> ...the first Framework Laptop 12 motherboard is going to use Intel's 13th-generation Core i3 and i5 processors
I _really_ hope they launch an AMD version (perhaps with an iGPU) soon after that.
That and preferably with Libreboot support. This would make it the ideal portable laptop for me and thus I'd be able to (finally!) replace my X220T.
Libreboot would be amazing progress for moving open-source downwards in the stack.
It feels odd having a load of closed source EFI stuff and then putting linux on top of it.
Sure linux injects a bunch of firmware into hardware later in the boot, but it's still progress
I am a fan of open source and being able to tinker etc. But I've never felt the need (advantage?) to do more than just use the bios/efi to boot or configure a few basics.
I've been burned by a small SBC that had poor support, but on laptops/desktops never felt limited.
But people always sound so excited to libreboot their personal computer... Am I missing out or is it just nerd cred?
I'd say that after numerous revelations in regards to UEFI vulnerabilities and such, an open source BIOS / EFI has become a necessity for me rather than something just nice to have.
Framework shipped AMD 7040-series and 13th-gen Core i-series alongside each other for the 13.
The 13th-gen Intels had miserable battery life and heat issues under load. If you could manage that, all four USB-C ports were full Thunderbolt ports equally capable of driving displays, PD, and USB 4 throughput.
The AMD line had considerably better performance-per-watt but rougher firmware support (and early on, really broken Linux kernel support that required Fedora or other rolling kernel release distros). It also couldn't deliver the same "every port does everything" promise that the Intel boards did, with some ports not supporting displays or USB 4, which significantly reduced the value of the expansion-card model to kind of a novelty.
On the 12, if it's likely also going to have a smaller batter than the 13, going only with 13th-gen Intels means it likely will be either a further step back in battery life vs. the 13 or throttled to extend the battery.
The issue isn't TDP so much as performance-per-watt. The equivalent Ryzen 5 PRO 7540U can run at the same base TDP, had 2 full and four 4c cores on a smaller die, and outperformed the 1334U almost across the board.
Both chips were Q1 '23, so the timing's not a great excuse. They were in HP's 2023 EliteBook G10 840 (1334U) and 845 (Ryzen 5 PRO 7540) laptops, and the 845 was better on both single- and especially multi-thread Cinebench R23, _much_ better in GPU loads and gaming, _and also_ lasted longer on battery.
I think Framework mostly just wants to target an education market with a mainboard experience that's lower maintenance than AMD has been for them. Fewer USB-C restrictions, less firmware drama.
Still hard to get excited about it being the _only_ available option, though.
I would suppose they got a good deal on them, as they're a little out of date, but they're good enough, and overall provide a good package. If you're trying to hit a price point, there will always be compromises.
I don't know about the GP. I won't buy anything from Intel unless things change dramatically. My last Intel laptop had serious thermal throttling problem that could be completely avoided if Intel cared a bit about users. The one before had some other problems. In past 20 years, anytime I bought (or was given by a company) AMD I was happy, and as time goes by I get less and less happy with Intel.
i don't know about other people's experience - but my framework with intel cpu is always running that fan relatively maxed out even when it's not doing anything. And it has massive issues staying asleep which is some sort of driver issue with Windows. But I can be an airport and all of a sudden my backpack feels like it's about to combust and i can hear my laptop fan rippin', even though it should be asleep.
That is by design, it's a feature from Intel and Microsoft called "modern standby." It basically means your laptop cannot actually sleep anymore. Instead, it enters a slightly-lower-power mode so that it can download emails in the background, run Windows updates in the middle of the night, and generally pretend to be a phone even though no one wants that and the hardware/os was not really designed for it.
Modern Standby requires that deepest sleep states take less power than S3 standby, the issue is mainly drivers and applications either waking the system or not putting peripherals into deep enough sleep (or shutting them down entirely if possible)
Some new laptops cannot actually fully suspend to ram. It sounds crazy but I had this issue even after installing Linux on a laptop. It’s a hardware limitation. You can thank Microsoft for trying to make sure they can sneak in OS updates when you think your laptop is asleep.
It's not sneaking in OS updates, it's faster wake-up mainly.
