Honestly, it was much cheaper than I had assumed it would be. A pre-built "performance" version starts at $1,699 (Ryzen 7 7840HS) with 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD. Compare that to the entry 16 inch MacBook Pro at $2499.
The "overkill" system with a Ryzen 9 7940HS, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD is $2099. A pseudo comparison to the 16 inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro, 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD is $3099.
Also these systems are cheaper if done DIY and no Windows tax. Framework really might have a winner if this system can live up to their promises.
Not being snarky or anything, but do you have easy access to broadband internet where you are, or do you live in a locale that prohibits VPN?
It turned out more effective for me to buy a Chromebook and build a remote workstation to do actual work from, with the added benefit that I don't care if my Chromebook is lost or stolen because it doesn't store any data and costs less than a screen replacement (<$179).
I also wasn't impressed by the highly externalized "there's an adapter for that" dongle-shuffle for basic ports when Apple did it 2017, and if I wanted to bring it all with me, I'd still need to buy and lug around a eGPU if I wanted to do any compute. Plus I get like 14 hours of full-brightness work time off of one charge, similar to an M1 MacBook Air.
That's just my use case, of course. I've also built an SFF system with eDP when I have to travel and generate a lot of data and an Alienware m17 isn't enough.
Remoting into a beefy workstation works for plenty of command-line tasks, but is going to yield a subpar experience for GUI tasks. As someone whose daily driver for several lean years was a $180 netbook (remember netbooks?), anything that I could do on my remote machine was grand (at the time, a $5 VPS), and anything that I had to do locally was a slog.
> "there's an adapter for that" dongle-shuffle
> lug around a eGPU
One of the unique selling points of the Framework is that you can customize the ports to your needs, so dongles are unnecessary unless you need a whole lot of ports. And the Framework 16 doesn't need an eGPU, you can plug in an actual GPU that integrates with the body of the laptop.
No worries habibi. Your post isn't snarky and I get where you are coming from with what you wrote. I was more commenting on my expectations of the price given that this is a (relatively) new company on a larger form factor that has a lot of interchangeable parts, external GPU, etc.
This laptop isn't personally for me but I can see why people would like it. Also my workflow requires a lot of GUI applications for simulating and visualizing robotic movement and that is incredibly hard with ChromeOS or macOS.
admittedly, my primary role hasn't been development in over a decade, so nothing fancy. primarily vim with plugins, good integrations, and native compilers/utilities, and Microcenter or Costco special Chromebooks (14" 1080p matte screen, plenty of ports, and uSD). besides some native Linux utilities, the Chromebooks just run a browser for guacamole and some other hosted services.
I'm very interested by the Framework Chromebook, but it's a bit excessive for my needs. I'm also provided a lot of Apple hardware, which I'll use in the office.
That’s a great idea. Thanks, I’ll seriously consider it. I’m skeptical of the network usage though. I might need to use cellular with this approach, does this result in high usage?
that's based on your compression and what you're transferring, so it depends on your definition of "high" (ie- cost, likely to exceed an "unlimited" plan, etc).
I haven't exceeded 1GB/mo on cellular in over a year, but I also have easy access to wifi.
Thanks! I was skeptical, but I took the time to actually compare Framework, Macbook and custom remote workstation on these metrics: battery life, security against theft and accidents, high speed networking, upgradability, repairability, compatibility (eg. external Nvidia GPU, coreboot), offline use, performance and weight. Remote won on every metric (has no single drawback) except offline use, which is not a problem when you are at home. So I decided on doing this. If you don’t mind, how do you connect? What is your setup? Are you able to eg. forward USB devices to the workstation?
Closed the tab on the original, better response. Sigh.
I don't use usbip, but it's an easy setup. I do use kvm/libvirt. Tailscale didn't exist when I built everything, but the documentation is excellent, and I could replace most of this with similar convenience.
Everything I'm mentioning here is locally hosted.
