A Year with the Framework 13(kevquirk.com)
17 points by herbertl 12 hours ago | 10 comments
- achayala 34 minutes agoI 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.
[-]- eigenspace 31 minutes ago2 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...
- BoredPositron 5 minutes agoNot 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.
- eigenspace 41 minutes agoThis 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.
- commandersaki 3 hours agoI 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.
- com 4 hours agoIt’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!
- aurareturn 3 hours agoTldr: 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.
[-]- eigenspace 36 minutes agoFor 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.
[-]- Orygin 32 minutes agoYou 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.
- kvuj 41 minutes agoI 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.
- 0xedd 3 hours ago[dead]