Surprised nobody seems to be talking about it yet so either I suck at search or I guess I’ll start:
I have an original, first-batch 13" from back in 2021. It still works well - power could be better, and I put a little ding in the display, but neither rise to the level of buying replacement parts yet. True to the promise, it’s kind of boring, keeps chugging along, and I have no need to replace it yet.
BUT, that AI 300 does look very nice. So what has changed over the years since then? Can I just buy a new mainboard when they’re available and slap it in? Will I have to upgrade the display to the higher-res one from last year? Would it require a new battery?
I guess - is there a guide maintained anywhere about deprecated parts or upgrade configurations that work and don’t?
With the original 11th gen Framework Laptop the pre-built models shipped with the Intel AX201 Wi-Fi card, which is Intel-proprietary and will need to be replaced. If you bought a DIY variant it came with the AX210 (or no card at all, IIRC the DIY model of that generation had an option to bring your own Wi-Fi card) which is a universal card that you can probably reuse. All newer models (except the Chromebook) shipped with universal Wi-Fi cards (regardless of DIY or prebuilt).
If he has the AX201 (ex. If he bought it prebuilt) then the old card won’t work.
Officially AMD recommends using AMD-branded Wi-Fi cards with AMD CPUs (just like Intel recommends using Intel Wi-Fi cards with Intel CPUs). Framework parrots that recommendation.
IIRC Framework had that same text on the Ryzen 7040 series mainboards and plenty of community members are using Intel Wi-Fi cards (mainly the AX210).
The only cards that cause issues are cards that rely on CNVio2 (Intel’s proprietary protocol) such as the AX201 and AX211 (but not the AX210) or Intel’s Wi-Fi 7 cards (which seem to have some firmware incompatibility with modern AMD systems).
So it sounds like I just upgrade the motherboard only (if at all) and chill until I actually have wifi 7 to bother upgrading that.
Honestly, my biggest problem with the framework 13 is that it’s kind of just a boring little workhorse, and I’ll never have any excuse to upgrade to the latest and greatest unless it’s actually justified.
And RAM. The newer CPUs use DDR5 (instead of DDR4).
From what I’ve seen WiFi 7 cards do get a moderate (~10-20%) bump to bandwidth when on Wi-Fi 6/6e networks compared to WiFi 7 cards. So there is still a benefit, but not huge.
As a user of the original 11th-gen Intel into the AMD upgrade, it was significantly worth it. I have very high hopes for this upcoming AMD upgrade over my current AMD 7840U. If I were in your position upgrading from the 11th-gen would be a certain increase. (My work Framework is still 11th-gen Intel and I see a night-and-day difference already.)