After the reviews, I’m personally still very excited to receive the laptop, although it is mostly likely biased from coming from a cheap laptop.
First, it was nice to see that the battery life can get as high as it does in web browsing (mine can only get 4 hours max). The gpu performance, while not the best for the price you pay, is still much of an upgrade from what I’m working with (the igpu is as good as my dgpu).
Combining this with the fact that this is one of the few laptop manufacturers that support Linux out of the box and the repairability/modularity, I’m definitely excited for my laptop!
I am right there with you. Coming from a POS Samsung Flexbook 2a, I don’t care about any of these performance issues as i know that in a month or two, i will never again burn my legs under my laptop again while it struggles to run rdr2 on the lowest settings with irisXE graphics. Man, I cannot wait.
Yeah, I think I’m going to keep my order after some thought and reading nrp’s responses here. I want to commit to a product with a company this transparent. Sure it doesn’t quite fit my lifestyle to have two Frameworks, but I think I am sold on keeping my order. With a 13 and 16, I hope I’ll never buy another laptop.
Now if only someone made an ortholinear keyboard for them… Hey, one can dream, right?
Mostly as expected.
I’m a bit surprised by how many people (here, not the reviewers) seem concerned about the chassis flex. IMO, that’s an unavoidable consequence of a machine that’s not glued together. The only laptops I’ve ever seen that have no flex are the permanently sealed ones… Macs and some of the really thin Windows machines (formerly “ultrabooks”). My 2021 Dell XPS has a little flex, my first-generation Asus Zenbook Pro has more (and is easier to open), and despite that flex, it’s 9 years old and is still a solid machine.
Keyboard feel is highly subjective. I have a FW13 and the keyboard is exceptional… no reason to think the FW16 will be otherwise.
Battery life w/o the GPU was a little disappointing, but will likely be worked out with driver updates once it’s in the field
in addition to your notes about the difficulty obtaining a competent machine with first-class linux support (omitted for brevity), i need to comment on the regularly repeated “you can get similar performance for half the price” claims that i find in reviews, in various forums, etc:
this appears to only be true if you’re happy with 32 gigs of ram or less. as soon as you ask for 64 gigs of ram, suddenly the price of the whole unit balloons. this is especially true if you’re looking for an rdna3 based unit. (i don’t need dgpu performance if the onboard rendering is good enough, and my time with the rdna2 apu on the steam deck has convinced me it should be sufficient for my needs.)
i spent some time pricing through various suppliers, and getting an equivalent spec’d machine to the framework 16 with the ram requirement i have, the unit is costing MORE than framework is asking. and that’s to get a device where the ram is soldered.
personally, i intend to get a 96 gig kit for my fw16 (or 128 if the appropriate chips manifest by the time batch 15 rolls around, but i’m assuming 96). options for laptops with that amount of memory are, shall we say, sparse.
This is exactly why, even if I canceled my batch 6 preorder, would still go with Framework and a FW13.
The cheapest laptop I could find (in France) with 64GB of RAM is 2800€ and with a 1TB SSD.
Most often, the comparable gaming laptops prices skyrocket to more than 5000€.
For that price I can get my config (7940HS, RX7700S, 64GB, 4TB SSD) and a second, lower speced FW16.
I wholeheartedly agree that a bare FW16 is expensive, but having the choice of SSD and RAM can make it comparatively very, very cheap.
Yeah, the more you upgrade from the base model, the more the price to performance ratio evens out. The Dell XPS laptops look to be extremely expensive because the RAM is now soldered on all of the 2024 models and I think you have to get the highest end GPU on the 14 and 16 to get 64 GB of RAM as an option. More flexibility when you can DIY in that regard.
Yeah, this extraordinarily high level transparency that almost never see anymore is enough for me to keep my batch 1 pre-order too, despite some worries I have. I’ll be sure to keep everybody updated if LTT’s problems happen on my unit on Linux. (And granted, that’s my OS of choice.)
I’ve been more disappointed by the approach the reviewers have taken than by what the numbers and data they gathered show. A lot of focus on how you could get something that performs better for the same price, or equally for a lower price, but very little focus on how that is offset by being able to swap parts. Also not a lot of attention on ease of repairability of everything. Having purchased two Clevo 17 inch behemoths before this, getting this good a deal on a laptop that is half the weight and with the possibility of upgrading more than RAM and not having to go through dodgy third party resellers to get replacements for parts which can fail way past the time when the manufacturer decides they’re done with the model is impossible to beat at the moment. Not to mention that generating less e-waste is also important, and I can tell Framework genuinely wants to move towards sustainability.
