Okay I am not against Framework in any way, but tin-foil hat moment:
(note: I wrote those. I just put quotes to organize them visually.)
HOWEVER, I have not had a laptop with a very high quality finish (used in combo with a high quality cable) with every USB-C port plugged 5 times a day going through 5 years without having loose connectors, because absolutely nobody around me care about cable quality (and they will think a $2 cable is perfectly fine) or insist on sticking to a machine for 5 years.
RAM is like in the middle. But, as the “minimum size” basically doubles, I don’t think a 16GB will be completely fully utilized as quick in a way a 8GB will (especially if one do at least a decent job of saving work and closing apps), and a 32GB basically will never reach even 24GB. (note: you can get 24GB od fual-channel but this might cause severe instability or part of the memory in a inaccessible state)
Okay, okay… it depends on your use, but my current work machine is limping along with 16 GB. I basically can’t run an IDE or do any heavy development locally. My personal machine has 32 GB and tends to run on the edge of falling over.
YMMV, but there are genuinely people out there for whom 64 GB of RAM is beneficial.
Indeed. My old machine is using 8GB in ‘default’ idle with browser and email, skype etc. Have had instances (specific work loads or some light gaming) where it hit the 16GB ceiling as well.
Thus 32GB for the future is pretty much necessary and 16GB should be minimum for any new laptop out there.
I dropped 64GB in mine accidentally (thought I was buying 32GB in 2x 16GB sticks but accidentally bought 2x 32GB sticks) and I’m honestly glad I did. Running Win10 with multiple Docker containers under WSL eats a whole lotta RAM, and I’m glad I have a whole lotta RAM to feed it.
I agree with @Xavier_Jiang…I have no idea how people are using that much RAM. Okay, so I use a tiling compositor, but still! I regularly have an Electron app (Signal Desktop) and several Firefox profiles and rarely ever go above 4-5 GB usage. The only time I’ve ever hit 16GB (the max on my previous laptop as well as how much RAM I have on my Framework) was when I had a program I wrote run away and gobble up RAM. Under daily usage, I never even get close to 8GB, let along 16.
I know GTA V use up a lot of RAM (and cause blue screens on my 8GB machine), which is why I say 16GB.
However I had not been able to obtain a pirated copy of GTA-V for testing purposes, but I very much think that 16GB is quite sufficient if you do some very basic management (e.g. not install garbage)
Alas, that’s mostly Firefox (don’t ask how many tabs I have open; seriously), but popping an IDE would add another ~4 GiB or more, and compiles can easily eat up a similar amount, sometimes even from a single process (especially the linker).
As I type this, I am running:
Too many Firefox tabs
A dozen or so shell sessions
Thunderbird
KATE (a multi-document text editor with some advanced features, but short of an IDE)
A couple instances of KWrite (a “basic” text editor)
About a half dozen other odds and ends
That’s 37 windows across 6 virtual desktops. By my standards, it’s a modest workload. If I had 32 GB of RAM, I’d almost certainly have 2-4 full IDE sessions running on top of that, and might actually be able to do local compiles. Even on my 32 GB laptop, I’m constantly having to choose between abandoning something I’d rather leave open (I tend to have a lot of tasks “active” concurrently and regularly rotate between them; I don’t like having to restart things) or doing without e.g. an IDE.
Sure, plenty of people never have more than a few browser tabs open, or a few applications in total open… to be fair, 16 GB is probably fine for most users (e.g. if whatever video game you’re playing is guaranteed to be half or more of your total memory usage). But there are more people like me that push their browser much harder and do software development on large repositories, or other more “technical” workloads that demand a lot of memory. We can get grouchy when someone doesn’t include qualifiers on statements like “32GB basically will never reach even 24GB”, because that’s basically excluding our market segment. (Particularly when something like Frame.work tends to appeal disproportionately to our market segment.)
