I bought my FW 13 in August 2023 and I’ve been a big fan of the modularity since the beginning. My only issue was the missing touch screen and the average speakers. This could be solved if I upgraded to the 13 Pro.
My questions are:
Can i just buy the chassy and insert my Hardware (I think not, but I couldn’t find a definitive answer)
If I have to upgrade anyway, would it be more sensible to switch to AMD Ryzen? Im an engineering studen and use a lot of Fusion, Inventor, Excel etc
If I have to sell my laptop to upgrade to the 13 Pro, should I sell it with my RAM (32GB) or keep the RAM for the 13 Pro
Im using Windows on my Laptop, and I dont think that Im going to switch or Dual Boot even If I have the 13 Pro because I have a Thinkpad with Ubuntu on it. Furthermore I only use Ubuntu for OpenFoam. Still I think it’s really cool, that the FW 13 Pro is Ubuntu certified… Unless Fusion and Inventor get available on Ubuntu I won’t be able to switch sadly
Thank you for taking your time reading this (and hopefully commenting)
You can re-use your mainboard in the new Pro chassis. It looks like they are even making a chassis upgrade kit that would allow you to upgrade and swap your stuff over. If all you want is the new display, you can just buy the new display and install it in the machine you have now. The speakers are trickier and will require the bottom chassis kit, which seems to require the new battery and possibly the new input cover. At that point, you may as well just buy the chassis upgrade kit.
Alternatively, if you are able to sell your current machine, you could just sell it a buy a complete 13 Pro. Intel or AMD is going to be up to your preference. The new Panther Lake Intel chip has good iGPU performance, and should have better battery life all around than the current AMD offerings, and especially during light workloads like internet browsing or streaming video. But it’s tough to say for sure what the real-world results will be until it’s in people’s hands for a while. If you go with the new Intel boards, there’s no reason to keep your current RAM, as the new boards require LPCAMM2. If you currently have DDR5 RAM and decide to go with the AMD offering, your current RAM would be compatible if you wanted to swap it over.