In some sense I guess this is to be expected, as my particular interest in using this as my work machine stems from specific requirements which most people don’t have (also why I’m fine putting up with the inconveniences of Clevo laptops). Even if my initial model has flaws, I’ll take it as the price of putting my money where my mouth is and giving a chance to a company that is trying to achieve what I want and need and to innovate in a market where we increasingly get less choices as consumers.
I for one am glad you’re focused on “Smashing” all of the hardware issues.
I don’t take much stock in the reviews at this point. Reason being is their taking a test framework (excuse the pun) meant for gaming type benchmarks. To put it simply, Benchmarks are meant to gauge race car speeds, and they’re applying this method to a Transformer. A Transformer may not be the fastest, but it can run, jump, do some shooty, and punch Decepticons too.
A modular systems architecture laptops is hitting the reset button on how to think about a PC ala the way an IBM clone did when it hit the scene. A modular system is also a one size fits all scenario. So, if you want a gaming rig, go purchase a gaming rig. If you want a Laptop PC that can play decent games, run your house network, do Arduino projects, work on some parametric modelling, run some MatLab scripts, and make you toast stick with the framework, and actually work with them to develop a full Modular Architecture.
Just don’t allow Dell to buy you up and reduce the Quality control to garbage.
Yeah, regarding Linux, Michael from Phoronix knows his stuff. Reason my first address to check details on hardware etc. is phoronix.
And usually, he fixes issues himeself if possible!
Got a platinum membership on his site!
I am glad Framework chose an IPS screen, because OLED still is…not durable enough. OLED as an option, for those who crave it, would still be a good idea.
Regarding the reviews I’m pleased to see, that the FL16 runs better in real tasks (like kernel compilation) compared to synthetic, more or less unrealistic benchmarks.
I disagree on your statement that OLED is not a durable display technology and I say this as an OLED user of the past four years, which is how old my current display is. Ancedotally, my display still looks crisp and bright (for OLED) with absolutely no burn in, just some dead pixels due to a manufacturing defect that I caught too late to get covered under warranty. Beyond ancedotes, Rtings has been hammering OLED and LCD displays with their infamous burn-in test and depending on the manufacturer, some OLEDs are holding up better than LCDs!
I think what Rtings shows is that all displays are a consumable, despite what we might think, and that will mean that they will need to be replaced at some point. That point will depend on the manufacturer of the display and how the owner takes care of it. At least with Framework, we can actually replace the display
I’m sorry to rain on your parade, but did you read that test carefully? That conclusion refers to TVs!
For monitors it says:
Below, you can see the progression over time for the three monitors running on this test, starting with the initial photos taken at the start of the test (month 0). After forcing a panel refresh on all three before taking the month six photos, there’s very little image retention on any of the panels.
…They’re literally the same technologies. When LG uses WOLED on their monitors, it is the same WOLED tech in their TVs. When Samsung uses their QD-OLED tech in their monitors, it is the same as their TVs. It’s fair to extrapolate that the monitors will behave similarly to the TVs.
That might be true for some manufacturers, but I doubt the IPS panel for the Framework Laptop 16 is involved in that, and nothing else matters.
Still, there are differences between TV- and Monitor-panels:
Going out on a speculative limb, but those links look like AI-generated garbage. Read that bold “lifespan” text in your first link critically. None of the numbers add up. Second link doesn’t have much of a point or coherency to it, just rambles about display technologies.
Same with those TechRadar links, TBH. I wouldn’t treat any of those as sources of information.
If not AI, then low quality content farm stuff SEO’d to death, same thing.
While the reviews aren’t as glowing as I’d like, they still haven’t deterred me from my enthusiasm for the Framework 16 due to the one thing that no other laptop offers: ease of repair.
Maybe it’s just bad luck, but I’ve had to have all four laptops I’ve previously used (Fujitsu, Sager/Clevo, Asus, MSI) repaired. Which put me out of commission for a couple of weeks as I’d wait for them to be fixed and shipped back.
Fujitsu - GPU overheated and needed to be replaced (thanks, ATi!)
Sager - GPU issues, power issues (honestly, getting a laptop with dual GPUs was just a bad decision). Hinge broke later (but never got it repaired)
Asus - Screen assembly causing pressure points to a couple of spots on the screen (possibly due to customization errors with the seller)
MSI - Hinge broke, fans stopped working.
I don’t trust myself to have fixed any of these myself, given how most laptops are manufactured. But I am somewhat of a tinkerer, and Framework is offering something perfect for me: a laptop meant to be fixed and upgraded by the end user.
Hopefully, any issues that do arise with the 16 can either be fixed by Framework or by the community!
