This looks suspiciously like something I could buy : a lightweight well made Linux laptop, with long battery life.
I currently use a MacBook and won’t get near a windows machine.
Two questions
1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
2/ software-wise how reliable are the suspend/resume and all the laptop features ? I’ve been using Linux for about 30y and to me this is typically the bits that usually fail. To put it differently, how confident are you that things will work properly out of the box ?
Other than that , I love what you’re doing, please continue.
As other comments have noted, we have Framework Laptop 16 for folks who want bigger screens, and we had some updates for that product today too: haptic touchpad option and an entry-level Ryzen 5 version.
We've been sending pre-release hardware to developers at a bunch of distros to make sure that the core use cases like suspend/resume work as expected out of the box. You can check our general Linux support at frame.work/linux
I want to say as a fw13 owner that people don't realize that the 3:2 screen ratio gives you extra vertical space compared to your typical notebook and the screen does not feel small at all. That was an excellent decision from their design team.
Agreed. I have a work MBP 14" and a Framework 13, and I didn't realize until just now that they weren't the same screen size. The Framework 13 is very comfortable to use.
I’m not @nrp but I think I can safely answer this one:
> 1/ will there be a 15 inches version ? ( I’m not getting any younger I like bigger screens )
They make a Framework 16, so a Framework 16 Pro now suddenly seems like a possibility, but I don’t think they’re going to make a 15-inch when they have the 16.
Are you guys thinking about pushing to improve the linux software experience at all? To me that could almost be another selling point, if Framework 13 came with some downstream patches that improved sleep, power management, multi-display and hi-dpi monitor handling, etc.
And secondly how healthy is framework as a company, and to what extent do you make money from consumers vs sales to big companies?
Framework is not really a software company. But they are actively working together with various Linux distributions and they also provide funding for open source development.
That would be fantastic! The standard keyboard design is extremely outdated, while for desktop there are some products pushing it with ortholinear layout and thumb clusters, for laptops its doesn't exist at all.
I don't know how much keyboard-design flexibility is available to you, but innovative keyboard could even be a killer feature.
How is ortholinear supposed to be better? I've never used a full-size ortholinear keyboard but every time I've had one on a portable keyboard or mobile device it has driven me nuts (and staggered keyboards of the same sizes have not).
I agree that offering more user choice here could be a unique and standout feature, though. One of the small things I love about their keyboard offerings is that they offer all blank key cap options.
I don't know how relevant is the parent argument these days, but pfu see released HHKB with trackpoint. Even despite dropping their signature topre switches, I consider this one of the best purchases. My wrists can't thank me enough.
First off, Framework is maybe the most exciting company I've seen over the last 5 years. My Framework 13 AMD is a wonderful machine. Thank you to your and your team for the incredible work and commitment!
Two questions:
1. Will there will be a concrete guide to upgrading a standard Framework 13 to the Pro. I watched the video and read the page a few times, and I'm a bit confused what the whole process is and if all the required upgrades need to happen together, or if they can go piece meal.
2. With all the different components and increasing SKUs, I'd be a little worried that if I didn't upgrade to a Pro in the near future, that the old hardware would no longer be supported and it'd be a headache to upgrade at some point. Can Framework guarantee that there will always be an upgrade path within a size and line?
Again, big thank you to Framework and I look forward to using my Framework 13 for a long, long time :)
That's actually the part that I was getting confused by. Does everything with a yellow caution sign have to be upgraded together, or can that happen over time?
Reading it again, I'm assuming they're overtime and individual upgrades that can take place? If someone could confirm or deny that for me, I would appreciate it. I may just be overthinking this table.
Edit: yeah that's what I'm taking away after rereading this a few more times. Very impressed by the modularity on each of those parts.
We're going to publish more Linux benchmarks as well. We have s0ix noted (7 days), and we're trying to make some more repeatable productivity-oriented workflows for Linux to use. We expect that Phoronix will publish some pretty thorough power efficiency tests too. We'll certainly be providing them with review hardware.
