The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches.
IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up.
I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.
My personal machine is a Framework 13 AMD (first gen of AMD for them) and my work machine is a MB Pro M4. The Mac Book just keeps battery _forever_ while suspended, where as I've found the Framework (running Ubuntu 24) loses about 1% an hour while suspended. 1% per hour is acceptable for me, but the Mac Book's power to performance ration is just insane.
I can't blame Framework, of course. Upstart laptop manufacturer that is open about repair vs tech giant who's spent years optimizing hardware and batteries.
All that said, I'm optimistic for better batteries, better suspend software/hardware support, and more efficient mobile processors outside of the Apple ecosystem in the coming years. The M-series Apple processors are definitely kicking others in the industry into gear.
> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low.
This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the details.
Thanks, I did not knew that. My understanding was that keeping the memory alive for suspend-to-idle was the main issue here. But that also might be something a vertically integrated Apple Silicon can win vs. that x86 madness there every day.
And to be sure, I do not claim that there is nothing to gain in s2idle. I bet theres still a lot of headroom to safe energy. Its just that it would be easy to safe a lot of power if s2disk "just worked".
As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex.
You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them.
Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc.
Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too.
It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.
> It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more.
I had the original Steam Deck and the OLED Steam Deck and neither of them would hold a charge past a day or so. It's a constant annoyance for me as I don't want to leave it plugged in 24/7 but if I don't, it won't be ready to go when I use it. I often end up playing while plugged in which is just silly.
A week of battery (while it's "off") would be amazing, it feels like I can't get 24hrs without the battery being trash.
Compare this to my iPad or MBP and the difference is stark. I really only use my Switch in docked mode (the joycons suck) so I don't have a good read on how long it holds it's battery but I assume it must be better than the Steam Deck.
Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).
I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.
If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.
This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.
The standby issues with Framework laptops (at least the early ones, I don’t know about recent developments) was a well known issue.
I recommended Framework to someone looking for a laptop a while ago and they were bit by the standby battery drain issue. I felt bad having recommended it to them because I assumed such a basic issue would have been addressed in a laptop that was so highly regarded.
Some of the issues have been addressed. For example, iirc, there was a bug where pulling out the power plug while the lid was closed would trigger the device to wake up.
Some other issues remain. Largest I am aware of is independent from the hardware, but an issue with suspend-to-disk & kernel lockdown, which prevents deep sleep.
I had* an 11th Gen Intel NUC that couldn’t sleep at all for something like a year due to EFI bugs… They finally did eventually fix the regression but really, it’s just incredible - if one company should be able to do EFI right it’s Intel!
I’m not sure if this was related to “modern standby” (it was around that time if I recall) but that hasn’t really helped anything. This is a desktop so why they insist on deprecating real standby for everything is beyond me…
* I actually still have it but it became my home server, so now doesn’t ever need to standby, luckily.
The idea behind modern stanby is a good one, when it is implemented correctly (like how Macbooks do it). Unfortunately most PCs have a terrible implementation and instead get hot and drain the battery overnight.
The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.
Exactly - Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa. They get battery gains across the stack.
I remember when the M1 Macs first came out, an Apple engineer revealed they'd optimized the hardware so one specific low-level operation macOS does all the time was 5x faster than on Intel [0].
FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.
Saying that the macOS desktop is vastly inferior to Linux desktops is absolutely nuts. I've tried to get my relatives on Linux desktops so many times, just for it to go completely wrong a couple of weeks after and having to reinstall Windows. It's just not made for average (or below-average) users, so I don't see how it can be VASTLY inferior to something as easy and polished as macOS.
It’s more subjective of a thing than many would like to admit. As someone who’s been working as a dev for a decade and writing code outside of work for twice that, one of the things keeping me away from Linux is that there simply isn’t a true Mac analogue DE.
I do all my software development in remote clusters/supercomputers. I’d consider myself a power user. My laptop is for running a terminal, vscode, a browser and the various applications my company requires, e.g. Teams, Slack. So I want reliability, low configuration and maintenance overhead on my part and good battery life. Linux can’t compete on these fronts.
All those pros you list have nothing to do with the desktop environment. Maybe low configuration but you can have that on Linux too.
I totally agree that the hardware and the underlying Unix is decent. Audio on Mac is also way less of a hassle. I am not saying that a power user wouldn't have good reason to chose a Mac, just that the desktop is for me the weakest part of it compared to Linux.
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world
I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work.
They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience.
Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
On a Mac, you can switch between apps with Command-Tab or windows of the same app with Command-` but there's no way to cycle between all windows or bounce between to two most recently used windows.
Maybe this used to make sense when apps were single purpose but I do basically everything in a web browser or a terminal so not being able to bounce between the previously selected window(of whatever kind), as I can with Alt-Tab on linux or windows, is frustrating.
Also Command-` switches to the next window, not the previous one like I would expect.
MacOS removed subpixel antialiasing, honestly for understandable reasons, making rendering on low-ppi displays blurry, but high-ppi displays are still super expensive. I got a 32" 4k monitor(~140ppi) at Costco for $250. A >200ppi display of the same size costs 20x that amount.
For web apps, spinning them into “installed” apps (doable in both Chrome and Safari now) is the move. This unclogs your tab bar, gets rid of the pointless persistent browser chrome, and gives you the benefit of OS task management capabilities.