Combined with properly prepared HW taking less power in modern standby than in S3, but it requires hardware/firmware/driver/userland confluence to work well
I'm not sure I had the same issue, it is a different laptop, but it would not go to sleep. The current solution is to make it hybernate instead of sleep.
just an anecdata but recently I was building a HTPC/NAS. Initially I wanted N100 for pure NAS, but ended up with an 5500 AMD and I was blown away by the capabilities of IGPU. Turned out to be a quite capable gaming machine.
And a 2-in-1 laptop in tent mode would be perfect for (casual) gaming on the train with a gamepad; much more ergonomic than holding one of the many heavy gaming handhelds.
Oh, that's far more interesting to me than the desktop thing. I have a 13" Framework now, but a 12" would be super-nice as a travel laptop -- and the tablet conversion might let me use it as a on-the-go ebook reader.
Well, different people are fascinated by different things. :) I hope both products are successful, they've been (so far) a force for good in the industry as far as I can tell.
Definitely! ROCm is getting really solid for inference. LM Studio (and therefore the underlying llama.cpp) work out of the box already, and we see AMD pushing forward on PyTorch and other areas rapidly.
I've been looking at a Raspberry Pi 5 paired w/ a Wacom One Gen 2 13 inch screen or a Movink 13 --- will probably stick with that since I prefer Wacom EMR (and have a big investment in it in terms of devices and styluses).
I had a coat with large side pockets just big enough to fit the 11" air. Not that I would ever use them for that, but it sure felt nice to have the option...
Thanks a lot for that link! I know nothing of Apple stuff and a friend has got an old iMac that he thought was unupdatable but it seems there's a way. Cheers!
Same here. The 12" Macbook Retina was just about the perfect laptop size and weight, just had not enough HP, and obviously not serviceable in the same way as Framework.
I don’t quite get why framework focuses so much on Intel and AMD. ARM laptops are in the rise, and don’t need active cooling. It’s hard for me to think of upgrading to another laptop with fans when so many fanless (I.e.: silent) options are available.
To the best of my knowledge the ARM ecosystem is an absolute pain to work in, you can get Phone/Tablet SoCs painfully encumbered with out of date drivers and binary blobs. Or you can get enormous server processors that will cost $1000+. There just isn't much that's suitable for making a desktop or laptop that would meet Frameworks markets expectations.
And even Microsoft is dealing with pain points like Qualcomm he, few, and drivers actually breaking the spec and causing problems in servicing and supporting the ARM based devices.
Meanwhile properly SBSA compliant chips aren't targeted at mobile market at all and thus often lack certain features or are too energy hungry.
> ARM laptops are in the rise, and don’t need active cooling.
ARM has nothing to do with being fanless or not, that's just whether or not you're happy with what 15w can get you or not.
Not many people are, which is why ARM laptops with fans are just if not even more common than ones without.
Also there's a single ARM SoC that isn't garbage at this power/performance bracket on the open market, and it's embattled with legal troubles (Qualcomm vs. ARM over Snapdragon X Elite). And while the X Elite CPU is great, the GPU and software for things like video deciding are bad and break regularly
They don't seem to care about needing a fan, and the community on their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who don't want a fan (the zeitgeist there seems to believe that any compromise to performance at all costs is incompetence). It is particularly frustrating as you don't even have to go ARM to drop the fan: there are chips even from Intel that do not need fans, such as any of the ones in all of the 12" laptops I have used for the past dozen or so years (including the one I am using right now, which also happens to have a much much better screen than this new Framework: a Samsung Galaxy Chromebook 2 360, whose only flaw is it doesn't have enough RAM).
So they're exactly like the gaming PC community. "Decibels aren't a benchmark", as an enthusiast acquaintance says. If you want to go fanless, you need to go to a silent PC community. Where their forums is actively hostile--even brutal--to people who do want a fan.
There are a lot of more or less weird, very dedicated, very opinionated subcultures in the PC hardware world.
The issue is kind of on the other side, though: you can pay more to improve your cooling in a way that might be quieter or better; but, if you absolutely do not want any fan noise--nor any fragile mechanical motors to move air/water/oil/ether/whatever--you get to a point where money can't buy better cooling... you simply have to put up with less cooling, with less powerful chips that have lower thermal bounds and often simply aren't fast. Like, I don't buy a computer because it is fast, and as soon as a company starts telling me how fast their computer is I start bemoaning the lost battery life and certainty of a noisy active cooling solution that I don't want :(.