I connect via either wireguard or Unifi Teleport, depending on which network is needed. Wireguard connects to guacamole which manages connections to more secure core services, controllers, and shares. Unifi Teleport allows easy access to surface services like a book server, IOT, NVR, webuis, APIs, etc.
Chrome remote desktop is much more convenient than I expected, and I use it to connect to friends' systems or to hop onto graphical instances that I don't care to set up lasting connections to.
My three primary nodes are for GPGPU compute, "big" jobs, and storage. I've removed most IPMI/IPKVM to allow more flexible consolidation and upgrades. My "OOBM" is now UPS with remote power plugs with always-on BIOS settings. Once things gracefully halt, I can kill power if/until needed (my downtimes are all planned, but I reserve the capability).
I've greatly simplified over the past half decade so I can focus more on using than administrating, and while I haven't removed all of it, I try hard not to create environments more complicated than I can understand after not being touched for a few months.
Thanks, that was one deep rabbit hole of a reply! I did not think things would be this complicated. I'm happy to hear some things for which I've intended to roll my own solution with my RPis already exist. I took my notes, I appreciate you!
No compare it to the MBA 15 w 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM upgrades and the 70W charger from their educational store + $150 gift card offer. $1575 inc Cali tax
Yes but the AMD design draws double the power even though it was fabbed on a lower process node. I mean it defeats the purpose of a portable. Now you need double the battery weight or lose half the runtime. No, the M2 still wins. If processing is the goal at the expense of portability then you can buy a nice 64 core EPYC system for $1700
The battery life is still fine. Plugging in once in a while isn't a huge deal. I'd rather save time compiling than not having to plug in once every 8 hours.
Yeah I was just referring to default prices. The only one I modified was the comparison to the Overkill system because the base Apple configuration does not have 32GB of RAM and 1TB SSD.
Ok, but that same spec is 1699 plus tax direct from Apple without a discount so the same as frameworks pre built 16 inch option that ships in Q4. If you compare their “build it yourself and bring your own OS” version without memory or storage shipping in late Q4 the base MBA 15 +70W charger w/o discount is still $100 cheaper, shipping now and very likely will outperform w double the battery life
What's the comparison look like with 2TB of storage? And maybe a bit more RAM (I don't think MBAs let you upgrade after purchase so buying a 512GB machine seems shortsighted for a lot of use cases unless all your development is in the cloud)
The storage and memory upgrades are expensive and also have a penalty in terms of power. Memory draws the same current regardless of if it’s being used and that is significant. Unified memory is also very different, has much higher bandwidth than RAM and lower latency. You can’t compare unified memory with RAM.
As far as the SSD, the base option comes with one 256GB NAND flash IC, where if you upgrade to 512GB they have to add a second. That matters because adding a second means you double the IO bandwidth using their current design. It’s something like 3500 vs 7500 MB/s. If you add more NAND modules you also scale up the IO speed further but the difference between 3500 and 7500 is significant for all workloads where above that you probably won’t see a gain except in niche applications like video editing, assuming you have the complimentary processing power and unified memory to utilize that throughput. For storage, Apple provides 2TB cloud service for $10/mo and these have wifi 6E so it’s cheaper to use the cloud than buy the storage, assuming it’s not working storage, and safer too.
Also, upgrades on Apple products hold their market value very poorly. The M2 studio just came out and maxed out M1 units are on sale NIB at 1/4 price of retail from 3 months ago, which is not at all a true quantification of performance since the M2 is only what 15-20% faster.
So after quite some research for the MBA 15; 16GB + 512GB + 70W adapter is the optimum for power draw, performance, cost and value preservation.
Overall, it seems the best value strategy with Apple products is to take the first upgrade for memory and storage and leave it at that. You can then resell every year and recoup 60% and upgrade to the latest w a new battery. Apple is actually very cheap after the first investment considering the productivity and time saving benefits, and you can’t steal an Apple device. Just don’t drop it
Also if you are considering big upgrades, compare the cost to just buying two base units as the base units are way closer to the manufacturing cost. Often there is more benefit to having two expendable units and they will hold their resale value better.
