A Year with the Framework 13
kevquirk.com
kevquirk.com
Still, I am really surprised about your battery duration.
Do you have some sort of background process eating up your battery or something? Maybe cloud sync or something that's too aggressive?
I also have no heat problems unless I'm gaming...
I run debian, with backports enable for run the newest kernel version. I have syncthing running, but I think this is not a big problem. Fan run hard when doing work, otherwise it is quiet. All this in KDE battery save profile mode.
I don't know, maybe battery have something wrong? I was looking the framework page, and it says "The 61Wh battery retains up to 80% capacity after 1,000 cycles of use. ". Mine has 142 change-cycles and it is at 91%!!
For regular tasks like web browsing and coding I cannot notice any difference. The only times I really notice it is when I try to benchmark a piece of code and the benchmark comes out ~30-40% slower than expected, and then I remember that I'm power saving mode. But I just have to hit one button on my dock to switch profiles.
If power savings drops perf by further 30%, then an M5 is 2.26x in ST faster while on battery. Massive difference in snappiness.
2.26x faster and 3-4x more battery life for the Mac.
Even taking the Geekbench numbers at face value (which would be stupid), saying that another computer is 2.26x faster at something that I don't notice the speed is not interesting to me at all.
More battery life is of course great, but to be honest 6-7 hours away from the wall is more than enough for me.
All else equal, I'd of course love to have a computer with a slicker design, more performance, and more battery life, but some things are just more important to me. I like being able to repair and upgrade my computer, and I like to have first class linux support. Those two things just make a much bigger difference to me personally.
But I find even an M4 will lag sometimes when coding.
If you notice a hitch when doing something, that's almost certainly because the computer is fetching data from your SSD that's not hot in the RAM or CPU cache.
Clocking the CPU higher won't help with that at all.
The battery life when I first got it, was at best 4-5 hours of moderate usage, and then slumped to 3-4 hours; running Linux of course.
My one also had hinge issues where the screen would fall flat 180 degrees from a 90 degree position when picking it up which was just really annoying. There is a new hinge kit that costs $40, but they want $35 shipping for it.
The keyboard is mostly good, but it still annoys me that there isn't an half-sized inverted-T arrow keys like the Macbooks; I was mostly banking on a 3rd party creating this type of replaceable keyboard but it just never happened.
I think the display panel is of very average quality as well, maybe the newer generations are better.
The other annoying thing was the fan noise. It's just so loud, but it only does turn on when heavy compute is happening, and not randomly like a lot of the PC laptops out there.
Despite all these deficiencies, I think I mostly just miss using a Mac and being fully in the ecosystem. Linux just doesn't really do it for me, and I don't think I can ever really use Windows again even though it has WSL2. I just find Apple products so much better to use, despite the software quality degrading. Plus the accessibility tools which I lean heavily on outclass the competition by a large margin.
I should have known better, as before the current AMD F13 7840 I owned one of the first Intel gen11 (another family member suffering it for the last year).
I just wanted it hard to work and thought that the community-based investigation and feedback was just what I am accustomed to in general using Linux. Except the broken functionality is so basic, I was every day aggravated by the unexpected failure of a peripheral to work, or the hard switch off when I had not noticed port 3 had stopped charging.
I lost the will to fight when the whole train wreck with Omarchy[2] and supporting the Valley most toxic bro culture was left to fester in seeming contempt for the kind of users who had sacrificed money and time to support what we then believed to be "the right way".
Fortunately this allowed me to see the weaknesses, besides the malfunctioning ports: the miserable battery life and the trackpad that did not click anymore in the gen 11.
It also allowed me to not want yet one more US product, which makes me very happy as there doesn't seem to be any other way to stop the lunatics in charge than to sink its economy with persistent consumer-side boycott.
For a close person I bought a TongFang X4SP4NAL through a Dutch reseller [1] and it was cheaper, more powerful, with better customer support and so far, way more robust.
You can buy 2x M4 Macbook Airs for the same price, get significantly better performance, portability, screen, trackpad. Keep one in the draw in case one of them breaks. But Macs are tanks and will easily last 10+ years.
I think Framework is one of those things that sound cool to geeks, but basic math says it makes no sense.
The breaking point was when I tried out their "Hide my email" feature and I just knew what direction everything was going. At that point I just decided I wanted out, and was more than happy to deal with the idiosyncracies of Linux and Framework to get away from that.
Linux and Framework have problems, but their problems don't feel malicious and/or negligent the way problems with Apple or Microsoft feel. I'd rather deal with some annoyances but feel that I'm part of a community project to build something pro-social, open, and sustainable rather than closed and focused on entrapment and rent-seeking.
I have been working on MBP for years now and I don't even have an Apple account, I just install my browser and whatever apps I need and then go on with my day.
The most "Apple" feature I used is the time machine but it's usable without any account.
Without their special stuff, I just find macOS to be an okay, but rather opinionated and frustrating OS to use, whereas I find KDE on Linux to be a bit less polished, but much nicer at least for me as a software dev.
I think macOS is nice if you use it exactly the way that Apple wants you to use it, otherwise it's just painful.
Do you have an example? Apart from a few small opinionated decisions, I find Macos to mostly get out of my way.
Of course it lacks the customization that Linux offers, and there are a few UX issues with the DE (switching desktop animations, window management, etc), but for a software dev, being UNIX is pretty good and opens lots of opportunities.
Compared to Windows which is actively hostile towards its users, it's night and day
I think I recall something back in 2019 where the Catalina update also broke my favoured programming language because of some notorization change or something, and the process to approve improperly notorized apps was somehow broken, but I don't remember what exactly it was. That was around the time I switched to Linux, but my memory is fuzzy.
And yes, I agree I'd much rather use MacOS than Windows any day. I think I would be fine on a MacOS machine other than for gaming, where Linux and Windows are just way way way ahead in terms of compatibility and performance.
But given the choice between MacOS and Linux, I just feel more comfortable and more respected on Linux than MacOS, both in terms of customization, and general ideology.
Call me paranoid, but I really do believe that Apple wishes to lock down MacOS just as much as iOS is locked down, they just haven't found a way to do it yet that wouldn't cause a massive loss of users.
Back when it came out, Apple was starting to add firmware locks to more and more components like the battery and the rest of the industry were getting worse and worse ifixit repair scores. Nowadays, a lot of companies are starting to take repairability by the end user more seriously (look at the neo) which is hurting the value proposition of Framework's laptop.
This doesn't hinder repairability, as you will find with the Macbook Neo. It just thwarts a secondary market for stolen Macbooks and/or parts.