I would love an external battery for the expansion bay. I don’t need any ports, I am a network engineer that is on the road all day. I just need to never plug my laptop in while I am walking around troubleshooting wireless. I would even entertain the idea of having multiple external batteries and just swap them out when they lose the juice. Possibly even have an external type c port to charge the batteries when they are not plugged into the laptop? What is y’alls thoughts?
There has been some concern raised regarding duty cycles of the expansion connector in the back of the 16. I wonder if alternatively, we could get a battery bay that sits in there with its own connector. Or potentially have a dual battery bay so you can really be a crazy hot swapper person. Putting a housing within another housing eats up space, yes, BUT…
(I’m reminded of oldy moldy laptops that had dual expansion bays under the keyboard that you could swap for battery packs or disk drives)
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I still have an old Dell laptop with two expansion bays. I may have even had an iomega zip drive for it. Added battery was nice. I wonder if it would still boot, haven’t touched it in years.
This is definitely how it should be done. I believe even Framework made comments to suggest that route. Though I can’t recall where.
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Basically they would need a hotswap adapter that sits on the PCIe expansion connector and then a battery enclosure made to fit it. Not impossible, but would take some engineering time and probably wicked CAD skills. And at the end of it all, you’d probably end up with a pretty small battery, that’s just my natural pessimism kicking in.
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Then perhaps something that extends from the bay to outside the aluminum chassis, then an arbitrary chonk of a battery can be clipped on externally (either “underneath” or out rearwards). Which would mean the expansion bay portion is pretty heavily reinforced to allow for that much weight to hang off the back.
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I think it’s a good idea. Ironically, the people who need it the most may be people who can’t use it because they have a GPU in their expansion bay. 
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HP used to offer secondary batteries for a wide range of notebooks (ProBook, Elitebook) that would fit below the notebook. Part number AJ359AA. This kind of solution would allow for large extra capacity, the connector would reside in the expansion bay but there might be need for additional fasteners. Bulky and heavy, but that’s batteries for you.
Alternatively, take a powerbank with USB-C charging capabilities and connect it when needed.
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I would like to use the power bank with a cable option but I’m walking around with the laptop I don’t like having a cable and power bank solution. I usually already have a Ethernet cable plugged in at different spots. I care less about the weight. I wonder if they would ever allow the battery pack solution to be a little thicker than the actual laptop and allow it have a slight incline toward the user.
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The expansion Bay connector is rated for 50 Cycles so is a PCI Express Port yet you have graphics card review YouTubers using it many many times more than 50 so I would take the concerns with a grain of salt until you have a bunch of users actually using it more than 50 times. Let’s be real though how many users are going to more or less completely disassemble the framework 16 to swap something in and out of the expansion Bay. That is going to get old real quick
Also the hardware is already set in stone and is currently being manufactured so requesting that they make changes at this point is a non-starter.
This has actually been addressed by framework:
There continues to be a lot of incorrect information echoing around the Expansion Bay connector.
We’re developing our own semi-custom connector with the supplier specifically to make it better for end-user handling. The datasheet that people are referencing that states 50 cycles is for an off the shelf connector that Framework Laptop 16 doesn’t ship with.
And they’ve also stated, that they will share cycle life of the actual connector before the laptop ships. (source → Expansion Bay connector durability - #4 by MJ1)
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The can make the internal connector for the battery expansion bay the same, but have a more robust male type C connector with a cavity where you can hot swap external batteries maybe? This request is not rocket science and having a swappable battery idea is probably older than some of the users of this laptop lol
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We could end up having Framework 16s that have very power efficient APUs with substantial 1440p gaming chops by the very end of 2024 or mid-2025 thus freeing up the expansion bay for a 65-70% battery extension (and in 5 years it would be even non-flammably flying friendly with solid-state cells), a coule 2230 SSDs, coprocessor/accelerator cards, SBCs, and anything else that can make use of power delivery and the data transfer bus via PCIe.
Just look up “Strix Halo APU” Wfcctech has an article on it and MLID has a video on it.
RDNA3 12CUs (780M) = RX 470
RDNA 3.5 16CUs = GTX 1660
RDNA 3.5 40CUs = 2080TI ~3X to 3.33X 780M performance.
90W in “performance mode” and 120W “Tubo Mode” should be possible for a 2080TI APU
Even at “Quiet” or “Balanced” Mode at 60-75W it could still scale to 3060-1080TI
The Framework 16 has a 85Wh battery by default so a 55-61Wh capacity upgrade in the expansion bay (140-146Wh) could get us…
• 1.5 hours @ 2080TI scaling - 90W
• 2 hours @ 3060 scaling - 65W
• 3 hours @ 1070 scaling - 45W
• 5 hours @ 1650 scaling - 27W
Wh = energy in wattage over an hour
Framework Laptop 16’s current CPU cooling system can only sustain 45 W according to the release blog post. I am unsure if this can be improved in the future with better die contact, higher static pressure fans, or a better fin stack in the heatsink.
I was hoping to scrape the aviation allowed limit of 100Wh battery with a 90+Wh combined capacity. Battery-life is everything to me. I am so mad in fact that my laptop graphics card has been disabled in BIOS for most its life, just so that I can get those extra 3 hours out of my 95Wh (designed capacity) battery. This laptop is a piece of crap (not ganna name it), but the battery would get me 12h when it was new.
I would be throwing my money at Framework already if there was a large battery that I can combine with power efficient ryzen CPU.
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Same here.
I’m with ya. dGPU is disabled, and I want that long long battery life. If they don’t make one, I might.
Isn’t that per battery/device? So if it’s a removable battery or something that plus in separately, that 2nd battery has it’s own <100Wh limit?
Seems likely, and doesn’t mentioned limit on the number you can carry on. As long as it looks like it’s a production device, especially if it has a UL label on it, should be fine.
From Lithium batteries with 100 watt hours or less in a device | Transportation Security Administration
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I’m tempted to take a flight with 1 kW of li-ion! 
I’d love a battery option in the expansion bay. Nesting the battery as proposed would make the most sense. I miss the days of hotswappable batteries in laptops.
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