Review: Framework’s next-gen Laptop follows through on its upgradeable promises

It's one thing to say you're making a fully user-serviceable, upgradeable laptop. It's another thing to actually follow through with it.

The original Framework Laptop we reviewed last year did a lot of things right. It's easy to open and work on, the ports can be swapped out to suit your needs, and it's sturdy and well-built enough to stand up to traditional, less-upgradeable-and-repairable ultrabooks like Dell's XPS 13 or Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon.

But making "one surprisingly good laptop" isn't the same as creating a laptop ecosystem with upgradeable, interchangeable, user-serviceable parts. To do that, you need to keep up with new component releases. You need to address the shortcomings of your original design (or even release new revisions) without ending support for or breaking compatibility with previous versions of your design. And your small, independent company needs to continue to exist so it can keep getting all that work done, year after year, for a few years.

I can't say what the next year or two will bring, but I can say that the second-generation Framework Laptop is still doing almost everything right. It's a lightly revised version of the original chassis designed around a 12th-generation Intel Core CPU rather than an 11th-gen version, and the motherboard exists as a drop-in upgrade for anyone who has already bought a Framework Laptop.

The Framework Laptop does have problems, especially when it comes to battery life. But overall, it's a thoughtfully designed computer that treats do-it-yourselfers and PC builders like adults who can make their own decisions. There still isn't another laptop quite like it.

Getting a repairable laptop right

The box that the DIY Edition Framework Laptop arrived in, with Framework-provided RAM, SSD, and expansion modules.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In most ways, the new version of the Framework Laptop is identical to the one we reviewed a year ago because it's a slightly tweaked version of the exact same chassis with an all-new motherboard and CPU inside. But because this is my first brush with it in person, I'll go over the basics again in brief.

Framework sells two versions of the laptop: You can buy it fully assembled and ready to use in Base, Performance, or Professional configurations, all of which include scaling amounts of storage, RAM, and a Windows 11 license. Or you can buy the some-assembly-required DIY Edition, which also comes in three performance tiers centered on the Core i5-1240P, Core i7-1260P, or Core i7-1280P, but you are required to add your own DDR4 RAM, NVMe SSD, and operating system.

I received the DIY Edition of the laptop to review, and for anyone who has ever built a PC or put new RAM in a laptop, it's the one I'd recommend. To Framework's credit, the prices it charges for RAM and storage upgrades are less preposterous than those of Microsoft or Apple, but there's also no way to upgrade your RAM or storage without upgrading your processor or vice versa. The pre-assembled versions are between $230 and $520 more expensive than their DIY counterparts, and you can easily save a little money buying RAM and storage yourself, even if you want exactly the same capacities that Framework is offering. That's even more true if you already have a Windows license or plan to install Linux (more on that in a bit).

The Framework Laptop with its top cover popped off, exposing all of its parts.

Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop with its top cover popped off, exposing all of its parts. Andrew Cunningham

The included Torx screwdriver is all you'll need to get the laptop open.

Andrew Cunningham

The included Torx screwdriver is all you'll need to get the laptop open. Andrew Cunningham

The Framework Laptop with its top cover popped off, exposing all of its parts. Andrew Cunningham

The included Torx screwdriver is all you'll need to get the laptop open. Andrew Cunningham

Once you're inside, everything is clearly and thoughtfully labeled to help with upgrades, repairs, and installation.

Andrew Cunningham

Once you're inside, everything is clearly and thoughtfully labeled to help with upgrades, repairs, and installation. Andrew Cunningham

This list of names is just one of the little touches that gives the Framework Laptop its personality.

Andrew Cunningham

This list of names is just one of the little touches that gives the Framework Laptop its personality. Andrew Cunningham

Once you're inside, everything is clearly and thoughtfully labeled to help with upgrades, repairs, and installation. Andrew Cunningham

This list of names is just one of the little touches that gives the Framework Laptop its personality. Andrew Cunningham

Whichever version you buy, you get to choose how to populate its four interchangeable ports. In what is still the most innovative part of the Framework Laptop's design, the machine comes with four recessed USB-C port bays. Framework sells a variety of modules that slot into these bays, including USB-C passthrough, USB-C to USB-A, USB-C to HDMI, and USB-C to DisplayPort. Technically, it's the same mess of dongles you have to manage with any all-USB-C laptop. But they look and work like they're built into the laptop instead of dangling off the side, and it's super useful to be able to set your ports up exactly the way you like them or to change them out when you need something different.