You can add Shift to both Command-Tab and Command-` to move in the reverse direction.
Man just give me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows using a keyboard shortcut (without requiring some janky 3rd party program). Windows-style alt-tab. It's not a big ask and would make the macOS experience go from "barely usable" to "perfectly fine."
Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd.
I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt-tab support or custom shortcuts. An configuration is supper limited.
And it will get so much worse with the whole glasses ui thing.
This is one of my go-tos when I need a VM, so I’m familiar.
> I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box.
But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
This is the hyperbole that I can’t really take seriously. Calling it “absolutely unusable” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
I understand that some people like to customize their environments to the Nth degree and can’t live without their personal set of customizations, but that’s personal preferences. Calling other platforms “absolutely unusable” or “vastly inferior” is just an exaggeration when millions of devs use them just fine.
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing?
Your assumption that these Linux setups are "extremely customized" is wrong. Personally, I hate configuring or customizing much at all. The appeal of Linux is that there are distros that come configured out-of-the-box pretty much as I like it, whereas MacOS and especially Windows requires configuration and constant upkeep and maintenance. (MacOS doesn't even come with a decent terminal, for starters.)
For me, my main problem with MacOS is that it's full of looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animations that you can not disable or remove. Disabling animations (or setting them to be <10ms long) is one of the few configurations I like to do. But this is not even an option on Apple's operating systems. It's like running through molasses in a dream-- it's so damnedly and artificially slow.
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
My Linux Mint installation is actually barely customized. It absolutely works out of the box. I disabled a few animations and selected a different theme and added like three extra shortcuts but that is it. Nothing that would take more than ten minutes.
I was comparing the vanilla experience.
And yes, I should have specified that I am talking about my needs. I totally believe that the Mac Desktop might be better for the average user but that is no me.
Other OS’s handling of “alt-tab” does not make it de facto “proper”.
You are trying to use macOS like your other favorite OS(s). This is not how macOS has ever worked, and the macOS approach is more than fine for millions of people.
There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.
Desktop Macs do have fans so they're not completely silent, but if you were under the impression there aren't any then that reflects well on how good their tuning is. AFAIK the MacBook Air is the only passively cooled Mac.
I know that they have fans but I really can't hear them. Maaaybe when gaming but I would to have to really concentrate on that. And I am super sensitive to noise.
It is so sad that apparently no one else bothers to tune their fans properly. It is such a killer feature for me.
The one I have always missed is proper focus-follows-mouse support. The mac desktop always feels really clunky without that when working with multiple windows.
Personally, most of my problems with MacOS (and Apple's operating systems) would be fixed if it were faster. The OS is full of very lengthy animations that aren't necessary, such as when switching between desktops.
I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.
When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?
I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.
There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.
It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.
Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years.
Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..
I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out.
First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill.
The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components.
To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price.
Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option.
Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway.
The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there).
The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$.
I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail
If you're plugging and unplugging USB-C cables all the time, eventually the ports are going to fail, but we generally consider plugging things into USB-C acceptable.
The Framework expansion modules are just USB-C ports, but they're not subject to much twisting or bending when using the modules so they should last longer.
I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.
No issues so far, almost 1 year in, but I don't use specialized software: only web browsers, Office suite, Obsidian, Dropbox, PowerToys, FileZilla, Putty, VLC, Notepad++, WSL and random .exe utilities. I've found the emulation to be pretty good, but avoid it if you plan to do any gaming.
I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect.
For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.
"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."
That sounds like a plan!
I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.
The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed.
On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.
What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?
If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac.
Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up.
Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple.
Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class.
Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life.
Edit:
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
I don't own a Framework (yet), as I don't believe its the right product for me at this stage. I can't afford to get caught out without battery when out and about.
What attracts me is:
• Easy (self) repairs, especially OEM battery replacements. If I could carry two - three replacements that could be hot swapped, like old times, that would be acceptable too.
• Easy upgrades of RAM and SSD. I had to buy a new MacBook due to it hanging frequently from RAM filling up, even though rest of it would've been fine for at least three more years.
• Ability to make it "your own". Its a minor thing, but a little whimsy is nice in life. I also like the idea of my main machine being a ship of Thesus that stays with me for a long time, and shows marks of age.
"Specs" really do not mean a lot for Laptops. Most laptops are seriously bad quality, and I have not had one laptop in the past 10 years that did not require a major repair before the warranty period expired. With most laptops, you are buying e-waste. I can't afford buying e-waste. I would rather buy a laptop I can keep for 5 years without having to scrap it, and with framework I could just replace whatever breaks.
And for me Mac is not an option as I'm not using their crappy OS and I don't want to have the forever struggle of running Linux on their proprietary hardware platform.
MacBooks had historically tons of design issues with keyboards and GPUs. Which I guess can happen, but the problem with Apple is that they never admin anything until someone drags them to court and the out of warranty repair is always extremely expensive, usually not worth it.
The battery replacement can also be extremely expensive, especially if you live in a country without any Apple Store. Battery replacement for M4 Air is like $340 in my country, which is insane for a $800 machine.
Worse how? RAM, SSD and main board can be upgraded as an when needed, which is the point.
