which is great since the battery life otherwise prevented me from buying one. They spent a lot of time optimizing it both in hardware and software.
Meanwhile the firmware update to improve battery life on the 12th gen has been in beta since last year :( I've held off on installing it since some of the bugs sound scary (breaking USB ports)
I find battery life with linux in general pretty poor. It also struggles achieve any kind of reasonable hibernate/suspend. I can throw my macbook into a bag and pull out a week later with just a small battery draw down. I have never had a linux laptop that would not be completely dead in that scenario.
If you set up hibernate, then it will not drain the battery at all, as hibernate is completely powered off (contents of RAM are written to disk and reloaded on startup).
I agree with you on suspend, though: even with "deep" sleep enabled ("s2idle" is garbage), I still lose about 20% overnight.
I find my macbook (M1, Air) achieves really good battery life when I'm actively using it as my main computer (so including sleep/hibernate) but extremely poor when I'm not. For example if I turn my Macbook completely off and leave it for a month, the batteries drained completely.
I've had the similar experiences with a 2017 Macbook Air at my previous job. Over time it got worse to the point it'd be at 100% when it suspends at the end of the day and then when I was back at work the next morning there was a 50:50 chance it'd be completely flat. I eventually had to get into the habit of plugging in my Macbook in the morning for ~5mins before starting it up to ensure it didn't try and start on 0% battery and promptly shutdown. The same machine would last all day (i.e. charged to 100% first thing in the morning and then disconnected from power and used on battery the rest of the day) which seems to rule out battery capacity issues. YMMV.
> I can throw my macbook into a bag and pull out a week later with just a small battery draw down
Hmm, I can't with a Macbook Air M1. I lose maybe up to 10% a day.
When suspended, I see it appearing on the network a few times each hour. I can leave a process running in the background and see that it's getting a few seconds of cpu time each time this "suspended" mac wakes up to do whatever it is doing. There are no settings I can see for a deeper sleep and to stop it doing whatever it is doing. I think they check for updates and such.
Spending a ton of time on brittle power configuration in order to get from “bad” to “meh”, and suspend never quite working properly, is part of the experience of owning a linux laptop. That’s the way it’s always been.
Solutions include not caring, buying a mac, or buying windows and using WSL.
With windows you have the danger of not suspending or doing what my surfacebook does and just self heating -the gpu sometimes doesn’t get the sleep command, and just sits there burning power while the fan is shut down..easily hits 100C.
I've had suspend work perfectly using Debian on two separate Lenovo Thinkpads. No special config, just plain Debian works fine. Ironically I've had suspend issues on MacBooks. Even Windows isn't immune to suspend issues on the very same hardware Debian has zero issues with. YMMV.
Most laptops with high brightness monitors would leave you with about 2-3 hours of battery life... many laptops can hit 300-400 nits, some even more.
sRGB and BT709 declare the brightness of SDR white as 100 nits, and 100-120 is considered acceptable.
The rest of what you say sounds like your Ubuntu is misconfigured, which is common with Ubuntu installs. The fix is usually either changing a few files in /etc, or installing an entirely different distro that isn't user hostile.
I think you're way overestimating the power usage of modern displays. The Framework display (BOE095F) backlight based on my personal testing uses ~2.1W at 100% (440 nits) (this is as expected, you can look at datasheets on similar displays like https://datasheetspdf.com/pdf-file/1294460/BOE/NT156FHM-N41/... and the the Pbl on the specsheet).
The old Framework 13s have a 55Wh battery, so 2-3h would require 18.3-27.5W of average power consumption. For context, PL1 (max sustained power limit) of the 12th-gen CPUs are set to 30W in the Framework and when I tested last year, powerstat (calculated w/ ACPI battery info) reported that the laptop my 1260P Framework idles at is about 3.34W w/ backlight off, 4.01W @ 200 nits, and 5.46W @ 100% BL.
I didn't realize displays had gotten this efficient. I remember when LED backlights were more efficient, but not efficient (huge leap over CCFL, obviously).
So yeah, sounds like the parent comment's Ubuntu is just grossly misconfigured, either out of the box, or merely a few things relevant to Intel Cove-era have to be manually flipped on/off.
I'd love to see if he can repeat it with any other distro, such as with SuSE, or Debian + task-laptop and KDE.
I'm running Fedora with the i5-1240p, but I can squeak out maybe 4.5hours max if I'm just in VS Code and don't have my brightness maxed out. With max brightness and Google meet running in Firefox, I barely get 2. And that's with the "Power Saver" profile enabled in GNOME.
