Framework Laptop 12 press reviews are live and Framework Laptop 13 in-stock

https://frame.work/blog/framework-laptop-12-press-reviews-are-live-and-framework-laptop-13-in-stock

75•nfriedly•5h ago

Comments

ndiddy•4h ago

I think it's a shame they went with 2 year old 13th gen Intel processors for these. The newer Lunar Lake Intel chips have much better battery life and thermals, and you can find them in other similarly priced laptops. The main downside is that Lunar Lake chips have soldered on RAM, but given that Framework already sells a desktop with soldered RAM that shouldn't be a dealbreaker for them.

jabart•4h ago

For their marketing it is. There is a very specific reason the desktop exists. On-premise AI workloads. You can't get the bus width on socketed ram that you do soldered ram at the current moment. 1 product is an exception, 2 would be a break from their replaceable component marketing.

dpc_01234•2h ago

It used to be that CPU and GPU were separate cards/chips, nowadays they are often integrated. There are good reasons to solder-in RAM. Yes it's a tradeoff, but it's reasonable. I don't expect FW to revert technical decisions that are not under their control. Mostly, I just don't want to be buying whole new laptop because my keyboard had a defect, or I cracked my screen. If the compute module comes with a soldered RAM, it's perfectly fine with me. For most most of my systems I buy it with RAM maxed-out, and when I get a new one, there's typically new generation of DDR, new speeds, etc. and I will not reuse my old RAM. I'm fine with buying and replacing a new CPU + RAM module as a unit, and I would buy such a module. The fact that there are modules with external memory is already enough good faith commitment to repairability.

bevr1337•3h ago

Unless Foundation always uses the current generation CPU, then this complaint is always valid. Or maybe invalid.

Thermals and energy consumption are almost always improving between generations. It's hard for me to think of 13th generation as old. Maybe I'm getting old!

ndiddy•3h ago

The reason why I brought it up was that Lunar Lake was specifically designed to make an x86 offering that has comparable battery life with chips from Qualcomm and Apple. It's not a standard marginal generational improvement, for light office tasks (the type of use case this laptop is intended for) you get around 17 hours of battery life vs the previous generation's 10 hours (see benchmark results here: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2463714/tested-intels-lunar-... ).

moffkalast•3h ago

It's not surprising, Meteor Lake and onwards are all TSMC and unlike Intel they still actually know how to manufacture chips. Arc iGPUs are also a massive improvement over Iris.

ndiddy•3h ago

It's not just a TSMC vs. Intel thing, Lunar Lake gets 7 more hours of battery life than Meteor Lake when doing the same "light office tasks" benchmark.

moffkalast•3h ago

Ok that part is surprising, Meteors already draw very little, like < 25W unless turbo boosting and 6W idling. What kind of wattage does Lunar have?

ndiddy•2h ago

The numbers I've seen show that the peak power draw is similar to Meteor Lake, but it generally draws ~40% less than Meteor Lake when doing the same task. The SoC only idle power draw figures I've seen are 0.62W for Lunar Lake vs. 2.32W for Meteor Lake.

jeffbee•2h ago

Do the math on "6W idling". That's terrible for SoC energy draw. For modern expectations of battery life the SoC has to be in the milliwatt range.

bevr1337•2h ago

I wanted to understand if any other cpu generations had comparable gains over the previous, but I need to work on an Intel ark scraper. Maybe I'll find some time to post it back here on HN. Thanks for added details

moffkalast•3h ago

Yeah I complained about this on the framework subreddit when I first heard of the FW12, asking for reasons and expectedly got downvoted into oblivion. Apparently expecting them to use something mildly recent is too much to ask for and it's supposed to be a cheapshit student laptop aimed at schools or whatever. Wouldn't be as bad if it weren't Intel's worst CPU gen in recent memory, FW probably got a bargain box deal on them.