Unified memory literally is RAM. It's just LPDDR5. It might have better timings, due to being located closer, that's it. The framework 16 also does DDR5-5600, so you get 100GB/s of bandwidth with a dual rank memory setup.
In theory you'd take a latency hit, but in reality (at least the M1) was limited by it's memory controller and had DRAM latencies of ~100ns, which is actually worse than Zen 4 at ~70ns. This is because before querying RAM, you first need to query every level of cache, and then you hit the latency of the DRAM itself, so the actual distance is not a dominant factor.
So no, unified memory doesn't give any actual performance advantage. It could in theory (and marginally), in practice it's just marketing.
Apple doesn’t verify that purchases from the educational store are from students it’s honor system. Those prices are available to everyone, in small quantities.
Sit the 15 inch MBA next to the 16 inch MBP and the screens look identical. Performance wise the M2 w unified memory crushes X86 systems across the benchmarks at half the power budget.
Congrats to the framework team. This looks really awesome. I am looking to get one for sure. In particular I was extremely excited by the fact that Jack Humbert[1] is prototyping an ortholinear keyboard module[2]. I have 3 plancks and 1 prionic. Love me some Humbert keyboards, and it's an absolute dream to have an ortholinear keyboard on a laptop.
Maybe someone from framework or knowledge of this area can explain this, but I'm a bit baffled by the price difference between the prebuilt and DIY editions.
LinusTechTips recently did a tour of one of the assembly stations in Taiwan. The DIY editions are fully assembled, tested, then disassembled, and put into packages. Considering that DIY has an additional labour intensive step, how come they're so much cheaper? Shouldn't the prebuilt ones be cheaper because they have less labour involved?
The DIY Edition price is without memory, storage, and operating system, which are included in the pre-built versions.
The memory, storage, bezel, and Input Cover that are temporarily installed into DIY Edition systems get cycled back through the line at the factory and reused repeatedly. If you order memory and storage as part of a DIY Edition configuration, those are new modules specific to your order that get added to the package at our fulfillment center. This means that we can enable thousands of different orderable DIY Edition configurations while only having a handful of unique configurations leaving the factory.
I configured a DIY edition with essentially the same specs as the pre-built version. The price differential was pretty close to the cost of the windows licence (which I don't need).
According to the specs. The keyboard is running QMK on a RP2040. Does anyone know if this will be programmable like quality mechanical keyboards? One thing missing from all high-end laptops is the ability to program the key mapping at firmware level so one does not have to re-configure the OS. Caps lock is such a useless and easily accessible key.
qmk keyboard firmware is awesome. You can do some incredible things involving toggling different layers, chords, different mappings if you hold vs tap a key, macros, all kinds of stuff. For an example of a qmk feature (that I don't actually use in my maps but it gives you an idea of the art of the possible) there is the "Space cadet shift" https://docs.qmk.fm/#/feature_space_cadet
Word for those who'd like to pre-order as well - Create your account _before_ ordering. Perhaps this was just a one-off issue I had, but I tried setting up an account whilst ordering, as the website suggested, and it erred, charging my card but not sending me any receipt or creating any account, AFAICT. It may be that it's just a fluke, but you may as well be cautious.
I have a M1 Macbook Air and a Framework 13, and the trackpad is objectively worse on the Framework. A little mushy, a little inconsistent in the click pressure needed across the surface, palm rejection is still an unsolved problem it seems, and I haven't found a Linux DE that can do three-finger drag and other gestures as naturally as the Macbook has been doing it for over a decade. :/ I hardly ever use the thing now because it's slower and hotter than the Air, blasting fans with a single Twitch stream running in the background, and about the same price too.
