Author here. I'm posting this before bed. If there are any suggestions or questions I will answer in the morning.

> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life.

Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU.

The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.

The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.

I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor.

I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.

As a Linux user I feel you.

The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good.

For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans.

I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.

> I haven’t measured it but I read that I should expect it to lose 3-4% in suspend every hour. Is that a joke?

That has to be a bug. I have a thinkpad with a Ryzen 7 6850U, running debian, and lose at most 3% per day.

This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.

I've been using the Core i7-1165G7 mainboard for the 13, which works well enough with a large amount of RAM and has mature OS support.

What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?

If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac.

Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up.

Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple.

Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class.

Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life.

Edit:

You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.

Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.

[0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo...

[1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...

  ...worse overall experience...

I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect.

For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.

The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches.

IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up. I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.

As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex.

You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them.

Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc.

Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too.

It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.

The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.

The same points made about battery life with Apple Silicon in this blog post equally apply to Snapdragon Elite X laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0

Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).

I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.

If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.

My Thinkpad P15 battery was also great after two weeks vacation, with Windows 11 Professional, and Intel CPU.

I genuinely think there's no stakeholder in the Linux ecosystem to take on the challenge of delivering a good battery life for a single laptop. There are so many moving parts that need to be part-aligned for it to take place, I am not sure it will ever happen. The schedulers need to schedule in a power-aware fashion, the user space applications must back-off and be throttled appropriately when necessary. Device drivers mustn't be absolute dogshit, yet they are. We can barely get a functioning WiFi and BT driver, engineering one that cooperates with the rest of the system to suspend correctly is a task one does after they've proven they can implement it to spec.

"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."

That sounds like a plan!

I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.

Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years.

Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..

The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.

I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.

I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out.

First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill.

The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components.

To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price.

Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option.

Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway.

The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there).

The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$.

I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.

The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed.

On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.

I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy.

The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days.

Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc.

On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is.

Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you.

Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both.

Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/...

[1] https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-susp...

I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.

When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?

I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.

There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.

It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.