I recall a video from Gamers Nexus at a trade event, though only that it was sometime roughly within the last year.
Entirely passive (I THINK / recall there was no pump), heat based circulation, with just TONS of radiator surface and an unwieldy design. However for that entirely custom solution they could theoretically scale up with additional size.
Still, if someone's going _that_ overboard, the heat's getting dumped somewhere.
'Industrial Chilled Water' as in a connection to an external (to the room, maybe even building) pump, and an external cooler (usually evaporative cooling, could be mega radiators in the shade too) like you see at industrial sites.
Totally fair, but I'd argue the water-cooled crowd is another, distinct sub-culture with it's own goals (e.g. silent is nice, but getting the highest overclock is nicer). Just like the nitrogen cooled and SLIC guys are scratching a slightly different itch. And, FWIW...there's probably 10 Noctuas within 20' of me; they are wonderfully quiet, but I think those calling them 'silent' are not quite accurate, YMMV.
Strix Point AMD laptop CPUs are just better than non-Apple ARM CPUs across the board, and don't have the whole host of compatibility issues. There isn't really any point to them.
You trade no incidental fan noise and better idle power for ass performance and "too bad this app you used for years doesn't work". I don't think that's even close to a good deal.
Do you have a "benchmark program" for performance and results for it? (e.g. I like to wall-clock measure a clean build of LLVM to approximate the performance on the compute-heavy workloads I run often.)
I hear you: would love to see a RISC-V-based system without all the downsides to using ARM. Perhaps in another 3-5 years we'll see performance parity and it'll be viable. If we get close it certainly seems like we'll see a laptop from Framework using such a chip.
Yeah I’m thinking it’s at least a few years off. But it’ll get better eventually. Framework is already on the RISCV train, so I have no doubt when a good RISCV SoC is available it’ll be in a framework ASAP. I’m hoping by the time my current 16 is feeling slow the RISCV option will be the obviously best choice
They are a fairly small company, and going for amd/intel means reaching the widest audience.
Linux on arm is very mature, but windows on arm not completely.
That being said, other companies could very well develop and sell boards for the frameworks laptop. So much so that iirc sifive did release a risc-v laptop board to use in the frameworks laptop case.
Linux on arm is actually pretty terrible outside of the server space due to their (Qualcomm, Imagination, and ARM) integrated GPUs being bad and having terrible drivers.
Is Windows on ARM still immature? I'd think with the Microsoft Surface (ARM processors for several years now) that Windows on ARM would be fine but I've never owned or used one so I don't have any anecdotal evidence, just my assumptions.
My brother is on the Windows side of the world (MS partner and all that, lots of CRM/DB work). He said if you stick to mainstream apps (MS apps, Adobe, etc) ARM is basically on parity with x86, tho not the performance choice. He said these days he rarely has customers come with support issues that boil down to "bug only occurs on ARM", though "it's slow on ARM" does come up. OTOH...If you have specialty/niche apps that you rely on, or apps from a small dev who doesn't have the resources to support 2 archs, your mileage may vary.
There's no ARM GPU on par with AMD's integrated GPU in the 300 series. The ARM CPU also among the top, trading blows with the M3 Max. Plus you can avoid the compatibility mess that is ARM on the desktop...
I like the concept of being able to upgrade the mainboard, the problem I have is that the support needs to come with it. I've had a framework 13" intel 13th gen since September 2023 and it's "mostly" ok. There's a weird battery charging issue where it discharged while plugged in which I raised shortly after getting it and it's still there I've been told to wait for a response. That one I can live with. But for the past few months the CPU gets stuck at 400Mhz and I have to boot into the BIOS and disconnect the battery and power cable to get it to clear which isn't great when I'm in the middle of something important. Support have been prompt and polite but it's been like getting blood out of a stone getting somewhere, from previous experience with other manufacturers it would have been RMA'd by now. I'm not writing them off yet but I'm not filled with confidence.
