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> 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.

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.

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

> 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.

>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.

Isnt that the entire value proposition of the company?

> 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 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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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 :)

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?

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.

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

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.

You magnificent bastard, you know just how to suck money out of my wallet. And it's not even Christmas yet :-)

I’d prefer a non-touchscreen. Touchscreen does add about 200g of weight. Is that likely to be an option?

Why is the AMD version not available in LPCAMM2, and can we expect to see an LPCAMM2 version in the near future?

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?

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 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.

What’s the display color accuracy like outside of sRGB? How much of adobe or P3 does it cover?

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?)

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?

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?

Any plan for a 75% keyboard?

There's no mention of Wi-Fi. Is the network card integrated to the new intel mainboards ?

What would it take you to ship to Norway?

Do these laptops, either the Intel or the AMD version, work with eGPUs on Linux?

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?

How well does the haptic trackpad stack up against the ones found in macbooks?

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?

Will the hinges be 360 like the laptop 12? I wonder how useful the touchscreen will be without it.

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…

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?

Why LPCAMM and not SOCAMM2? What is the status of SOCAMM for laptops and would it be possible to do a SOCAMM for NVMe?

Thanks Nirav, always appreciated :)

P.S. The printer gag was cruel, just saying.

No silver option?

Any blue-sky thinking like 256GB RAM support?

I have a feeling that laptops don't keep up with the today's dev workflows.

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.

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.

To compare anecdotes, I’ve had mine for 3 years, and it’s still working great. Haven’t had any issues with it.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

This is largely driven by RAM prices, which is a real shame.

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.

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?

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

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.

I bet the linux drivers are not fully done yet and will mature after release.

4k on linux is not possible due to drm I think?

> 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.

Netflix doesnt support 4k streaming on Linux.

In the announcement video, he says the display is "LTPS LCD" (I don't actually know if that's good or not)

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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...

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.

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).

same

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

> 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 :)

?

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.

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.

Doesn't it work perfectly with a 2880px-wide display with 2x scaling?

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.

Forget fractional scaling, just keep scale at 100% and increase font and icon sizes.

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

Or, another way to think about this: "buy more ram when it becomes more affordable"

14" macbook pro with those specs is ~2100. 200 dollar delta for repair-ability seems acceptable to me.

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?

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.

Don't forget literally all the battery values are specified as Windows 11.

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.

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.

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.

Well you know how it is on linux, one wrong move and pulseaudio needs restarting lol.

to be fair, your money isn't as good as VC money for RAM at the moment

Do mobile CPU's and northbridges support ECC?

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.

16" inch laptop with a tkl keyboard and an AMD chip - why don't we have more of them on the market?

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 am more hung up on not having ctrl/alt/super on the right side

Hear, hear!

Some System76 SKUs have Coreboot now, e.g. https://system76.com/laptops/darter-pro

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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

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.)

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.

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...

It's a 13.5" screen with a 3:2 aspect ratio. It's very comparable to many consumer-style 14" 16:10 screens.

You could get a blank keyboard, and nice transparent stickers.

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.

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.

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.

You can add extra disk via the removable slots, frame.work shop has various disk sizes.

They do offer blank keycaps, no labels, as an option…

Full?! I'm seeing half up/down keys.

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.

Let's all thank the AI industry for this.

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

I do. Why not?

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 :)

No numpad

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

> 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 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!

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.