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It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#101

Post by benoau »

As nice as Apple's hardware is it's all undermined by who they are as a company, intentionally limiting their devices more and more while they relentlessly argue in courts and to regulators that we owe them more and more for using our devices.

Rosetta 2's retirement announcement was when I realized I won't buy another Mac, I'm not interested in a computer that is preoccupied with stopping me from running software. Work can buy them for me but I won't spend my money on a platform like that anymore.

Depending on how their Supreme Court argument goes in a few weeks I will stop buying an iPhone too, if they establish the precedent that any method of paying for Netflix deserves a $5/month fee then they will leverage that to extract the same fee everywhere else.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#102

Post by curt15 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #70

What Framework is trying to do feels like something that would've made more sense 10 years ago. And the reason for that is b/c of Moore's Law approaching its end. The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a…

> There are also latency and bandwidth benefits how they setup their RAM just from pure physics

What sort of physics? Dedicated GPUs achieve massive memory bandwidth without needing to put all of their memory on-die.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#103

Post by Aurornis »

tracker1 wrote: post #85
Aurornis wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you're not willing to pay a 20% premium for upgradability/fixability, then you don't _really_ want it. And that's fine! $799 versus $499 is a 60% premium. The best case numbers are buying used RAM and SSD for the Framework like Jeff did in the article ($749 total, if you can find the RAM at those prices) and comparing against the non-EDU MacBook Neo at $599. That's still a 25% premium.

Now pretend you can't get the student discount and actually want the extended warranty/applecare and compare the final result. Now pretend you want to bump up to 16gb of ram so you can run a VM.

> Now pretend you can't get the student discount

Okay it's $599 vs $799 now. 33% premium.

> and actually want the extended warranty/applecare

The Framework warranty is only 1 year, same as the MacBook Neo.

If you add AppleCare+ to the MacBook Neo you could get a 3-year warranty laptop for $739 that performs better than the $799 Framework 12

> Now pretend you want to bump up to 16gb of ram so you can run a VM.

I don't think the students shopping for a MacBook Neo are going to be heavy VM users on their little laptop, but if I do this on their website the price bumps to $1049

$1049 is within $50 of a MacBook Air with 16GB of RAM and much better CPU, display, build quality, and battery life.

So I still don't see the value, sorry.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#104

Post by AshamedCaptain »

akkartik wrote: post #66
SoftTalker wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't watch the video but isn't the main selling point of the Framework line (from their website) "Designed for easy customization, upgrades, and repairs." I would imagine the Mac Neo is a sealed unit that you use as-is until it's e-waste.

It's actually not bad. The rhetoric has had an effect over the years. https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-r...

It's actually not bad? "The most repairable MacBook in years" means practically nothing. And for someone who might be comparing with a Framework, it's probably an insult.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#105

Post by Zak »

deng wrote: post #82

Well, if Apple killed it, Lenovo killed it even more. I recently was looking for a laptop for a student. The Lenovo E14 Gen7 is 800 Euros here in Germany (where prices are always higher, the MacBook Neo is 700 Euros), it has 16GB of RAM, 1TB SSD, a 2.8k IPS display, a Intel Ultra5 12core CPU, and it has a repairability score of 9/10 from ifixit. Framework doesn't even come close to that package.

Framework is definitely premium-priced, but I don't think most people are cross-shopping the Framework 12 (a 12" convertible tablet) and the Thinkpad E14 (a 14" dedicated laptop).

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#106

Post by Dylan16807 »

LarsDu88 wrote: post #70

What Framework is trying to do feels like something that would've made more sense 10 years ago. And the reason for that is b/c of Moore's Law approaching its end. The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a…

> The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a major advantage over competitors.

Lots of laptops have integrated graphics. And many recent CPUs have strong integrated graphics. They're not doing anything special there. I don't understand why that gets so much attention.

The special thing they do is having very wide bandwidth on the higher end models, to a CPU with integrated graphics. That doesn't affect the Neo though.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#107

Post by AshamedCaptain »

46493168 wrote: post #79
petermcneeley wrote: post #71

Isnt the reason to by a Framework (or similar) because you would not want to be part of Apple's ecosystem? Why would benchmarks even matter here?

Framework needs an audience bigger than that because mostly people don't think in terms of ecosystem, they think in terms of 'does it do what I want for a cost I want to pay' and Apple wins on this.

This is why no one buys Windows laptops I guess.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#108

Post by rjrjrjrj »

SoftTalker wrote: post #64
throwaway2037 wrote: post #2

This is a brutal (but polite -- classic US Midwestern Geerling 'kill them with kindness'!) side-by-side comparison. My heart goes out to the Framework Computer team. Any team trying to compete in this product space against the surprise from Mac Neo must feel crushed. That said, I am still very optimistic for Framework Computer. It seems like nerds are going wild for them.

I didn't watch the video but isn't the main selling point of the Framework line (from their website) "Designed for easy customization, upgrades, and repairs." I would imagine the Mac Neo is a sealed unit that you use as-is until it's e-waste.

You will be able to drop an old Neo off at an Apple store and they'll recycle it. Same as with most of their other products.

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#109

Post by borgel »

bhouston wrote: post #86
LarsDu88 wrote: post #70

What Framework is trying to do feels like something that would've made more sense 10 years ago. And the reason for that is b/c of Moore's Law approaching its end. The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a…

> CPU, GPU, and even DRAM sitting on the same "die" This is actually great. The laptop body stays the same and you swap out a small mini circuit board that has the CPU + GPU + DRAM on it. This is the point of the Framework laptops. They are just unfortunately stuck with non-Apple parts and thus are slow / inefficient. Maybe Qualcomm can make a motherboard for Framework high end laptops with their Snapdragon X2 Elite…

Yeah, I think this is the right idea (or the most optimistic path towards M-series power/performance). If you wanted something fully/aggressively open you could do something like build a mainboard compatible with one of MNT's fully open SOMs like [1].

[1] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform-rcore-rk3588-proc...

Re: It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12

#110

Post by LarsDu88 »

bigyabai wrote: post #92
LarsDu88 wrote: post #70

What Framework is trying to do feels like something that would've made more sense 10 years ago. And the reason for that is b/c of Moore's Law approaching its end. The way to manufacture more efficient compute now is do things like put DRAM closer to the chip and even closer integration between CPU and GPU. The fact that Apple can co-design their silicon such that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a…

> that the CPU and GPU can pull from the same pooled RAM is a major advantage over competitors It can be an advantage, it also has downsides though. LPDDR5 is fairly slow as far as GPU memory goes, and on Apple Silicon it splits the bandwidth across the entire chipset. Many recent Macbooks have dGPU-tier hardware constrained by Wintel-laptop memory bandwidth. And if Apple uses DDR5, why not CAMM? If Apple uses NVMe,…

Right now, at this point in time, for applications like local AI and certain types of gaming, I would argue for most people having more VRAM is more useful than having faster VRAM. I personally now do more AI stuff and gaming on my M5 mac with its 24 GB shared (300 GB/s) RAM pool than my 12 GB 5070 Ti (900 GB/s).

Apple still lives in its walled garden and defends it vociferously, but I would argue they have made the correct design tradeoffs for their business.

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