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Framework Laptop 12 review

arstechnica.com

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Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#331

Post by throwaway63467 »

square_usual wrote: post #226
throwaway63467 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenovo X9 Aura is pretty great. 80 Wh battery which gives you 6-10 hours of usage, 15’’ 120 Hz 3k OLED screen, new 3 nm Intel CPUs. Only half as fast as my M4 but less than one third the price, with an upgradable SSD and a customer-replaceable battery. My only gripes are the soldered 32 GB of RAM and that they only put one USB C connector on each side, otherwise a tremendously good machine for that price. I think it…

What? You can get an M4 MacBook Air with 32 GB of RAM for $1400, and from googling the X9 Aura is the same price. How is that "less than one third the price"?

I have the MBP M4 Max with 48 GB and 2 TB drive, which is around 5.500 € here. That’s what I compare it to, it has around 40.000 points on Geekbench, the X9 around 20.000 and it was around 2.000 €. Not sure how the other M4 compare. And sure the MBP or the Air is of course the better machine if you want to run MacOS, for a Linux laptop the Aura is the best option now though.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#332

Post by throwaway63467 »

MBCook wrote: post #309
throwaway63467 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lenovo X9 Aura is pretty great. 80 Wh battery which gives you 6-10 hours of usage, 15’’ 120 Hz 3k OLED screen, new 3 nm Intel CPUs. Only half as fast as my M4 but less than one third the price, with an upgradable SSD and a customer-replaceable battery. My only gripes are the soldered 32 GB of RAM and that they only put one USB C connector on each side, otherwise a tremendously good machine for that price. I think it…

6-10 hours? That’s considered good in the PC world?

I guess. MBP is in the same ball park, it uses around 5-8 W when idle with the screen on, it’s just that the 16’’ model has a 100 Wh battery so naturally it lasts longer. On Windows the Lenovo apparently lasts as long as a MacBook but I use it on Linux where power management isn’t as well optimized, it idles at around 9 W.

I don’t get these comments in general, sure the MacBook is much better, and I use one as well. I still prefer native Linux on my machine sometimes and the Aura is probably the best Linux laptop I ever owned.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#333

Post by sandreas »

nucleardog wrote: post #130

> A good laptop, but not a good value Where "value" is purely monetary, I think that pretty succinctly sums up my experience/views on the Framework product line. They make good laptops, but you can generally get more for fewer dollars. If you're shopping on price, you can probably just skip right over their entire product line. That doesn't mean that their offering doesn't have value. It has value has a vote with you…

The monetary value comes in the long term (5+ years).

Other Brands Notebooks are not upgradable, not repairable and the most frustrating part are the batteries - which framework offers an original replacement for.

"Modern" office notebooks don't have to be that powerful. I'm still using a T480s which will only render unusable as soon as the battery dies with no I think buying a framework is an investment for people planning to keep the device for 5+ years and/or want to support the right to repair movement.

I'm really suprised and impressed they managed to ship such a great device and keep their promises for so long even if it is not the besteht bang for the buck (short term). Keep up the great work.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#334

Post by kevthecoder »

moffkalast wrote: post #118
WillAdams wrote: post #6

As much as I like the ideals Framework is espousing, I'm seriously considering just making a folding shell for a Raspberry Pi 5 (maybe Pi 500) and a second gen Wacom One 13 (stylus w/ touch screen) and a battery.

Just saw a kickstarter for something like that recently, a laptop built around a CM 5 with even GPIO broken out. Argon 40 something.

Probably this one (not launched yet) https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/argonforty/upton-one-th...

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#335

Post by krior »

ItCouldBeWorse wrote: post #137

> A good laptop, but not a good value One of my mentors had the great sentence: "I dont buy laptops- they suck, because they are tailored to transport. I buy desktops- and connect them via internet to flat transportable terminals. And desktops can be upgraded, merged, reused and send to the closet as server at the EOL-" And he was kind of right. For almost all purposes, even for gaming in a way- a remote desktop is k…

Maybe you live somewhere with crazy-stable, ultra-low-latency internet covering every little nook and cranny you could ever care to find yourself in, but I doubt this is the case for most of the world. Until we realize this utopia globally a remote desktop setup is simply not flexible enough.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#336

Post by leptons »

kcb wrote: post #294
leptons wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple M-series laptops get a performance boost by putting the RAM inside the CPU, which makes it completely impossible to upgrade RAM. That is the antithesis of what Framework is doing. Apple are the kings of disposable hardware that costs way more than the competition for no good reason. You want 32GB? You're going to pay a lot for it . Oh, now you need 64GB? Too bad, throw out that old laptop and get a new one.

