Framework guns for cheap laptops with upgradeable alternative Framework, maker of modular and repairable laptops, is aiming at a wider audience with an upcoming 12-inch touchscreen convertible that will target the entry-level market. Framework range The new Framework convertible The California-based biz detailed its plans at its Framework (2nd Gen) Event in San Francisco this week, …
Compare that to something like an HP stream from Argos at £249 (they do other cheaper stuff).
Most people do simple things and do not need hefty machines. I want a cheap laptop when away from home, where I have a more powerful desktop.
Intel Celeron N4120 processor.
Quad core processor.
1.1GHz processor speed with a burst speed of 4GHz.
4GB RAM DDR4.
128GB SSD storage.
Operating System: Windows 11 Home in S mode (Pre-Installed).
Resolution 1366 x 768 pixels.
That's Chromebook spec with Windows 11 shoehorned into it. Framework laptops are better than e-waste so it's to be expected that they're more expensive than a HP Stream.
No, you said that the Framework was "not cheap" by comparing it to a low cost bid winner that has a fraction of the useability.
If you actually meant to say "this is too much laptop for most people", you should have said that to start rather than as a covert retraction. And you would then be obviously wrong.
I'm browsing from a 11 year old Asus 11" i3 laptop which is comparable to that HP. It would have gone in the bin long ago if I hadn't wiped Windows and put Linux Mint on it. It's main drawback is a fixed 4GB of memory, I have lots of tabs open in FF so it's using 3GB of RAM and has another 3GB in the SSD swap, so 8GB would be much better, but it does for browsing in front of the TV and ssh'ing in to my Pi's.
you can certainly do as well or better with a 2nd hand/refurbished computer/laptop. haven't bought a new computer in years. actually have only bought a new computer once 24 years ago. there are some dealers who sell used/refurbished computers that are in pretty good shape that are good performers. you do have to know what your are buying though. look the machine up on the vendors site, and don't go to amazon. know someone who bought a macbook that was definitely hot. in other cases have seen specs that didn't apply to the computer listed.
The difference is that whilst this is more expensive to start... it is a) an order of magnitude better now and b) completely maintainable, so won't be eWaste in a year's time (assuming it even lasts that long)
IF (#vimesboots) you can afford the up front cost then it's likely cheaper than the eWaste options.
But I am also somewhat disappointed that they didn't manage to hit a lower price point with this design. There was alot of cost cutting, and then they went and made it convertible, and touch screen...
Add those as options to the full fat FW laptops and keep this one really simple.
No need to be a maximum of three microns thick, no need to come with a huge battery (though space for a second would be nice), no need to be fancy with touchscreen or convertible hinge.
The prices we have are for the 13-inch laptops with significantly faster processors. The prices for the lower-power convertible will be lower, although they haven't said how much lower and I'm expecting it won't be as lower as we might want. I don't expect the convertible hinge and touchscreen to be cheap additions at their scale, though.
I'm also waiting to see how repairable the 12-inch model is. Since it's Framework, I'm expecting it will be significantly more than any other manufacturer, but I have their laptops as a point of comparison so I'm expecting to find fewer replaceable parts in the new model than exist in their laptops. Still hoping that Framework will prove me wrong.
There are already teardowns and repairability reviews... looks bloomin' good.
Captive screws everywhere to make life even easier - and they've moved from a ribbon cable to connect the keyboard to pogo pins with a little magnet to ensure good connection (it also holds the sodimm cover out of the way whilst you upgrade/replace that).
I do hope the price is lower - the 899 mentioned isn't of course to do with the F12... so we can hope that they hit maybe $5-600?
Could you link some? I have failed to find anything detailed. I have found a lot of articles that describe it, including confirming that it's using the same expansion modules that the other machines do, but they are much less clear about everything else. I assume RAM and storage are replaceable because it would be crazy if they weren't, the desktop notwithstanding, but none of the articles even mention this.
It seems unlikely to the extreme, but I would have hoped that they could build this around the same mainboards that are used in the 13-inch laptop. I expect that this will use a mainboard with a CPU with a lower TDP because the battery is smaller, but that would have been an advantage for the laptop users who could opt for something cheaper and lower power, and convertible users could update to other boards that could operate with the smaller battery. For example, you could probably run the RISC-V board on the smaller battery if you wanted to. My primary reason for wanting this is that, if they have one standard mainboard, it is easier for them to keep making new ones and for users of older devices to replace them. It also makes it more likely that someone else might make a compatible mainboard. Now that they have four different models, none of which have board compatibility with any others, what happens if they decide to stop making one? I understand why the 16-inch laptop benefited from a larger board, but I'm not sure whether there will be as many benefits to the convertible.