The DIY Edition of the Framework Laptop still comes mostly pre-assembled. The motherboard is already built into the laptop (as is the Wi-Fi card; last year, we had to install our own Wi-Fi card), and the laptop is already put together, so all you need to do is unscrew the five captive Torx screws with the included screwdriver, carefully pry up the keyboard cover, and install your RAM and SSD. The slots for installing both are clearly labeled, as is everything else inside its chassis.

The Framework Laptop has an unassuming, inoffensive keyboard and trackpad that are both nice to use.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Once you've installed those parts, replacing the keyboard cover is simple thanks to gentle built-in magnets that pull it into place—simply re-tighten the Torx screws and you're good to go. Accessing the innards of most other laptops requires prying at a bunch of easily breakable plastic retention clips, but the Framework Laptop opens up easily and smoothly. I never felt like I was going to damage it just by trying to open it up.

The laptop takes its time to do an initial RAM check the first time you boot it up, but once that was done, I had no trouble installing Windows 11 from a USB drive and then downloading and installing Framework's driver bundle.

A couple of the Framework Laptop's port modules. They provide the utility of a dongle without all the downsides.

Andrew Cunningham

A couple of the Framework Laptop's port modules. They provide the utility of a dongle without all the downsides. Andrew Cunningham

Framework sells a wide array of different port options, which can be swapped out and rearranged to your liking.

Andrew Cunningham

Framework sells a wide array of different port options, which can be swapped out and rearranged to your liking. Andrew Cunningham

A couple of the Framework Laptop's port modules. They provide the utility of a dongle without all the downsides. Andrew Cunningham

Framework sells a wide array of different port options, which can be swapped out and rearranged to your liking. Andrew Cunningham

More than a proof-of-concept

The best thing about the Framework laptop is that none of the DIY-centric design decisions affect its utility as a laptop. Once installed, the port modules are secured firmly in their bays, and plugging and unplugging stuff feels exactly as good as it does with built-in ports. Its 2.87-pound weight is in the same ballpark as an XPS 13 or MacBook Air, and its mostly metal chassis doesn't creak or flex ("lid rigidity" is one of the few actual structural upgrades compared to last year's Framework Laptop, and Framework sells an Upgrade Kit that bundles the new lid and a 12th-gen motherboard together if you want both).

Framework's keyboard and trackpad also feel excellent. The keys are perhaps a little firmer than the ones on a Dell XPS 13 or a Surface Laptop, but they have comfortable spacing and travel, a legible font, and a good backlight. The trackpad is unremarkable in a good way, with accurate finger tracking and multi-touch gesture support. The fingerprint sensor integrated into the square power button also gave us no trouble.

The physical webcam and microphone switches are a nice touch.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Image quality from the laptop's 1080p webcam is great, and we appreciate the on/off switches for both the webcam and the microphone; unlike most other webcam covers, which physically cover the webcam but leave it enabled, the Framework Laptop has a hardware on/off switch that disables the webcam entirely. It's one of many thoughtful touches you'll find throughout the laptop.

I only have a couple of quibbles with the hardware design. The biggest is with the screen. It's a 13.5-inch panel with a 2256×1504 resolution and a taller-than-typical 3:2 aspect ratio, all things I like. I also have no problem with the 423 nit peak brightness, its 1,310:1 contrast ratio, or its 99.4 percent sRGB color gamut coverage (all as measured with an i1 Display Studio colorimeter). But it's too bad that there's no touchscreen option for people who prefer one, and I also don't love that Framework chose a glossy finish over a matte one—this gives it the occasionally unpleasant reflectivity of a touchscreen without the functionality of a touchscreen.

The glossy non-touch LCD is reflective enough to occasionally be annoying.

Andrew Cunningham

The glossy non-touch LCD is reflective enough to occasionally be annoying. Andrew Cunningham

The screen's brightness helps it stay usable in bright light and outdoors, despite the reflections.

Andrew Cunningham

The screen's brightness helps it stay usable in bright light and outdoors, despite the reflections. Andrew Cunningham

The glossy non-touch LCD is reflective enough to occasionally be annoying. Andrew Cunningham

The screen's brightness helps it stay usable in bright light and outdoors, despite the reflections. Andrew Cunningham

The laptop's stereo speakers are also decidedly not great. Volume is fine, and you won't have a problem understanding speech in a Zoom call or a YouTube video, but music sounds muffled and muddy. This is doubly true if you are resting the laptop on a soft surface (like a lap!) that absorbs rather than reflects the sounds from the bottom-mounted speaker grills.

