Framework Laptop 16

Anyone using Framework for a daily driver that can compare to an M-series Macbook? Specifically, battery life on your OS. Does anything compare to a MBP these days?

From a value proposition, it seems good. Our group definitely goes through keyboards and mainboards from spilled tea at least annually it seems, but AppleCare is just a no-brainer, and away we go.

I still drive on my original M1 at home without complaint, and use my M3 at work. Anyone have the early Frameworks still in daily use? How are they?

I have an early batch framework (i7 11th gen) still in use (I have no other laptops or a PC). A few benefits I've gotten out of it: - I spilled almost a liter of milk on my keyboard, really gummed it up. Keys stopped working. Got it replaced for pretty cheap. - Linux just works. No weird driver issues But... - Battery life is horrible. I pretty much just have it plugged in whenever I can. When off battery, I use the cpupower frequency set command to limit to 1000MHz which is fast enough for vim anyways. Compiling stuff becomes a bit slower but since I write Go, it's not too bad. - Fan noise is loud - My specific laptop had a weird sensor bug where it would sometimes randomly get throttled to 200 MHz. Framework didn't really help or replace it.

Honestly it'll probably last me another 5 years before I need to switch out the mainboard. I don't do anything intense like gaming.

I have a first generation framework 13, I upgraded the mainboard last year to the 12th gen intel i7-1280P mainboard. My original mainboard was from the first batch with the bios battery issues but still works, though I haven't had success getting it to run standalone in the coolmaster case yet.

I'm happy with my framework 13 four years later. I might switch to the stiffer hinge and/or a matte screen in the future. Might try one of the AMD mainboards in a few generations when they're cheaper and put my current mainboard into another case...

Edit: FWIW I bought a macbook air M1 a year after getting the framework 13, and ended up selling it. The battery life on the macbook air was significantly better, but I can still spend an entire workday in the park with the glossy framework 13 without needing to recharge so the extra battery life from the M1 didn't really have a ton of value for me.

Some interesting discussion around this topic yesterday here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45019483

Unfortunately I do not think anyone comes remotely close to Apple in the battery life department. I have an M2 Air that I really adore, but after driving Linux on my workstation for the last 2 years I want to explore Linux laptops. All my research has concluded that if you care about longevity, a Mac is the only way to go.

I’ve had an AMD Framework 13 since around its launch. I still love it and much prefer the Linux experience and its customizability over my M2 MacBook Pro. I also love that all the people who worked on it have their names literally on my mainboard—you’re supporting a small business trying to make the industry better, instead of a megacorp doing everything in their power to prevent easy repairs.

The battery life is good enough that I never worry/think about it. The keyboard is fantastic. The trackpad is meh, not terrible but not MacBook great—use a mouse or vim :)

I have a Framework 13 (11th gen i7 + Debian + KDE) and the battery lasts just as long as my M3 Apple laptop. Maybe I get an extra hour out of the Apple one. Nothing major and there’s no stupid nub at the top of the screen.

Nothing touches Apple Silicon on battery, including laptops with similar performance per watt. And there's no scenario where, on pretty much any individual performance spec, a FW is going to compete with a Mac.

When I first got a 12th-gen Intel mainboard FW13 with the original 55Wh battery running stock Ubuntu, the battery life at best was <6 hours. Since moving to the 7040 AMD mainboard, the upgraded 61Wh battery, and Fedora, I've not run out of battery in an 8-hour workday. I've also got an Ultra 7 155H mainboard with the same work performance with respect to battery life.

I can't speak to the FW16s with 85Wh batteries, but I also don't consider them as being designed with either work or battery life as priorities.

Framework doesn't provide official optimized Linux power management profiles. Community profiles make up some of the difference, but if untuned battery life out of the box is a priority to you, and if you also don't care about the process of replacing its battery, just get a Mac. If Linux is an additional priority to you, get an old M1 or M2 MBP with a low battery cycle count and run Fedora Asahi Remix on it.

