This 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 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?
Not really, no. These CPUs are very fast. Giving them a lower power budget is usually not noticable.
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.
As I said though, the computer is already so snappy and fast that I don't notice the difference between the power saving profile and the high performance profile for anything but benchmarking and gaming.
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.
The question though is if those lags you're noticing have anything to do with CPU or GPU performance. My editor and web browser are basically never CPU or GPU bound in their performance.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 don't have any major things to complain about, but I think those small opinionated things just build up rather heavily for me over time. There's a lot of little third party fixes for various things, but often Apple will break those third party fixes with new MacOS releases, and once you upgrade a computer you're not allowed to downgrade which is legitimately infuriating if it breaks something you rely on.
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.
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.
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.
This 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 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...
Power-saving setting. Isn't that slow and laggy?
Not really, no. These CPUs are very fast. Giving them a lower power budget is usually not noticable.
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.
https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/17300000?baseli...
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.
As I said though, the computer is already so snappy and fast that I don't notice the difference between the power saving profile and the high performance profile for anything but benchmarking and gaming.
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.
I suppose if it works for you, that's great.
But I find even an M4 will lag sometimes when coding.
The question though is if those lags you're noticing have anything to do with CPU or GPU performance. My editor and web browser are basically never CPU or GPU bound in their performance.
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.
SSD isn't a problem. Web browsing, for example, is affected by ST performance. So is compiling, running tests, etc.
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 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
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!
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.
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.
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
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.
[1] https://laptopparts4less.frl
[2] https://crimier.github.io/posts/Framework-Omarchy/
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 don't have any major things to complain about, but I think those small opinionated things just build up rather heavily for me over time. There's a lot of little third party fixes for various things, but often Apple will break those third party fixes with new MacOS releases, and once you upgrade a computer you're not allowed to downgrade which is legitimately infuriating if it breaks something you rely on.
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.
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.
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.
Mac VRAM is an absolute bargain if you need high bandwidth ram such as for local LLMs.
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