I’ve been using a Framework 13 7840u for over 2 years. I can only recommend this laptop to people who are not afraid to tinker or are more of a Linux-type person.
I bought it because Framework is run by people like me, who have the same view on what a laptop should be like and what it shouldn’t. The support is very good. The people replying to my tickets actually knew what they where talking about. Deep understanding, clear messaging and they know which type of screenshots/photos they need and what I should try next.
But the build quality is at most B-tier when compared to my Thinkpad T430i. I’ve had 4 hardware problems with my Framework 13:
- Broken display which flickered under CPU workloads
- Fan started scraping more and more with time until it was so loud it stopped/choked
- Battery swell
- Pre-applied heatpaste was trash and wasted a lot of my time debugging throttling issues
The first 3 issues were fixed by support. They sent me free replacements. But I’ve also had a bunch of firmware/driver issues which should never happen:
- My GPU driver (amdgpu, Fedora) froze my whole system every time I did something that taxed the GPU. The driver is fixed now and works, but it took almost a year
- A recent upgrade broke my docked setup
Despite that, I don’t regret buying and would do it again. If I would’ve bought a Dell XPS or a Macbook, I would probably complain much more because they suck in other ways that I hate even more. The only laptops I see as competition are probably ThinkPads, but I don’t know how good the latest models are.