On previous generations I think it's decent. The main annoyances are that when I touch the glass a certain way I can feel a scratch or divot, and the pressure it takes to click varies based on where you click.
Overall I think the hardware is great, my complaints are mostly with software/firmware/BIOS. My biggest complaints are with battery life, especially during standby. Framework has been working on a fix since 2022 but no dice so far.
-Sent from my Framework laptop at maximum brightness because the brightness keys don't work unless I disable other sensors on the laptop
Battery life is probably my biggest reservation. The fact the MBP/MBA has 20 hrs of USAGE is unbeatable still. How is the power suspend? I had huge issues with Linux laptops, if I left it unplugged, the battery would drain 10% a day where it seems like a couple % on MacOS
Similar... I lose about 10%/day when the laptop is asleep. Some flavors of Linux easily transition to hibernate (which has much lower drain) if the laptop is asleep for a while, but I haven't gotten that to work in Fedora.
Neither Intel nor AMD officially support S3 on their recent CPU generations. Unofficially, S3 functionality has continued to degrade over time. On the positive side though, s0ix continues to improve for both Intel and AMD.
Has anyone seen any benchmarks for these new AMD processors that show power per watt? I have the previous generation Intel processor, but it gets too hot too easily, and I'm thinking of upgrading to the new motherboard.
According to Notebookcheck[1], if you put a power limit on the 7940HS, it will achieve 15625 points on Cinebench multicore with an average of 66 watts. This puts it above the M2 Max in efficiency and right behind the M2 Pro. Far ahead of any Intel chip.
If you don't want to mess with software power limiting, you'll have to wait for benchmarks of the 7840U.
Hmm, that's really interesting. I guess I'd need to software limit, but still, that should mean I can get good performance and low battery usage, plus low fan usage.
I might have to upgrade, the Intel processor I have right now is very annoying.
What's the difference between the HS and the U? I'm not good at specs :/
You can upgrade each individual component, except that all the components are low volume bespoke, so you'd save more money upgrading all of them at once by buying a new laptop and selling your old one. In which case, you get a more integrated, lighter solution. And you can't upgrade the screen.
Pass. I'm not so poor that I'm eating cat food and rummaging through trash for aluminum cans. I'm not the target market for this laptop.
If you mean the optional ethernet port module, no, because 1) foldable ports are more fragile, expensive, and patented, and 2) if there's demand for it, anybody can manufacture an alternative ethernet module with a folding port, which is the point of being modular.
I was looking for pre-orders to open expecting there will be an Nvidia GPU option too (for gaming + stable diffusion image generation etc).
This has AMD Processor with integrated graphics only. I have never used a computer with AMD processors, will it be able to use Nvidia GPU later at all?
It has a dedicated AMD GPU option. That should work quite well for gaming. For CUDA ML stuff, it won't, as you suspect. (Will an Nvidia GPU come later, theoretically it could, but Nvidia is probably less willing to work with Framework ...)
There's an AMD Radeon™ RX 7700S GPU available for 400$. The Verge article implied that they'd be releasing new GPUs in the future, as well. (emphasis on implied - it's not a certainty.)
How is the battery life though, I heard it was pretty bad early on. That might have been for Linux or Windows specifically, I honestly cannot remember. Any insights would be appreciated.
> The back two slots on each side can take up to 240W power input over USB-C using USB-PD 3.1.
I would like an option for normal barrel jack power connector. I found USB-C power delivery very unreliable and not universal. For many applications (Pi4, Rock5) you are limited to original makers power adapter. Framework in this case is using very new PD spec to deliver 180W, so I assume it will be the same.
There is also power renegotiation, when voltage drops to zero for couple of seconds. This board is also supposed to operate without batteries!
With barrel plug I just need to know diameter and voltage. I already have many adapters, or power sources. Much easier to operate.
All minipcs (minisforum, beeling) come with barrel plug and USB PD.