Thank you Nirav for everything you are doing for right-to-repair and better hardware. And, thank you for directly engaging with the community. I can't wait to update my 12th gen i5 FW 13 with a new chassis!
Hey Nirav, congrats on the newest release and I'm really eyeing the 13 Pro.
A couple of questions:
1. How are the thermals? I've had mixed experiences with my 11th gen FW 13 throttling under load with the fan sounding noisy. It's fine if I'm alone but if I'm at a team gathering, it's noticeably loud.
1. Intel Core Ultra Series 3 is super efficient for video conferencing. That's a use case that Intel has specifically been optimizing for, so as long as you're using video conferencing software that leverages hardware encode/decode, which should be most of them at this point, the fan should stay off entirely.
2. We have one hand open on the lid for each generation of 13.
1. That's awesome! I assume RDP or VNC would be the same then, I use that for work primarily.
2. Huh. Well, I feel like an idiot! I always use two hands when opening the lid, muscle memory, I guess.
ps. one question you don't have to answer: for the wireless keyboard, did you guys consider something like a fingerprint sensor? I like the idea of having something like that akin to Mac's Wireless Keyboard but I don't know how much integration something like that would need.
I'm excited for the new speakers - that's been one of the biggest pain points on my 13.
- Is the Dolby Atmos configuration available for Linux as well as Windows? Or more generally, will the speakers sound as good on Linux as they do on Windows?
- Will we be able to get audio comparison samples between the old and new speakers?
For those of us that, say, just got a new battery months before this was announced... a while ago (I forget when), there was talk of possibly sharing designs to enable repurposing them as power banks. Any word about that?
Also is there a way of exposing an existing touchpad to that new control board for your external one? (Or keyboard I guess, but the use case is that I had to replace my keyboard too, and for what was available at the time ended up just going with a whole input cover. Truthfully, I was already curious about exposing it to USB-C before hearing about this, and prefer wired anyway, but am also curious about the more immediately relevant part of the question.)
Has anyone tried Qwen 3.6 35B A3B on the 370 version with plenty of ram and if so what's the best tokens per second you can get, with the ideal quant, like maybe the U GGUF at 4 bit
Q4_K_S Qwen3.5 30B-A3B runs at around 29 t/s for me on the 370 version with 64 GB of RAM, running llama.cpp without any tweaking. I haven't tried Qwen3.6 yet, but could download it tomorrow; since I have a 128GB FW Desktop at home, I tend to use that remotely rather than my laptop directly, which preserves my battery.
Hi! Congratulation on the launch, I hope the users will like these!
Please, I do have a question about Desktop: there have been numerous reports of noisy PSU fan and little feedback from FW [1], could you shed some light on the situation? Are you seeing noisy PSU yourself, are there plans for a fix or another PSU? I understand you wanted a separate, and thus reparable Flex ATX PSU, but maybe just one larger fan for the whole case would have worked better (c.f. Steam Machine)?
Really happy to see the new chassis for the 13 Pro! I own the 16 myself, and have been really happy with it, and am excited to see the haptic touchpad + unibody modules hit the marketplace. Those address the largest build quality issues I had with the device.
You probably can't comment on this, but just to note it, I would be very excited to see the 16 get a similar Pro chassis.
And no brightness impact either, right? (I think that was in the LTT video.) We always ordered thinkpads without touchscreens, but it sounds like just leaving it off in software might actually be sufficient...
The touchscreen is backward-compatible with the old/regular FW13, so I imagine the regular FW13 screen is forward-compatible with the Pro. (Of course, I don't know if they'll sell that configuration or if you'd have to cobble it together from the marketplace.)
200g is weight of a smartphone, there's no way touch weighs that much.
Framework 13 Pro screen seems to have plastic surface as before, not glass-laminated (which I guess could add 200g, but it's not a requirement for laptop touchscreen)
I have two Dell xps 13, two generations apart, the newer one is touchscreen the other (older) isn’t. Guess which one weighs 1.3kg and which weighs 1.1kg.