They do, but "case" in this sentence means only the plastic shell so you're not using the bear board. It doesn't let you do anything else with the board, for example attaching a fan so you can run hot more of the time or having any of the other things you tend to find in a desktop. Not that they need one. I wouldn't really expect their desktop to use the same mainboards as their laptop; while it would be nice if they could manage it, those are designed quite differently. A 12-inch laptop and 13-inch one, especially when the 12-inch model exists to have a touchscreen and 360-degree hinge could use the same boards. As I said, I'm pretty certain that they don't or they would have said so, but this would be a disappointment to me because the potential is too obvious and few downsides would exist.
One of the things that made me choose Framework when I bought a laptop was that they intended to keep the same form factor, and they have proven that by continuing to release mainboards. I am less confident that they will have a similar amount of demand for the other model, which means they may have to choose which one will continue to get upgrades and which one gets dropped. If they used the same mainboards, they'd just have to keep making the chassis for the smaller model, making it easier to have multiple niche devices, and they would be able to use economies of scale for the mainboards which could be used in several types of devices. If I'm right, I have a feeling I'll be lucky and the 13-inch laptop I have will be the one that lasts.
LTT (note that Linus is a FW investor) did a tear down, and I'm pretty sure I've seen another as well, I just can't recall where.
There was only a single sodimm slot, I don't recall storage, but I rather strongly suspect they've just got a single nvme slot in there.
The addition of a new mainboard size is a minor concern, but I suspect there is a market for 12" as well as 13", even if they ending up running with another chassis that's more conventional (even if still plastic with a metal skeleton).
To be fair, you can buy that from HP directly at the moment for £169. Or max it out with a Pentium Silver N5030 for £20 more...apparently both that and the Celeron have comparable performance to a 5th gen Intel i5 ULV processor which still offers usable performance on something like Linux Mint. Windows 11 though? Not a chance.
I love the framework concept.
That said, I don't see the point on adding another form factor to the mix, specially when you already have the 13" model.
I would much rather have the option of using the same motherboard on 13" and 16" models, so I could switch form factors as I see fit.
talk to me about life time costs
I bought a MSI 14" laptop with an i7 w/ rtx1660TI during COVID for $999. Still running fine and I should get a few more years out of it. 10 years is a pretty long time for anything on a computer other than the chassis.
In 4.5 years the only limitations I have had is I bought a second laptop, same configuration but with a rtx3060 and 64g RAM so I could use it for UE5. UE5 isn't a common workload for the average laptop buyer. BTW, when I got it 1.5 years ago it was the same price as the previous one, or maybe $50 higher. But if it would have been possible to upgrade just the video I might have gone that route. Or might not have, just to keep one laptop for daily use/gaming and the other for UE5 and coding.
The key factor of whether Framework is cost effective over the long term is how durable the chassis is. Will it stand up and you can keep upgrading modules (including keyboard and display), or will you end up starting fresh anyway to get a new chassis?
For me the more interesting product is the mini desktop with the NPU for running local AI workloads. I can use my rtx3060, but I don't want to do it on a laptop due to heat.
Out of curiosity, why would you prefer that? There are several problems with the model that make it less interesting to me. Compared to the Framework, the Pi 5 is a lot slower. Four A76s is not very much in comparison to modern CPUs, and it maxes out at 8 GB of RAM (there are 16 GB full Pi boards, but not compute modules that this laptop uses). There are some tasks I want to run on a laptop that use more.
Perhaps my biggest problem is power management. The Raspberry Pi uses a lot of power to deliver the performance it does, and it doesn't have lower power modes, or at least not support for them in software. This means that, whenever I connect one to a battery, it takes a very big battery and I have to perform a full shutdown any time I want to leave it for a while and come back with some charge still in the battery. That makes a laptop based on it much less interesting.
Isn't that supposed to be their entire reason for existence?
I saw this announced elsewhere and the copium in the comments was hilarious. "Well that Ryzen CPU depends on LPDDR5X to achieve its performance levels so they had no choice". I'd be willing to bet $1000 the same people who posted crap like that don't cut the slightest bit of slack on Apple for using soldered LPDDR in Macs.
It is still just a me too mini-ITX PC that isn't the slightest bit more repairable than any other SFF PCs for sale and less repairable than most. Why would Framework damage their brand that way? Where's the market for buying a mini-ITX PC from them versus one of the many alternatives? (some of which are significantly cheaper)
A Mac Mini with M4 Pro is going to handily beat that, and cost less too. Quite a trick for them to be underpriced by Apple lol
I agree with you that it's not very impressive, but don't go overboard in your quest to prove it. They didn't have an option to use replaceable RAM with the CPU they used, but that might have been an indication that they should consider using a different CPU. Unlike their laptops, there is not any repairability benefit to their desktop.
