I promise nothing but I did order a sensor, unfortunately I start a lot more projects than I finish XD.
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I’ve just tested the microphones on the laptop, and thought I’d post my observations.
First, I’ve disabled any noise reduction and signal processing that I can, as I don’t like those features being active on microphone inputs. Sometimes, this can have a negative result because of high noise, but this wasn’t the case on the Framework.
The microphones are stereo. I wasn’t sure about this, because the video reviews with sound from the Framework microphones I’ve listened to, weren’t recorded in stereo. I was quite pleased to hear this. Furthermore, the microphones have a pretty good degree of stereo separation, as they’re positioned on either side of the outside of the hardware switches, not the inside of the switches and closer to the camera. They don’t provide the best stereo image, but they provide a better image than any other laptop I’ve ever used. The self noise seems low for laptop microphones, and I made my recordings with no microphone boost and the level at 100 percent. The audio quality was excellent for Webcam microphones, and though I just listened to it from the speakers, the frequency response seemed quite good.
The speakers, too, have surprising audio quality for something as small as they seem to be. I don’t mind that they’re down firing speakers, and I imagine the audio quality of the speakers for the Framework 16 is quite good as well, with a greater degree of stereo separation given the chassis and the fact that they point out to either side.
I’ve been typing on the keyboard for some time now, and I’ve rather enjoyed it, too. The size of the keys is greater than other laptop keyboards from systems of a similar size that I’ve used. The only thing I wish was different, was the arrow keys, though I’m used to dealing with my Surface Pro input cover, so this is an upgrade.
I’ve managed to determine where all the FN layered keys are for the most part, but I didn’t find an applications key. Some keyboards I’ve seen use FN with the right control key for applications, but not the Framework. Shift+F10 seems to work well for this purpose most of the time, so this shouldn’t be a significant problem.
Performance on the battery isn’t too bad, either. In fact, I can’t tell any performance difference between use on the battery and use while connected to Framework’s charger as I could with most other laptops I’ve used. This is great news for me, because I don’t like lag time with my screen reader while dealing with changes in CPU clock speed. I touched on this on another post.
The BIOS has no options to change any CPU related settings as was revealed in the intel BIOS guide community post here, but I expected some differences from the AMD and Intel versions of the BIOS. I have enabled standalone mode, which does bring up a question, if anyone knows the answer. There appears to be another option for standalone detection, currently enabled for me. What exactly does that do, and what would happen if I turned it off?
I also discovered the save custom defaults in the BIOS. Where are these settings saved or loaded from? It simply saved without prompting me for a location. And, is there a way I could view the saved BIOS settings somehow?
If no one has the answers to these questions, that’s not a problem.
All in all, I’m quite satisfied with my purchase still, and it should be quite useful to me.
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Glad that turned out to not be a problem.
You can do quite a lot in smokeless but I definitely would not mess with that if I could not see what I was doing XD.
Standalone detection is for operating the main-board without a battery, in a laptop it should not really matter.
Should standalone detection be enabled or disabled when operating the mainboard without a battery and outside the chassis?
Enabled if I understand correctly.
Thank you for sharing your experience and your feedback. This is very valuable to us. If you have any specific feedback that you’d like to share or anything you want us to improve, please let us know.
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The only thing that I think could be improved, is to LED color error codes. Audio feedback would be nice to have, which could be optionally enabled in the BIOS. I’d also hope to see options in the BIOS for CPU related features for the AMD laptops, such as Intel’s ability to disable turbo boost, etc.
Other than making the BIOS fully accessible to someone who can’t see, which is not really available on any system just yet, I can’t think of anything more. Perhaps the Optima Braille Laptop can help to make inroads for accessible BIOS, as I know this is something they want to achieve. If so and it can be ported to Framework’s laptops, that would be the best thing since screen readers, in my opinion, though I anticipate something like that is far into the future.
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Thank you for the additional feedback; I will be sharing this with our internal teams. I also agree that making the BIOS fully accessible is not something that can be achieved very shortly, but it is something that we all should be focused on.
