Viability of an ML 1220 rechargable battery for RTC | CMOS (11th gen)

Think maybe this is a new ‘directive’? Maybe reach out to support again, and have them referred to nrp’s post?

Get them to read the bolded text.

If that is really an issue then yes you are correct but isn’t that inevitable.

I really don’t care about the waste only about people being upset because they feel ignored or abused.

It’s not about money or material resources. Does anyone have the strength to realy care, not for me or for you but for their own integrity, because I don’t want to associate myself with people who don’t care.

If the business is truely about caring then it may stutter, if it’s about money it’s already dead.

OK I hope you appreciate the full irony of this - like scripted level of drama here:

Support emailed me linking to nrp’s post in my ticket. Nrp’s post says to contact support…

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This is why it hits so hard. I was caught up in the Just Cause of framework. I’m on vacation with my family right now - I brought my framework and of course dealt with all of these issues (again) so pretty much my whole vacation has been consumed with researching and reading forums and trying to contact support to find out why I have to deal with this every time I go to use it. This is supposed to be a time of relaxation and yet…

I was inspired and caught up in what framework was supposed to be… There are so few companies these days that you can truly get behind and vote with your wallet. But instead, yes I am feeling a little ignored and a little abused a lot let down.

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I felt all these a couple of weeks ago.

Out of that phase now. I’ve accepted the 11th gen was a public prototype… It’s not a release-grade product IMO. (Everything is alpha/beta)

The money is with Framework now… I’ve since focused my mind on getting/waiting for the next laptop.

Ugh, but that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid! I ordered on July 30, 2021. Received the laptop finally in October and only used it a handful of times - each time dealing with these issues and spending time reading and researching, doing resets and bios updates, hoping it was fixed. Now finally find out its a design flaw they won’t own up to, where the only fix is a new laptop (or a new main board they won’t swap or sell me).

At this point it’s a year of “hopium” and frustration and it seems like framework wants me to just get rid of the laptop so they don’t have to deal with this issue. Most expensive beta test of all time - both in money but also frustration and emotional investment destroyed.

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I get it. I absolutely get it. Trust me…I’ve been there mentally, emotionally, financially…

I do wish they have an old-board trade-in program. At the moment, all 11th gen customers are just suckers and guinea pigs (myself included)…willing ones too, unfortunately. It’s definitely a lesson learnt…don’t buy gen 1 products…ever. Now, I’m just going to wait it out, and see how the 12th gen boards play out. Going back to ThinkPads, or Precisions, or zBooks in the meantime…people who really CAN build laptops.

You’ll be better off just cut your loses…and save your sanity and mental health. At least, that’s what I’ve decided on. Hope you’ll find peace.

By the way, since it’s an Intel silicon bug, it must also affect other brands as well. Has anyone found any mention of this anywhere else? Specifically, how are other brands handling this?

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Well, that probably went as well as could be expected.
They openly admitted that there was a problem, gave (sparse) technical details about the cause, and offered to work to resolve the problem for people who were having serious problems.

Some of us said “Great! Was that so hard?!” and a few of the more passionate of us are still deeply dissatisfied.

I’m sure that’s part of why they were hesitant to communicate about this in the first place – but I’ll heartily put myself in the “Thanks!” group and hope that this motivates them to keep the open communication coming.

Sure, I wish they had a quadrillion clams in their back pocket to add “free Gen 12 for all that want it!” to the message … but I knew exactly what I was getting into with a startup disruptive company and I’m certainly not wanting or expecting them to do that. I just want them to do whatever they can to fix the problem, and if they can’t find a solution then just acknowledge the crappy situation, apoligize and do whatever they can to make sure it isn’t repeated.

If you guys ever need a beta tester to give a free laptop to, you know where to go!

Overall I’m satisfied.

But luckily I don’t have a consistent problem with mine, so that’s easy to say!

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I use my laptop only occasionally and this is a painful/tedious/annoying issue for me, where my laptop will sit unused in its bag for months at a time. I use the also painful/tedious/annoying practice of having to reboot into BIOS and enable the battery disconnect feature every time I shut the system down, otherwise a month later when I pull the system out of its bag, the mains battery will be hugely discharged (causing more recharge/discharge cycles and shortening the life of the battery). And to add even more joy to the process, I now have to dig out my AC adapter every time and plug it in, or it won’t boot when you last shut it down with Battery Disconnect enabled.

At this point, I would gladly return my laptop for a refund if I wasn’t so far out side the return period. This issue really sucks and Framework will get nothing but bad press and bad word of mouth from me.

I can not in good conscience use or recommend a product with these kind of painful usage issues, especially considering the number and variety of other laptops I’ve used in 30+ years of software development that did not suffer from any of these problems.

I love what Framework is trying to do for the industry, but at the end of the day, I need a laptop that doesn’t ask me to stand on one foot every other tuesday and sacrifice a chicken just to get it to boot.

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It’s understandable for people to be upset and Framework has consistently dodged all the threads on their boards around the issue until now. Now that 12th gen has rolled out they can safely acknowledge the issue because it wouldn’t hurt future sales. I don’t buy laptops often so spending the same price or more than established manufacturers only to be told later my parts have a defect is frustrating.

I am confused by nrp’s response and agree with @d_p, because it’s not a rare occurrence like they keep stating; ask anyone who doesn’t charge every single week. It was never explained in the site guides why this was needed because in doing so would put them in a spot where they might take a financial hit (loss of sales, warranty, outright returns).