I like Framework's aesthetics more than MacBook already, and like the little customisablity (i.e bezel, mismatched coloured parts etc). I can accept a lower quality screen (compared to MacBook), speakers and camera no problem.
I'm willing to pay higher than MacBook price for the above package due to superiority of Linux over MacOs and supporting this model in general. However, I draw a line in the sand at battery life, so Mac it is for me for the foreseeable future.
I know Windows laptops are very finicky and unreliable. For example, loads of people complain that $3000 Razer laptops break after a few months.
I guess I'm mostly talking about Apple overall.
You're paying a lot more money for self-repairability. Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop. That's crazy.
Macs are tanks. Not a single issue with my 4 year old M1 Air. Even if there is an issue, I can still take it to an Apple Store to get it looked at.
> Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop.
Do you have an example? An 8tb m4 macbook pro runs over 7 grand; the comparable hx370 framework 13 is barely over 3 grand. I bought both within the last couple months and found the macs to be significantly more expensive in the segment i was looking at.
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
That can't possibly be true. I was recently considering my first ever Apple laptop but I would be paying a fortune to get RAM and storage anywhere close to offerings from any other vendor. And I've heard they're difficult or impossible to upgrade myself, so I can't even select a base model now and add more later.
The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced.
As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.
I’m not the OP but for me, with my mid-2015, I had the battery replaced once. This was used almost every work day until 2023. My M2 Pro MBP I then bought, never so far (as you would expect for its age) and it still feels brand new.
I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.
As with all things, it’s all dependent upon the details. OS, Bios, chip, they all can have an impact on battery consumption while sleeping. The linked (from the post) Reddit thread has many suggestions on how to fix this, but for the author, I don’t think it was ever resolved. The author of that Reddit post was also shocked.
The reason why it works well for Apple is that they control everything. There are limited numbers of parts they have to support, so they can make sure it all works.
In the PC world, there are many… many variables, even from the same OEM. It’s a legitimately hard problem and manufacturers aren’t particularly motivated to get it to work better (particularly with Linux). In fact, at this moment, there’s another post on the front page that talks about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 . It is about debugging an ACPI bug that has existed for years.
The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.
> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life.
Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU.
The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.
I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration.
Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite.
It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced.
We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.
I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy.
The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days.
Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc.
On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is.
Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you.
Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both.
Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook.
The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.
Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.
IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content.
The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
> Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack
Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works.
The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack.
Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it.
The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case.
For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management.
The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.
The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches.
IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up. I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.
My personal machine is a Framework 13 AMD (first gen of AMD for them) and my work machine is a MB Pro M4. The Mac Book just keeps battery _forever_ while suspended, where as I've found the Framework (running Ubuntu 24) loses about 1% an hour while suspended. 1% per hour is acceptable for me, but the Mac Book's power to performance ration is just insane.
I can't blame Framework, of course. Upstart laptop manufacturer that is open about repair vs tech giant who's spent years optimizing hardware and batteries.
All that said, I'm optimistic for better batteries, better suspend software/hardware support, and more efficient mobile processors outside of the Apple ecosystem in the coming years. The M-series Apple processors are definitely kicking others in the industry into gear.
The thing is - a lot if power saving is achieved by hybrid sleep (computer hibernating after a timeout).
Setting that up is pure hell on Linux, with poor documentation and security people actively fighting against making this easy.
On Windows/macOS it just works, on Linux you'll probably break secure boot with it.
> If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low.
This is cope. An Apple Silicon Macbook does not need to suspend to block devices to save energy (they only do this when the battery is empty). ChromeOS doesn't offer hibernate at all. The only reason that a Framework can't have good battery life in an operating state is that nobody is paying attention to the details.
And what are those details? Sounds like you know specifics that I'd like to also know.
If you're claiming it is just an oversight, then please back it up.
Thanks, I did not knew that. My understanding was that keeping the memory alive for suspend-to-idle was the main issue here. But that also might be something a vertically integrated Apple Silicon can win vs. that x86 madness there every day.
And to be sure, I do not claim that there is nothing to gain in s2idle. I bet theres still a lot of headroom to safe energy. Its just that it would be easy to safe a lot of power if s2disk "just worked".
As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex.
You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them.
Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc.
Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too.
It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.
Excellent point with Steam Deck. The machine is proof that x86 and Linux can do it and simply don’t.
While proof, I think it also highlights the root cause of the issue.
Linux is developed to be compatible with different hardware setups.
SteamOS and MacOS are both (supposed to be) locked to their respective hardware. It works on that hardware, but ymmv on anything else.
> It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more.
I had the original Steam Deck and the OLED Steam Deck and neither of them would hold a charge past a day or so. It's a constant annoyance for me as I don't want to leave it plugged in 24/7 but if I don't, it won't be ready to go when I use it. I often end up playing while plugged in which is just silly.
A week of battery (while it's "off") would be amazing, it feels like I can't get 24hrs without the battery being trash.
Compare this to my iPad or MBP and the difference is stark. I really only use my Switch in docked mode (the joycons suck) so I don't have a good read on how long it holds it's battery but I assume it must be better than the Steam Deck.
Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).
I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.
If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.
This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.
The standby issues with Framework laptops (at least the early ones, I don’t know about recent developments) was a well known issue.
