hey everybody it’s la inside and we’re taking a look today at the framework laptop a lot of you have been asking me to get one of these in to review so now we’ve got one and on the surface this looks like any other run-of-the-mill windows laptop nothing fancy to look at but what makes this laptop a lot different than some of the others is that it is designed with serviceability and upgradeability in mind in fact they encourage the user to do that servicing and upgrading themselves they give you a screwdriver in the box and this is the only tool you need to work on this laptop there’s nothing glued together it is very easy to do your own work on this thing and you can even buy parts for it should something fail down the road they even offer a diy version where you can pick and choose your own components to go inside of it that is very unusual in the laptop industry and just to illustrate the differences here this is my current windows laptop this is my surface laptop go i like this quite a bit very lightweight nice performance but you can’t get into it it’s really difficult to break the case open and do upgrades these rubber feet are very delicate and everything is glued together this thing as you’ll see is a very different story so we’re going to take a closer look at this laptop and what it’s all about in just a second but i do want to let you know in the interest of full disclosure that my brother josh paid for this laptop with his own funds i was up in vermont visiting him the other day when it came in so he wanted me to take it down here to set it up and give you a review of it so be sure to thank josh down in the comments section all the opinions you’re about to hear are my own no one is paying for this
review nor has anyone reviewed or approved what you’re about to see before it was uploaded so let’s get into it now and see what this framework laptop is all about now there are two tracks you can take for buying this laptop one is the diy route which starts at around 749 dollars that will give you the minimum bare bone configuration meaning you have to get your own ram storage and even your own wi-fi and bluetooth radio to stick inside your new laptop or you can go with a pre-configured version so the one my brother went with was one of the pre-configured options this is the professional edition which costs about two thousand dollars he’s got an i7 1185 g7 processor in here from intel this has 32 gigabytes of ddr4 3200 ram on board it has a one terabyte nvme ssd inside and also an intel wi-fi six card so this is like fully decked out my advice though if you are looking for the pre-configured version is to go with the performance edition which costs about fourteen hundred dollars it has an 1165 g7 processor on board an i7 along with 16 gigs of ram and a half terabyte of storage i think that’s kind of the sweet spot but if you’re feeling adventurous you can start with a bare bones i7 for around a thousand dollars and then put your own components in it to get it going now every configuration has the same display option this is a thirteen and a half inch display it is running with a three by two aspect ratio at a resolution of 2256 by 1504 it is ips but it’s not a touch display it’ll give you about 400 nits of brightness and it covers 100 of srgb the display looks really nice actually i’m not seeing any bleed through the contrast ratio is really nice on it and the colors really stand out and pop here so i was very pleased with the quality of the display i was also pleased with the quality of the webcam it’s got a 1080p 60 frames per
second webcam up here at the top and you can see a quick video image of what it looks like here in kind of normal room lighting so i was very happy with the resolution and the overall quality of the image out of it you’ve got a couple of hardware switches here at the top to disable the microphone and the camera so you can just cut it off here with a physical switch the camera lens doesn’t cover itself but this actually turns the camera physically off so that’s pretty much just as good as covering the lens up in my opinion the design feels really nice it’s metal it’s not all that ostentatious it’s just pretty simple and one of the things that i like about this is that when you lift the display up here it doesn’t take the keyboard deck with it so that shows that there was some decent design that went into all of it my only gripe though is that the display does bounce a little bit more than i would like so if you’re on a desk and banging away on the keyboard you will see that display popping around a bit which might distract people you’re having conversations with online the display though will go down flat to your desk here as you can see this is not in two in one it doesn’t flip over but it does have a good range of motion to it and there’s just a little too much motion when you stop moving it so that’s the one thing i would like to see improve with it now the weight on this one is just under three pounds 2.87 pounds to be exact that’s about 1.3 kilograms it’s about the same weight you would find in a similar 13-inch laptop from some other premium brands now what’s really neat about this are the ports because as you can see here they have these little modules that plug into the side of the computer so my brother bought a bunch of usb a ports for his that seems to be his port preference but you can choose other modules so i’ve got a displayport one here that he also got along with a micro sd card reader they also have one