Meanwhile the HX370 is still warm from the oven and already in the FW13, linux drivers aren't even ready yet with compatibility complaints aplenty. Not to mention the FW Desktop with the AI Max which was the first launch of that chipset worldwide.

katmannthree•3h ago

From your careful word choice you know this but I'd like to draw attention to the specifics here. I'm not sure if it's actually soldered on but RAM is on-package like apple's M-series chips, unlike what used to be the case where soldering ram to the board was a choice made by the laptop mfgs.

Here's there's no choice to be made other than not using the chips. And unfortunately (although there are some benefits), it's probably not going to be just a few generations but a trend for high end processors going forward.

joshfee•3h ago

It is actually one of the few cases where I don't actually really care about independent upgradability. In my experience I find that I pretty much always upgrade my CPU and my RAM in tandem. New CPU architectures sometimes force it (e.g. need DDR5 instead of DDR4), and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice I find that I run out of CPU headroom before I run out of RAM headroom.

So if there's performance gains to be had by co-locating RAM with the CPU in a single package, it makes sense to me to do so

fragmede•2h ago

> and as long as you don't severely undersize your initial RAM choice

That's the problem though. when dealing with used machines (because new ones are beyond your budget), you get cheaper hand me downs, and those are going to be of your undersized RAM variety. In the socketed days, you could get a five year old laptop, replace the existing RAM with the biggest sticks you cloud get your hands on, and get a few more years of life out of the machine. A laptop stuck at four gigs of ram these days isn't going to be great for much web browsing, but is also basically stuck at four gigs.

9283409232•3h ago

Selling a laptop with soldered ram might literally kill the company at this stage. Their entire brand and market is based on repairability.

bgorman•4h ago

I would have bought a Framework laptop but here were the dealbreakers - Ancient Intel processors - AMD option seemed to be accompanied by broken wifi

It's not that hard. Just provide a single modern option that just works. I don't want to troubleshoot device drivers in my spare time.

miloignis•4h ago

What's wrong with the AMD version's wifi? I've got the original AMD F13 (and run NixOS) and I have no issues.

NewJazz•3h ago

It's also a plain old M.2 WiFi/BT module. So if you really hate it, swap it out.

ben-schaaf•3h ago

I haven't had any issues with Wifi. A family member replaced theirs with an Intel chip to fix an issue; turns out reception was just bad and not the wifi chip.

That brings me to my second point: if the wifi chip's what's holding you back there's nothing stopping you from replacing it.

preisschild•3h ago

I use the Framework 16 AMD with the Mediatek MT7922 WiFi 6E wireless chip using the mt7921e driver and it works great

pbadeer2•3h ago

Wifi worked out of the box for me on FW13 both the AMD 7840U and the HX 370 mainboards, in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS and 25.04. Ethernet via USB-C dock worked out of the box as well.

unclad5968•2h ago

> It's not that hard

I suspect it's actually quite difficult to build an entirely modular laptop to work with several operating systems while supporting the latest components, and be void of any driver issues.

dartharva•3h ago

It's going to remain a niche token product for everyone but connoisseurs to ignore with that kind of a specs-to-cost imbalance.

9283409232•3h ago

I don't see anything wrong with that Framework is going after a specific but lucrative segment of the market

dartharva•3h ago

No objection from me either. It's just that it defeats their intended purpose of pushing a paradigm shift to high-sustainability devices.

chintan•3h ago

I ran XPS Developer Edition (Ubuntu) for 5+ years without any issues.

Using Framework for past year - every day I have to reboot because it freezes with 20+ Firefox tabs (Ubuntu 22.04, AMD). Tried all options (disable vGPU etc) but no luck.

FirmwareBurner•3h ago

Older laptops, especially all-Intel ones, tend to be way more reliable on Linux from my experience.

wing-_-nuts•3h ago

Yep, my last laptop purchase was an xps13. Unfortunately the 8gb of soldered on ram is becoming woefully insufficient with how bloated the modern web has gotten.