You're blaming the touchscreen for a lot here, when the explanation is likely a lot more pedestrian. Change in case molding, change in PCB size, slight change in battery size...
If they're two generations apart, then 200g difference could be hiding anywhere, but touchscreen (I really doubt it adds even 20g).
e.g. 30g in larger heatsinks, 80g in glass-laminated screen, 20g in larger battery, 40g in more stiffer chassis. 30g in aluminium top case instead of carbon fiber :)
Framework does sell their parts piecemeal, so if you were inclined once new parts are available, you could put together one to your liking without a touchscreen.
I thought I would never use one either, but whenever I use my SO's laptop with touchscreen, I keep touching the screen for "quick actions" like pausing video or starting apps or moving things around. I don't use it when I need precision, but when I need to just do one thing quickly where I don't need accuracy, I actually find it really handy.
Touchscreen is one of those things that sound nice, but in my experience are not so useful. At least not for my typical use (programming, writing, even CAD design). Before having a framework 13 I had a dell xps 13 with touchscreen for about ten years. I never really had a use for it. But hey, the rest of the specs of the screen alone make it still a nice upgrade possibility for the future :)
Now that you have a custom touch-screen. How long until you release a tablet (Surface-pro-like) form factor? I'm still using my 2017 Surface Pro because the form factor is amazing, but no one has come up with anything to compete with it.
I know it's not the most ideal form factor for a repairable device, but I can dream.
The biggest issue with a Linux tablet, is you don't have a lot of tablet apps for Linux. Desktop apps don't translate to tablet usage that well. I found that out when I was using a Chromebook tablet, with the Linux mode add-in. Tried using things like openoffice, even firefox, and there were just too many issues (smaller tap targets, things like dragging your finger on a window selecting text (i.e., what a mouse would do) instead of scrolling like you would expect on a tablet of phone, etc).
So you are either running Linux with a web browser that has a tablet mode, and making sure all apps are web apps adapted for mobile or at least non-keyboard use. Or you re-invent Android. One thing that somewhat worked was Nokia's Maemo -- it used X11, but the defined UI toolkit and guidelines made everything uniform and touch-screen friendly. Not sure about how the successor projects look if they are what I remember from Maemo / Meego (so maybe Sailfish or Tizen, not sure how open these are though).
I looked into it a little and it does seem like LPCAMM2 just can't provide that memory bandwidth through a single socket and dual socket would be overly complex to wire up. Bummer :-(
It looks like not (you'd assume they'd have called it out if it was). I really don't understand the utility of a touchscreen without a 360 degree hinge.
Response from the support (according to the Framework forum):
The Framework Laptop 13 Pro Touchscreen supports touch input but does not currently support stylus input. Like other Framework Laptop 13 models, it opens with a maximum hinge angle of 180 degrees and is not designed for pen or convertible-style use.
What's the sleep situation? I have an ancient Dell with S3, which is totally fine, and a Mac for work, which is fine, but the modern standby situation, as summarized by people who are mad about it, sounds bad.
There’s hope. My 12th gen intel still supports sleep, while the AMD doesn’t. Need to use Linux to access it I think. Haven’t confirmed that on latest hardware however.
Ultra X7 358H is the config we've used for most of our battery life tests, and efficiency should be very similar on the X9 config. We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
> We're keeping the SKU stack simpler and just having a single display option that has touch. You can disable touch in your OS though if you don't want to use it.
The reason I asked was mostly that, in my experience, touch displays tend to be glossier / less matte than non-touch ones.
I preordered a 13 Pro with Ryzen, which I'm already very excited about. Reading between the lines of your video announcement, though, it seems like the Intel experience might be more optimal (you pointed out Intel's new low power efficiency cores and Dolby sound being tested with Intel).
If I want the best battery life and sound possible with Linux, should I switch my preorder to Intel?
What I am also curious is around memory management. On the Intel, I can get at most 64Gb RAM for now, 96Gb in the future. On AMD I can get 128Gb right now. Do they differ in how they can share RAM with the GPU? Do either need me to specify how much is vRAM and how much is available to the CPU, or are them both unified, similar to how Apple Silicon does it?
