Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Framework Laptop 12 review

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 398 posts

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#51

Post by criddell »

perching_aix wrote: post #41
chrismorgan wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The baseline of 96ppi is nominal only. Form factor and intended distance from screen matters a lot. In the laptop form factor, you’re aiming for more like 110–125 as 1×. Apple laptops range from 221–254ppi as 2×. 186ppi is designed for 1.5×, an uncomfortable space that makes perfection difficult-to-impossible, yet seems to have become unreasonably popular, given how poorly everything but Windows tends to handle it. (…

There's PPI and then there's PPD. If they want more PPD (which is what's field of view and thus viewing distance and display size dependent), that's fine, but then it's not PPI they should be complaining about. This might sound like a nitpick but I really don't mean it to be. These are proper well defined concepts and terms, so let's use them.

I wasn't thinking about the difference between PPI and PPD, so thanks for the clarification.

The bottom line is that I work with text (source code) all day long and I would rather read from a display with laser printer quality than one where I can see the pixels like an old dot matrix printer. Some displays are getting close to 300 DPI which is like a laser printer from 35 years ago.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#52

Post by theodric »

> "A sturdy, thoughtful, cute design that just can't compete in its price range."

People will pay untold thousands for a Mac, but God forbid when a PC manufacturer charges more than $599 for a laptop. If you're whining about the price, Framework isn't made for you. Go buy that Acer that you really want. The Framework is Sam Vimes' expensive boots that are made to last[1], and I've happily paid in full to get a pair.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#53

Post by lukan »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #16
criddell wrote: post #14

Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1? I get that Framework focuses on making repairable machines, but does that prevent them from making a fanless, hi dpi, good performing, long battery life machine? I wouldn’t expect parity with an M4 machine, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think they should be competitive with the much older M1. I…

Competitive along which lines? Performance, yes, impossible. Battery life? Yes, impossible. Anything else? Definitely!

Hm, aside from it working reliable, performance and battery are my top priority, though.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#54

Post by coder543 »

hu3 wrote: post #24
criddell wrote: post #14

Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1? I get that Framework focuses on making repairable machines, but does that prevent them from making a fanless, hi dpi, good performing, long battery life machine? I wouldn’t expect parity with an M4 machine, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think they should be competitive with the much older M1. I…

I'm confused. The article shows a few charts where a Framework laptop is faster than M4 Air both in single and multicore CPU benchmarks. Their office suite benchmarks puts it at almost 10 hour battery. See Framework 13 Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. To me, being able to run native Linux alone is worth its weight in gold, even if it was slower.

> The article shows a few charts where a Framework laptop is faster than M4 Air both in single and multicore CPU benchmarks.

Every single chart in the article showed the M4 MacBook Air beating the Framework 12 by a large margin.

I don't know what charts you were looking at.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#55

Post by username223 »

I wish them the best, but if they can't compete with a MacBook Air on price despite Apple's huge profit margins, then maybe it's just not meant to be. People used to talk about paying the "Apple tax," but how many people are willing to pay the "Linux tax?" Mac OS is a similar Unix with the usual tools, and you can rent a VPS if you need Linux on an x86 sometimes. An MBA with an M4 will last 5+ years with a battery swap, and still probably perform better than whatever Framework releases in 2030.

I guess I'm not the target customer for this. I can see myself tinkering with a desktop, but I'd rather just have a laptop that runs fast and long enough, and stands up to abuse for 3-5 years.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#56

Post by nico_h »

hu3 wrote: post #24
criddell wrote: post #14

Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1? I get that Framework focuses on making repairable machines, but does that prevent them from making a fanless, hi dpi, good performing, long battery life machine? I wouldn’t expect parity with an M4 machine, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think they should be competitive with the much older M1. I…

I'm confused. The article shows a few charts where a Framework laptop is faster than M4 Air both in single and multicore CPU benchmarks. Their office suite benchmarks puts it at almost 10 hour battery. See Framework 13 Ryzen AI 9 HX 370. To me, being able to run native Linux alone is worth its weight in gold, even if it was slower.