Performance: A big CPU boost

Framework sent us the fastest-possible version of the 12th-gen laptop, which means a combination of six P-cores and eight E-cores. That's two more P-cores than either the baseline i5-1240P or the step-up i7-1260P, plus 96 graphics execution units (EUs). If you install a matched pair of DDR4 RAM sticks to get dual-channel memory speeds, it's branded as an Intel Iris Xe GPU, but if you just install one memory stick, it calls itself "Intel UHD Graphics" to reflect the loss in performance.

We've compared the Framework Laptop's performance to a few other devices. Here's a brief summary of specs:

• The Framework Laptop has a Core i7-1280P (six P-cores, eight E-cores), 32GB of 3200 MHz DDR4 RAM, and an Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU with 96 EUs.
• The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 has a Core i7-1260P (four P-cores, eight E-cores), 16GB of 5200 MHz LPDDR5 RAM, and an Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU with 96 EUs. It's running in "Best Performance" mode.
• The Acer Swift 5 SF514-56T-797T has a Core i7-1260P, 16GB of LPDDR5, and an Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU with 96 EUs.
• The Dell XPS 13 9310 has a Core i5-1135G7 (4 P-cores), 16GB of 4267 MHz LPDDR4x, and an Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU with 80 EUs.
• The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 9 has a Core i7-1185G7, 16GB of 4267 MHz LPDDR4x, and an Intel Iris Xe integrated GPU with 96 EUs. It's running in "Best Performance" mode.
• The Microsoft Surface Laptop Studio has a Core i7-11370H (four P-cores), 16GB of 4267 MHz LPDDR4x, and an Nvidia RTX A2000 GPU (roughly equivalent to an RTX 3050 Ti).

In my experience so far, Intel's 12th-generation laptop chips have been particularly sensitive to how much power they're allowed to use, especially for sustained workloads like video encoding or gaming. The i7-1260P in the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 we're testing can be twice as fast in "Best Performance" mode as it can be in "Balanced" mode; in some of our tests, the Balanced power profile made it perform a little worse than the 11th-generation CPU in its predecessor.

All of this is to say that you can use the X1 Carbon's i7-1260P as a rough approximation of how well a Framework Laptop with a Core i7-1260P would perform, and you can use another laptop's i7-1185G7 to approximate how much faster this year's Framework Laptop is than last year's. But now more than ever, laptops with the same CPUs can have very different performance profiles, and the Framework Laptop exhibited some of its own unique weirdness in a few of our benchmarks.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

As it was last year, the Framework Laptop's Geekbench performance is an outlier in our CPU test, with both single- and multi-core performance that comes in lower than some other laptops that use the nominally slower Core i7-1260P. But that's not reflected in the rest of our CPU tests; in the multi-core Cinebench test, our Handbrake video encoding test, and 3DMark Time Spy's CPU subscore, you see a 20-percent-ish performance uplift from the extra P-cores.

Those tests also show what a huge performance increase you can get moving from 11th- to 12th-gen if you choose to actually take advantage of your old Framework Laptop's upgradeability and install a new motherboard. The i7-1280P can be up to twice as fast as the Core i7-1185G7 in heavily multithreaded tasks, making it a tempting upgrade option if you're regularly doing processor-heavy work on your laptop.

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

But if CPU performance gets better, gaming performance mostly stands still. That's partly on Intel; an Iris Xe GPU in a 12th-gen chip uses basically the same amount of the same graphics hardware running at the same clock speeds as an Iris Xe GPU in an 11th-gen chip. It's also partly because the laptop uses socketed 3200 MHz DDR4 memory, whereas other laptops use faster (but soldered-down) LPDDR4 or (rarer, more expensive, also soldered-down) LPDDR5. Sometimes the RAM speed holds it back, as in the Geekbench Compute benchmark. Other times, its faster CPU can help to improve overall performance, as in the 3DMark Time Spy test.

As integrated GPUs go, the Iris Xe is still pretty good, and it's easily more than three times faster than an older Intel UHD 520 or UHD 620 GPU if that's what you're upgrading from. But for Framework Laptop upgraders, know that the performance benefits are almost entirely CPU-derived. It's not going to get better at gaming.

Battery life is a problem

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Most of my criticisms of the Framework Laptop are mild, but its battery life might just be a dealbreaker for a lot of people.

The last-gen version of the laptop already had mediocre battery life, as we saw in our testing last year. At just over 6.5 hours, the 12th-gen version seems a little worse. This is not the direction that things needed to move.