I also fail to understand how it helps us to swap a defective board for another defective board. This seems to be just a hollow gesture to hopefully get everyone to stop talking about the issue.

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I understand that this issue is incredibly frustrating for those who are experiencing it. We likely never will know the details of the content and timing of responses. I don’t find speculation as to motive to be helpful for previously mentioned reasons. This is not intended to brush aside the frustration of those who are having the problem. I understand and agree that it would be maddening.

Moving on, I am fortunate to have two framework laptops - my daily driver, and a family machine. I pulled out the family machine yesterday, booted it up without connecting to power, and found that the last shutdown date was 5/20. I believe that that is correct, but I’ll leave it until the end of the month to see if it fires back up. So I am lucky that I am not experiencing this issue. My daily driver is batch one, the family machine batch six. I am happy to test things out on the secondary machine to see if there is a trigger for the issue. Not that I want to experience it, but that I’d like to help. When I am done using it I shut it down fully. I believe that lines up with what I’ve seen from others who have the problem. That machine has 2x usb-c and 2x usb-a. I’ll see where the charge is on the main battery when I fire it up in a couple of weeks.

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Factually true. But if the defect is coming from Intel, then I’m not exactly sure what Framework can do… Unless “Intel silicon bug” only occurs on some batches of Tiger Lake, and we’re expected to somehow go through silicon lottery to get a processor without the bug? i.e. If it’s not a fault of Framework, then I don’t think they should take the hit (financially) / heat.

So, I’ve been trying to find if this “silicon bug” issue is mentioned elsewhere, but I’m not able to find anything. It should be happening with other brands’ laptops too, right? I wonder how they’re dealing with it.

Making a broad assumption, I’d assume it would be less of an issue for other brands if they have lower power consumption RTC battery circuits, and the typical larger RTC batteries that would last much longer than the ones present in Framework laptops. They might last long enough though that it would become a problem in 4 years instead of 10 for laptops that don’t have this silicon defect.

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I guess my questioning technique didn’t come through as apparent.

Framework is now pointing the finger to Intel. Other brands don’t seem to be having this issue. …see where I’m going?

(trust me, I’m sceptical as fxxx as to who’s actually responsible…but we now know it’s a hardware issue…and one that Framework has been trying to shy from publicly commenting on for months.)

Imagine if a well known Youtuber bring Intel into this…it could trigger a wider discussion.

I’m just cutting my loses with the 11th gen board at the moment…can’t really be bothered to battle it out. Just going to wait and see what the next gen will be like.

Also, I’m slightly bias here in the sense that I want / we need Framework to survive …and become mainstream approach to consumer electronics design. I much rather seeing improvements in the next gen, than to get bogged down in the past.

i.e. The benefit of the doubt has been given…for 1 generation (approx $1500 CAD).

I need Framework to continue on fulfilling their mission statement now that they’ve admitted to hardware issue.

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If I’m paying a significant amount of money for a laptop that is being marketed as premium I expect bugs like these to have been ironed out as it affects usability. Other manufacturers received the same chips but don’t have the same issues. I don’t understand why Framework could not have designed around the problem before releasing the product. Surely they must have known there were issues. Disappointing to say the least.

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Yes. Totally agree. And your expectation was also mine as well, but I came to the conclusion that, for me, 11th gen mainboard is a trial run for Framework… Which led them to Series A…and now 12th gen board.

The public will not truly know if this was a known issue or not…unless a class-action is filed. For now, Framework is saying it wasn’t a known issue.

Consider the price paid is kind of like a kickstarter thing…1st gen being 90% baked here…which is better/more than a lot of other kickstarter projects.

This issue is a deal breaker for some, not so much for others. So the ‘impact’ is user-dependent / usage-pattern dependent…luckily(?).

I’m hoping that if we look back at this, say, 3 years from now, that we made the right choice to support Framework. It would be a real tragedy for such a drastic industry change potential to fall apart on such a small issue (in the grand scheme of things).

On the bright side…if you charge / dock it regularly, they it’s a mostly decent unit. (Not a trusted mobile unit though unfortunately)

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The first issue here is Framework has a high draw idle state AND chose a tiny RTC battery. This has nothing to do with Intel.

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Unfortunately it appears Framework has not admitted any fault. They have pointed to an Intel bug that makes their design decision worse (unrecoverable when RTC drains). My understanding is other 11 Gen laptops are not effected because they are using traditional high capacity, long life clock batteries and don’t have high drain.

For 12th Gen, it looks like Framework chose the same design. There likely won’t be an Intel issue but you’ll likely still have to deal with clock dying faster than most laptops when stored and having to connect AC and manually reset clock. Nrp has stated they have lowered the drain so it should last longer but still much shorter than all other brands.

Unfortunately 12 gen boards are not available via the website or support so even though nrp has solicited for those with issues to open support tickets, support is unhelpful so no one suffering from this issue has a path out of, even if they pay their way out to test a 12 gen board and report findings back (I’ve offered both to pay and to eval the new board to report if my issue is resolved) but support has stopped responding to my ticket.

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My cynical side would suggest renaming the title of this thread to include [Unsolvable] at the beginning similar to how one would add [Solved] to the beginning if an answer is found, but my practical side explains that this would be petty.

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