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My first-gen Framework 13 with Ubuntu is usable, but has major issues around power. Battery life is very poor compared to ordinary laptops (I get ~3 hours of web browsing and light coding), and compared to M-series Macbooks (which have extraordinary battery life >8 hours) it is abysmal. Suspend/resume often fails in strange ways, and occasionally even power on is problematic (e.g. battery is full but it won't turn on without being plugged into a charger). Repair-ability and running OSS software is an idealistic goal that I share, however in practical terms the need to repair a laptop is very rare. So when it breaks, I'll be well ahead of the curve; when it doesn't, which is most of the time, I'm behind the curve.

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> battery is full but it won't turn on without being plugged into a charger

This is a known issue with specifically the first-gen model (i.e. Intel 11th Gen mainboard). The rechargable coin-cell RTC battery is only charged from the USB-C charger, not from the internal LiPo battery. When the coin cell degrades, it cannot hold a charge for long anymore, so you need to connect the notebook to external power to turn it on even if the battery is full.

Framework has acknowledged the issue and provides a replacement part free of charge that you can solder onto the main power rail of the notebook. Since I have no experience with soldering, I had a friend assist me with the soldering part, and now the issue is gone for me.

I can't paste the link right now because my workplace's firewall blocks the frame.work website for whatever reason, but search on the community forum for "RTC Battery Replacement" and it will give you the thread with instructions for how to get the replacement part.

I also have a Framework 13, and I agree that Apple’s ARM laptops have amazing performance per watt. The reason I have a Framework 13 instead of an ARM Mac is user-serviceability and cost savings. There is 32GB of RAM in my Framework, and at any time I could choose to upgrade to 64GB whenever necessary. However, because RAM in ARM Macs is integrated into the system and is not a separate user-replaceable component, I must purchase the maximum amount of RAM I could afford upfront, which is prohibitively expensive for me. I also do not like how storage is built-in instead of available as NVMe M.2 modules. I miss the days of my 2006 MacBook and my 2013 Mac Pro, which were both easy to upgrade. It’s this lack of upgradability in recent Macs that led me to switch to PCs despite my preference for macOS over Windows and desktop Linux.

With that said, if a company offered me the choice between a PC or a Mac, I’d pick the Mac every time. It’s different when someone else is paying ;).

I’m firmly in team Mac. And I really don’t care about upgradability that much. I’m OK with buying up front.

But Apple’s BTO prices are, as everyone knows, totally insane. Combined with pathetic base amounts it really burns people. I know a lot of Mac fans who keep putting off upgrades because it costs so much to get a decent config.

There are some decent sales on B+H and Microcenter on older higher-spec units. B+H had a 16” MBP M1 Max 10/32 (upper bin) with 4TB/64GB for $3.3k (then $3k, lol jebaited) this time last year. Microcenter has M1 Max 14” 64GB/1TB (yeahhh 1tb but it’s ok) for $1800 right now, refurbished tho. And stuff does go on sale in the refurb store too over time, and “factory refurbished” woot are also AppleCare eligible, factory refurb (which the microcenter don’t appear to be?) may also be the same at other vendors so just a thing to keep an eye on. Usually it’s in the About, and you can jump to a system report by holding down option when clicking the apple menu and it’ll be an option. TIL and I’m passing it on. Apple: you can (not) discover

AppleCare is more worth it on a loaded out newer laptop imo. If you have a $3k laptop you are committed to getting it fixed for a while. It maths out that if you break a screen you’re break even. Whatever. I’ll probably lose the bet but things like tile and stone will fuck up a screen if it gets any velocity at all, hard surface impacts suck. I bought a nice laptop because I want to carry it around outside etc and still be able to do whatever I want off the plug. And M1 Max is perfectly fine at that, really the popularity of the M1 has massively eroded most of the M2 and M3’s thunder. “More perf more power” was only a narrative that mattered (throttle to whatever you want, and efficiency goes up anyway) because the price gradient from M1 has always been insurmountable.

(original German, machine auto translation English at the top with the flag) https://www.notebookcheck.com/Qualcomm-Snapdragon-X-Elite-in...

