Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by CraigJPerry 1083 days ago
>> So if framework can let you reuse the "shell" for 2-3 upgrade cycles

I badly want the framework laptop idea to succeed - the idea of re-using your old laptop battery as a battery bank when you upgrade, that's just brilliant. The idea of taking your old motherboard and sticking it in a slim case that bolts to the vesa mount on the back of your monitor, beautiful.

However, it's far more expensive that just buying a MacBook. I bought the base model M1 Air for £999 at launch. I just sold it, what's this, 3 years later, with 90% battery life remaining for £600 plus shipping, after eBay & paypal's cut I'm £537. That's £462 for 3 years of having faster single core / interactive responsiveness than anything else at comparable price on the market.

How much more would I have had to pay over a similar time frame for a slower heavier framework with much much less battery life.

I considered the framework for this laptop cycle but instead I just traded up to a second hand 16" M1 Pro/16Gb/1Tb with 16 cycles count on the battery - i.e. brand new. Sure it's 25% slower than the equiv £2800 M2 Pro version but this cost me just £1500 delivered in pristine condition. I'm feeling very confident I'm going to come out ahead again in total cost of ownership.

3 comments

My framework (latest revision i5 DIY edition) is lighter than my wife’s maxed out M1 MBA. She has 16gb of RAM and 2tb of storage, and it cost $2500 with taxes and shipping. I have the latest i5 DIY edition and I forwent everything (charger, RAM, storage). I got the fastest 2tb m2 drive supported and the fastest 64gb of RAM supported on Amazon. Total cost with taxes and shipping for everything was $1250.

My framework compiles the linux kernel faster than her MBA and lasts all day on a single charge. I did spend an enjoyable afternoon dialing things in, although I know not everyone would enjoy that. I wouldn’t recommend a linux laptop to anyone who doesn’t understand init systems and how to manage config files.

They’re both great laptops, but with different target markets. Let people enjoy things!

Those comparisons work against any Windows business laptop though, which Framework competes well with on price and features.

No doubt Apple Silicon has really exposed AMD/Intel and x86/64 in general

Too bad Apple's hardware doesn't play nice with Linux.
It's not doing to badly with Asahi Linux. There are still shortcomings to work out, but there are people using Asahi on their Apple Silicon machines for their daily driver.
Yeah but it's nowhere near the choice you get with a typical x86_64 laptop with an AMD/Intel chipset.

I have minor problems with my Lenovos and Framework, but by and large they do work out of the box.

Asahi Linux basically works. The main issue is that Linux software, especially proprietary, does not play nice with ARM.
That can only be proprietary sw. Almost every program I know works on arm64, thanks to availability of the platform through raspberry pi.
Discord, Spotify, and MS Teams desktop apps are not usable. Some of them you can use the web apps, but for things like Spotify, not even the web app works since the web DRM doesn't work on ARM.

My point is that this isn't Apple's doing. The hardware works fine and is mostly unrestricted. It's the end user software that causes major issues.

Linus released the last kernel from an ARM MBA