that’s a storage module that gives you a terabyte of storage that you can just pop in and out of the computer at will there’s nothing special about these things they’re just little usb type-c devices so you could plug these into any other computer with a usb type-c port and get the same functionality it’s all standard stuff they secure themselves pretty firmly in the machine here so there’s a button to release them so you push the button down and then just kind of pull them out and then underneath here is a usb type-c port so you get four usb type-c ports on the computer and you can either put in your own usbc module here or just plug things directly in if you want but of course it’s a little more elegant to have that port flush to the side of the computer now these ports are usb 4 ports and the good news is that it appears that all four of these usb 4 ports support power data and video framework is not claiming that these are thunderbolt ports because they have to get certified by intel first but there are people on youtube who have successfully connected nvidia based egpus to these ports and have been able to get those gpus to work at a level of performance that is similar to what you would get with a fully certified thunderbolt laptop but it’s something that they’re not directly supporting just yet at the time i’m recording this video so if you are thinking about using this with an external gpu it’s likely it’ll work but it’s not guaranteed to work i have an amd e-gpu that i use for testing around here in the studio and that one with an rx 580 was really problematic so it’s going to be a hit or miss thing but if they do get the thunderbolt certification i’m sure there’ll be some drivers that will make everything work a little bit better so just approach that component a little carefully but it looks as though the usb4 here will support the thunderbolt devices that you might be thinking of connecting to it it’s just not guaranteed to work at the moment now i am very fond of the keyboard on this one the travel is 1.5 millimeters nice and
deep the keys feel really good so you get a nice tactile feel on these they’re the right size they’re very nicely spaced i’m very happy with what they did with the keyboard the track pad isn’t bad it’s not as good as the surface go we were looking at the beginning of the video but it’s decent enough it’s a little springier than i would like one thing that i noticed that’s gotten better since i started playing with the laptop is that initially it wasn’t registering every click as i push down on the trackpad but whatever issue it has it seems to have worked itself out now that i’ve had some time to play with it so so far so good on the trackpad not the best but i have played with worst ones out there now for biometrics you have a fingerprint reader that’s integrated with the power button you can see that it lights up there when the laptop is powered on it works fairly well there is no windows face detection though on the laptop the speakers are downward firing you’ve got one over here and one over here they sound okay a little on the tinier side so they’re probably better for spoken word and conference calls and that sort of thing if you want to listen to music you do have a headphone jack here on the left hand side or you can hook up some bluetooth headphones to the device wirelessly battery life on this you’re looking at about eight to ten hours depending on what you’re doing you’ll get a little bit more towards the 10 hour mark if you stick to the basics like word processing and email and keep the display brightness down if you have a brighter display going or playing games or doing video editing or something like that you’ll definitely eat into that battery life a lot quicker now it charges over usb type c this is the included 60 watt charger it is super small isn’t it but you do need to have a usb type-c port accessible on the computer to charge it you got to use one of the four slots here so if you pick a bunch of usba modules you can’t charge your laptop unless you take one of them out the good news is that you can connect things directly to
those usbc ports that are embedded inside of the case here so if you are out and about and find yourself without the usbc module just take out one of the other modules and stick a cable in there and you can charge things up now the one we’re looking at today came with windows 10 professional install that’s because my brother went with the professional configuration option if you choose one of the other two pre-configured options you get windows 10 home now on the diy version you can choose not to have an operating system installed at all and this will run just about any flavor of linux it is also compatible with windows 11 according to the health checker tool here so when you’re ready to make that plunge you can go ahead and install it on here but i would wait just a little bit longer on that now what i want to do is take it apart and just show you the approach that framework is taking to laptops that their competitors largely are not so we’re going to take out the screwdriver tool here and see just how easy it is to crack this thing open and play around with stuff inside now to get into this all you have to do is unscrew these five screws here on the bottom you don’t have to pull up the rubber feet there’s no other screws hiding anywhere just these five once you get those screws undone you flip it over you open the display up and then you just have to grab the edge of the keyboard deck here and it opens right up there is a ribbon cable here that attaches to the motherboard that detaches very easily and now our keyboard and trackpad are free and you can go on the back here and replace whatever you need
