What I don’t get in the Macbook comparison:
- Macbook Air 13 M4 with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD: €2199.
- My Sage Framework Laptop 12 i5 with 32GB RAM and 1TB SSD (3rd party): €1000-1100.
This is not the same league.
(NL prices)
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Not to mention that macbooks are the best performance wise. Undisputed market leaders, no other windows or linux laptop can compete with them either. It’s kinda pointless to measure device performance against a macbook.
Their tradeoff is their walled garden, with MacOS only, 1st party repairs only, factory setup only, and limited app support. Possible to bypass to an extent, but bypassing their walled garden sucks hard. Other companies don’t compete on quality or performance per dollar with them, they compete by not being an Apple product.
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I don’t know if it’s quite pointless to compare them, but the stuff you mention should definitely be taken into consideration. Also, the Macbook Air isn’t a 2-in-1 and doesn’t even have a touch screen. So that’s a big consideration as well.
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OMG!!!
You can compare SINGLE ASPECTS of two devices. I was only talking about the CPU. The fact is, you absolutely can get a M4 PROCESSOR for $999. And this M4 CPU will kick the i3 as well as the i5 in the butt.
I was mentioning this to make the point that REGARDING THE CPU (which is all I am writing about in that whole paragraph) the FW12’s value proposition is rather difficult to accept. This was my whole point.
“If you especially look at the cpu the price of the FW12 seems elevated.”
“The cpu of the FW12 hurts its value proposition.”
The only point that was made.
And that is why I go on and mention that I am really interested in seeing the FW12 with another CPU.
“But when you consider memory and storage or this and that it looks different! Then the value proposition looks different.”
No shit! Of course you can consider all kinds of additional things. But just adding criteria on top of the one I was looking at, doesn’t change how my original criteria performs…
I just don’t find it meaningful, because the macbooks are not really a competing product in the same segment. And that goes for most other laptops on the market too, not just framework.
If you are okay with the tradeoffs coming with an Apple product, you should always get a macbook, they are the current best thing on the market.
If you are not okay with the tradeoffs coming with an Apple product, then you want to choose from a selection of other laptops, not including the macbook.
Anything is going to suck in comparison with the macbook if compared without the ecosystem. So the only lesson an user can learn from this comparision is “apple still makes the best laptop”. That’s true, it just doesn’t tell how a product fares in its own segment.
EDIT: Oh, you made the FW12 vs Omnibook Flip video. Thank you for that, I was thinking along this line to compare to an actual similar product. An user could actually do similar things on these two devices.
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Again, I don’t compare the laptops…
I don’t compare the laptops
I don’t compare the laptops
I DON’T COMPARE THE LAPTOPS
I DON’T COMPARE THE LAPTOPS
‘The slow cpu hurts the value proposition of the Laptop 12’
Concentrate on this statement/opinion.
All the other fuzz I was writing about is to make my point stronger and more easily to understand. Though I now feel it might have hurt the ‘easier-to-understand’ part. It only ever was meant to underline my argument… sigh
I really expected people to understand the rather focused and limited scope of my comparision and that I am in fact not comparing the two products as a whole. I agree that my short paragraph would be a rather poor comparision of the two laptops.
edit: I haven’t made a video…?
I don’t get the comparisons at all. Framework to me, like Fairphone, is about changing the industry. Yes, it will cost us money, and yes performance will be sub par, but isn’t this what we want!?
Sustainability comes at a cost, and while it might still be just a promise, that promise is what we’re paying for. The extra money goes to the mission, and tbh I couldn’t care less, if word opens faster on a macbook, or if chatgpt gives me better results than DDG, because it’s not the tomorrow I want.
Cult or not, go Framework! 
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Benstor214 Dude, in the top right you can see who they replied to
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I agree. I still think the FW12 would have looked better with a different cpu. 
I’m not your dude, friendo!
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edit: I haven’t made a video…?
Well, yes, but the comment is tagged as an answer to BigT, not you 
I’m not trying to debate that an M4 is not far superior if we only compare processors. It’s quite literally the best laptop chip on the market right now.
Yeah, I noticed that too late. I edited that part in my post.
And you can have it for under a thousand, while you can easily go over that for the FW12 by configuring it accordingly.