M4 Max is the first time I’m interested, primarily because of SVE and true neural accelerator APIs not through metal. And a lot of cumulative gains too, of course. AV1 encode and decode, way better perf and much better graphics, etc. I’ll definitely wait at least another gen most likely (get M4 Max on firesale?) but there really is starting to be a more substantial difference than people realize.

Honestly the air 15” is also a very compelling form factor if they give you a second pixel pipe in the m4 (does it? I thought I read it did). Especially if they get it to 32gb on the top sku… fine. Even 24gb is fine for what it is and those M2 Air 15” 24GB/1TB SKUs are down to $1700 or something in the refurb store. 14/16" MBP 32GB/1TB M1 Max are also perpetually cheap, I've seen them down below $1400 iirc. Standard/popular work laptop.

It’s been nice having the M1 Max and doing inference on the gpu, dolphin-mixtral etc are super useful and actually helpful in on tons of first-pass summarization of a niche etc. I would like more, I hope AMD lets the gpu allocate unlimited memory on Strix halo. Half the time it's plugged in as a pseudo workstation, doing some AI shit and tinkering and generally just being a beefcake with crazy memory b/w, triple thunderbolt, etc, half the time it's out on the (stone) patio or a table out in the lawn sipping power, with a nice bright screen (the fingerprints tho...) while the dogs play (and one of them is on a tieout, so he knocks things over, etc). And whether or not it's a gimmick ($350 for the 3-years and I break even if I have a screen break? i'm ok with this) it's given me peace of mind to just carry it around and use it.

I've totally been able to spend way more time out with the dogs with a nice laptop again. It's been a huge QOL change to get a portable workstation slash do it all thin-n-light with great build quality, a well-supported unix ecosystem and pytorch ecosystem, a performant GPU with a good library and broad application support, super great efficiency, high-end AI/ML model capability, a nice screen, a reasonable keyboard, tons of thunderbolt... the MBA was nice but something bigger is nice outside, and it sold me on the expensive loaded out laptop actually because it was such a good user experience just as a unix user. I've used linux plenty, I've used windows (mostly for gaming now), I've used freebsd, part of the ick people feel is just because they aren't used to bsdutils. Yes, they're archaic and different etc. They're also a cohesive ecosystem of their own, this largely isn't an apple thing. And apple is actually ironically really good about letting you have command-line utils to set file associations, bless apps (ie grant security console privilege toggles), etc, and applescript/shortcuts is always the weird fallback interface.

(Apple has had a long history of writing all their stuff as Intents, that's a hypercard thing, if not before right? And applescript/shortcuts just lets you push the buttons of the intents just like siri. You can actually make a ton of shortcuts which un-annoyify ios, in particular. "Airdrop on" right there on my home screen. Living in the 21st century.)

I think apple BTO prices are competitive with large laptop vendors but not with Framework. For example a m3 pro 16”/96gb/2tb costs 7700aud. A dell with 64gb and 2tb costs at least 6000aud. hp zbook with 64gb/2tb costs like 8000aud and that’s after discount. Obviously the dell and hp may shine in one or two things but are probably inferior in many ways. I’m not sure how warranty stacks though, applecare for 3 years is 650aud, and that’s definitely something i would purchase.

I reckon there’s apple tax, but I also think it’s competitively priced.

Framework 16” is significantly cheaper if you diy.

Edit: Now that I'm at a laptop and not on phone I could check on the warranty situation. The Dell come with 1 year standard warranty (which is better than Apple's 7 complimentary 7 day), but the XPS is 420aud for 3 years, and the Alienware is 735aud for 3 years. HP situation is better with a HP Care Pack with 3 year support/warranty for 190aud or 270aud depending which model you choose.

Hmm.

> a m3 pro 16”/96gb/2tb costs 7700aud

You can't buy an m3 pro with more than 36GB in the UK. A Max with 64GB is £4,699 (8,900 AUD).

A 64GB/2GB Dell Alienware is £2,399 (4,550 AUD).

Yeah, I got the naming wrong but the prices right-ish (actually 7800aud not 7700). That'd be a m3 max 16"/96gb/2tb which is 4799ukp, but you're right the spec equivalent dell alienware is 2399ukp.