You may have confused the lower/higher is better? I think the Air is missing from a few charts though.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#57

Post by AlotOfReading »

devmor wrote: post #28
paddy_m wrote: post #27

What do you all use for a modern web development machine. 16GB of ram is no longer enough, I will soon upgrade to a new MBA with 32GB, but I still fear that won't be enough. I was looking at the latest framework and you can get it with 96GB of ram for $2k, that's $3600-$3800 for a mac and it's a much larger mac than I want. A quick scan of Dell and Lenovo non workstation class laptops didn't show any with more than 3…

If you need an 8gb docker image as part of your local web development stack, that’s a toolchain problem.

One of our vendors publishes a 70GB docker image as their SDK. It's awful.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#58

Post by perching_aix »

criddell wrote: post #51
perching_aix wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's PPI and then there's PPD. If they want more PPD (which is what's field of view and thus viewing distance and display size dependent), that's fine, but then it's not PPI they should be complaining about. This might sound like a nitpick but I really don't mean it to be. These are proper well defined concepts and terms, so let's use them.

I wasn't thinking about the difference between PPI and PPD, so thanks for the clarification. The bottom line is that I work with text (source code) all day long and I would rather read from a display with laser printer quality than one where I can see the pixels like an old dot matrix printer. Some displays are getting close to 300 DPI which is like a laser printer from 35 years ago.

I can definitely appreciate that. I just think it's important that people argue the right thing. It provides insight to the variables and mechanisms at play, and avoids people falsely giving rhetorical checkmates to each other, like I kind of did to you.

The brief version is that if someone has a screen real estate concern, they need to look for the PPI, but if they have a visual quality concern, they need to look for the PPD.

Maybe it will be elucidating if I describe a scenario where you will have low PPI but high PPD at the same time.

Consider a 48" 4K TV (where 4K is really just UHD, so 3840x2160). Such a display will have 91.79 PPI of pixel density, which is below even standard PPI (that being 96 PPI, as mentioned).

Despite this, the visual quality will be generally excellent: at the fairly typical and widely recommended 40° degree horizontal field of view, you're looking at 3840 / 40 = 96 PPD, well in excess of the original Retina standard (60 PPD), which is really just the 20/20 visual acuity measure. Hope this is insightful.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#59

Post by acdha »

paddy_m wrote: post #27

What do you all use for a modern web development machine. 16GB of ram is no longer enough, I will soon upgrade to a new MBA with 32GB, but I still fear that won't be enough. I was looking at the latest framework and you can get it with 96GB of ram for $2k, that's $3600-$3800 for a mac and it's a much larger mac than I want. A quick scan of Dell and Lenovo non workstation class laptops didn't show any with more than 3…

Firefox takes less than half a GB base plus your usage, so you might want to see which extensions are bloating it up.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#60

Post by encom »

dale_huevo wrote: post #35
criddell wrote: post #14

Is it unreasonable to think Framework should be able to make a laptop competitive with the 5 years old MacBook Air M1? I get that Framework focuses on making repairable machines, but does that prevent them from making a fanless, hi dpi, good performing, long battery life machine? I wouldn’t expect parity with an M4 machine, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think they should be competitive with the much older M1. I…

Yes. "Repairable" is a bit of a fool's errand. It really hinges on availability of spare parts, supply chain, etc. They will never sell enough of this niche product to nerds to make that a long-term reality. An old MBP is far more repairable because so many were made there will never be a shortage of parts on eBay. While an emphasis on repairability is noble, the false prophet of brick-like pluggable USB modules ain'…

FrameWork is not openly hostile towards right-to-repair, and do not actively sabotage repair efforts. Try calling Apple and ask for spare parts or circuit diagrams. Anything you find is either leaked, cloned/copied or trash-picked. It barely qualifies as spare parts.
Post reply on HN