I own the "original" gen11 Intel Framework 13. This is a company that wasn't able to ship a working RTC battery, a touchpad that would register a click when a physical click happened, a screen hinge that would reliably hold the screen in an upright position, or a USB-A port that wouldn't consume a watt of power when unused. You expect way too much engineering from them.
Heh, I remember the “remove the USB A” debacle when I had my OG.
That thing really hacked me off generally. Coming from a MBP 2016 that sipped power, the battery anxiety was real (especially standby drain), and I spent more time than I’d care to admit tweaking tlp to be still a pretty poor drain.
Then the backlight would only work in certain positions.
Love the dream, but it got sold and replaced by a MBP of 2x the price. 4years later the MBP has been used and abused like a tool, dropped from my car boot while trying to carry it and a child, and is still fresh as a daisy. I worry that FW doesn’t fit into “buy once buy well”
Well, at least I haven't had the backlight issue.
I did eventually tweak it to a very particular state where it had decent idle power use. Of course, it had to be re-tweaked occasionally.
Apart from that laptop, I've only ever used good-gen Thinkpads (and I'm back on one; the Framework now lives on my son's desk). The whole "we ship a screwdriver" gimmick gets old fast if you have to use that screwdriver on a regular basis (_of course_ they couldn't just use Phillips screws).
I still don't understand we are comparing a brand new company's engineering to Apple, who have been making laptops for what, 40 years now? Apple's GPUs used to over heat a fry the laptop. They used to make keyboards that would fully break because of a piece of dust, but they were riveted down so they were irreplaceable. Titanium powerbooks had hinges that would break in a year.
I also had one of this 11th Gen Intel FW13s, and the RTC battery on mine worked for a short time because they for some reason used some garbage rechargeable one with a 2 yr lifespan instead of the more common not-rechargeable battery that every other PC vendor uses with seemingly 10x the lifespan
Yep. Cheapest one from AliExpress works with no issues for four years now, so I shudder to think where they got the ones they shipped.