Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linguae | Hacker News Reader

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I have a Framework 13 that I use as my personal laptop and a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro.

I love my Framework 13. I'm a long-time Mac user, but I increasingly found myself alienated by locked-down hardware and increasingly locked-down software, and so I ended up switching back to PCs. I greatly appreciate my Framework 13's user-serviceability. While I use Windows 11 + WSL (Microsoft Office is the main thing holding me back from using Linux exclusively, and yes, I was a regular LibreOffice user back in my student days when I couldn't afford a Microsoft Office license), it's great to have the option to go to Linux full-time on well-supported hardware.

With that said, my M3 MacBook Pro has absolutely amazing battery life. By comparison, my Framework 13 has rather abysmal battery life by 2025 standards. In fact, it feels reminiscent of my very first Apple laptop: a 2006 Core Duo MacBook, which got roughly five hours when brand new. Even putting my Framework 13 to sleep drains the battery after a few hours, while on my MacBook Pro, it barely sips from the battery.

I hope future releases of Framework laptops have better battery life; it makes a difference.

My beef with the Framework laptops is that their memory bandwidth is 5 to 8 times slower (depending on the generation, CPU, and RAM) than that of a $1,500 refurbished MacBook Pro M1 Max 64GB.

But then you have a 5 year old laptop that’s going to lose official Apple software support in 5 years and become a paperweight unless you install your choice of ONE Linux distro.

If you don’t specifically have a memory bandwidth-constrained workflow this doesn’t matter at all and having upgradable memory is still better for most people.

If Framework starts using CAMM modules or releases a Ryzen AI board with soldered RAM this difference is lessened/disappears.

> choice of ONE Linux distro

fwiw the asahi kernel and patches are usable from other distros just fine; i've done it on nixos in the past and the linked blog post shows some stuff running on gentoo

Sounds like a bunch of extra work and potential bugs/issues compared to “download iso, install iso”

But it's so slow. Why not just buy a new MacBook Pro every 2 years with more RAM and a faster CPU? The machine makes us money. I mean, I don't know what you guys are doing.

A M1 Max has 400GB/s of memory bandwidth but the CPU is only capable of using half of that (see https://tlkh.hashnode.dev/benchmarking-the-apple-m1-max#memo...). So a framework 13 with ddr 5 5600 with 86GB/s of memory bandwidth has a bit less than half, nowhere near ⅕th.

If we compare like-to-like the rtx 5070 in a framework 16 has 384GB/s on its own, add the 86 and the combined memory bandwidth is higher than a M1 Max.

I was being generous. These are just the pure bandwidth speeds. For my workflow when the CPU has to go back and forth with the RAM hudreds of times with unique queries, SoCs are hundreds times faster not 5 times.

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