I really love the machine otherwise, but I can't say I haven't considered just getting a Macbook Air (especially now that they have the 15").
For me it's even worse. Being in a Google Meet with "level 1" blurring activated puts my battery life between 60-90 minutes. I don't know if it's Google Meets fault or bad battery management of the Frame.work or even the browser :/
And that's what I don't get. Especially with the developers I know, you're mostly having a desktop setup with a power supply. Or is the stereotype of most of the developers sitting in a Starbucks all day, every day, true?
I don't know if magnesium is a common choice for computer enclosures, but one of the few examples of magnesium that I immediately recall (besides Surface) is a NeXT computer that went up in flames: https://simson.net/ref/1993/cubefire.html
It's very popular for laptops. The reason Magnesium is popular is a combination of favorable physical properties like light weight, but especially, the specific injection molding process mentioned in the article, Thixomolding. https://www.designnews.com/materials-assembly/thixomolding-w... does a decent job explaining the process and how it's unique from most metal injection molding.
Magnesium alloy is reasonably common in notebooks and other consumer electronics. Sometimes it's an internal structural element with a different cosmetic outer part, and sometimes as in the Framework Laptop 16 along with some of the higher end ThinkPads, it's directly the outer shell. As noted in the linked story, it's actually really difficult to burn the kinds of magnesium alloy that are used for structural purposes, and the author had to jump through hoops to get it to work.
Still waiting for the other shoe to drop with a pricing announcement. I keep getting almost excited about the Framework 16", but then I'm remember it's probably going to be well over $2500USD for a decently specced model (without a GPU even) and my excitement quickly dissipates.
What's the alternative high quality laptop in that price-range though?
A Dell XPS that comes with a lose trackpad, massive coil whine, batteries that drain when plugged in and so on?
Or an LG Gram Pro (more expensive than Framework) that isn't sold outside of the US and maybe some Asian countries where the only thing you can upgrade is the SSD?
Or maybe some Apple laptop?
I personally feel the price of a Framework is fair, even if it is 2500 USD (or more). Not necessarily because Framework is great (I would prefer 17"), but more because the alternatives are worse or don't exist.
From [0], the only model under $1600 is bizarrely discounted 45% from $2849, which I assume is a limited-time offer.
The lowest-end model costs $1959, and is pretty meh: 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, crap 720p camera.
The higest-end model is also strangely 45%-off discounted, but runs $3769 regular. If the Framework 16 ends up costing $2500 (or even $3000) for a reasonably-spec'd setup, I think that'd be pretty fair, especially given the configurability and upgradeability. If you don't value those things, then you probably shouldn't be considering Framework in the first place.
Don't forget to check the screens on Lenovo laptops. Their prices, other specs and keyboards are usually good, but then the display is either low res or dim.
The T16 comes with the following display in Australia: 16.0" WUXGA (1920 x 1200), IPS, Anti-Glare, Non-Touch, 45%NTSC, 300 nits, 60Hz
> I believe Foxconn, the main assembler for Apple, still sleeps 6 workers to an apartment.
The thing is, if Chinese labor becomes more expensive, these workers will get replaced either by an automated factory elsewhere (maybe in America!) and unemployment.
Considering how we're talking about a manufacturer that famously installed anti-suicide nets for it's worker, maybe some time away from the factory would be a good thing?
That's not a useful rate until you factor in population.
"High suicide rate" is a relative term, and does not describe foxconn.
Specifically, the baseline China rate is either 100 or 220 per million per year depending on source. Foxconn had about 14 suicides that year out of about a million workers (or about half a million at the relevant factories? I'm not exactly sure.) That's an impressively low rate. And for reference the US rate is about 100-140 per million per year.
Again, we're talking about a factory that beats its workers[0], faces them down in riots[1], hasn't paid wages on multiple occasions[2], negotiates against mass-worker suicide pacts[3], forces employees into overtime to fatal extremes[4] and blackmails the families of their workers[5].
Maybe, just maybe, giving authoritarian autonomy to a factory complex full of human workers is not a good idea.
Even if you go to the hypothetical extreme of pretending every single one those people committed suicide, it still doesn't give them a high suicide rate overall...
You can't automate installing ram, or a bunch of other things.
Electronics will get more expensive.
Maybe that's not only ok, but actually desirable. More expensive electronics might help reduce ewaste (which is VERY hazardous in aggregate) and push manufacturers to go back to repairable and upgradeable designs.
I don't think abusing your employees is ever okay.
If the only reason we haven't fully automated something is because we can force 6 people to live in a 100ft apartment then there is something pretty fucked up.
