The Framework 13 after months of use
Buying a new machine just so I can write an article
Summary
The Framework 13 laptop offers a customizable design, allowing users to easily swap and upgrade components. After months of use, it suits my needs enough that I want to keep it for years to come.
The assembly process is smooth and well-documented, and the everyday performance is strong, handling general tasks efficiently. The build quality is nice, the inputs are ok, and the screen is lovely.
However, its lack of a dedicated GPU limits it for anything with rendering and the battery life is abysmal. This past point could be a deal breaker for many.
It excels as a reliable tool that I forget about, and I plan to use its modular capabilities to keep it alive and relevant as long as I can. If all goes well, I should still use it in 10 years.
The specs
The Framework is a very cool concept of a laptop: it's made so that you can swap any relevant parts like Lego. In theory, it should let you easily build the machine to your specs, and upgrade it as you go.
In practice, it does exactly that.
I ordered it last May after an idiotic failed attempt at fixing my previous computer, picking the following config:
13-inch format, 13th generation of the model.
Intel Core i7-1360P (5.0GHz, 4+8 cores)
32G DDR4
2TB NVMe SSD
5 expansion cards: 2 USB-C, 1 USB-A, 1 HDMI, 1 Ethernet Expansion Card
No OS pre-installed.
No charger (I had one).
That's about $2000 and it arrived in a few days.
Unboxing
The setup experience is best in class. You get to assemble all the components (hey, you signed up for that!), and you can see they cared. The box itself is well organized, everything has a pictogram and a label, clear instructions every time you need it, and it comes with a screwdriver.
Assembling the component is a no-brainer, Ikea could take notes:
Many screws stay attached near their hole once loose, so you can’t misplace them.
The insides have visual cues, names, and even QR codes so you know what is what.
Cuts, magnets, and shapes make all the stuff snap right into place with little doubt about the right spot and orientation.
You get a video that takes you by the hand through the process anyway.
20 minutes after opening the box, I was ready to install a dual boot Windows/Ubuntu which was the smoothest I did in a while. Not that dual booting those two is easy (it's actually getting harder with encryption, secure boot, etc), but hardware support is near perfect and the BIOS/EFI they used is there to help you, not get in your way.
Plus, I get to save money on the Windows licence and start with a crapware-free install. Win-Win.
I plugged it to an USB-C Acer dock so that it connects to my screen, webcam, microphone, charger and ethernet with one cable and it handled it as it should. Wifi and bluetooth (for the mouse and headphones) were also no problem. Sad we have to check those in 2024 but that’s what it is.
But that's the honeymoon starting, what is it worth once you daily drive it for a while?
Perfs
There is no surprise with this, because it's true for pretty much all modern laptops, but the everyday usage is smooth. Of course it is, today's machines are overpowered for surfing the web, coding, and watching videos. Even with a virtual machine running, a few electron apps, my web browser and jupyter notebook performing some data analysis, I can't fill 32Gb of RAM without seriously messing up, and I don't have 2TB of data to fill the disk.
While writing this article, I have none of the 15 cores of the CPU sweating. Which again, is to be expected. I only start getting them a little excited when I work on projects with a lot of services to run locally, but they are not going to be exhausted any time soon.
Again, it will not shock anyone the absence of a dedicated GPU makes it unsuitable for serious video editing, 3D rending and heavy gaming. I did manage to cut the last interview without trouble, and I can play League of Legends fluidly on minimal settings, but that's a low bar. AI model inference is super slow, even something light like whispercpp takes 20 seconds to parse a few sentences, and I don’t hope to train anything on it.
The build
Another excellent point, the hinge is well balanced, the design while simple, doesn't hurt the eyes, and the robustness is top-notch. I managed to have the machine fall from my height on concrete, it now has a bump (didn't break, it bent a corner), but it's still happily running like nothing happened.
The whole thing feels right and solid in the hand, and I appreciate the fact I don't have to manipulate it like a crystal glass because I move it a lot, I throw it sometimes, and it definitely gets mistreated in my bags.
The keyboard is pleasant for a laptop. Nice key size and spacing, decent tactile feedback. I miss an Fn key light status and I don't like the up/down arrow being merged, but it's definitely better than average. I'm not a mechanical keyboard addict, so take it with a grain of salt.
The touchpad is a good surprise as well, large, with just enough sensibility to be practical, and the driver does a good job a ignoring my palm when I type. It's not OSX level, but you get the point.