Versions of the laptop with the Core i5-1240P or Core i7-1260P processors may fare better on the battery life front; we can only test the configurations we have on hand. But the new Framework Laptop falls hours short of what you'd expect from a 13-inch ultrabook in this performance class, and it's something that reviewers with lower-specced versions have noted as well.

Almost any laptop has tradeoffs, and it may just be that you're willing to trade battery life for repairability and upgradeability. But if the Framework Laptop's battery life is already not great, and the company's entire sales pitch revolves around selling you a laptop that you can upgrade and fix for years to come, and battery performance usually degrades noticeably after a couple of years of continuous use... you might be shelling out for a battery replacement sooner rather than later. That the battery will be dead simple to replace when the time comes is a small comfort.

A brief note on Linux support

Framework isn't all-in on Linux to the same degree as System76, but it does specifically brag about the laptop's Linux support and its use of Linux-friendly internal hardware. The DIY Edition doesn't come with an OS, but Linux users are certainly one of its target audiences.

Fedora 36 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS should both support all of the new laptop's hardware out of the box, according to Framework, but for any distribution you use, you'll want to check the age of the Linux kernel it uses. To properly assign work between the E-cores and P-cores and get the best possible performance, you should try to run kernel version 5.16 or higher; that version provided some performance boosts for Alder Lake chips, but kernel 5.18 also introduces some improvements for the hybrid processors.

That means you might run into issues with other versions of Linux that are based on older upstream distributions. Linux Mint, my preferred distro, is still based on Ubuntu 20.04 and ships with Linux kernel version 5.4. Even the "Edge" edition, meant to solve exactly this problem by pairing the current Mint version with a newer kernel, only ships with 5.13.

Installing the Edge edition of Mint and then installing all updates (including an auto-update to kernel version 5.15, though you'll need to upgrade manually to get something newer) seemed to get most things working OK, including audio, networking, and graphics acceleration. But I had to install an additional package to get the fingerprint sensor working, and you'll still be missing Alder Lake-related improvements in newer kernels. Ubuntu 22.04 did work more smoothly out of the box, albeit still with an older 5.15 kernel.

Alder Lake issues aside, my other gripe with Linux on the Framework Laptop is the density of the display. Text and icons are a bit too small for comfort at 100 percent scaling, but things are too large to be useful at 200 percent scaling. Many distros, including Ubuntu and Mint, offer fractional scaling as Windows does, but the feature is usually gated behind some kind of experimental toggle. I think most people will find a scaling level in the 125 percent to 150 percent range to be comfortable, but Linux apps can respond unpredictably to fractional scaling, and you may also notice blurry text and images depending on the distro and settings you use (these problems used to exist in Windows too, though it's been a while since I ran into any of them in the apps I use).

Trying to use the Framework Laptop's fingerprint reader in Ubuntu also consistently failed for me, producing a "Problem Reading Device" error that I couldn't get past. I didn't spend much time trying to troubleshoot the error beyond installing all available OS updates, but it's something that Framework says should work out of the box. Update: Framework told us that the fingerprint sensor issue happens when you enroll a fingerprint in Windows before you install Linux. Documentation for manually clearing previously enrolled fingerprints is here.

BIOS updates also can't be installed on the Framework Laptop via Linux yet, though Framework says it is "working on enabling firmware updates through LVFS" so that Linux users can more easily update their firmware.

Impressive technical achievement, decent laptop

The Framework Laptop. The new version has a redesigned lid that's meant to be less bendy.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Credit where it's due: the Framework Laptop was an impressive achievement in the first place, and the Framework team deserves praise for following through on its promises and actually providing the hardware updates needed to make a project like this worthwhile. It's an incredibly thoughtful design, easy to open and repair or upgrade, but it's good enough and reliable enough that someone with no technical knowledge can still use it as a plain-old laptop.

Unfortunately, considered as a plain-old laptop, the upgraded Framework Laptop is merely good, not great. This mainly comes down to battery life, which was pretty mediocre last year and, if anything, seems a bit worse this year, at least in the top-end Core i7 model. I really like the screen's size and aspect ratio, but I don't love its glossy finish. I wish the speakers were better.

It's kind of incredible that the things that sink the Framework Laptop for me are the same problems that could sink any laptop—none of them are directly caused by the laptop's modularity and repairability. That doesn't mean every manufacturer is going to start putting out repairable, upgradeable laptops. But it does indicate that the tradeoffs we made at the beginning of the MacBook Air era—less-fixable, less-capable laptops that were worth it because they were so thin and light and easy to carry—don't necessarily need to be made anymore. You can do both!