That’s why I mentioned it. They’re financially connected to other PC vendors.
If everything I wanted could be done on a macbook, I’d absolutely get one. The performance is superior, and bottom of their product line is kinda affordable. The available repair is basically a subscription model, but at least it exists.
But since their motto is “my way or the highway”, and their way is not a good fit for me, I am stuck with choosing from the rest of the market. Macbooks are superior on basically everything they can do, but if they can’t do what you want, you are fucked. That’s the huge tradeoff with buying apple.
And that’s why I think comparing to macbooks makes far less sense than other normal laptops. Because being an apple product is a gigantic part of a macbook. It can be more important than actual specs. Not buying another superior normal laptop wouldn’t make sense, but not buying a superior apple laptop does.
OMG!!! Okay, you pushed me to it: I will delete all mention of the Apple device from my previous posts. It seems it is such a red flag for people that they are no longer seeing the actual point my comment was trying to make…
edit:
I don’t compare the laptops
I don’t compare the laptops
I DON’T COMPARE THE LAPTOPS
I DON’T COMPARE THE LAPTOPS
Edit: FYI, this is all in good fun. Just being silly.
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From a price-performance ratio perspective, the Framework 12 absolutely sucks, and there are plenty of other brands that are significantly better than Framework.
However, Framework’s philosophy aligns with mine that I OWN my laptop, not the other way around. The ability to repair, upgrade, and customize every part without heavy roadblocks is something I deeply appreciated. Sure, I’m sacrificing raw specs per dollar, but what I gain is control, transparency, and long-term sustainability. And for me, that outweighs pure performance.
These are also the reason why I love MNT Research so much.
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Pretty much my exact position.
Here is a sanitized version of my original post:
Some thoughts:
In my eyes, FW12 does have a rather difficult value proposition, especially looking at price-per-performance. Although a lot of that naturally comes down to the CPU. Rest assured that I am aware of the rather focused and limited scope of putting the price against the performance of the cpu. I just feel like the cpu might be the ‘main culprit’ of the FW12 perceived poor value proposition.
In the review Sierra mentions that the Tiger Lake processors aren’t ‘the most efficient’, giving you either ‘low performance’ with ‘low power draw’ or ‘high performance’ with ‘horrible power draw’. I am very interested how a version of the FW12 with one of the newer AMD processors would fare!
They also mention in the review that Framework laptops always cost 200-300 dollars more. This is not wrong and it might be the prize you pay for modularity and repairability.
And it may sound like a conspiracy but other brands absolutely do have a revenue stream from bloat- , ad- and spyware they ship their devices with. So it is more like you get a rebate from the other brands for all the data you willingly give up to them and all the advertisement you kindly let them serve you… food for thoughts.
It is also possible to keep the price of the FW12 low by ordering without the charger, memory or storage and forgoing the upgrade to a i5, too. One does not even have to mention the windows license, I guess…
In the end I think one sentence nails it. Sierra says: ‘I think a techie would love something like this to mess around with.’ The Laptop 12 might have, despite it’s apparent popularity, a smaller target group than Framework would wish for. That being said, this absolutely can change over time with the right upgrades (in the review they talk about ‘things to be addressed with a gen 2’) to the mainboard, display and keyboard, but that’s just my opinion.
Personally, I love it! Though I am said ‘techie’… I have a hardened Linux 2-in-1 I can use for hours as a tablet without the fan spinning at all.
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i think you hit the nail on the head. we’re not paying just for the laptop, we’re paying for the promise that there will be upgrades in the future, and as you said “you can use it as long as you like”
i do think fw could do a better job providing upgrades (or communications about upgrades) to products that aren’t the fw13, that’s a point i saw made in the comments that i actually agree with.
i do wonder if a part of the reason they’re getting a lot of hate is because of how they’re choosing the market the desktop with an ai angle, which at best confuses me and at worst makes me go “really?”
it feels like they poked a hornet’s nest with a red hot stick.
But did you consider the FW12’s repairability and upgradability, or the fact that you can customize every part without any heavy roadblocks? You can’t just look at price-performance, you also have to consider that framework’s philosophy orbits around control, transparency, and long-term sustainability!
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