I love it, I've been waiting for years to buy a Framework, but my current laptop has so far refused to die. I think it's now finally old enough to justify upgrading.
Will the new keyboard colour schemes come to other locales? I love the orange/black/grey but probably not enough to learn American English.
I noticed my 13 thermally handles being on a soft surface (like a bed or a couch) very poorly, it gets quite warm to the touch and runs the fans hard even at rest. Does the improved thermals of the 13 pro also help this case?
Question: did the hints given at https://frame.work/nextgen include any secret messages you want the public to know about? Maybe the secret was missed during the run up to today?
Hey, love that thing and I am considering to sell my current laptop to get one, but I wanted to first know if the laptop features pen/stylus support? I guess not, as it is not using a full glass cover like the 12 and otherwise it would have probably been advertised, and can we expect in the future an upgrade path towards that (by replacing only the panel or the whole top part maybe?)
And anyway the performance of this CIX chip is really bad compared to the Snapdragon X2 or current x86 chips. Jeff Geerling has geekbench results here:
I didn’t realize they were selling it on another site, thanks for the link! (Framework has the RISC-V board on their shop, so I was expecting to see the MetaComputing one there too.)
And yeah… what I really want is some Oryon cores in a Framework 13 motherboard.
Will there be more keyboard choices?
I'd like a keyboard with dedicated Home, End, Insert, Delete, Page Up, and Page Down keys. The layout of the ThinkPad keyboards is especially nice here: The PageUp and PageDown keys are above the Left and Right arrow keys.
I have the 13" with AMD 7040 and eGPU worked fine, but I switched back to a SFF desktop as I couldn't git hot-swapping to work reliably and bandwidth loss over thunderbolt was a little more than I was happy with. But functionally/mechanically it worked
I just realised that the credit card I used to place my preorder will expire next month. Will there be an option to update my card details when I need to pay the full amount?
Yes, you'll get notified when your batch is getting ready to ship, and you can update your payment information. You can also update the default payment method in your user account any time.
There's no reason they couldn't use smaller capacity modules. SOCAMM has better area efficiency and z height, both highly relevant for thin and light laptops.
The form factor is only a tiny part of the RAM module price. DRAM already isn't compatible gen to gen so you might as well go with the most optimized form factor
I agree, competition and economies of scale are much larger factors. Custom RAM SKUs for a single manufacturer with no competition will obviously cost more than an industry standard part. And you'll be locked to buying RAM upgrades from framework themselves.
Why do you keep sponsoring Rails World and giving laptops to David Heinemeier Hansson? After the community reaction last time, don't you understand the message you're sending with this behavior? Are you not concerned about the rise of fascism and white nationalism, trends which gain legitimacy in part through corporate endorsement of people like DHH?
It's interesting what political issues people make paramount. Apple does ewaste as a service but don't have a fraction of the criticism and infighting as the open source community.
As recently as a few years ago, Robert was directly answering emails and shipping out signed prints of his BYTE covers. We have had some hanging in our office for inspiration. He set the best tone for what computing feels like.
There are still bright spots, but the space is so much larger it’s hard to find them. I still love all the companies that present at SC and Hot Chips.
One I like in particular is Cerebras. Wafer scale didn’t work when wafers were 3” but, somehow, they managed to make it work when they are the size of a manhole cover.
BYTE would run entire issues on the exploits of IBM in POWER and Z, on Intel and AMD’s latest tricks, and on the latest 250TB 2.5” SSDs.
Yes, Cerebras is very cool. But that sort of thing is also becoming the exception. I use the homepage of HN as a sort of thermometer, the trend seems to be towards 'more' rather than 'better'.
Same here. HN is an excellent way to take the pulse of our industry.
This "more over better" is a natural trend - a lot of money can be made for a relatively low effort. Cerebras did the Really Hard Thing, something many other brilliant companies and people failed at for decades. I remember Gene Amdahl failing at wafer-scale back when wafers were tiny.