FWIW, I had a Dell laptop that I put Ubuntu 22.04 on when I got it, and the battery life was atrocious; closing everything except Firefox, closing every FF tab but one, stopping background services, setting the screen to half brightness, I got about an hour and a half of battery life.

Went and installed Slimbook Battery and left it at default settings and got several more hours of battery life without having to close everything. Had to reinstall later and just installed TLP and left it at default settings and still getting far better battery life.

Not sure why Ubuntu is so cripplingly bad out of the box when it's so easy to fix, but if you haven't tried that it might be worth checking out.

> the first batch with the bios battery issues

This was some seriously infuriating bullshit. I remember them blaming it on intel on the forums, even though no other laptop had the issue.

In my case, replacing the battery with a random aliexpress ine fixed the issue, and they could have just said so.

Really made me lose trust in the company.

I have a ThinkPad T14 Gen 5 AMD (besides MacBook Pro M1 Pro) and with some powertop tweaks it lasts about 6-7 hours. Not as great as the M1 Pro, but generally good enough to work a few hours without power. The nice thing is that I loaded it up with 64GiB RAM and a 2TB SSD for cheap (almost infinite NixOS generations, yay!).

The MacBook has a better trackpad, stronger case, better battery life, far better display. But the ThinkPad has NixOS running perfectly (I had Asahi on my Mac Studio, but with the lack of Thunderbolt and not so great battery life I don't want to run it on a MacBook). At any rate, the Mac is going to be better, but I have to sacrifice a bit for tech-feudalism-free computing (Mac is slowly becoming more and more closed).

I regularly use an M4 and a Framework 13. There's really no comparison in terms of battery life and performance (even compared to the M1 which I also used extensively). Having said that, Framework 13 is a good machine for Linux. My only complaints is battery life could be better, and I don't like the trackpad.

The Lemur Pro gets up to 14: https://system76.com/laptops/lemp13/configure

I like the framework and I like Fedora KDE. However the battery life, thanks to AMD and Intel, is horrible in comparison.

I can easily do 10-12 hours on my M4 MBP. My framework AMD 13 can do maybe half that if I have it on power save mode and I don't do anything heavy.

The keyboard is good, speakers are meh, track pad is not as good as Mac. Form factor is good.

I have an M2 Max MBP for work and a Framework 16 for home.

Build quality of the MBP is better. The machine feels more solid. The battery life is better, although to be fair, I run Linux on the Framework so the hardware itself isn't the only difference.

The Framework 16 wins hands-down when it comes to ports, one of my biggest pain points with any Apple laptop in the last 10 years. It has six of them and I can mostly arrange them according to my needs. In the rare cases where I plug it into an external monitor, I swap out one of the USB ports for an HDMI port. If I'm using more older devices than normal, I replace the USB-C ports with USB-A ports. I say "mostly" here because not all ports work in all positions.

The repairability and openness of the Framework laptop were the big draws for me and it delivered well on both counts. I'm happy with it.

I don't think the build quality is very far off in any sort of terms that matter. Sure, Apple gives you a hollowed out block of aluminum and that's really nice and fancy but that doesn't really matter in any tangible way except feeling nice.

Framework has pretty minimal keyboard deck flex and other measures of build quality that actually impact usage. I think it fares better than a good chunk of PC competitors like the ThinkPad T14.

The only thing Framework really needs is a haptic trackpad and it'd be pretty much there in terms of the build feel. I also like how Apple puts the air intakes on the side rather than the bottom where they're frequently blocked by a lap or a soft surface.

Thanks for the tip, I'll have to try Slimbook battery and TLP out.

> Framework doesn't provide official optimized Linux power management profiles

Is this difficult? Would it not behoove them to do this and get better work-hour scores? I would imagine it would be part of making sure the screen can dim, touch pad works, etc in terms of "building a quality product".

I dont mean this in a snarky way, I just figure if you're making it and know the products in it, couldn't you optimise a power profile for it? Or perhaps they "know" it has an AMD/Intel processor in it, but that isn't enough to really do a worthwhile job and it's more on AMD/Intel to do it?