On the plus side I'm hoping that it's the existence of framework that have convinced lenovo to stop soldering components in their new laptops, that's what put me off buying one and why I went with a framework.
That stuff is mostly fixed on the AMD stuff (I've owned every model of framework 13 and the framework 16 now), which makes me cautiously optimistic for the future. I think you still have to approach them as an ideals company working hard to become an actual company, which is why I don't buy their stuff for work anymore but buy it all day long for personal use. For work I can get a lenovo with similar specs and often a better OLED screen with a 3 year next day on site support contract for the price of the assembled frameworks usually. For home I prefer to self support and I greatly appreciate the speed at which their parts ship and the reasonable prices, plus with the DIY discount it's closer to price competitive. I think with the 16 I have now and I hope with the 13 refresh they just announced the problems stay away broadly and I can say they are an ideals company that is also an actual company but I need another year of use to feel comfortable with that statement.
Well now I've given up, they've told me I need to buy a new mainboard because it's "out of warranty" which is crap since I've been complaining about it since I bought it.
This is huge for me. I've wanted a framework for years and got really close to purchasing a 13" but I can't pull myself away from 2 in 1s (or really just any laptop with a touchscreen). The fact that it's going to be budget focused also excites me as a student, I hope that screen quality isn't too compromised.
I know the comment you're replying to called it a "180 degree hinge", but the linked Ars Technica article states that it "flips around to the back with a flexible hinge, a la Lenovo's long-running Yoga design". This is not clear from the pictures in the article, but was on display during the livestreamed event earlier today.
It's sort of obvious if you've seen the Panasonic implementation like in CF-RZ line, it's the same setup. The top and bottom halves are connected through a pair of square pieces long as the laptop's thickness. Hinges each articulate 180 degrees to total 360 degrees to allow it to fold like a human knee joint.
The four hinges must stay synchronized under lift force from the user, but I haven't seen that being a problem on a Let's note, so it's probably good.
I think I would primarily used the 12 inch as I don't personally find the screen space to 13 inches that significant an increase in size and I would find a benefit to having a 2 in 1 that utilises a stylus especially if it works well with Linux. I feel that form factor is better for travelling to and from work as well as on trains and planes.
I am not sure if I would keep the 13 inch and use it exclusively indoors or if I will sell it.
Reserved one of the updated base model 13’s. Battery life for this gen of Ryzen seems solid in other laptops so I’m hoping it’ll do reasonably well at stretching the FW13’s 61Wh battery for low intensity tasks, particularly in power save mode under Linux.
I really want to get a Framework to replace my aging IdeaPad, but they don't ship to my region yet.
I was planning on ordering the 7840U version to where I'm staying in a trip to the US, but now it feels a bit of a let down to order a last-gen model since the new one might not arrive in time for my trip in mid-April.
Be careful with this because framework will not warranty your product in any way, and given their size and age, there is a not insignificant chance you will experience a product defect or failure and have no recourse, love my framework but I experienced a mainboard bricking after a failed firmware update, which framework addressed under warranty. I would caution against buying without a warranty.
I would expect similar to any convertible thinkpad. I personally don't mind it but due to the back light there is a gap between the end of the pen and the line which does affect the experience. If a paperlike film is produced, that would improve the situation.
Why would you want haptic trackpads? Having used modern Macbook trackpads they feel like a massive downgrade compared to either of my Frameworks. The vibration-based simulation of haptics feels uncanny and unsatisfying compared to the real deal.
Strongly disagree. MacBook haptic trackpads feel plenty natural to me and don’t suffer the weird inconsistency issues that plague traditional trackpads. I say this even as someone who uses a machine with a traditional trackpad everyday and has a new FW13 reserved. If Framework ever offered a haptic trackpad upgrade I’d buy it.
Why would you want a diving board trackpad? Every single non haptic trackpad I've tried always sucks, requiring excessive force to press a button, particularly if you're not on the very bottom of the doving board mechanism of the trackpad.
With diving board trackpads, I usually just tap to click.
Physically pressing down a diving board is just asking for frustration. Sometimes I miss the separate left, right, and middle click buttons under the trackpad like the old days.
If you pretend that the click buttons are still there, you can press down a diving board just fine. You use your fingers to move, and the thumb to click. The problem is that this is totally unintuitive to anyone who grew up without visible buttons.
