Could you imagine waking up to see a drone that you brought into your house, hovering over you, watching you sleep? 
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From start to finish, I thought it was a satirical spoof video. And then I went to the YT channel andā¦ Hot Jesus on a spit, itās the real thing. And the idiots in the comments actually seem to want this.
Iām underwhelmed by humanity.
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Iāve been meaning to do a little write-up for a bit now, but Iāve been caught up with school. I posted back in May, and later in July about the Framework laptop.
I purchased it as my new school laptop, after my old one decided to die on me. Thankfully, I got a hefty COVID grant through my college which managed to cover it.
People seemed interested in it, so I thought Iād leave a brief review. I got mine a few weeks ago, and Iāve had 0 real problems with it. Assembly was very quick. I got the DIY version, so I had to install my own RAM, SSD, and wifi card. I just followed the online guide (laid out similar to an iFixit guide), and I had it running in less than 10 minutes.
My version is the i7-1165G7 model, and I installed 32GB of DDR4-3600 and a 500GB Samsung 980 NVMe SSD. I often run VMs, as well as doing a lot of data processing, so 32GB of RAM made sense. Itās also nice to have a ramdisk for SDR uses.
Pros:
- Somewhat official linux support
- The fit and finish is very good, IMO comparable to a Macbook. It feels very solid, with very little flex.
- The trackpad is quite good, the best non-Mac trackpad Iāve used. Two and three finger gestures work great.
- I love the 3:2 screen, fantastic for getting work done
- The HiDPI screen looks fantastic
- The keyboard is excellent, one of the best laptop keyboards Iāve used.
- The expansion cards are fantastic, and itās annoying now for me to use any laptop without modular ports. I normally keep it stocked up with mostly type-C ports, but if I know Iām going somewhere where Iāll need a type-A, I can just pop it in. Charging on either side is nice, too.
- The hardware cut-off switches for the mic and camera are excellent, and I wish every laptop had them. No more shitty sliding covers.
- The power button is a fingerprint reader, and it works with fprintd (thanks to upstream patches by Framework)
- They werenāt kidding about repairability. It takes me less than 5 minutes to remove the display. Thatās unheard of in modern laptops. The magnets instead of clips are excellent.
- The Xe graphics are pretty good, and can run most games just fine. Minecraft, Factorio, Stardew Valley, all run great.
Cons:
- The screen is glossy, which I donāt normally prefer. Itās not too bad, but on a sunny day it could be annoying.
- The battery life is poor, generally 5-6 hours. Thereās some standby issues in linux, but fixes are being actively developed by the Framework team, and theyāve been trying to keep everyone in the loop. Thankfully, since it charges with USB-PD, I can keep a powerbank in my bag.
Also, the storage expansion cards are great for dual-booting. Windows wasnāt a fan of it, but I was able to use Rufus to turn the expansion card into a Windows-to-go instance, and itās worked flawlessly since. Now, I can keep a Windows expansion card in my bag, and pop it in if I ever need it.
With the exception of battery life, IMO itās likely one of the best 13.5" laptops a tinkerer could buy today. Well, I say today, thanks to the batch system, itāll take a while.
Unrelated side-note: The PineTime has gotten a lot better. The update released today seems to have fixed most of the BLE connection issues.
EDIT: Iāll also tag @TheCyberSystem. Iām not sure if theyāve gotten theirs yet, figured they might be interested in seeing my thoughts.
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Thanks for the writeup. How well does it keep cool under heavy workloads or does it do a lot of thermal throttling? Does the display have good color and contrast? and how does the keyboard feel?
Iāve been considering getting one for both the vision of the company and the fact I may need a computer that is more on-the-go capable then my current 10 year old dell with a mostly dead battery.
I havenāt noticed it thermal throttling too badly. Itās got a fan thatāll occasionally kick on during high loads, but otherwise it seems to perform decently thermally. When I play games on it, it will get a touch warm on the outer casing, but I donāt notice significant slowdown.
I went ahead and did a stress test on Linux, it looks like at 100% load (on all cores) for a few minutes, it tends to hang around 3.2 or 3.3GHz with the fan going at a reasonable volume. For momentary boosts of ~10-20 seconds, it does boost to ~4.2GHz. This test would be a worst case scenario though, and unlikely in real-world workflows.
Iāll also note that Iāve installed a CPU governor service to help with battery life though, so it only reaches those speeds for me while plugged in. This is just personal preference, you can configure it however you want. For me, even with the CPU heavily governed, it still performs perfectly well.
Iād say the display is all-around excellent. Couldnāt have asked for more from it. Colors are great, contrast is good, and brightness is decent. I havenāt tried it outside though, not sure if itās bright enough to overcome that.
