A Year with the Framework 13
kevquirk.comThis more or less tracks my experience having a Framework 13 for 2 years years now. It's not a perfect laptop, but it's quite nice and I'm happy with the tradeoffs it makes.
I thought mine was ok, not a Mac but then I played around with non 3:2 format laptop screen and ran back to the Framework
I am not so happy, it is really a surprise to me the battery life. I mean you mention all day work? men, my framework laptop with Intel Ultra 5 just work for 2 hours maximum from I bought it, I also have problems with touchpad (support send me a new one) and the heat is a real problem. I mean, I just have to manage the laptop in battery save mode, otherwise the cpu temp easy get 100 degrees or more doing normal work.
Still, I am really surprised about your battery duration.
2 hours? That's crazy. I regularly get 6-7 hours of coding done without charging on my Framework 13 linux with an AMD 7840 chip in the power-saving setting.
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...
Does it run the fans hard even when not chewing CPU? Sounds like perhaps a thermal issue - there are guides on repasting/padding heatsinks online; you might want to try that.
I have a Framework 13 2nd gen (I think), Intel. I forget the specs now and haven't opened it up for the last 2 years now.
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.
It’s Le to chime in and say I’m really happy with mine too. It’s less portable than my old MacBook Air, but it is just a dream machine with Debian 13!
I only had problems upon problems with the USB-C ports: some stopped charging, some stopped supporting 4k external monitors, it's all a mess and I spent uncountable hours reading forums and trying things. All for naught.
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.
My son got a Framework 13 AMD with high res screen and has happily used daily for over a year. Good battery life. He doesn't bang it around so ymmv
Not a fan of my framework (gen2). I am almost certain I would have been happier going with a ThinkPad again. The framework is fine overall but everything has little annoyances that are just hard to overlook the longer you use it. The cpu power profiles they ship are borderline unusable and make me question them as a manufacturer.
Tldr: It's worse than a Mac in every way except that you get a piece of mind that you can repair it yourself by buying overpriced replacement parts from Framework if it breaks.
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.
For me it was really just that I constantly felt like Apple was doing everything they could to entrap me in their ecosystem and make it maximally painful to leave.
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.
You don't need to enter their ecosystem to use the computers.
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.
Yeah, it was mostly the stuff on iOS that drove me away, macOS can be used as a relatively open and okay laptop OS without their lock-in features, but I also found that those lock-in features were the only things that were really compelling to me about their laptops.
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.
> I think macOS is nice if you use it exactly the way that Apple wants you to use it
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'd have loved to buy a MacBook instead, but the price gouging on RAM and SSD at the time was insane (less so six months later) - massively cheaper to buy a DIY framework and put your own RAM and SSD in.
I think a good portion of their sales have been ideological in nature.
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.
I much prefer the parts pairing that is required by Apple. Parts pairing is a mitigation to theft, but in my opinion should be a stronger anti-theft measure. I don't think Apple goes far enough with this. At the moment, a locked part, that is a part that has been taken from a mac with the activation lock still enabled, should render unusable on another mac, or at least show up in the parts setting as marked lost or stolen, and should at render as completely inferior to that of a genuine or authenticated part.
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.