Don’t get me wrong, I get professional workloads can require immense amounts of RAM compared to more pedestrian use cases but that’s extreme, I seriously can’t even fathom how you stay organized
I kill every process that I’m not using or haven’t touched in like 15 mins, I feel my desktop gets cluttered otherwise
I get where you are coming from, really I do, nobody likes to feel marginalized but seriously, your use case is in the minority
I’m not telling you how to use your machine or anything like that, merely pointing out there are more users who don’t need that much RAM compared to those that do
And I don’t think Framework wants to limit themselves by marketing exclusively to I.T pros-that would run counter to their idea of being repairability to the masses
About 2 weeks after posting this I purchased a 17" HP Omen laptop with RTX 3070 graphics for $1870, and currently waiting on it to ship. The screen size and the discrete graphics are good for me. That being said, I would have bought a 16" if I could have gotten it with the 3070 at the time.
I’m still hoping to get a thin and light in the near future (the HP Omen I bought definitely is not that) to travel around with, and I would love for it to be a Framework laptop. Since I now have a machine with the graphics I want, this thin and light doesn’t necessarily need to have discrete graphics, though I would still prefer even entry level discrete graphics (like a 1660Ti).
But mainly, 13.5" is still too small a screen size for me. A 15" Framework would be perfect. Even a 14" would be tempting. But 13.5" is a deal breaker.
I would prefer to get a Framework machine to replace my HP Omen in the future. I would consider a similar spec’d Framework machine to be an upgrade, due to the reparability.
Just giving my feedback to encourage the Framework team to move in this direction.
professional workloads (e.g. editing video) does not necessary having to open many different things at once since a reasonably organized workflow won’t involve more than half a dozen apps for each task
Whereas some workload might involve in lots of clutter, such as designing circuits, where you need to look up the specifications of the chips (file explorer / browser), the datasheets (pdf viewer), the schematic, and the PCB itself and can easily get quite messy.
I have a habit of leaving things open when I am not quite finished. However, because you are not doing one task for 24/7, you will eventually reach a stage where you say “ok. I think I will finish today after I finish wiring up this part of circuit” and you save and exit. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t (e.g. leaving pdf readers open across 72 hours). Mostly depend on the amount of RAM I have.
Think of RAM as your table. Sure, a big table can fit more stuff, but eventually it can get crowded and you would be at least periodically storing things up and taking things from storage to use them.
As of those tasks that you just can’t do without a big table (e.g. think of a 10K piece jigsaw puzzle or a 5K piece lego), such as compiling entire applications (GIMP for example), but that is quite a special task that most people aren’t dealing with and I don’t think we should be talking about those here.
There is a reason motherboards with 40 USBs exist and other weird oddities, but if we want a average computer to have even 20 USB that’s quite a bit overkill, and thus I don’t think we should discuss them here.
The best way to represent “what people want” is a poll to take on the opinion of a large amount of people without flooding the thread with posts about “I want this” and “I want that” and everything just getting buried up in essays
I don’t really want to write essays, but there is just quite some content to type about here.
So, hopefully we can shut up about RAM and just … do my survey.
We don’t need a survey for RAM, do we? You literally have slots that you can jam whatever that fits in there. So how about we just end this conversation right there. And you almost always have only two because the CPUs only come with a dual channel memory controller.
I do a lot of video editing so 13’’ is a little bit small for me… Correction, it is way too small. I am currently working on a 15’’ laptop and although it’s doable, this is small.
However, I am still going to buy a Framework laptop, and add a USB-C portable screen to it. This will solve the problem for the time being.
As a few other people have said (in this thread I think but I’m not sure? I’ve been reading a lot of posts here these past few days lol!) it is probably best to let them focus on making the current model a success… To then expand once they have the capability to do so.
If you need to transport your computer you take the 13 inch, 17" is for a domestic use, more confortable for the eyes, to watch movies and play video games
Yes, I’m well aware that portable monitors exist. So do portable TVs, but nobody would say TVs are portable.
It’s silly to say there’s no use case for any laptop with a screen over 13.5" because you can hypothetically lug around an extra device with you instead.
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