Now that 12th gen supports the 61wh battery

Framework Laptop 13
1

Is it worth it? The battery life and the display are my 2 biggest pain points with this laptop, hoping this can possibly alleviate one of them.

2

Only you can decide if it’s worth it. 61Wh is ~11% more than 55Wh. Calculate how much extra runtime 11% equals with how you use your laptop.

You could also check the current capacity of your battery, all li-ions experience wear that reduces their capacity over time. With more wear if you’re hard on your battery. Be sure to do battery-calibration first.

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A better solution would be to purchase an external battery bank. Not only is it cheaper, you can use it for other devices and won’t have an extra battery laying around after upgrading.

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This is what I did and it’s great so far. If you do though get an 100 watt one!

5

Yeah, I figured this would be the answer.

in retrospect this really wasn’t the best choice of laptop, it isn’t a bad laptop, the battery life just has it feeling more like a NUC with a screen.

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If it’s any consolation, at least if you decide to upgrade in the future, battery life gets a whole lot better. Switching from 12th gen to the AMD boards has doubled my battery life.

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Yeah, I started with 11th, the 12th gen upgrade was an impulse, wish I had waited for AMD, though I’d honestly like to get those ARM battery life hours, without macOS

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The Macbook M series do not get days of battery life simply because it’s based on ARM. They have such great battery life because they put a battery with nearly double the capacity, and on top of that, have very aggressive hardware and software tweaks in an effort to make everything as efficient as possible.

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I’m not looking for days, I’d like 12 hours without needing to plug in multiple times.

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If you really want 12hrs of battery life then like one of the comments above you should upgarde to an AMD board ,I am easily getting 8-10 hrs of battery life for basic tasks like browsing without any tweaks on the 55whr battery. Although playing Dirt 3 seems to drop it down to less than 1.5hrs,I was expecting more like 3 hrs

11

Unless I can get the board for the same price as the battery, it isn’t in my cards currently.

Is that 8-10 with the screen always on?

12

Yes the 8-10 hrs is with the screen on

13

Wow sounds like AMD is amazing there. Maybe I will upgrade once I get my Framework back from my relative using it for school. A pity that Meteor Lake is a flop, hopefully Arrow Lake isn’t by then.

14

Full backlight or is it dimmed down?

15

At 20-30% brightness most of the time

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Wild, I’m too blind to see anything with it that low.

17

i just put the 61whr in a few weeks ago, and have an AMD 7840U mainboard. my battery is charge capped at 80%. i generally have the following open:

  • a single alacritty window, running tmux, weechat, and 3 instances of neovim (which each have a terminal buffer and various files open)
  • 3 qutebrowser instances, varying tab counts from ~5 to ~40 each. after hours and on non-work days, this is reduced to 1.

if i’m not on video calls or playing youtube videos, i tend to get ~6 hours from an 80% charge. on the intel boards, this was ~3-4. on the weekends, it’s maybe a little longer, but i don’t think i’ve ever gotten 10.

my brightness varies between ~50% (during the day with window blinds/curtains open) to ~20% in the evening (or in shaded interior rooms) when the surrounding light is reduced (i dim my lights a bit to reduce eye strain).

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18

I bought the 61Wh battery and I got a mail saying I need to update my BIOS, but that the BIOS is not available yet? Does anyone know if I can just swap out the 55Wh battery for the 61Wh one and make good use of the extra capacity?

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You need to be on the 3.08 beta bios.