You could mod one into the hardware if you really wanted. The drivers for the Magic Trackpad are pretty much flawless on Linux, you could engineer your own plug-and-play solution with COTS hardware if you found the motivation.
It's likely chosen for cost. There's a couple of brand new fairly cheap laptops with exactly the same screens on paper and a few other similar sized laptops that are in the ballpark.
Skimming Google, there are pretty much are no laptops 12" and higher resolution than 1080x1200 that's current nor made by Apple.
On sibling thread I already mention the Surface Pro (convertible) at 12'' and it's 2880 x 1920. The next 2025 convertible that I found, Latitude 7350, is also 2880 x 1920 (at 13'', though). In fact, most of the 12'' convertibles with 1080p are either sub$800 (which I doubt this thing is) or come from Lenovo (whom you really do NOT want to compare with regarding screen quality -- https://www.notebookcheck.net/Enough-with-the-cheap-screens-... ).
And let's not get started on 12'' Android tablets...
That model of Surface is nearing almost 8 years old by now. Not current by my standards. I'm thinking about the chance of existing tooling still being around to make a screen and slap into a laptop rather than if it existed at one point.
But yes, considering that Framework's Chromebook is/was expensive (over $1k) for the class doesn't give a lot of faith that the 12in model would be any different. Though that was equipped with a 2k screen and had a 12th gen i5, so I genuinely wonder what kind of meetings happened to ship out a premium Chromebook (a segment that does not exist)
The last Surface model is less than one month old. The chassis was updated less than 2 years ago ( and to reduce the screen margins, no less ), and the resolution was improved again.
For me it's the perfect resolution on a laptop currently. I don't need a higher resolution and by not unnecessarily increasing it I get better performance, better battery life and a lower cost.
I can see that you have strong feelings about it, but let's be honest, this is perfect resolution for the laptop. And since it is Framework, they might have upgrade in the future.
No, it is not. It would be perfect for a 6'' phone, maybe. The goal is to have at least double the pixel density, and my 2016 tablet can reach this ( ~2700x1800 at 12'' ).
Even Surfaces have been using 1440p at 12'' since 2016, and 2880 x 1920 since 2018! Why would Android & Apple tablets at much smaller screen size have higher DPIs, if 1080p was perfect? Do you expect to put Android tablets closer to your face than x86 tablets for some reason?
Sigh... since when has DPI started _decreasing_ again? I refuse to accept this trend, in the same way it was stupid back in the 2000s when LCDs became a thing.
The human hardware isn't getting any better, so we must accept that there exists some upper bound beyond which improving resolution isn't a selling point for most people, especially given the necessary tradeoffs in battery life, processing power, memory usage, and input latency it entails. Now consider that this ceiling may have been hit 20 years ago, and that the continued dominance of 1920x1080 may not be because manufacturers are lazy, but because most people are happy enough with it.
It's not. Finding the ceiling is always going to involve overshooting the ceiling and then walking back from there. It sounds as though you're not willing to consider even the possibility that this may be the effective end of progress for this combination of technology and use case, at least for values of "progress" that involve increasing resolution, rather than values that involve decreasing cost.
Or rather it sounds as someone misreading me again as asking for "progress" when I'm just asking not to skimp over on what was already offered 10 years ago and practically everyone else still offers today.
The Steam Hardware Survey shows that 1920x1080 is still the majority resolution, and that's among an audience that's inordinately populated by technological enthusiasts. The fact that people are seemingly dead-set on sticking to 1920x1080 despite--as you point out--the availability of alternatives only further strengthens the argument that the majority of consumers just don't particularly value higher resolutions.
Note that I game at 1080p (or worse), even on my setup with dual 4k monitors (because it is also over 10 years old), so neither shows up on steam survey as anything other than 1080p (which also puts dual setups at a different category). Gaming at 1080p or even higher still requires thousands on GPUs which I'm not willing to do. However simply having more than 1080p for desktop usage is accessible and has been so for over 10 years. A 4k monitor costs a fraction of what a gaming GPU costs. My desktop iGPU from 2014 has zero problems driving 2x4k. It also does so with the system consuming less than 60W from the wall at usage (lower than some laptop CPUs do these days).