That is incorrect. All of our laptops have modular, upgradable memory. Our Framework Desktop is a mini PC that does not because AMD’s Ryzen AI Max platform doesn’t support it. Regardless, we maximized modularity and reuseability on that product too by following PC standards. It uses a MiniITX form factor, standard 120mm fan, and FlexATX power supply.
We have open source documentation and CAD around the Mainboards to enable people to reuse them as single board computers or mini PCs after upgrading them out of their laptops. Even if the original owner of the Mainboard has no use for that, the functionality means it has resale value for others to use, reducing waste.
We’ve been able to hold the same price we had at launch because we had buffered enough component inventory before prices reached their latest highs. We will need to increase pricing to cover supplier cost increases though, as we recently did on DDR5 modules.
Note that the memory is on the board for Ryzen AI Max, not on the package (as it is for Intel’s Lunar Lake and Apple’s M-series processors) or on die (which would be SRAM). As noted in another comment, whether the memory is on the board, on a module, or on the processor package, they are all still coming from the same extremely constrained three memory die suppliers, so costs are going up for all of them.
Longer contracts are riskier. The benefit of having cheaper RAM when prices spike is not strong enough to outweigh the downside of paying too much for RAM when prices drop or stay the same. If you’re paying a perpetual premium on the spot price to hedge, then your competitors will have pricing power over you and will slowly drive you out of the market. The payoff when the market turns in your favor just won’t be big enough and you might not survive as a business long enough to see it. There’s also counterparty risk, if you hit a big enough jackpot your upside is capped by what would make the supplier insolvent.
All your competitors are in the same boat, so consumers won’t have options. It’s much better to minimize the risk of blowing up by sticking as closely to spot at possible. That’s the whole idea of lean. Consumers and governments were mad about supply chains during the pandemic, but companies survived because they were lean.
In a sense this is the opposite risk profile of futures contracts in trading/portfolio management, even though they share some superficial similarities. Manufacturing businesses are fundamentally different from trading.
They certainly have contracts in place that cover goods already sold. They do a ton of preorders which is great since they get paid before they have to pay their suppliers. Just like airlines trade energy futures because they’ve sold the tickets long before they have to buy the jet fuel.
If you’re Apple, maybe that works, in this case we’re seeing 400% increases in price, instead of your RAM you’ll be delivered a note to pay up or you’ll get your money back with interest and termination fees and the supplier is still net positive.
the risk is that such longer contracts would then lock you into a higher cost component for longer, if the price drops. Longer contracts only look good in hindsight if ram prices increased (unexpectedly).
Do they make DRAM? I thought they made compute chips mostly.
If I recall correctly, RAM is even more niche and specialized than the (already quite specialized) general chip manufacturing. The structure is super-duper regular, just a big grid of cells, so it is super-duper optimized.
They (GF) do not make DRAM. They might have an eDRAM process inherited from IBM, but it would not be competitive.
You’re correct that DRAM is a very specialized process. The bit cell capacitors are a trench type that is uncommon in the general industry, so the major logic fabs would have a fairly uphill battle to become competitive (they also have no desire to enter the DRAM market in general).
The permanent fix involves soldering stuff on the mainboard, which I don't have any prior experience. The RTC substitute module you mention is just the ML220 coin battery that will also eventually stop working.
I did this repair and it was not nearly as easy as you imply. The wire is extremely thin, and the pad on the motherboard is extremely small. I had to purchase special eye-wear in order to see what I was doing, in addition to a soldering iron.
It was and is totally wrong that Framework requires users to repair a component that was faulty from the factory. You should ship the laptops back to your facility and repair them, at your expense. At worst, offer a substantial discount on a motherboard replacement.
This experience is a big reason why I went from a strong Framework proponent to a strong detractor. You do not support your products, and users cannot trust you to do the right thing. You now bask in the idealistic haze of nerddom but your actions show that you're just a business for whom repairability is a sales strategy to justify premium prices.