I recommended Framework to someone looking for a laptop a while ago and they were bit by the standby battery drain issue. I felt bad having recommended it to them because I assumed such a basic issue would have been addressed in a laptop that was so highly regarded.
Some of the issues have been addressed. For example, iirc, there was a bug where pulling out the power plug while the lid was closed would trigger the device to wake up.
Some other issues remain. Largest I am aware of is independent from the hardware, but an issue with suspend-to-disk & kernel lockdown, which prevents deep sleep.
I had* an 11th Gen Intel NUC that couldn’t sleep at all for something like a year due to EFI bugs… They finally did eventually fix the regression but really, it’s just incredible - if one company should be able to do EFI right it’s Intel!
I’m not sure if this was related to “modern standby” (it was around that time if I recall) but that hasn’t really helped anything. This is a desktop so why they insist on deprecating real standby for everything is beyond me…
* I actually still have it but it became my home server, so now doesn’t ever need to standby, luckily.
The idea behind modern stanby is a good one, when it is implemented correctly (like how Macbooks do it). Unfortunately most PCs have a terrible implementation and instead get hot and drain the battery overnight.
The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.
Exactly - Apple hardware is designed for its software, and vice versa. They get battery gains across the stack.
I remember when the M1 Macs first came out, an Apple engineer revealed they'd optimized the hardware so one specific low-level operation macOS does all the time was 5x faster than on Intel [0].
[0]: https://daringfireball.net/2020/11/the_m1_macs
Author here. I'm posting this before bed. If there are any suggestions or questions I will answer in the morning.
FWIW, I use Arch Linux with XFCE on my Intel Framework 13 and I only lose a few percent battery per day in sleep mode. I suspect you could find some software settings to make this better, maybe worth digging a bit further.
What sleep modes does that support? The 7840HS only supported the "modern standby" mentioned in another comment.
Sorry, I have no idea, it just worked this way out of the box so I never had to do any digging into it.
I've wanted to buy a Framework to have a linux laptop for so long, but exactly this issue of battery life is what's holding me back.
As soon as Asahi supports TouchID, I think my M1 will become a linux laptop...
It seems to be also (still) missing support for external displays and USB-4 in general?
And according to use reports battery life seems quite awful compared to macOS?
As a Linux user I feel you.
The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good.
For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans.
I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.
Saying that the macOS desktop is vastly inferior to Linux desktops is absolutely nuts. I've tried to get my relatives on Linux desktops so many times, just for it to go completely wrong a couple of weeks after and having to reinstall Windows. It's just not made for average (or below-average) users, so I don't see how it can be VASTLY inferior to something as easy and polished as macOS.
The macOS desktop is vastly inferior for devs and power users. That is what I care about.
You are right, for barely tech literate people, yeah mac might be the better choice.
It’s more subjective of a thing than many would like to admit. As someone who’s been working as a dev for a decade and writing code outside of work for twice that, one of the things keeping me away from Linux is that there simply isn’t a true Mac analogue DE.
I do all my software development in remote clusters/supercomputers. I’d consider myself a power user. My laptop is for running a terminal, vscode, a browser and the various applications my company requires, e.g. Teams, Slack. So I want reliability, low configuration and maintenance overhead on my part and good battery life. Linux can’t compete on these fronts.
All those pros you list have nothing to do with the desktop environment. Maybe low configuration but you can have that on Linux too.
I totally agree that the hardware and the underlying Unix is decent. Audio on Mac is also way less of a hassle. I am not saying that a power user wouldn't have good reason to chose a Mac, just that the desktop is for me the weakest part of it compared to Linux.
Sometimes jumping through random hops to solve things just work on other operating systems is fun (not sarcasm).
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world
I have to use Mac, Linux, and Windows desktops in my work.
They all have their pros and cons, but I can’t say I’d ever argue that the Mac desktop experience is vastly inferior to the Linux desktop experience.
Edit: Getting a lot of downvotes but most of the comments are about someone’s highly customized Linux desktop compared to completely vanilla Mac desktop. I’m referring to apples to apples comparison where they’re either some standard out of the box version or when customized with available tools and mods. Comparing your highly customized Linux desktop to a completely uncustomized Mac setup with no attempt at other tools or utilities isn’t an interesting comparison because it’s not apples to apples, it’s just a statement about your current preference.
On a Mac, you can switch between apps with Command-Tab or windows of the same app with Command-` but there's no way to cycle between all windows or bounce between to two most recently used windows.
Maybe this used to make sense when apps were single purpose but I do basically everything in a web browser or a terminal so not being able to bounce between the previously selected window(of whatever kind), as I can with Alt-Tab on linux or windows, is frustrating.
Also Command-` switches to the next window, not the previous one like I would expect.
MacOS removed subpixel antialiasing, honestly for understandable reasons, making rendering on low-ppi displays blurry, but high-ppi displays are still super expensive. I got a 32" 4k monitor(~140ppi) at Costco for $250. A >200ppi display of the same size costs 20x that amount.
For web apps, spinning them into “installed” apps (doable in both Chrome and Safari now) is the move. This unclogs your tab bar, gets rid of the pointless persistent browser chrome, and gives you the benefit of OS task management capabilities.
You can add Shift to both Command-Tab and Command-` to move in the reverse direction.
32" 6K monitor from ASUS costs $1400, 27" 5K Dahua monitor is $500, it's not $250, but we are slowly getting there ...