If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years (which exceeds the number of laptops by far), and even friggin' eink notepads.
"The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken. "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit (as trivially disproven as todays arguments about 60fps), and remind me of the discussions I had when forced to use 60fps 800x600 TN screens (pure hell on earth) after having used 1280 at 90hz for ages with CRTs, all in the name of "progress".
> so neither shows up on steam survey as anything other than 1080p
The hardware survey doesn't occur while games are running. It's recording the display setting of your desktop, which would put you and everyone like you in the 4K bucket.
> If you want to play the useless popularity game, go and check what are the resolutions on the phones and tablets with even smaller screens sold in the last 10 years
I have a rather new high-end phone. Its native resolution is 2400x1080, and that 2400 is only there because phones have a particularly long aspect ratio compared to other devices.
> "The fact" is people today would never accept sub-retina dpis even for cheap phones, and the market has clearly spoken.
1920x1080 is a wildly popular resolution. You appear to be frustrated that the market hasn't spoken in your favor.
> "The fact" is your arguments about human perception are utter bullshit
You appear to be hallucinating arguments that I haven't made.
It's higher DPI than a 24" 4K monitor. It is plenty dense, especially for a battery powered device where the power needed to drive the display is a real consideration.
That's why this has half the resolution of my current same size 12'' tablet, even though my current device has also half the battery capacity, and likely costed half than this thing will cost.
Even if you use today's prices, the cheapest iPad has almost double the resolution. No, 1080p at 12'' it is not plenty dense. You do not put this smaller thing as far from your face as a 24'' monitor.
Triple the DPI? Are you doing the calculations right? The DPI of this screen is 189. The iPad Standard, Air, and Pro at 11 and 13 inches have a DPI of 264. The iPad Mini is a standout at 326 DPI, which is 1.72x the DPI.
You are correct; I am using number of horizontal lines rather than computing the actual DPI. But this barely changes my argument, since even when they are at screens of similar size cheap iPads have double the number of horizontal lines. I have updated my post to reflect that.
They have not done that for years? That used to be a thing 5 years ago or so, but nowadays battery saving mode just forces 60 hz refresh rate but otherwise does not change the resolution. I do not buy top of the line devices so I do not know for sure, but mine has >1080p and keeps the resolution for sure.
And, to give an idea of what are we talking about, even in such power saving modes these much smaller and older phones still have more pixels than a 1080p screen.
The way to analyze this is using pixel density: 1900x1200 on a 12" display is only 187 PPI, which is frustratingly below the "retina" range at the usual distance of a laptop screen (much less a tablet one, and this one is part tablet). The resolution you want for a 12" screen is 2560x1600, which is also 16:10 but at a much more usable 251 PPI.
That’s approximately 189 ppi, which calls for a 1.5× scaling factor. (For these sorts of devices, 1× should be around 110–140ppi.)
Fractional scaling isn’t great. Windows handles it the best by a large margin (it’s really quite respectable; honestly I’d just call it “not ideal” rather than “not great” if restricting to Windows), and has done for many years. macOS doesn’t even try, but rather downsamples from the next integer, which guarantees it will be atrocious, much worse than a lower-resolution integer-scaled panel for many purposes. Linux can be finicky, but is slowly getting there, though downsampling is still common. (Me, I’ve been using Linux/Sway at 1.5× for the last five years.)
You’d get much better results by increasing density by a third in each direction: 2560×1600 is 252ppi, excellent for a 2× scaling factor. (The effective resolution is thus 1280×800.)
yeah that's tough to get right even on a 14" 1440P is almost too much (problem is scaling, particularly with external monitor and your laptop, depends on OS)
I also have a 13.5" 3000x2000 laptop and it uses 200% scaling, fractional is blurry. Initially I was trying to use Ubuntu but the extend monitor scaling was so bad (Chromium, VS Code), just decided to stick with Windows for this device.
New 12-inch laptop form factor with 360 degree hinge (ie "tablet mode") and a touchscreen. No price announced, but it is aimed at students: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/frameworks-laptop-12...
New mainboard upgrade options for Framework 13 models: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/framework-gives-its-...