Is that really going to cost $2500 though? Sounds like a massive deal-breaker to me.
Apple is giving me a Macbook Pro with solid hardware for an equivalent amount of money that I can always count on for everything I do, and still set it for ~40% of the value 5+ years later.
For this you don't need to sell it 5+ years down the road—you pop in a new mainboard with the latest processor, for much less than a new laptop would cost, and off you go.
Given the whole idea here is total user freedom for ports and I/O expandability, it bothers me that I cannot get this with an SD card slot, a feature that comes standard on newer macbook pros.
They do have microSD, at least[0]. I feel like full-size SD cards are a bit more niche than they used to be (mostly DSLRs?). But there's no stopping someone designing and manufacturing a full-size SD card reader if there's enough demand to warrant it.
They should have designed that module to be full size sdcard because the microsd to sdcard adapters are easily available everywhere (a lot of microsd cards actually have the adaptor included in the packaging).
If you buy all components from Frame.work, yes. Nobody else to my knowledge is making compatible components for their laptops though, so we're still a ways away from having an ecosystem of options like desktop PCs have.
If you're not an EE, the only things you can buy 3rd party are RAM, SSD, and Wi-Fi modules. Which you can do the same for Thinkpads.
That said -- I do appreciate that partial upgrades are possible with Frame.work. I own one and when I upgrade the motherboard, even though I can only buy a motherboard upgrade from them, I won't be upgrading the case, display, and other things that don't need upgrades.
To date, framework's laptops are the only ones I've ever seen that were designed with replacing the motherboard as a possible upgrade path. There are a few Thinkpad series out there that by happy coincidence, you can swap parts and upgrade screens or maybe change to a newer generation's motherboard.. but generally that's more of a coincidence and not an intent.
I'm glad framework is trying this out. I'm not surprised about the battery life, but pretty much anything not made by Apple will have that issue lol.
If anything I would suspect if it's anywhere near the complexity of assembling a PC. This laptop is designed to be no-more than a real-world drag and drop machine
I went searching and was sad to find it'll ship without touch support. The display sure sounds great, but lacking touch is kind of a deal breaker for me.
I don't think the hardware or software are mainstream enough to make it work yet sadly.
There are ARM CPUs available, but they are mostly for servers or very low end devices, there's not a lot in the pro laptop market, and even if a low-end server chip could be repurposed, I don't know if the brand recognition would work, customers know AMD and Intel and what they're getting in terms of performance at different specs. That all works differently with ARM.
And then on the software side, Windows support seems... partial? Linux support is much better, but selling a laptop with only Linux as an option is a big step down in available market, and even Linux struggles with compatibility sometimes.
Apple's ARM chips are the only mainstream laptop/desktop class chips, but that's a completely distinct software and hardware ecosystem that neither Framework nor anyone else have access to.
This laptop is targeting the "pro-sumer" market. Framework aren't targeting the $500 price point, but they're definitely aiming to be mass market not require a computer science degree to use one.
Distro support for ARM is good, but the state of packaging software on Linux isn't wonderful, it's certainly not something the average computer user could manage (hence why Linux for desktop/laptop use isn't popular outside of software engineering). ARM adds one more layer of complexity, and given that this is already difficult, that rules out more of the market.
I gather Windows on ARM support is poor. The OS technically works, but a lot of software doesn't, and most software must run in emulation, which isn't great. MS announced more tooling for this at BUILD in March, but we're ~5 years in? and this is still going (macOS effectively fully transitioned in ~18 months). I think it's got a way to go before there aren't any obvious trade-offs for users.
You're right most users probably don't need Windows, and something like a Chromebook would be more appropriate, and there are ARM Chromebooks. That's not the market for these laptops though, and the CPUs are much too low end for these machines.
The picture at the end shows the laptops shadow on its left made it look like the laptop had a cheap shape. You can’t hVe sharp shadows like that on a photo
Magnesium is lighter than Aluminum because it is in the 2nd group of the periodic system to the left of Aluminum residing in the 3rd. The latter has got one additional proton and a couple of neutrons more.
There’s more to it than their atomic weights. Magnesium (24 amu) is ~66% the density of aluminum (27 amu). As I understand it, the crystalline structure of aluminum is more “tightly packed” than that of magnesium.
I’m strongly considering buying a Framework 16 when they come out. But with all the hype they’re generating, I feel certain that I and many others have to be disappointed. It can’t live up to it.