Not bad! Thanks for pointing those out.
Man just give me a way to switch between only the two most recent windows using a keyboard shortcut (without requiring some janky 3rd party program). Windows-style alt-tab. It's not a big ask and would make the macOS experience go from "barely usable" to "perfectly fine."
Are you a gnome user?
Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss. Or well anything else, you are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux. There is the perfect one for everyone. At least if you use X11, wayland is still a turd.
I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box. You need a metric ton of third-party extensions for simple stuff like proper alt-tab support or custom shortcuts. An configuration is supper limited.
And it will get so much worse with the whole glasses ui thing.
> Linux Mint with Cinnamon is bliss.
This is one of my go-tos when I need a VM, so I’m familiar.
> I found the Mac Desktop absolutely unusable for any development work as it comes out of the box.
But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
This is the hyperbole that I can’t really take seriously. Calling it “absolutely unusable” just isn’t something I can take seriously.
I understand that some people like to customize their environments to the Nth degree and can’t live without their personal set of customizations, but that’s personal preferences. Calling other platforms “absolutely unusable” or “vastly inferior” is just an exaggeration when millions of devs use them just fine.
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing?
Your assumption that these Linux setups are "extremely customized" is wrong. Personally, I hate configuring or customizing much at all. The appeal of Linux is that there are distros that come configured out-of-the-box pretty much as I like it, whereas MacOS and especially Windows requires configuration and constant upkeep and maintenance. (MacOS doesn't even come with a decent terminal, for starters.)
For me, my main problem with MacOS is that it's full of looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong animations that you can not disable or remove. Disabling animations (or setting them to be <10ms long) is one of the few configurations I like to do. But this is not even an option on Apple's operating systems. It's like running through molasses in a dream-- it's so damnedly and artificially slow.
> But why are we comparing vanilla macOS to an extreme customized Linux setup as if they’re the same thing? Why one set of rules for one platform but those criteria are suspended for Linux, where we get to assume some specific set of perfectly configured everything?
My Linux Mint installation is actually barely customized. It absolutely works out of the box. I disabled a few animations and selected a different theme and added like three extra shortcuts but that is it. Nothing that would take more than ten minutes.
I was comparing the vanilla experience.
And yes, I should have specified that I am talking about my needs. I totally believe that the Mac Desktop might be better for the average user but that is no me.
Other OS’s handling of “alt-tab” does not make it de facto “proper”.
You are trying to use macOS like your other favorite OS(s). This is not how macOS has ever worked, and the macOS approach is more than fine for millions of people.
I doesn't matter if it is fine for millions of people if it isn't fine for me.
> You are absolutely spoiled for choice with Desktop Environments in Linux.
That is both a pro and a con. For someone offering tech support or writing documentation it's a pretty big negative.
> as it comes out of the box
This doesn’t seem like a fair way to evaluate MacOS given the effort involved in configuring a Linux installation
Depends how you configure it. If you like things like tiling window managers and keyboard driven computing, Linux is in a category of its own.
There are a dozen or more options for tiling systems and keyboard-driven computing on macOS. Personally, one of the reasons I use macOS over Linux is because I find it easier to create custom keyboard commands and shortcuts. It’s all doable on Linux, sure, but on macOS there are several apps that make it easy.
Desktop Macs do have fans so they're not completely silent, but if you were under the impression there aren't any then that reflects well on how good their tuning is. AFAIK the MacBook Air is the only passively cooled Mac.
I know that they have fans but I really can't hear them. Maaaybe when gaming but I would to have to really concentrate on that. And I am super sensitive to noise.
It is so sad that apparently no one else bothers to tune their fans properly. It is such a killer feature for me.
> The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world
Asking out of curiosity, why is this? What's the functionality you miss on Mac?
The one I have always missed is proper focus-follows-mouse support. The mac desktop always feels really clunky without that when working with multiple windows.
Most of it is there but you need a crap-load of third party extension and some even cost money.
Like proper alt-tab, better keyboard configuration, Finder is the worst file manager I have ever used, a classical task bar and so on.
You can manage but the defaults are really bad for power users.
Honestly Apple just needs to let me install a proper Desktop Environment like KDE on it. The unix base is decent, just give me more freedom.
To be fair KDE is also pretty wonky out of the box (basic stuff like turning numlock on boot is unnecessarily buggy or confusing).
you usually also need a bunch of extensions. And 50% of them are broken due to various if you try to use KDE builtin extension thing.
Personally, most of my problems with MacOS (and Apple's operating systems) would be fixed if it were faster. The OS is full of very lengthy animations that aren't necessary, such as when switching between desktops.
Looks like on Windows it possible to disable all animations, including switch desktop, but you have to press two buttons to switch.
I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.
When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?
I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.
There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.
It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.
Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years.
Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..
I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out.
First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill.
The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components.
To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price.
Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option.
Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway.
The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there).
The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$.
I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.
> if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail
If you're plugging and unplugging USB-C cables all the time, eventually the ports are going to fail, but we generally consider plugging things into USB-C acceptable.
The Framework expansion modules are just USB-C ports, but they're not subject to much twisting or bending when using the modules so they should last longer.
I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor.
I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.
i also want an arm laptop running linux with good hardware. hearing it a lot too. fingers crossed.