The screen bezel embeds physical switches for both the camera and the microphone, with an obvious ON/OFF state without being intrusive. I absolutely love that. I rarely use the webcam and mic because I have external ones, and it's great to be able to disable them so that I don't have to toggle that in every software. And a boon for privacy.
I don't use the fingerprint reader, so can't say much about it.
Power
Battery life sucks. I'm happy when I get 2 hours, which is ridiculous in 2024. If being a nomad is important to you, forget about it. And yes, it's both on Windows and Linux, even with average luminosity and not doing crazy things with it.
It's really bad.
I've lived with terrible battery life all my career because I use Ubuntu, which even on laptops with good autonomy makes sure you won't get much juice if you are not plugged into a wall. So I accept this trade-off.
But if you are a Mac user, you are going to think it's the middle age.
On the bright side, it's not getting uncomfortably hot. However, I can hear the fans more than I want.
Sound, video and connectivity
Sound and video inputs are meh. Passable for a quick call on the go, but I would not want to work with a colleague who can only talk to me through that. The sound output is ok, quality is average, but the volume is higher than I expected for such small speakers, so you can hear clearly dialogues in movies and listen to music without having to strain your ears. It’s not a media machine by any means, but it’s sufficient when you are not home.
The 13.5-inch screen is great. It's mate and has a weird 3:2 aspect ratio that I wasn't sure I would enjoy. I stand corrected, it proved to be a very pragmatic form factor for a developper that spends most of his time dealing with walls of text in multiple contexts. I now grunt when I have to work with any other laptop format.
Connectivity has been a breeze on Linux, even, astonishingly, Bluetooth. Ethernet, Wifi, VPN, all going on and off in a dance, with no issues after waking up from sleep mode.
Windows is another story. The Framework 13th gen offers drivers that officially support Windows 11 only, which I didn't want to install. I chose Windows 10 instead, and it worked for everything, except the ethernet. I get random disconnections and don't know why. Wifi works and the ping is sufficient for a MOBA game once in a while. Since I spend most of my time on the other side of the partition, I’m ok with this. However, if you are going to be working mostly on Microsoft land, know that you will likely have to settle for Windows 11.
The subjective side
It's not a wedding of love, it's a successful business partnership.
I don't adore my laptop, I don't look at it and appreciate its design or marvel at how incredible it is.
Mostly, the machine is transparent to me, I forget about it.
And it's exactly what I want from it: something that works and get out of the way.
In fact, I've been hammering at it for months and didn't had a thought about it until I had to write this article. It worked, didn’t slow down, didn’t crash, performed the task I asked and that’s it. It's like a pen, it lets me focus on the task, not on the tool I use to perform it. Note that it’s true for me because I’m almost always plugged to the wall. If you had to live on the battery, you would have a different experience.
If you need something that will awe you, that's not the device you are looking for. It's an alternative to a Thinkpad or a XPS. It's a good quality workhorse, made to keep you pumping those git commits.
I can see myself staying with it for years.
The last laptop I'll ever buy?
The concept is that you don't have to buy another laptop. You can upgrade it as long as you need to.
So far, Framework has a good track record at it, since it's the 13th generation, and you can keep buying parts to swap your old ones. I could buy their new screen and swap my current one in 15 minutes.
I will likely eventually change the case to remove the bump and all the other crimes I will certainly end up inflicting on its shell.
And when the battery dies (or the fans like in my previous machine), I won't have to chase parts on eBay and hold my breath to perform the surgery while praying to all the old and new Gods I won't break something.
The expansion cards system, a nifty idea that makes all ports swappable, works flawlessly. It's impossible to disengage slots by mistake, they feel like part of the laptop, even performance wise. But you can slide them in and out in an instant.
I thought I would use it more though, but my old hubs already fill my connectivity needs. However, it allowed me to choose precisely what whole I wanted, and where to put it. Ok, that sounded ... weird, but you understand, right?
Having 2 USB-C on each side so I can charge either way? Checked. Having one USB-A for compat? Checked. Having one HDMI to plug to any screen on the go, yep. And yes, there is a jack in there. Plus, in the future, I can change my mind about each of them. One day, maybe I won't want any USB-A. Or maybe there will be an USB-D, who knows.
But I'm tired of having to buy a whole new laptop just because one part fails. And I don't even know if the new purchase will be good enough. This one is. If I can keep it alive and relevant so it can support me for years and years to come, I'm sold.