If you have any other feedback about the laptop, our knowledge base, support articles, or anything else in the future, please keep sharing them here! Thanks!
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Converting the light colours to tones would be fine, if trying to convert it to words “blue green red” etc would probably require slowing them down.
Yeah I was definitely going for tones, words are way too slow for that to be useful for most things (and also way harder to implement XD) and as far as I know blind people tend to have quite keen hearing. My first though is to convert the color to frequency and the brightness to volume, I think that could work, if it doesn’t I may try something else.
Hell I could see someone doing slow scan television straight to the brain like that XD.
After using the laptop, I have some more observations I thought I’d post.
The input cover does seem to have a very slight seem between the bottom part of the chassis and the input cover itself, which isn’t really much of a problem. Just something to note, though. At certain angles of interacting with the keyboard, this slight crack can snag on some of my arm hairs. I know this is probably a strange observation, and the angle at which I’m interacting with the input cover in this instance is with my elbows lower than the laptop input cover itself. It’s the wrong angle to type on for any length of time, but unfortunately, the desk at my work isn’t positioned very well. Using my laptop as a lap top seems to mitigate both of these problems quite well.
Thermals are quite good on the AMD 7640U CPU with all the basic tasks I’ve done, minor editing in Notepad and some web browsing. The fans don’t turn on unless I make them, by running a full file virus scan, or some other intensive task. I’ve not installed all the programs I’d normally use on a computer just yet, I’m avoiding keeping my personal data off the system for now.
The expansion cards seem to work very well. However, the outside of the inside edges of the ports seem to be sharp rather than being rounded off slightly. This probably cuts manufacturing costs, but it almost makes them seem cheep. The 3.5MM audio card doesn’t seem to have this problem, just USB-C, USB-A, HDMI, and presumably the display port card also, though I don’t have one of those to examine. The edges of the USB-A port will scratch some cheaper USB-A connectors with a plastic outer housing as a result of this. Unfortunately, there might not be too much extra space to work with to resolve this problem, but if there is, I’d be willing to pay an extra cost for a more premium feel to the ports.
Power switches for any card that draws power, which can have enough space to support it, would also be nice to have. I know this has been expressed elsewhere here on the community. I know the USB-A card will draw power without anything connected, even if it’s only a slight amount of power. It would be nice to have the ability to turn this off when I’m not using it. In the mean time, I’m planning to carry around some small USB-C to USB-A converters to use, which should work out nicely.
I’ve been typing on the keyboard more than I have on my first review, and I’m still enjoying the way it sounds and feels. I wish the touch pad wasn’t quite so large, though, but I do understand that those who use it, like that particular aspect. It can make longer typing sessions a bit awkward, since I’m used to the keyboard being on the edge of a table or desk without anything adding extra space to get to the keys, such as a wrist or palm rest. If there was a redesigned input cover putting the keyboard at the front edge with the touch pad above it, I’d like that, and I think others who type a lot would probably appreciate it, also. Unfortunately, that might make using the touch pad a bit awkward, so I suppose there’s trade offs for each design.
Everything is still working out great, and I plan to provide feedback on the Ethernet expansion card, if I have anything significant to report that hasn’t already been reported.
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Thank you for the additional feedback!
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I have more observations since switching to my clear input cover. In retrospect, I probably should have done the switch myself, I’ll go into more details on that below.
I really enjoy the feel of the clear input cover. The touch pad feels the same, but the keyboard has that nice, smooth feel of warn keyboard keys. And, as an interesting consequence, those that aren’t touch typists seem to have a problem typing on my clear keyboard. Especially since I keep the screen at the lowest brightness with the screen reader’s screen curtain on, which makes the screen completely black, from what I’ve been told.