This! Would be an immediate buy from me.
My wife loves her (ancient) Surfacebook and is thinking of upgrading. Any comparability issues with the ARM chip?
No issues so far, almost 1 year in, but I don't use specialized software: only web browsers, Office suite, Obsidian, Dropbox, PowerToys, FileZilla, Putty, VLC, Notepad++, WSL and random .exe utilities. I've found the emulation to be pretty good, but avoid it if you plan to do any gaming.
I guess it's a bit on how various technologies are optimized within the system. My Steam Deck can hold quite some battery juice for a while, but i will never be more amazed than my original Nintendo DS, that still has lots of battery capacity even after years and years of neglect.
For my current laptops i have been ignoring the battery completely. I rather have max performance, so every energy saving thing gets disabled. Most of the time it's connected to power anyway.
"I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it."
That sounds like a plan!
I suppose that if I was distant from an outlet for a long enough time, the battery life would be great, but I'm rarely if ever. It's nice not to be tethered to a wire, but it's not bad really overall.
The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed.
On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.
The same points made about battery life with Apple Silicon in this blog post equally apply to Snapdragon Elite X laptops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMTJm3vmh0
What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?
If so, I seriously doubt that the lifetime pollution of a Framework laptop is better than an Apple Silicon Mac.
Macbooks tend to last a very long time. I used my Intel Macbook Air for 10 years. After that, I sold it and maybe it continued to get used by the second owner. While you can keep upgrading Framework laptops (parts require shipping/pollution to manufacture), I doubt it'll last a decade or someone wants to upgrade it for a decade to keep up.
Apple also has recycling programs and it seems to do quite well when it comes to using recycled materials. I doubt Framework is big enough to do these things as well as Apple.
Framework laptops are often more than doubled the price of similar spec'ed Windows laptops. They're also quite a bit more expensive than Apple laptops in the same class.
Framework is one of those things that is great for virtue signaling but doesn't make sense in real life.
Edit:
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
[0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo...
[1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...
I don't own a Framework (yet), as I don't believe its the right product for me at this stage. I can't afford to get caught out without battery when out and about.
What attracts me is:
• Easy (self) repairs, especially OEM battery replacements. If I could carry two - three replacements that could be hot swapped, like old times, that would be acceptable too.
• Easy upgrades of RAM and SSD. I had to buy a new MacBook due to it hanging frequently from RAM filling up, even though rest of it would've been fine for at least three more years.
• Ability to make it "your own". Its a minor thing, but a little whimsy is nice in life. I also like the idea of my main machine being a ship of Thesus that stays with me for a long time, and shows marks of age.
"Specs" really do not mean a lot for Laptops. Most laptops are seriously bad quality, and I have not had one laptop in the past 10 years that did not require a major repair before the warranty period expired. With most laptops, you are buying e-waste. I can't afford buying e-waste. I would rather buy a laptop I can keep for 5 years without having to scrap it, and with framework I could just replace whatever breaks.
And for me Mac is not an option as I'm not using their crappy OS and I don't want to have the forever struggle of running Linux on their proprietary hardware platform.
> Macbooks tend to last a very long time.
MacBooks had historically tons of design issues with keyboards and GPUs. Which I guess can happen, but the problem with Apple is that they never admin anything until someone drags them to court and the out of warranty repair is always extremely expensive, usually not worth it.
The battery replacement can also be extremely expensive, especially if you live in a country without any Apple Store. Battery replacement for M4 Air is like $340 in my country, which is insane for a $800 machine.
> What mission do you love from Framework? Is it environmental?
The fact that I can repair it, exchange every part, get every part, upgrade every part, and I never have to use a hairdryer or heat gun to do so.
Are you willing to pay 2x the price for a Framework and get a worse overall experience in exchange for repairability?
Keep in mind that the Framework spare parts are generally also pretty expensive.
I like Framework's aesthetics more than MacBook already, and like the little customisablity (i.e bezel, mismatched coloured parts etc). I can accept a lower quality screen (compared to MacBook), speakers and camera no problem.
I'm willing to pay higher than MacBook price for the above package due to superiority of Linux over MacOs and supporting this model in general. However, I draw a line in the sand at battery life, so Mac it is for me for the foreseeable future.
For me it's the repairable nature. Prior to the Framework 13 I had a bunch of Thinkpads until the enshittification by Lenovo in recent years.
I know Windows laptops are very finicky and unreliable. For example, loads of people complain that $3000 Razer laptops break after a few months.
I guess I'm mostly talking about Apple overall.
You're paying a lot more money for self-repairability. Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop. That's crazy.
Macs are tanks. Not a single issue with my 4 year old M1 Air. Even if there is an issue, I can still take it to an Apple Store to get it looked at.
> Frameworks are generally more expensive than Macs, sometimes 50% - 100% more expensive for a similar laptop.
Do you have an example? An 8tb m4 macbook pro runs over 7 grand; the comparable hx370 framework 13 is barely over 3 grand. I bought both within the last couple months and found the macs to be significantly more expensive in the segment i was looking at.
You can buy an M4 Air for $799 on sale frequently.[0] Meanwhile, a similar spec'ed Framework with a slower AMD CPU/GPU is $1,517.00.[1] So the repairability angle just doesn't seem worth it. If the Air breaks, just buy a new one.