RAM is on the package not inside the CPU. Maybe possibly some performance boost from that but the benefit is mainly improved packaging.

The fact is that the CPU and the RAM are in the same package. Yes, essentially the RAM is on the CPU for the purpose of this conversation about upgradeability. You cannot upgrade the RAM in any M-series Apple computer, not even desktops.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#337

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mmcnl wrote: post #191
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The per-core efficiency of Apple and AMD CPUs on the same process node is pretty much identical. This has become harder to directly compare because they're now using alternate process nodes from one another, but have a look at this chart for example: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cpu_performance_... What do we see at the top of this chart? TSMC 3nm (M3/M4), followed by TSMC 4nm (Ryzen 7000U/8000U), TSMC…

You're linking to a multi-core benchmark. The story is a lot more in favor of Apple if you look at single-core efficiency, Apple is roughly 2-3x more efficient: https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-Lunar-Lake-CPU-analysis-... And this benchmark doesn't even include M4, which is even more efficient.

> The story is a lot more in favor of Apple if you look at single-core efficiency

Your link is comparing the M3 against AMD chips with higher TDPs. Higher TDPs tank "single-core efficiency" because power consumption is non-linear with clock speed. Give a core near its limit three times the power budget and you're basically dividing the single-core efficiency by three because you burn three times more power and barely improve single-thread performance at all, and then that's exactly what you see there.

To have a useful comparison you have to compare the efficiency of CPUs when they're set to use the same amount of power.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#338

Post by AnthonyMouse »

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #171
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the chip which determines whether it's fanless. Basically every modern chip supports power capping and then the power cap is determined by how much heat the machine can dissipate. What that really determines is multi-thread performance. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of one core? No problem. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of all the cores? For that you have to lower the clock speed…

> The number of people who pick the second option given that trade off is so small that hardly anybody even bothers to offer it. The number of manufacturers or the number of people? Apple was on the path to laptop irrelevancy before the M series, it doesn't seem clear to me at all that people don't care about noise and heat along with performance.

People generally have a priority between noise and heat vs. performance. If you don't do compute-heavy stuff then you might as well have something quiet. If you do, i.e. you're always waiting on the machine, how many of those people want to sacrifice a third of their performance to avoid having a fan?

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#339

Post by AnthonyMouse »

ndiddy wrote: post #146
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't the chip which determines whether it's fanless. Basically every modern chip supports power capping and then the power cap is determined by how much heat the machine can dissipate. What that really determines is multi-thread performance. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of one core? No problem. Fanless laptop that can dissipate the power of all the cores? For that you have to lower the clock speed…

If someone besides Apple made a fanless laptop that had competitive performance with Apple's offerings (i.e. not a $200 Chromebook with a Celeron or a cast-off 5 year old smartphone CPU), I'd absolutely buy one. I got excited when the Qualcomm Snapdragon X was being discussed pre-launch, but then it came out with performance worse than the original M1 and it turned out that Qualcomm lied about giving it first-class L…

I mean, you could just buy something that allows you to configure the TDP in software and then set it low enough that the fan doesn't run. You'd be sacrificing a non-trivial amount of multi-thread performance, but that's what the fanless Macbooks are doing anyway.

Re: Framework Laptop 12 review

#340

Post by leptons »

eddythompson80 wrote: post #320
leptons wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Apple M-series laptops get a performance boost by putting the RAM inside the CPU, which makes it completely impossible to upgrade RAM. That is the antithesis of what Framework is doing. Apple are the kings of disposable hardware that costs way more than the competition for no good reason. You want 32GB? You're going to pay a lot for it . Oh, now you need 64GB? Too bad, throw out that old laptop and get a new one.

There is a lot you can fault Apple for, but we're literally talking about a 4 year old CPU that is still unmatched by their competition. People often argue "how much is Apple ahead of the competition" if at all, right? Guessing you're in the "not at all, it's all PR bullshit" camp, which is fine. This is the one undisputed example though where we can put a definitive number on it. So far Apple is 4 years ahead of the…

>a 4 year old CPU that is still unmatched by their competition

It isn't all that high performance compared to other laptops, but sure.. fanless and low power it has. I just would rather plug in a laptop to get my workload done in 1/2 of the time it would take on an M1 laptop.

The Dell laptop we got runs at 55W (Intel Core i9-13900HX) and is faster than the M1 Ultra 20-core at 60 Watts, which you can't even get in a laptop format. The benchmarks don't lie. That intel CPU is as fast as the fastest M4 16-core CPU, and the M4 runs at 90W (so far as I can tell from a google search).

>Guessing you're in the "not at all, it's all PR bullshit" camp, which is fine.

I'm guessing you're in the "reality distortion field" camp. Nevermind, I know you are.

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