The warranty suggests that Framework would "ship the laptops back to [their] facility and repair them, at [their] expense," as you said they should. Did that not happen while your warranty period was in effect?
The issue did not arise until after the warranty period expired. The manufacturing flaw drained the real-time clock battery which lasted about a year. Their first fix was to send a new battery; the second fix was a soldering job. I am not a lawyer, but this does not seem like it is legal. The manufacturing flaw was present from the beginning but was masked by the battery's charge.
I appreciate the response, but my suggestion would be to offer a mail-in service program so that users don't have to fiddle with potentially dangerous soldering (ideally Framework bearing the shipping costs or atleast subsidizing it).
Done! Thanks for coming here to read the tough hacker new comments. I really like what you're doing with Framework, and I hope you are able to keep iterating and improving.
----
Update: Sorry, there is no mistake! The i7 order was my original pre-order, which I canceled. My order is correctly recorded.
It's funny. I think a lot of more software-y people just don't see the need for a lot of Framework features. I deal with a lot of hardware (as a hobbyist and a hardware engineer) and I've seen every USB standard connector in the last week.
I also own something like three different Framework products (16, 13 and Desktop) and gifted two more (13 and Desktop) to people. Really, apart from the fit issues on 16 spacers and perhaps the speakers, the only really unforgivable issue is the size of the expansion cards (too small for interesting hardware like a good LTE modem).
Software-y people also have a way of being deliberately and performatively obtuse about their technology choices. This person's proclamation about not using any USB-A peripherals hits the same as when they feign surprise that any non-luddite would still have a use for printers, scanners, and fax machines.
Perhaps because Framework users are a bit more geeky and are more likely to use older hardware that still has USB-A?
USB-A is like what DB9 was. Easy to use, easy to plug-in, used on most devices. But there comes a point in time where we move on to the next connector, which is USB-C.
Most of my hardware is younger than ten years and everything has USB-C. I had a night light with micro-USB still but that was one of the last devices with a legacy port.
I have a stash of USB keyboards and mice in my closet, gathered from various sources for free. They're all USB-A because they're like 15 years old. The SD card reader I got somewhere ages ago is USB-A. My Xbox 360 controller is USB-A. So I got a USB-A module. Shrug.
Hi it's me from the past. I daily drive a VGA screen and a USB-A hub that connects my USB-A mouse and USB-A keyboard. My µSD-card reader uses USB-A. Ethernet adapter (for when I need a second NIC) is also USB-A but it came with an adapter to C so I have a choice there. All USB sticks I've ever seen are A, as well as all external hard drives. My charging cables are predominantly USB-A to micro, and nowadays I also need C for my phone. It's a bit annoying to need that extra C charging cable everywhere after we had already standardized on micro (except for Apple), but at least there's one standard now (xkcd.com/927) after the current devices die
Edit: forgot the printer. I connect it via USB-A on demand. /edit.
My laptop (bought this year) charges via a DC barrel jack, afaik because USB-C doesn't deliver enough power for peak usage. Buying a little HDMI-VGA converter was a lot cheaper than throwing a perfectly good screen away. My keyboard, mouse, and other peripherals also simply still work, seems silly to replace them just to get a C variant when 700-1300€ laptops have 1 or 2 C ports and always 2 A ports (I happen to be up-to-date on that, at least, because I helped someone select a new laptop ereyesterday)
I don't know what I'd need more than one C port for but I'm very happy that there is more than one A port on my laptop. Add in the standard set of 3.5mm jack, HDMI, ethernet, card reader, and charging, and you're already at more ports than even the new Framework 16 can physically fit in its frame, let alone nerd ports like serial or a second ethernet port. I considered buying a double-priced Framework earlier this year for the linux support and upgradeability (I really support their goal and would pay that premium if it were a suitable system) but this is one of the main reasons it just doesn't work for me: I'm actually a power user that regularly uses these connections and more
> My laptop (bought this year) charges via a DC barrel jack, afaik because USB-C doesn't deliver enough power for peak usage
I've got a Dell 120W USB-C charger from a 2017 Dell laptop, and I think you can go up to 240W now.