Keep in mind that the M4 Air has a better display, significantly faster CPU, faster GPU, significantly more battery life, is fanless, better speakers, much better trackpad, and a thinner profile.
[0]https://www.macrumors.com/2025/08/27/200-off-every-m4-macboo...
[1]https://frame.work/products/laptop13-diy-amd-ai300/configura...
That can't possibly be true. I was recently considering my first ever Apple laptop but I would be paying a fortune to get RAM and storage anywhere close to offerings from any other vendor. And I've heard they're difficult or impossible to upgrade myself, so I can't even select a base model now and add more later.
How often have you needed to repair a MacBook?
The enhanced repairability is basically insurance in case of a fault. Compared to a MacBook, or insurance for a MacBook, this insurance is overpriced.
As for the environment, the power consumption + larger design with extra parts to make it repairable + how few people ever buy parts makes this a virtue signaling wash.
I’m not the OP but for me, with my mid-2015, I had the battery replaced once. This was used almost every work day until 2023. My M2 Pro MBP I then bought, never so far (as you would expect for its age) and it still feels brand new.
That's 8 years of being used daily and the only thing you had to replace was the battery. That seems like a super reliable machine.
In the 15 years I've known her, my wife has needed to repair each of her 3 MacBooks at least once (One of them twice).
In the same time, I've had to repair one Gigabyte laptop. The second Gigabyte that needed repair, I trashed and just stopped buying Gigabyte.
That's the problem with Apple. They're build quality isn't that great, but you don't have an alternative.
Were they they the butterfly era crappy Macbooks?
Funnily enough, I had to get my M1 Pro repaired on day 1 of receiving. It had a defect in the screen that caused a white horizontal line. I was livid!
> I am sure that the Apple Store just handed you another one to replace a DOA Macbook, though.
Actually no. Where I live there is no local Apple Store. I had to take it to an authorised repairer, and it was there for 1.5 weeks.
That’s called a shipping accident, from which Framework is hardly immune.
I am sure that the Apple Store just handed you another one to replace a DOA Macbook, though.
I have heard anecdotally that the Snapdragon arm window laptops have amazing battery life. I'd be interested in hearing from people who have used these as well as the Mx MacBooks.
> I haven’t measured it but I read that I should expect it to lose 3-4% in suspend every hour. Is that a joke?
That has to be a bug. I have a thinkpad with a Ryzen 7 6850U, running debian, and lose at most 3% per day.
As with all things, it’s all dependent upon the details. OS, Bios, chip, they all can have an impact on battery consumption while sleeping. The linked (from the post) Reddit thread has many suggestions on how to fix this, but for the author, I don’t think it was ever resolved. The author of that Reddit post was also shocked.
The reason why it works well for Apple is that they control everything. There are limited numbers of parts they have to support, so they can make sure it all works.
In the PC world, there are many… many variables, even from the same OEM. It’s a legitimately hard problem and manufacturers aren’t particularly motivated to get it to work better (particularly with Linux). In fact, at this moment, there’s another post on the front page that talks about this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45288440 . It is about debugging an ACPI bug that has existed for years.
I've been using the Core i7-1165G7 mainboard for the 13, which works well enough with a large amount of RAM and has mature OS support.
My Thinkpad P15 battery was also great after two weeks vacation, with Windows 11 Professional, and Intel CPU.
The difference is fundamental. A product where the hardware and software is built by the same entity will always work better in the long run. It all comes down to decades of iteration and low-level optimizations that aren't easy to do any other way. This is why you'll pry my Apple devices from my cold, dead hands. Even if a super magical alternative device manufacturer with the perfect open source OS appeared tomorrow they wouldn't be able to replicate the decades of compounding interest that have been invested into the Apple ecosystem. The value of that compound interest far outweighs any other concerns I might have about Apple devices, such as "lock in" or declining software quality (valid concerns, still worth bearing the cost). Apple devices are objectively and measurably better not just on metrics like battery life. Linux nerds like DHH and his heroic Omarchy effort are simply wasting their time because they hate Apple.
> Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life.
Not really, actually. ARM isn’t terribly more efficient to decode than x86, and both are converted into micro-operations that are internal to the CPU.
The real strength is Apple’s custom ARM cores; as evidenced by the failure of Qualcomm and MediaTek to make anything quite like it, even with the same manufacturing nodes.
I think as jeffbee said below it's not even the custom ARM cores, but rather Apple's ability to control not only the hardware but the software on-top of it. In a typical Windows machine you are dealing with your CPU and microcode made by AMD/Intel/Other, then the BIOS/Driver code written by your motherboard manufacturer, and your GPU from either the on-board, or dGPU from Intel/Nvidia/AMD and then Windows made by Microsoft. All of this leads to silly things like the ASUS ACPI driver bug [1] or Dell [2]. Apple does not suffer from this lack of control and communication, instead allowing tight integration.
[1]: https://github.com/Zephkek/Asus-ROG-Aml-Deep-Dive
[2]: https://triangulatedexistence.mataroa.blog/blog/i-uncovered-...
Qualcomm is getting there with the Snapdragon X Elite.
It's still significantly slower than the M4 but you can at least meaningfully compare them nowadays which is a strong come back from where they were when the M1 was introduced.
