Long battery life is important to me, as I’m coming from a passively-cooled Core m3 Asus T302CA with two batteries (one in the main unit, and one in the keyboard), which could easily deliver an average of 11 hours of battery with my normal loads on Linux, when new. I basically want it to last all day, both working and at home, without plugging it in, as I keep moving between rooms and taking my laptop with me.
Based on Notebookcheck’s battery life figures, the framework delivers around 8 hours of battery life, while the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9, which is my main contestant, delivers 11 hours and 40 minutes using their web browsing tests (sorry, I can’t seem to link directly to the battery life sections).
I believe Framework staff has benchmarked the Framework at 10-11 hours using Mobilemark 2018, but the Mobilemark 2018 score that Lenovo claims for the Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 9 is 16 hours, so still substantially higher.
The Thinkpad X1 does have a very slightly beefier battery (57Wh vs 55Wh for the Framework), but I suspect that’s not the thing that makes a substantial difference. So if the batteries are roughly the same, do you think there’s any hope of the Framework reaching similar battery life as the Thinkpad X1 in the future thanks to UEFI, EC or other software tweaks? Is it a realistic goalpoint, especially under Linux?
I think based on other forum threads I’ve read, Framework staff have stated that the only hardware thing that makes an objective difference on battery life, compared to most mainstream ultrabooks, is the unsoldered DDR4 RAM (an entirely understandable choice). Could there be other things that just can’t be helped?
(By the way, bit of a different topic, but about the RAM, I believe that Microsoft certification will require Modern Standby support, at least on Intel chips which no longer offer S3, but the Modern Standby spec requires soldered RAM. I’m a Linux user so it’s not like I care what Windows does, but I believe to sell the laptop with Windows on board, Microsoft certification will be required, is this correct? So can we expect future iterations of the Framework to still have non-soldered RAM?)