Now the highest power is a bit of a compatibility nightmare. I also have a 60W framework charger but it will only charge the Dell at 15W because that's the maximum mode that both the Dell and Framework charger support in common.
But given the barrel connectors are usually only compatible with the exact laptop they're sold with, that's probably an improvement.
I got a couple of type-A cards for my AMD FW13 and generally keep one loaded in the laptop for connecting to random junk like flash drives, charging cables for all sorts of widgets (like my bike light or head lamp), etc. I get dramatically more use out of the type-C cards. And in the quite-rare cases where I really need all of the type-C ports, I'll just eject the type-A card and plug directly into the chassis without the interposer at all rather than carry an extra type-C with me.
That said, there have been a few things that have been a bit less than deluxe on my FW13:
- The touchpad mechanical click is just not that good. It is too sensitive to exact pressure and touch location and I find holding it down and dragging to be excessively difficult compared to all other touchpads I've ever used.
- The delete key seems to oxidize and needs a bunch of hard mashing to get it to become responsive. No, it's not sticky or dirty.
- The air intake on the bottom is highly prone to getting blocked, mostly by my legs.
- There's no BIOS option to turn down the brightness or disable altogether the charging status LEDs, and I find that when I travel and can't keep the laptop in a separate room that it's bright enough to interrupt sleep. I've taped over them, but the light leakage from other crevices is still sufficient to be at least mildly annoying. The translucent Ethernet adapter card also acts like a lightbulb.
- The laptop ramps its current consumption from type-C very quickly and seems like it overshoots its target a little bit, and so it is the only device I have that trips out the OCP on some of my bricks.
- There's no BIOS option to artificially limit the charging power, and so I often trip the OCP on aircraft if my battery is not fully charged before plugging in. I don't want to carry a secondary small brick just to use on planes.
- The LCD backlight uniformity and color quality are mediocre, but for my use case I just don't really care that much. For me, this is a portable technical productivity machine and not an art studio, so it doesn't matter.
- The LCD backlight intensity curve is pretty bad. I very-frequently want to have a brightness in-between the lowest and second-lowest settings. I would love to get more control at the bottom and less at the top. It feels like it's linear when it should be logarithmic.
- The speakers suck. So does the volume control. I very rarely go above 10% volume and frequently don't have sufficient control resolution at the bottom. Anything above about 14-16% volume causes something to distort and other stuff to rattle. Luckily I mostly don't consume media, so this is rarely a real problem. But it is truly atrocious.
All that said, I'm generally a pretty happy camper. I look forward to continued improvements from the company over the years.
Could you reach out to support about the delete key? There was a small window of time where a burr on a batch of Input Cover lattices resulted in wearing down the keyboard membrane in that spot: https://support.frame.work
Thanks for the feedback on LED brightness and airplane OCP. That should be something we can improve in firmware.
Thanks, I'll do that! I figured I've had the machine for a while and it was unlikely to be covered by warranty, so I didn't consider reaching out to support. Instead I assumed I'd buy a new keyboard if it ever annoyed me too much.
At some point I actually considered poking around the firmware and seeing about fixing up the PD behavior. But it never quite rose in priority above my many other projects.
I absolutely love that the embedded controller firmware and much of the motherboard schematics are available. It makes it possible to do these little projects should I gather the gumption. That, plus easy and reasonably priced replacement parts availability and easy OS compatibility, are why I got the Framework.
A note to other folks. Don't bother asking customer service about this. They want you to record videos, as if that's a productive use of your time or required to support a product.
As soon as a CSR asks me to record a video, I write off the brand. Maybe Gen Z will tolerate that, but I'm too old for that nonsense.
The actual touch part of the FW touchpad, including tap to click, works just fine. I might be a weirdo for liking mechanical click for dragging (and I dislike the Macbook tactile fakery; it does not fool my finger).
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