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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. C

by zmk5 3y ago

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. EDIT: The verge also has a deep dive into the system https://www.theverge.com/22665800/framework-laptop-16-hands-on-preview-modular-gaming-laptop?utm_campaign=theverge&utm_content=chorus&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter https://www.theverge.com/22665800/framework-laptop-16-hands-...

trashcanman 3y ago
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
- ceearrbee 3y ago
  Are they not referring to the default price which is available to all? Adding all those situational discounts is not a fair comparison since it requires a very specific set of circumstances to achieve it.
  - zmk5 3y ago
    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.
  - trashcanman 3y ago
    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
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Why compare it to a smaller computer with no expandability with pricing that is unavailable to a huge majority of consumers?
  - trashcanman 3y ago
    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.
    - onlypositive 3y ago
      Ah yes, let me tell HR about this neat trick.
    - canuckintime 3y ago
      > Sit the 15 inch MBA next to the 16 inch MBP and the screens look identical. No, they do not.
- Rebelgecko 3y ago
  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)
  - trashcanman 3y ago
    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.
    - 3y ago
- senknvd 3y ago
  The M2 can't match the 7840HS in CPU performance though[1]. It's half as fast in multi-core benchmarks and a bit slower in single-core. [1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M2-vs-R7-7840HS_14521_14948.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/M2-vs-R7-7840HS_14521_14948.24...
  - trashcanman 3y ago
    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
    - lifeformed 3y ago
      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.
    - sudosysgen 3y ago
      Double the power for double the performance indicates you can use a different scheduler if you don't need performance. Also, the CPU isn't the only powerdraw in a system, in my use the screen alone averages more power draw.
washadjeffmad 3y ago
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.
- kibwen 3y ago
  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.
- zmk5 3y ago
  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.
- senknvd 3y ago
  Which Chromebook did you go with? And what tools (IDEs, debuggers, etc.) do you use for development?

by zmk5 3y ago

trashcanman 3y ago

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

ceearrbee 3y ago
Are they not referring to the default price which is available to all? Adding all those situational discounts is not a fair comparison since it requires a very specific set of circumstances to achieve it.
- zmk5 3y ago
  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.
- trashcanman 3y ago
  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
dghlsakjg 3y ago
Why compare it to a smaller computer with no expandability with pricing that is unavailable to a huge majority of consumers?
- trashcanman 3y ago
  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.
  - onlypositive 3y ago
    Ah yes, let me tell HR about this neat trick.
  - canuckintime 3y ago
    > Sit the 15 inch MBA next to the 16 inch MBP and the screens look identical. No, they do not.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
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)
- trashcanman 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago
senknvd 3y ago
The M2 can't match the 7840HS in CPU performance though[1]. It's half as fast in multi-core benchmarks and a bit slower in single-core. [1]: https://www.notebookcheck.net/M2-vs-R7-7840HS_14521_14948.247596.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/M2-vs-R7-7840HS_14521_14948.24...
- trashcanman 3y ago
  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
  - lifeformed 3y ago
    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.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    Double the power for double the performance indicates you can use a different scheduler if you don't need performance. Also, the CPU isn't the only powerdraw in a system, in my use the screen alone averages more power draw.

washadjeffmad 3y ago

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.

kibwen 3y ago
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.
zmk5 3y ago
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.
senknvd 3y ago
Which Chromebook did you go with? And what tools (IDEs, debuggers, etc.) do you use for development?