I strongly disagree with this. I purposely do not buy anything that’s not USB-C or lightning because I like being able to bring one charger for everything. Do you have older version of the RPi4? They accidentally made the USB-C non compliant but was fixed in late 2018, early 2019. Overall, as long as you have a 100W USB-C cable, you can practically charge anything (minus the now 240W standard).
To clarify: I want both. I only buy laptops with barrel jack and USB-C. The same with mini PCs.
It is OK for travelling. But my portable USB-C monitors randomly switch off for power renegotiation!
USB-C is not so great for stationary use. I always run into issues where all USB ports can not be fully powered, despite sufficient power rating on USB-C adapter. Older Macbooks would even discharge, while plugged, USB-C could not deliver enough juice, for high performance apps!
And those bloody things are supper expensive (like 100 euro). Cheaper are highly questionable and not even grounded!
I'm fine with either. The big advantage of the old way is if you have something approximately the right voltage (and sufficient wattage) all you need is a $0.25 barrel connector to charge. I damaged the power brick for my laptop once and ran it off of a bench supply with the original DC cable while I was waiting for the replacement to arrive in the mail.
With USB-C PD, If you live sufficiently close to a Best Buy (or similar) you can usually just get the USB PD brick with the most listed versions supported and have it work "good enough" but I have definitely seen laptops/PD brick combinations that negotiate rather low power.
Wow. Strong disagree. I have been using USB-C power only across 4 different makes of laptop on windows, mac and linux for about 6 years now and I don't recognize these issues.
I literally have never seen power renegotiation after the first time I plug a device in even a single time. I have seen problems where external displays don't find display signal just as you do with hdmi or displayport sometimes but I've never had a power problem. Are you using sketchy cables perhaps?
You can install steamOS on it if you want, it is just a Linux distro like any other.
Not sure why you would want to though, there are plenty of good Linux distros available and Windows is a much better choice for gaming if you don't need handheld specific features.
I know you can install the initial versions of SteamOS on it, but as far as I know, SteamOS 3 (the version powering the Steam Deck) has not been officially released for desktop use.
My dream is a gaming laptop with the same type of suspend/resume capability that the Steam Deck has
Great thing that I probably won’t buy unless my thinkpad x1 extreme 1st gen will die.
Picture wise the bezel on monitor is horribly large, and there were comments about chance of module with columnar layout on keyboard that didn’t materialize :(
System76's next flagship, "Virgo," will be in-house designed and has a trackpoint keyboard with a layout will be similar to their line of Launch keyboards [1].
They've been teasing their Virgo prototype [2] [3] [4] on their social media feeds.
Execution is everything, including the buttons. Someone designing this might also want to look at the Trackpoint buttons from before Lenovo switched to flat keyboards, and see the tactile merits of that (even when combined with flat keyboards).
I'd personally love to see an ortholinear layout option. I cannot go back after my Moonlander (like serious, I lost the ability to touch type on staggered).
We've been working with Jack at OLKB on figuring out how to enable additional keyboard layout types. Since there is a broad range of different layout preferences, our goal is to make it easy for third party keyboard makers (like OLKB) to be able to create their own compatible keyboard modules.
You can get a centered (no numpad) keyboard, and it has a second fan for the GPU; so I expect it would be quite comfortable. The only issue left is weight (4.6-5.3lbs), which seems to be the heavier side of average.
The number reflects the screen size (rounded down). Framework Laptop 13 is 13.5". Framework Laptop 16 is 16". Both product lines are continuing in parallel.
The "overkill" system with a Ryzen 9 7940HS, 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD is $2099. A pseudo comparison to the 16 inch MacBook Pro with M2 Pro, 32GB RAM and a 1TB SSD is $3099.
Also these systems are cheaper if done DIY and no Windows tax. Framework really might have a winner if this system can live up to their promises.
EDIT: The verge also has a deep dive into the system https://www.theverge.com/22665800/framework-laptop-16-hands-...