The 2256x1504 resolution is great too, although I need 150% scaling for it to feel comfortable.
It feels very nice. Very little deck flex, and a good amount of travel. It reminds me of the ~2012 era Macbook keyboards, before the butterfly switches.
IMO it feels better than the newer Thinkpad keyboards, at least compared to my T450s. The layout is nice as well. The only issue I run into is pressing FN by accident instead of control. However, theyāve even enabled a BIOS option to swap those two keys, if I wasnāt able to get used to it (almost used to now though).
The keyboard backlighting is nice too, but nothing to write home about. Looks similar to most backlit keyboards nowadays.
Excellent. Thanks for answering my questions. I will most certainly be purchasing one in the near future.
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Iām so glad to see that the frame work is catching on
I sadly didnāt find out about them till I dropped all my laptop savings on an asus scar 15
I was very interested to read all that. Love the pros you mentioned, and the cons we already knew about. Out of curiousity what powerbank are you using?
We desperately want to support framework in what they are doing and if we could add our drop to the bucket then we would with like a small donation or something. We donāt have the money for something like this just right now, and weād be looking at more of a desktop replacement. For our usage we cannot go without a lot of NVIDIAās features, especially NVENC. Everything else is amazing about the laptop, but we absolutely have to have an NVIDIA gpu in the chassis rather than eGPU, and a minimum of 15" screen with an equally scaled-up keyboard for our massive hands. Until then itās just not really workable for us.
Glad itās working great for you, though! Weāre just waiting until they have larger sizes and dGPU options!
~ Jamie
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I really like the idea of the framework laptop, but I donāt know if I would replace my current laptop with one. In the future if it were slightly thinner and had better battery life Iād definitely consider it though.
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I just filled out a 15 page questionnaire at the hospital, full of really stupid multiple-choice intimate ālifestyleā questions. One of the questions was āDid you have remunerated sex recently?ā I was so bored with the whole thing I replied āNo, I did it for free.ā The nurse gave me that reproachful look. No sense of humorā¦
I hate pretty much any questionnaire because they almost always ask questions that are badly worded at some point, or they are making assumptions about ānormalā.
I frequently have a stuffy nose, and can be anosmic (it varies) so at times I have no sense of smell. Being asked do I have these symptoms during lockdown is pointless as in my case it may not be a sign of Covid, but that is not what they ask in their screening questions.
I also have a tendency to answer either/or questions with a yes/no response.
Have you moved or are you still at 1234 street lane? Yes.
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Badly worded is right. It was questions like "Have you ever performed anal sex? YES / NO / I DONāT KNOW. I meanā¦ How the hell can you not know?
As for normal, one of the questions was āHave you had sex with another man?ā - again same thing: YES / NO / I DONāT KNOW. I thought the same thing. But then I thoughtā¦ yeah, in that case, dunno might apply.
And then I hoped they didnāt give the same questionnaire to women, because then that question wouldnāt make any sense - at least for the purpose of rooting out risky homosexual behavior I suppose.
I feel that. I was misdiagnosed with severe depression for about 30 seconds because of some disorder or something that affects my appetite, along with some other entirely unrelated factors that influenced a test I had to take. Itās pretty amusing honestly. You could see the very abrupt shift in body language and tone when they were explaining to me that, out of nowhere and unbeknownst to me, I had suddenly developed depression.
I believe itās fairly common for doctors to diagnose you with some sort of mental disorder when you have some uncommon physical disorder.
My nephew for instance seemed to walk like a duck when he was a kid. My sister was really worried and went to several doctors, who declared he was ābeing a difficult childā on purpose or some such. But she didnāt give up. Eventually one of them took it seriously, ordered a scanner, and they found a huge angioma in his brain about to burst. He had to be rushed to a hospital in Argentina - the only place where they had the skills to operate on him back in the 80ās.
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Iām pretty sure I have diagnosed myself with severe depressionā¦
Later I realized, it was less depression, and more the fact I was surrounded by assholes
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Lemme just turn this knob a littleā¦
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More assholes or more depression?
I think Iām good on both
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I totally love the āI donāt knowā choice. I mean, hey, things can happen! And alsoā¦ do they mean active or passive? And why on earth does a doc want to know such things, unless you have problems that might directly be related to anal sexā¦?
I am always a bit angry about that - same thing with not being allowed to donate blood (at least in Germany) unless youāve not had homosexual sex for twelve months. This just reinforces the opinion that STDs are just a thing for homosexualsā¦ and that might be dangerous.
Funny enough, they donāt care if you, as a woman, had sex with another woman recently. Nope, STDs are just a thing for men! 
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