I know Framework somewhat have their hands tied by modularity, but for the 13 I think the next thing they need to focus on more than anything is battery life. At this point it’s not just MacBooks that greatly outperform the FW13 on that front, but also several competing x86 laptops. For the price it’s difficult to justify taking such a steep hit, even with repairability factored in.
I guess this depends on how much you value repairability. To me it makes the difference between having a laptop or a desktop. A non-repairable laptop is inherently unreliable as you must return it to the manufacturer for any repairs and are without a computer for that time. That makes traditional, non-repairable, laptops something you get for mobility in addition to your desktop. Not only does this increase costs significantly but also that you need to worry about syncing when moving between the two.
Value of repairability depends on how often things break and how accessible shops are. In my case it’s pretty unusual, and I’m not often far from an Apple store.
It also depends on how much one values the qualities inherent to laptops. To me, a battery that burns through quickly is a major ding to its portability and extra overhead (needing to find outlets to sit near, having to carry a quick charging brick, etc) that I’d rather not deal with.
I think there’s probably a happy medium to be found in this situation. Power consumption could be reduced by switching RAM away from DIMM slots and over to CAMM, allowing usage of efficient LPDDR modules for example, and they could also offer an ultra-low-power soldered RAM mainboard option for those willing to trade off a little bit of repairability for battery life (I’d bet most people will never bump up their RAM before upgrading their mainboard anyway).
Whatever the case, repairability is something I value, but not so much that it overrules all the other qualities that make a laptop good. It’s one aspect of many.
I would like Framework to go the System76 route and adopt a Linux distro that they can very finely tune for the Framework laptop. Macbooks have the benefit of MacOS being completely vertically integrated. I don't see Framework putting this level of effort in, even on the OEM Windows side of things like other OEMs such as Dell do. Their software needs to be better.
Funny thing is, a lot of the System76 tweaks aren't specific to their system (or OS) at all. One popular example is the system76-scheduler, which you can install on pretty much any hardware or distro for the same responsiveness improvements: https://github.com/pop-os/system76-scheduler
Kinda leads me to believe the whole "vertically integrate my Framework" shtick is a snipe hunt.
You may be misunderstanding me or I'm not explaining myself properly. I don't want them to vertically integrate in the same way that Apple does, I want them to invest more on the software side by selecting a distro and building around it. If they can piggyback on popOS then great but they need to invest in software.
Realistic starting point: hire one Linux developer to daily drive Debian Testing + mainline Linux kernel on Framework hardware, then upstream integration/optimization fixes to mainline Linux and Debian unstable.
Upstream fixes would benefit multiple Linux distros, reduce Framework support burden and increase the usability of Linux on Framework hardware.
I don't see how that would help, and in a lot of ways I feel like PopOS is an example of how phyrric the effort is. They're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to support a distro that most users will probably replace with something else. Really all they have to do is ship a Debian/Fedora image as default and test the hardware config before shipping it so people have a level of QC to depend on. Building and maintaining an OS from scratch is a baby+bathwater solution to this, at least from where I'm standing.
What kind of problems do you anticipate this would fix?
PopOS is not wasted effort. The goal of PopOS is to have an out of the box Linux aimed at people new to Linux that has everything working out of the box. Specifically, graphics drivers working out of the box which is notoriously hard if you are running an Nvidia card. According to the Steam Hardware survey, it is 10th on the top 10 Linux distros[0]. Realistically higher when you consider that the Steam Deck and SteamOS heavily tilt the survey. I'm not asking them to build an OS from scratch and that is a crazy way to interpret what I said which was "build around a distro"
It’s technically also covered by Mint and kinda (not as well) Ubuntu, but one thing that pop gets right in my view is bundling in the Nvidia drivers that a huge chunk of people are going to need, as well as enabling non-free repos by default, neither of which Fedora or Debian do (not to mention, a lot of users will find Debian’s user-facing packages too old [yes, even with Testing]). I say this even as someone who generally doesn’t use pop and favors Fedora.
I don't think this is what makes Apple jump ahead of the competition. M-series is a low-wattage SOC.