I have a beefy desktop, but if I replace my laptop I think it will probably be a thinkpad.

rtkwe•3h ago

People make fun of Chrome being a RAM hog but I'm having more issues with FF than I ever did with Chrome. For some reason on reddit specifically FF will randomly freeze for a few seconds, my cursor will stop rendering on top of it (like it's going behind the window) and it won't accept inputs. If I keep typing through it it all appears in the window after it unfreezes. Also FF will regularly take multiple gigs for random tabs like Youtube if I leave them open.

Tldr it might be more of a firefox problem than a framework problem.

afandian•3h ago

I have a ThinkPad T480s with Ubuntu and Firefox. Works like a dream except every now and again the whole thing locks up (have to power cycle). Happens with AWS Console and LinkedIn. Maybe it's doing me a favour.

cosmic_cheese•3h ago

I would hazard a guess that it’s more of a “devs only test against Chromium” problem than it is a Firefox problem. It’s a problem seen under WebKit-based browsers at times, too. Gecko and WebKit often behave differently and have different performance characteristics than Chromium/Blink does, but that’s often not accounted for at all. The extent of QA on non-Chromium browsers too often stops at “it technically runs”.

rtkwe•2h ago

That's also probably part of the story but ultimately as an end user the fact is Firefox is a bad experience I'm suffering through only to not use Chrome. I can't force websites to patch whatever memory leak is causing Youtube tabs on FF to eat 5 GB of ram for example.

miloignis•2h ago

That's frustrating, I'm sorry! I don't experience anything like that, and I have over a thousand tabs open in Firefox on NixOS.

Based on https://frame.work/linux Ubuntu 24.04 is the minimum supported version for the older AMD F13's, so I'd suggest updating and then reaching out to Framework if the problem persists on a supported distro.

openmarmot•2h ago

on chrome based browsers with Linux I have to disable 'use graphic acceleration when available' in the browser settings or the browser with freeze intermittently. This has been a consistent issue across distros for years. Not sure if it also affects firefox.

Disabling this feature mostly works, but results in poor performance for some graphics heavy websites.

I also had a lot of issues with my AMD framework laptop and ended up reverting back to a older Intel Framework laptop. Top issues with the AMD laptop were the realtek wireless, and random AMD (integrated) GPU glitches. Intel hardware continues to be absolutely top tier for Linux support.

jeffbee•2h ago

> on chrome based browsers with Linux I have to disable 'use graphic acceleration when available' in the browser settings or the browser with freeze intermittently. This has been a consistent issue across distros for years. Not sure if it also affects firefox.

Oddly enough works fine on all Chromebooks. It really is a matter of platform hardware/firmware qualification being suited to task.

lawn•30m ago

I've never had any issues on my AMD framework 13 with way more tabs than that (on Void Linux).

zeta0134•3h ago

I suppose the main thing keeping me from being interested in this thing is that every 2-in-1 convertible I've tried in the past was *heavy* and *cumbersome* to use as an actual tablet. I wonder how this holds up, but I'm not sure it's possible to fix the main issue: the keyboard makes it real awkward to hold. It's like a whole product class that looks amazing in marketing shots and is kindof a pain to use in any of the non-laptop modes in practice. Am I just holding it wrong?

starkparker•2h ago

My favorite 2nd device is an old Dell Inspiron 11 2-in-1. By all accounts it's a terribly specced device, but it still runs modern Fedora + KDE well, the touchscreen works well, and the display quality isn't awful.

Many of the knocks against it (small size, cheap plastic case, small battery) work in its favor by keeping it light enough to use as a tablet. The battery, RAM, and SSD are all serviceable. I see them on eBay frequently for as little as $20-40 each in lots or $50-70 standalone.