Now, the reason I should have replaced my input cover myself. First, it would have made for an interesting and detailed experience I could have reported on here. And second, the individual who replaced my input cover stripped a couple of my bottom cover fasseners, and lost all of them. They were replaced with screws that are properly threaded to fit on the bottom and input cover, which use a hex key. I’ll be replacing those with the correct fasseners from Framework once they arrive, since I’m a bit OCD about things being the way they originally were as much as possible. If anyone has lost their bottom cover fasseners and had to replace them, any advice on some best practices while replacing them would be helpful.
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That tends to be an issue with unlabeled keys, I know someone that went a step further and put the keys in random places (within the right height of course) to confuse people trying to use his keyboard XD.
Well. I got my bezel and replacement fasseners today. Adventures. And more adventures
First, I replaced the bezel by removing the old one carefully, starting at the top left and right corners with the screen opened almost flat, of course. There wasn’t too much adhesive on the bottom portion, and once it was removed, I was able to put on the new one. I tried to start at the top first, figuring that might be easier, but I found that starting at the bottom was simpler. And, to make sure I didn’t have to worry about pealing adhesive, I didn’t remove the little paper strip along the adhesive portion of the bezel. I think I’ll probably just leave it there, since it seems to be working just fine without it removed. I made sure the bottom was flush and realigned it ever so slightly to make sure the wires weren’t interfiering with the bezel in any way. I wouldn’t want to pinch delicate wires when the lid was closed. And finally, I closed the laptop. There was no clicking or resistance that there shouldn’t be, but I did end up closing my long carpet in the lid. Oops.
I did notice some little plastic or paper pieces of film over the webcam and switches, I wish this had been one long strip. It would have been easier to deal with, in my opinion.
Now, replacing the fasteners in the bottom cover. That probably took me at least a half hour. At least. Since I have no visual frame of reference to even try and align the threads with their inserts, I had to do a little bit of trial and error, and not lose the fasteners in the process, of course. Those Torx T5 heads are tiny things, but not the smallest there is for Torx. I carefully aligned each one, probably initially started them ever so slightly crooked each time, but they did go in, and once they reached their straight post for their captive design, I backed them up until they clicked to align themselves with the input cover threads, then screwed them in place. I did not use Framework’s screw driver for this, because its bit is just slightly smaller than a proper Torx T5 bit.
There is only one fastener that isn’t captive any longer. The front left one, since that requires a clip to make it so. And, I don’t have that any longer. The threaded insert in the bottom cover on the front left must be longer than the rest are, I wish this wasn’t the case. I understand why it is this way, so the fastener can lift up that part of the input cover slightly. However, losing the captive clip is a problem in this instance, so I suppose I’ll have to be very careful with that fastener, and perhaps do a little trial and error to see just how far it needs to be removed before the input cover itself is able to be removed, that’ll be a fun project to do some time, I suppose. Unless Framework sells something that can make this captive again, or if anyone else has any ideas, feel free to chime in.
It’s all done now, I have all my original bottom cover fasteners inserted. And I really, really hope I don’t have to deal with that again. I actually prefer the hex key screws I had in one sense, they’re easier to deal with being longer than the originals, if only slightly. They’re a bit too long, though, and do tend to stick out of the bottom cover just a bit. And, since they aren’t the Torx T5 the Framework came with, it bothered my OCD. All is almost okay, though, except for my non-captive front left bottom cover fastener. Poor fastener.
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As I someone who recently started using transparent keyboard, I feel the only issue is the function key placement and sometimes the numbers,since my previous laptop had a slightly different layout for the shortcuts. But I am still concerned how it would look in few years compared to normal one.
That might just be me xD
Not only did I scramble the keys, I’m using Colemak CAW on my PC to add to the confusion.
I immediately got hyped when I saw that there’s a blank keyboard for the FL16 available.
Yup, the fn keys are the only thing that I needed to check a few times. I know the placement of the media and brightness controls now, but I might just change the entire layout with QMK soon anyways.
What do you mean by that?
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I feel the keycaps would get scratched over time and would look quite bad
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Ah okay, as they’re translucent. Yeah I see that, luckily not an issue with the black keycaps on the blank iso keyboard I’m using with my FL 16.
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