[ktallett]

I have the base amd and found it perfectly acceptable for everything I have need and it has 32 gb of ram with a 2tb ssd in, and it cost all in around £1000. It can do 3d work, both lab based in Lumerical and Blender plus Cad. I would say considering workstations and comparable macs would cost around double minimum I am not of the view it is particularly expensive.

[Dylan16807]

A mac would be double the cost purely because of order of magnitude ram/ssd markups, so that comparison is tricky.

For the specs you listed, I don't know how much the integrated GPU matters, but I can find laptops with the same ram and storage and a solid ryzen CPU for $650-750. There are probably sacrifices but framework isn't free of sacrifices either.

[ktallett]

It is tricky of course, but that is the state of play. I wish it wasn't that way.

As someone that used to travel weekly, I used to go with Thinkpads or a Zenbook as both I was able to fix whilst away (the former had a keyboard issue, and the latter a HDD issue). I am yet convinced on the long term durability of the Framework but I have had it a year and it is pretty good still. No different in issues than any other laptop I have used in recent times. Overall for the quality I am pretty happy as I have used a lower cost laptop for various reasons and found I was always anxious of breaking it.

The big thing I do feel I am missing when doing 3D work is a dedicated GPU for simulations but then that would reduce the battery life too much day to day.