But you've decided to go compare it to a Mac Mini, so let's do that.
"A Mac Mini with M4 Pro is going to handily beat that, and cost less too. Quite a trick for them to be underpriced by Apple lol"
The Mac Mini with M4 Pro starts at $1,399 (I'm using dollars to avoid including tax in the comparison). The Framework Desktop starts at $1,099. That cheapest Framework has 32 GB of RAM. The cheapest Mac Mini has 24 GB. Not looking great for your comparison. If we want identical amounts of RAM, we can do that. For $1,599, you can get a Framework Desktop with 64 GB of RAM. To get 64 GB in a Mac Mini, the price jumps to $1,999. Not cheaper after all. But, of course, there's more to a computer than RAM. Let's compare CPUs. The 12-core M4 Pro receives Passmark benchmarks of 4623/33153. The CPUs used in the Framework haven't been benchmarked yet, but the one in the comparison is a 16-core CPU with a 55 W TDP. AMD does have one of those that has benchmarks: last year's AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX (4062/54826). The Mac's storage is significantly more expensive and proprietary, so to have more than the default 512 GB, you'll be adding a lot more to that price (a 2 TB SSD does not cost $600 elsewhere).
Your price comparison is wrong on all levels.
Your suggested alternative? Sadly, I have neither an M4 Pro nor a Ryzen AI Max 395+* to run software on, so I needed a benchmark that includes enough candidates and samples to provide me with any numbers. Passmark has both. Most other benchmarks I'm aware of either don't have as many samples, don't work on as many operating systems, are operating system-specific meaning a Windows or Linux Ryzen measurement can't be compared to Mac OS M4 measurements, or simply don't have good numbers, apart from a single user-provided number, available to me. When citing your suggestion, I'd also appreciate any reasons you have for thinking the benchmark is more accurate.
* After typing the AMD processor name a few times now, it strikes me how much I don't like their new naming conventions. They seem to have taken a hybrid approach between Intel's and Apple's naming, and I don't think it helps.
"Well that Ryzen CPU depends on LPDDR5X to achieve its performance levels so they had no choice".
I've seen that in several stories. It sounds more like AMD said this is how we're going to implement and you can do it that way or pound sand. I don't like being limited by the amount of RAM I choose on the initial purchase, particularly when manufacturers tend to use the lower amounts in their configurations to keep prices down. I think it will raise the price of machines built with 128g because they'll end up in the premium lines with expensive features many won't want.
It is still just a me too mini-ITX PC that isn't the slightest bit more repairable than any other SFF PCs for sale and less repairable than most.
From my brief shopping, it's the only desktop on the market that is using this AMD AI processor. All the other systems are laptops. The processor is interesting because it has a NPU and might provide a cheaper entry point for locally hosting AI. I don't know if you've looked at NVidia GPUs lately, but the prices have been obscene ever since the bitcoin miners found them. Now they're the path to AI too.
I'm sure someone else has thought of this, but isn't the answer to the non-upgradeable RAM problem to hark back to the Amiga of old?
You buy the system with a fixed amount of directly-connected RAM which works at full speed, but maybe you could be allowed to add more memory in the conventional manner later, even if it's a bit slower. It's still going to be faster than paging to storage and if this were to become a "thing" then OS support for perhaps moving foreground tasks to "fast ram" and shuffling background tasks (or those with low memory access requirements) to "chip ram" could offer the best of both worlds; very fast memory for ultimate speed but less pressure to max it out at purchase time and affordable upgradability using standard memory modules for long life. OS schedulers already do very clever things with processors which have multithreading and/or big.LITTLE type architectures so surely it's not that big of an ask.
I'm not sure how the memory bus works in these chips, and it might not be workable if doing the above means providing two entirely separate memory buses on the processor package, but it's a thought, eh?
M.
The only model they've done it with is the 13-inch laptop, but you have a few years of mainboard upgrades you can use as evidence. They're not cheap, but they are substantially cheaper than a full laptop. If you want a newer processor, upgrading them is quite easy and you still save a lot over the full laptop. For example, to put a Ryzen AI 5 340 in an existing laptop costs £/$449/€529 whereas a new laptop with it in it starts at $/£1099/€1309. Note that US prices do not include taxes whereas UK and EU prices have VAT included, thus them being higher.
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