But in australia the dell alienware is 6000ish aud, and the xps 16 (which is a non starter as it has a touch sensitive esc/function keys and invisible touchpad) is also 6000 aud. I guess we're paying some crazy tax on the alienware. Also the alienware is 18" which depending on what you want is good or bad (personally something I wouldn't want).

Edit: In the usa m3 max 16/96gb/2tb is 4699usd, alienware 16" 64gb/2tb is 2249usd.

> But in australia the dell alienware is 6000ish aud

The Alienware m16 R2 actually looks cheaper in Aus than UK, you just can't spec it with 64GB/2TB for some unknown reason. If you could for the same percentage bump as the UK, it would be 3577 AUD.

https://www.dell.com/en-au/shop/gaming-and-games/alienware-m...

> But Apple’s BTO prices are, as everyone knows, totally insane.

I think the thing to understand is that the only well priced configurations that Apple offers are the base models.

If you want more ram/storage, it's almost always better to upgrade to the appropriate level CPU that gives you that "for free". The only exception is if you want to run the absolute maximum amount of ram; there's nothing after the Ultra, so you just have to grit your teeth and smile while Apple takes their pound of flesh.

Hopefully Apple's newfound interest in AI will spur them to increase the amount of ram they include across the board.

> My first-gen Framework 13 with Ubuntu [...] (I get ~3 hours of web browsing and light coding)

Mine is significantly better than that, I don't mind saying it doesn't last as long as my (I think M3 Max) MBP, but it's not that bad. I use Arch rather than Ubuntu, and I think have 'tlp' or something installed as generally recommended (for any laptop), but haven't otherwise done anything special. I haven't even updated the firmware/BIOS, which I think is supposed to offer a battery life improvement.

I use arch on my framework 13” with sway and no real special software for battery or special bios setting. I’d be very lucky to get 4 hours with light web browsing. Typically I get 2 hours since I do some compiling and/or video conferencing. Pretty appalling.

I have the AMD Framework 13 running Debian/KDE and get substantially better battery life than what you're describing but it definitely still doesn't compare to an M-series Macbook.

That said, it's worth noting that battery life struggles are common across all Linux laptops, not specific to Framework. I've run Ubuntu on laptops from several brands and they all have weird suspend/resume issues, high battery usage, and so on. (I just installed `tlp` for the first time at the recommendation of another reply to you [0], so we'll see if that makes a difference.)

I'd be curious to hear from someone who runs a Framework with Windows (if such a person exists) to see what the power story is like there.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40745832

I had a Framework 13 (Intel, 11th gen) running Windows, the battery lasted 3.5h – streaming a movie (reproducible). The other major issue was the fan constantly running on max, I didn't have a laptop fan that loud for 15 years.

Before having several loops with customer support, I tried ever forum post, all options, settings, tricks etc. Then I end it in for repair, the final summary: Everything works as expected.

So I returned it. I tried another time with Framework 13 (Intel, 12th gen) and that showed exactly the same behaviour, so I again returned it :(

I want to love Framework, for me I clearly see a huge value in repairability: I'm having a Lenovo Ideapad for 5 years now, there was some dirt under the keys, so I tried (by documentation) to remove the key cap and destroyed it by doing so. Then I wanted to replace the keyboard, and by doing so I destroyed the connector to the keypad. I'm clearly not a hardware guy, but I've been repairing my devices (PC, phone) for decades now, and I never struggled as much as I did with the Ideapad.

I plan to give Framework 13 (Intel, Ultra) another shot, because they finally have the 61Wh battery in the first CPU tier. But I fear it won't make a difference as Framework remains ignorant about their broken power management (horrible battery, fan noise, heating up).

First gen Framework (11th gen) here. It's different your experience is from mine. I get typically 8-10 hours (more than enough for a full school day) on my laptop, although I have done numerous power optimizations.

If you'd be willing to share those optimizations, I (and many others, I would guess) would be deeply grateful.

Intense TLP optimizations do most of the work! There's a lot of threads regarding optimization on the community forum too!

Otherwise: - Keep all expansion cards as USB-C - Do what powertop tells you to do (watchdogs, autosuspend) - Run a lightweight WM/DE (Hyprland without blur and shadows in my case) - Limit electron apps, anything but electron apps. - Use light mode (dark mode, from my experience, causes me to increase the backlight far higher than on light mode, something unfavourable on IPS panels)

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