The 10" Lenovo Duet Chromebook tablets are a close second but don't age as well and can't be realistically repaired or upgraded.

mstngl•3h ago

The more videos with the FW12 moving and used before the Camera I see, the less I can ignore the fat bezels. The design language at all is not made for „business“ which is refreshing and they obviously have a budget approach, but such ancient bezels don‘t do a contribution for anything. The lack of any Windows Hello enabling hardware was the final bit for my sad no-buy decision.

9283409232•3h ago

I'm glad Framework exists but I don't envy them. Selling laptops aimed at the most nitpicky never-satisfied group of people must make it hard to see through the noise. I wish them the best.

vaylian•2h ago

Is my framework perfect? No. But it's still the best laptop I've ever owned. Just like open source software, it's not about having the most shiny look and feel, but it's about knowing that the creator wants me to have the freedom and empowerment to open it up and adjust it to my needs and desires. Other companies will just say that I've voided the warranty when I try fixing or tweaking it myself.

dpc_01234•2h ago

Maybe these users are picky, but they are under-served, very influential, and very productive w.r.t. improving support for the laptop in the ecosystem. At this point FW became a go-to laptop for Linux hackers, and it gets great support in all avant-garde tech like e.g. NixOS.

cosmic_cheese•3h ago

I know Framework somewhat have their hands tied by modularity, but for the 13 I think the next thing they need to focus on more than anything is battery life. At this point it’s not just MacBooks that greatly outperform the FW13 on that front, but also several competing x86 laptops. For the price it’s difficult to justify taking such a steep hit, even with repairability factored in.

9283409232•3h ago

I would like Framework to go the System76 route and adopt a Linux distro that they can very finely tune for the Framework laptop. Macbooks have the benefit of MacOS being completely vertically integrated. I don't see Framework putting this level of effort in, even on the OEM Windows side of things like other OEMs such as Dell do. Their software needs to be better.

cosmic_cheese•3h ago

It’d be nice, but keeping a team of engineers capable of that sort of low-level work can’t be cheap, so it seems unlikely.

fragmede•2h ago

Pennywise, pound foolish, unfortunately, but more than that, companies that do hardware and software well are few and far between, and the ones that do tend to be highly valued. AMD famously does value software much, or pay their software developers relatively well.

asoneth•1h ago

Is it pound foolish, or just a rational business decision?

Let's say they ship 100k laptops per year. Let's say they could meaningfully improve battery life with a team of half-dozen excellent software engineers, which would cost on the order of a few million a year. For the sake of argument, let's say ~$3M/yr. That increases the price per laptop by ~$30 on average. That's a premium I'd pay for improved efficiency, but judging by the comments here and elsewhere, the premium they're already charging above the raw component prices seems to be at the upper end of what most people are willing to pay.

It's fiendishly difficult to become the next Apple, Tesla, Nintendo, or Valve with thick enough margins on your hardware (or services) to afford excellent software engineering teams, so it makes sense that so few hardware companies attempt it, and many who try eventually give up.

fragmede•1h ago

It's a much more interesting question when framed with numbers! But let's say they ship 500k main boards (since it doesn't need to be a totally assembled laptop to benefit), and it only costs $300k, not $3 million (and a couple laptops) to the right eastern European software developer to perfectly tune some Linux config files. Then it's only $1.50 per laptop, and they could arguably just eat that cost.

Framework doesn't have to spend enough to be the next Apple (nor do they have the resources to be), they just need to spend enough to not be so desperately far behind Dell.

The explanation makes sense in isolation, it just seems like a local maxima if you zoom out.

bigyabai•3h ago

Funny thing is, a lot of the System76 tweaks aren't specific to their system (or OS) at all. One popular example is the system76-scheduler, which you can install on pretty much any hardware or distro for the same responsiveness improvements: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler

Kinda leads me to believe the whole "vertically integrate my Framework" shtick is a snipe hunt.

