4 ms·

I’ve got a framework 13, and am in the “I wish I just bought the MacBook Air” camp. The battery life is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the thermals are t

I’ve got a framework 13, and am in the “I wish I just bought the MacBook Air” camp. The battery life is terrible, the speakers are terrible, the thermals are terrible. It may be thin and light, but the different levels of R&D really show.

blueboo 3y ago
It’s scale, too, isn’t it? At Apple scale you get better materials, better engineering at every level, and better testing processes—for the same or less money. I admire Framework for achieving what they’ve done, modest though the success is in absolute terms. That said, they’re also probably still burning venture funding. Hardware disruption is hard.
rubin55 3y ago
FWIW, I'm a recent owner of a Framework Laptop 13, 13th gen 1370p. I am extremely happy with it. w/regards to battery life, I'm doing ~4.5watts idling/text-editing, screen on, wifi on. That is more efficient that I got out of my 5850u I had before this. I get about 9ish hours of battery life. You do need to run things like thermald, tlp and set the lower tdp setting in the bios (max battery setting lowers the tdp afaik). Fan barely turns on. I could probably take it further with ectool tweaks. Edit: to add, powertop is your friend! measure. Anything above 6watts usually means something is doing something (this ball-park 6watts comes from experience, last 3ish devices - anything lower than that whilst doing things == great. I do about 8ish watts when using VA-API to play video for example, which I find very reasonable + similar to my previous 5850u).
- bdavbdav 3y ago
  We’re talking about 9 hours with a lot of faffing here. The M2 MBA hits 15-18 hours real world. The FW feels like a laptop from 7 years ago to me.
  - vGPU 3y ago
    Is it running windows?
    - bdavbdav 3y ago
      It is currently - tried a couple of distros (arch, Ubuntu) with different combinations of the recommended (and other) tweaks. Windows seems to sip battery compared to both.

blueboo 3y ago

It’s scale, too, isn’t it? At Apple scale you get better materials, better engineering at every level, and better testing processes—for the same or less money. I admire Framework for achieving what they’ve done, modest though the success is in absolute terms. That said, they’re also probably still burning venture funding. Hardware disruption is hard.

rubin55 3y ago

FWIW, I'm a recent owner of a Framework Laptop 13, 13th gen 1370p. I am extremely happy with it. w/regards to battery life, I'm doing ~4.5watts idling/text-editing, screen on, wifi on. That is more efficient that I got out of my 5850u I had before this. I get about 9ish hours of battery life. You do need to run things like thermald, tlp and set the lower tdp setting in the bios (max battery setting lowers the tdp afaik). Fan barely turns on. I could probably take it further with ectool tweaks. Edit: to add, powertop is your friend! measure. Anything above 6watts usually means something is doing something (this ball-park 6watts comes from experience, last 3ish devices - anything lower than that whilst doing things == great. I do about 8ish watts when using VA-API to play video for example, which I find very reasonable + similar to my previous 5850u).

bdavbdav 3y ago
We’re talking about 9 hours with a lot of faffing here. The M2 MBA hits 15-18 hours real world. The FW feels like a laptop from 7 years ago to me.
- vGPU 3y ago
  Is it running windows?
  - bdavbdav 3y ago
    It is currently - tried a couple of distros (arch, Ubuntu) with different combinations of the recommended (and other) tweaks. Windows seems to sip battery compared to both.