I recently bought a lunar lake laptop, which is a similar design but x86. I'm easily getting 12+ hours on Linux and performance is superb. Turns out all it takes is putting everything on the chip and then running it at 15 watts. Which, I think, also proves you do NOT need ARM for such low wattage with acceptable performance. You just need really new production lines and the right chip design.
Not entirely convinced its just hardware as we're seeing from the now direct comparisons between windows and steamos. [1] Linux based SteamOS is thrashing windows in both gaming performance and using less battery to do it.
I would agree it's not just hardware, software also plays a role. Tons of background services connected to the internet are going to drain battery like crazy, we learned this with mobile phones a decade ago.
However, I'm not convinced MacOS is much better than Windows here. I'm sure It's a little bit better though - I've never seen MacOS pinned at 100% CPU usage doing seemingly nothing.
Pennywise, pound foolish, unfortunately, but more than that, companies that do hardware and software well are few and far between, and the ones that do tend to be highly valued. AMD famously does value software much, or pay their software developers relatively well.
Is it pound foolish, or just a rational business decision?
Let's say they ship 100k laptops per year. Let's say they could meaningfully improve battery life with a team of half-dozen excellent software engineers, which would cost on the order of a few million a year. For the sake of argument, let's say ~$3M/yr. That increases the price per laptop by ~$30 on average. That's a premium I'd pay for improved efficiency, but judging by the comments here and elsewhere, the premium they're already charging above the raw component prices seems to be at the upper end of what most people are willing to pay.
It's fiendishly difficult to become the next Apple, Tesla, Nintendo, or Valve with thick enough margins on your hardware (or services) to afford excellent software engineering teams, so it makes sense that so few hardware companies attempt it, and many who try eventually give up.
It's a much more interesting question when framed with numbers! But let's say they ship 500k main boards (since it doesn't need to be a totally assembled laptop to benefit), and it only costs $300k, not $3 million (and a couple laptops) to the right eastern European software developer to perfectly tune some Linux config files. Then it's only $1.50 per laptop, and they could arguably just eat that cost.
Framework doesn't have to spend enough to be the next Apple (nor do they have the resources to be), they just need to spend enough to not be so desperately far behind Dell.
The explanation makes sense in isolation, it just seems like a local maxima if you zoom out.
Sure, it totally depends on specifics! Only Framework knows how many mainboards they sell per year and can make an educated guess at how many of them end up running Linux.
Also, note that Framework already employs at least one person[1] working full time on Linux compatibility and support, so at least some of the low-hanging fruit may have already been picked. I'm sure they could spend an additional $300k, $3M, $30M, or more on improving Linux efficiency. I can't estimate what the benefit would be at each of those levels, nor do I know what the price impact would be, nor the sales impact. I don't know what they currently spend on Linux support except that it's at least one FTE.
We don't have enough information to answer or even meaningfully estimate most of these questions. I'm not saying they're making good decisions or bad decisions with respect to Linux support, I'm just saying neither of us have enough information to know.
I think almost anyone on earth would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life on a modular, repairable, hardware up gradable, Linux box.
Apple at the moment has zero competitors for upscale laptops and this would make System76 the only other alternative for a quality hardware machine.
The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers.
It would be the default goto box for a modern alternative to Mac much like Lenovo used to be a decade ago before MBA enshittification set in there.
Battery life is the ONE thing preventing myself and many others from pulling the trigger on a System76 and I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro for an alternative to a macbook with equivalent battery life but linux.
Plus PopOs is open source so there could be cross pollination with the Linux team on battery life optimization which would reap massive benefits for the Linux ecosystem as a whole and push more people towards Linux.
Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed
> The rave reviews alone would be free marketing worth well above the money invested in the software engineers.
Whether it's worth it depends on how much it costs to improve efficiency, and how many more laptops they need to sell at a higher price to recoup those costs.
For background, the AMD Framework 13's 61Wh battery supposedly gets ~9 hours[1] (~6.8Wh per hour), the System 76 14" Lemur Pro's 73Wh battery claims up to 14h [2] (~5.2Wh per hour), the MacBook Pro M4s 72Wh battery claims up to 22h [3] (~3.3Wh per hour).