We are likely to see improvements now that Microsoft buys Arm chips for their Surface laptops. I guess it was hard to justify the investment before.
I don't think Framework will be able to compete on efficiency with their design philosophy.
The NVMe disk is swappable, which means it has its own controller which manages power management itself. I did my research to pick an efficient SSD and ended up with a Lexar NM790. It tops Tom's efficiency charts and comes in third place for lowest idle power consumption [0]. This is still ~0.8W at idle. On a 60Wh battery an idling drive alone will kill the battery in 3 days.
Now technically there is the APST (Autonomous Power State Transition) feature in the NVMe specification. Is there some lower APST power state that can get the power draw down? Potentially, but that is a feature well beyond the purview of any SSD reviews I have seen, so I don't know- does this drive have reliable and well-implemented APST state support? How does this interact with the platform-specific sleep state implementation, which presumably wakes the disk sometimes to do some Modern Standby features- how often is it spending time in that 0.8W state versus lower? This can vary between board rev or BIOS version certainly. Beyond the actual drive configuration and ACPI interaction, there is also kernel interaction. Do certain drives behave poorly with Linux? Etc etc.
On the RAM side of things, they are using DDR5 and not LPDDR5. There is a lower voltage on LPPDR5 which is a constant inefficiency, but also LPDDR5 has dynamic voltage scaling and dynamic frequency scaling. There is also technically some voltage drop across the SODIMM connector which you don't need to contend with when you solder RAM, which would be a constant source of loss, but I am not sure how significant that is.
Beyond this you have different behaviour for every model of RAM. This post on the Framework forum shows the user could get 7.82 days of suspend time with the HMCG66MEBSA092N DDR5-4800MHz 16GB kit whereas only 2.25 days with the CT2K48G56C46S5 DDR5-5600MHz 96GB kit [1]. Consider that there are effectively infinite combinations of memory people can run, and even inside a model series, vendors can swap their chip providers, etc. Which kits give the best battery endurance? I can't tell you.
Now someone could certainly embark on a long adventure to test different drives, RAM kits, and measure their performance, recommend tunables for the Linux kernel you want to set for each particular set of hardware, etc. But this is effectively what Apple is doing for you with the MacBook. They are choosing their memory supplier, their flash supplier, and integrating as much as possible into their SoC with presumably an entire team focused on extracting the most efficient behaviour out of both.
Consider this same thing extends to display behaviour (beyond VRR support, which I believe Framework has now, you also have local dimming behaviour to tune on the MBP), wireless behaviour, all sorts of embedded controllers that Apple can wrap inside the SoC that I probably wouldn't think of... I don't see how a modular system like Framework can achieve anything close to the idle efficiency of a MacBook.
[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/lexar-nm790-ssd-review/...
[1] https://community.frame.work/t/impact-of-ram-density-on-susp...
The ISA has nothing to do with the battery life. Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack. Framework doesn't control every level of the stack. Arguably they don't control any of it.
Yes, it's this. I also own an M4 mbp and an AMD framework 13. With both on maximum screen brightness, side by side, doing similar workloads, battery life isn't that much better on the M4. I think the difference maker is that the mac constantly decreases screen brightness when possible, turns the backlight completely off when there isn't any activity, heavily leverages power efficient scheduling and efficiency cores, no doubt turns off power to all peripherals whenever possible, and so on. And of course lid-closed suspend on a mac lasts indefinitely. Arch does none of these things and even on cohesive distros like Fedora there's only so much you can do in user land. Linux is designed for compatibility across a huge breadth of devices; darwin only has to support Mac hardware and can extract every ounce of power efficiency from deep hardware integration.
IIRC the low power states of M series chips generally dips down further than most x86 CPUs do, and the way both the SoC And OS are designed are for racing to idle and coalescing tasks to reduce wakeups. On the MBPs specially the screen can also drop down to 1hz so the GPU isn’t wasting cycles redrawing static content.
The result is that in more typical usage where the machine isn’t under a constant load, battery life is much better. When it’s sitting there idle displaying a web page it’s barely consuming any power at all, where most competing laptops at minimum are pulling at least 2-3x as much power between the CPU not being able to scale down that far and constantly getting woken to perform poorly scheduled tasks.
> Battery life is the result of getting details right at every level of the software stack
Exactly. Apple's way of doing things is about vertical integration of the stack, which is the polar opposite of how the PC market developed and largely still works.
The vertical integration approach (where you control all the layers beneath the customer facing product) has the benefit of allowing you to optimize that customer experience by tweaking things anywhere in the stack.
Power management in digital systems mostly comes down to being able to slow or turn off clocks when appropriate. Doing this well can be complicated, but you can tell that Apple has put a lot of energy into doing it.
The downside of the vertical integration approach is that components cannot be sourced or replaced with off-the-shelf components, as the interfaces are not really standard, they are tailor made for the use case.
For the Framework folks to pull off something like the M1's power sipping, they'd have to invest a lot of engineering time (a.k.a. money) and have strategic partnerships with hardware vendors and standards bodies to move the commodity chip market forward to support better power management.
The thing is, one of the strengths of the Framework is that the hardware is commodity, making their devices easy to repair. Also, any work that the Framework folks do to move things forward also benefit their competitors, which can shrink the potential reward for doing so.