I've posted this about a year ago on another Framework thread. I see a lot of questions from people interested in FW laptops, so I thought my experience may help understand the good and bad.
I bought a Framework 13" in 2022, Intel 13th gen with 32GB ram (probably not as stupid as expensive as it is now) and 1TB drive.
It has good intentions but falls short. I would say overall it is a mediocre laptop in terms of quality.
Will it last longer than any other laptop? I would think so, as it has a strong story of available parts and upgrades. Similarly I believe it would last longer than any other laptop, since you can essentially do a Ship of Theseus with it.
Pain points:
- display hinge problem, picking up the laptop would make the screen lie flat 180 degrees, which is really annoying - this has been fixed in newer versions of framework, but to get a new hinge kit costs $39 AUD plus $30 AUD in shipping, so I'm not willing to make that purchase due to the ridiculous shipping price,
- the modular ports are nice, but I'd rather just have fixed ports and more of them, of course that'd obstruct the repair/modularity story,
- sometimes the modular ports do not work after resuming from a hibernate, I have to eject and reseat it,
- the display is okay, I notice mine has a small granular line of off coloured pixels - i don't think this is due to any physical damage but rather a defect in the screen as I've never had this kind of issue with any other laptop and I've handled the framework fairly carefully; but this line of off coloured pixels is very faint and virtually unnoticeable unless using very dark colours, so it's not a huge deal as I make it out to be,
- the keyboard works great, but I was hoping for an upgrade to something along the lines of an apple style layout with half height inverted-t arrow keys and fn/ctrl swapped; the idea of a marketplace for custom parts never really eventuated save a few niche things like RISC V,
- Battery life of about 3-4 hours of very average usage,
- Speakers are trash.
The webcam / mic are good enough.
I run Linux on it, and seems to run pretty stable.
I needed this laptop because I needed 32GB of ram for compile jobs (c++ programmers on large projects knows such pain). I have since got a macbook pro 16" with >32GB of ram and it can compile what I need using Rosetta 2 for Linux (so amd64 compiles). Since my mac can now do everything I need, I haven't really touched my Framework; I just keep it spare when I need a bare metal x86-64 in a pinch. I loathe the idea of having to use it over a mac laptop.
The good news is since my post a year ago, Apple has since released the m4 chips which allow the Macbook Air range to drive up to two external displays using thunderbolt.