I am skeptical anyone can get close to Macbook levels of efficiency without soldering components, designing new chips, and spending close to their ~$31 billion in R&D. But let's say we shoot for 4Wh per hour to get us in the 15-18 hour range.
If you could achieve such an improvement with a couple software folks and you can amortize it over a million laptops that might add less than ten bucks per laptop. That'd be great!
Personally I am skeptical it's anywhere close to that easy, and I'm skeptical that these niche manufacturers are selling a million laptops a year. I think it's much more likely that meaningfully improving efficiency would require making each laptop significantly more expensive.
> would pay an extra money per month for Apple level battery life ... I would gladly pay much more above and beyond a macbook pro
But would you pay an extra several hundred dollars for a Framework or System 76 laptop if other Linux laptops received the same efficiency benefits without needing to increase their costs to cover developer salaries? Apple can afford to spend billions improving efficiency because they can amortize that across many more laptops and because they can capture most of the benefit of their research. (And because for several decades they had loyal customers who paid an extra couple hundred bucks per laptop even when they didn't have better efficiency.)
> Something like this would be myself and many other peoples literal dream computers and withing a year or two's time almost any Linux user would be on System76 laptops, guaranteed
If we're dreaming, why stop there? If System 76 produced a $10 laptop that can be powered by nothing but sunshine they'd take over the world! But realistically, I think the best we're going to get in the foreseeable future is slow, incremental efficiency improvements that lag a generation or two behind Apple.
(A simpler way Framework or S76 could increase battery life to the ~15-19h range would be to bump up to a 99Wh battery which probably costs on the order of a hundred bucks for the larger battery and chassis, though it would also make the laptop thicker and heavier.)
Whats involved in improving the power consumption?
Im not an OS engineer so I have no idea, I was simply going by another commenters estimate which was a few OS developers.
And judging by the amount of times you said you were skeptical instead of giving any sort of meaningful information...
you clearly arent an OS engineer either.
And idealist and a skeptic walk into a bar. The bartender says two shots of disappointment coming up.
Correct, though I do regularly deal with the same class of assumption, where folks suggest that if I just hired a couple people to work on X, Y, or Z that would be well worth the money. The statement seems to come from a place of hope, a belief that there is a simple solution just waiting for someone to point it out, as opposed to something that is very hard or simply impractical.
But it's just not realistic to believe that the only thing preventing a niche laptop manufacturer from matching the battery efficiency of a vertically-integrated product backed by $30+ billion a year in R&D is a couple OS developers. Such a belief can also be demoralizing if every hard-won incremental improvement to Linux power efficiency is judged against such unrealistic expectations.
(I believe that someday we will have lightweight Linux laptops with 22+ hour batteries, but I also believe that by that point Apple will have shifted the goalposts again and people will continue to be dissatisfied.)
There isn't anything they can do about it while maintaining their allegiance to the SO-DIMM. Fundamentally, memory on a stick guzzles energy. The reality of energy efficiency and the myth of upgradeability are conflicting.
Indeed, indeed it does solve that problem, but other actors need to align. Someone would have to ship a CPU that people want that supports off-world LPDDR (i.e. not Intel Lunar/Arrow Lake), and laptop makes would need to adopt it.
My suspicion is what will actually happen is that CAMM2 is going to make inroads in desktop systems.
Seems like you're not aware of AMD's recent APUs, which seem to be very capable and very popular. I'm not sure if a laptop model sporting one with CAMM2 ram is available yet, but one can safely assume it's just a matter of time.
I'm also not sure what you mean by other actors needing to align. JEDEC has standardized CAMM2 already. Which is how all concerned actors accomplish alignment.
I am aware of them but as you pointed out they don't exist with CAMM. The one that I want is the Ryzen AI Max and all the implementations of it so far — the Framework Desktop, the HP Z2 G1a — have the memory soldered down without CAMMs.
I seem to remember executives from Framework being active in the HN comments at the Framework Desktop launch in which CAMM2 support was a highly requested feature. I suspect they received the message.
Lovely thing about the PC industry which differs from our friends in Cupertino is that it tends to explore the full design space over time. All good things come to those who wait.