9283409232•3h ago

You may be misunderstanding me or I'm not explaining myself properly. I don't want them to vertically integrate in the same way that Apple does, I want them to invest more on the software side by selecting a distro and building around it. If they can piggyback on popOS then great but they need to invest in software.

bigyabai•2h ago

I don't see how that would help, and in a lot of ways I feel like PopOS is an example of how phyrric the effort is. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a distro that most users will probably replace with something else. Really all they have to do is ship a Debian/Fedora image as default and test the hardware config before shipping it so people have a level of QC to depend on. Building and maintaining an OS from scratch is a baby+bathwater solution to this, at least from where I'm standing.

What kind of problems do you anticipate this would fix?

cosmic_cheese•2h ago

It’s technically also covered by Mint and kinda (not as well) Ubuntu, but one thing that pop gets right in my view is bundling in the Nvidia drivers that a huge chunk of people are going to need, as well as enabling non-free repos by default, neither of which Fedora or Debian do (not to mention, a lot of users will find Debian’s user-facing packages too old [yes, even with Testing]). I say this even as someone who generally doesn’t use pop and favors Fedora.

walterbell•2h ago

Realistic starting point: hire one Linux developer to daily drive Debian Testing + mainline Linux kernel on Framework hardware, then upstream integration/optimization fixes to mainline Linux and Debian unstable.

Upstream fixes would benefit multiple Linux distros, reduce Framework support burden and increase the usability of Linux on Framework hardware.

charcircuit•2h ago

What if they let you swap your CPU for a M series chip?

jeffbee•2h ago

There isn't anything they can do about it while maintaining their allegiance to the SO-DIMM. Fundamentally, memory on a stick guzzles energy. The reality of energy efficiency and the myth of upgradeability are conflicting.

timschmidt•1h ago

Just one of the issues addressed by https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAMM_(memory_module)

jeffbee•1h ago

Indeed, indeed it does solve that problem, but other actors need to align. Someone would have to ship a CPU that people want that supports off-world LPDDR (i.e. not Intel Lunar/Arrow Lake), and laptop makes would need to adopt it.

My suspicion is what will actually happen is that CAMM2 is going to make inroads in desktop systems.

timschmidt•1h ago

Seems like you're not aware of AMD's recent APUs, which seem to be very capable and very popular. I'm not sure if a laptop model sporting one with CAMM2 ram is available yet, but one can safely assume it's just a matter of time.

I'm also not sure what you mean by other actors needing to align. JEDEC has standardized CAMM2 already. Which is how all concerned actors accomplish alignment.

jeffbee•1h ago

I am aware of them but as you pointed out they don't exist with CAMM. The one that I want is the Ryzen AI Max and all the implementations of it so far — the Framework Desktop, the HP Z2 G1a — have the memory soldered down without CAMMs.

timschmidt•51m ago

I seem to remember executives from Framework being active in the HN comments at the Framework Desktop launch in which CAMM2 support was a highly requested feature. I suspect they received the message.

Lovely thing about the PC industry which differs from our friends in Cupertino is that it tends to explore the full design space over time. All good things come to those who wait.

henryzhou•2h ago

Basically it says buying a used laptop worth more than the Laptop 12

drooopy•2h ago

For whatever reason the FW 12 is giving me iBook G4 vibes and I love that.

binary132•1h ago

I’ve been really curious about some of the hybrid handhelds / micro laptops from GPD lately. Framework should consider looking into this market niche as well.

attendant3446•9m ago

I was seriously considering getting a Framework laptop (but 13") and what stopped me is the limited shipping. Right now I live in the area where I can order one, but I was looking at another country where I'd prefer to live. It won't happen next month or even this year. But if I order a Framework laptop I want to have access to the new and replacement parts and Framework doesn't ship there. I don't want to rely on forwarders. And that's a deal breaker. So I went with another Thinkpad instead.

And on the subject of 12" laptop, when it was teased I hoped for a MacBook Air killer. But that didn't happen. I like what Framework is doing, but common manufacturers are still looking like a better value.

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Framework Laptop 12 press reviews are live and Framework Laptop 13 in-stock

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