Are PCIe cards just dongles in another form factor? Is it a question of how much of the peripheral's surface area is visible from the outside? Or is it the difficulty of insertion/removal that separates expansion cards from dongles?
For me it's the dangling that makes the dongle a dongle.
That's a disingenuous comparison. PCIe is not USB-C. You are comparing apples to oranges.
The Framework laptop expansion cards are all USB-C dongles in a different form factor. It's purely an esthetic choice. You don't like the dangle. Thats a valid opinion. I have a USB-C hub that handles all the connections I need in a dongle-dangle.
The only real objective benefit of it, IMO, (and this is HUGE) is the repairability. I am a huge fan of that, and hope that other makes would step up (or be forced to step up) and make the same kind of changes.
An expansion card that is flush with the rest of the laptop frame compared to a dongle that dangles from the side is absolutely not just an aesthetic difference. Expansion cards don't need to be disconnected and reconnected whenever you move the laptop. Dongles do. You can't put a laptop with four dongles hanging off of it into a bag.
The distinction between USB-C and PCIe, on the other hand, is meaningless for most peripherals.
An imaginary handheld AM radio is more similar to a handheld FM radio than the handheld FM radio is to a desktop FM radio, from the user's perspective. You could say that "comparing AM to FM is apples to oranges", but the user wouldn't care as much as they care about how they actually interact with the thing.
IMO it's a big mistake that the RJ45 adapter sticks out, because the laptop is not thick enough... There is no good reason for that.. also, I'd like batteries with cylindrical cells.
If you prefer, you can glue them into place and then they're just fixed, unchangeable ports. That would be incredibly silly to do, but if you're so against the idea of something that can be swapped out...
Is your point that dongles are bad and therefore these are bad? If so, can you explain what it is you think is bad about dongles, and how this different form factor doesn't fix those issues?
If that's not your point, then what is your point? My issue with dongle-based connections is generally 2 fold: dongles are an awkward thing to have/carry around and having dongle-based connectors usually means you only have 1-2 connectors total. Neither of those issues applies in this case, so to whatever extent they can be considered dongles, they also aren't a problem in my mind.
Apropos of nothing, I learned (thanks to a recent Linus Tech Tips video) that Framework's DIY Edition laptops are preassembled for QA and then disassembled prior to shipping. I found that amusing. Not sure I could buy a DIY model knowing that.
They probably insert the same and known to work: storage, ram, etc. see if everything works, then remove them and insert them into the next model. The storage and ram you receive are pre-packaged and were QA-ed separately. It makes perfect sense, really.
Yep, this is correct. The memory, storage, Input Cover, and Bezel are "turn parts" that temporarily carry along the manufacturing line on each DIY Edition unit so that the system can go through the full set of manual and automated testing and quality control. The modules you receive in a DIY Edition shipment are actually totally separate modules specific to your order that are also independently tested and packed out, and are dropped into the box when the order is being shipped out of the warehouse.
I'm not sure I follow you here. I'm not saying that it should necessarily come with RAM, storage, and OS, which can be removed without disassembling the entire laptop. And I'm not making a statement one way or the other on whether you'll have to ensure your computer works.
I'm only saying that it's funny to learn that Framework undergoes some effort to assemble and test the laptop only to undo that work so the buyer can assemble the entire thing. It might be for entirely good reasons, but that doesn't make it a bit funny prima facie.
> It might be for entirely good reasons, but that doesn't make it a bit funny prima facie.
It might be funny, but your argument wasn't just that, it was that you wouldn't buy it because of this fact, which seems absurd.
They're using known good hardware to make sure the parts they do send you will work. The hardware they're putting in and taking out prior to shipping will likely not even remotely be the parts you actually use since it's BYO. They're just there to make sure that what they do ship will work once assembled.
As another commenter said, would you rather they didn't perform QA and just let the customer figure out that their mainboard is actually busted after spending time assembling it? That would be an exceptionally bad user experience.
I found that very funny as well. Built a DIY edition with my dad a few days later. It makes more sense if you're bringing your own SSD or RAM, and even so I've found there's still some value in the DIY assembly process as an introduction to the hardware.
You stop shilling for System76, no matter how good their QA is, the actual product is trash. Their screens and casing are on the level of bargain store acer machines, not premium quality laptops. I want my Linux hardware to be on the level of Macs, "privacy" and "coreboot" are no excuse for lack of product vision and poor mechanical engineering.
If I'm buying a new laptop today, its gonna be a Framework.
If I need to recommend something more inexpensive and casual, System76 exists, but I'd only recommend that to people have yet to fix their flawed thinking and think they don't want a Framework.