now you’re going to notice that every part on here has a qr code and if you scan that with your phone it’ll tell you what you need to know about that part to fix it so i’ll scan this one here if i can get in there there we go and it’ll take me to a guide page here about how to replace the keyboard along with all the parts that i might need to do that so it’s really nice to see a company thinking about how the user might repair their own stuff and you can see these barcodes on everything here including the track pad and all the different parts you need to unscrew to get the keyboard detached it’s really again nice to see somebody thinking about how the user might fix this themselves or maybe a local repair shop the battery of course is replaceable here the entire motherboard can be replaced so what you see here from basically here to here is the main board so if down the road intel comes up with some fancy new arm architecture you can have a framework motherboard just dropped right in here to replace the one that is currently occupying the space inside the laptop and you’ll be good to go with the new configuration without having to buy a whole new computer what they’re also planning to do is have the motherboard work as a desktop when you pull it out of the laptop so it’s not going to just take up space or get thrown out you can actually keep using it in a different way if you want to keep using the components that you’re replacing now on the motherboard you can swap out the storage the ram and the wireless card let’s have a look at that so the wireless card is right here this one came configured with an intel card that supports wi-fi 6 and bluetooth this model with 32 gigabytes of ram has two 16 gigabyte modules now if you are going with a diy configuration my advice is to get a matching pair of ram because the graphics system on the intel processor really likes dual channel memory where you’ve got both of these slots occupied it will perform the best and you’ll see the kind of graphics performance we’ll get out of this when we put it back together in a few minutes and then you’ve got your nvme slot
here for your storage this has a one terabyte western digital drive that came from the framework factory this is an sn 730 and again this is a pci express 4.0 slot here it looks like you could fit another one over here but there is no other slot for storage other than this one so again you can do the ram the storage and the network card or you can swap the whole motherboard out completely at a later time now it’s also very easy to get at the display and the webcam i’m just going to flip it over here so you can see it on my overhead camera and all you got to do is just get the edge here lifted up and you just pull it off and it’s holding itself in place with magnets so when you’re done working on it you just put it back into place here and it all just kind of snaps together no adhesives nothing to unscrew at least for the bezel and you’re good to go again they do have some different colored bezels you can order so if you wanted a little pizzazz on the front here you can do that the front bezel is plastic but the rest of the unit here is metal and then when you’re done working on the keyboard all you got to do is just flip it back around here you reattach your keyboard ribbon cable to the motherboard connector let me just do that real quick and then when you’re good to go here you just line it up and it’ll snap itself into place magnetically it’s almost like putting a case on your ipad or something and that’s it and all i have to do now is just screw the bottom screws back on and my laptop is back to normal so this is easily one of the easiest laptops to work on and of course you can just scan those barcodes to figure out what parts you might need to fix something or upgrade something down
the road all right so let’s jump into some performance now we’ll just go and visit the nasa.gov homepage like we usually do and see how fast everything springs up here this is running on my wi-fi 6 network and as you can see everything is super quick and responsive here as we’re browsing around the web video startup right away everything renders in very quickly i would expect this out of an i7 based processor and a little bit earlier we played back some 1080p 60 frames per second content on my youtube channel it played back just fine no drop frames everything was very nice here for media playback one thing to note when you’ve got a three by two display like this is that you will see black bars on the top and bottom when looking at hd 16 by nine content because this display is a little taller than your standard 16 by 9 display might be so you’ll see these black bars in netflix and prime video and other things but it’s nice to have this height for working on documents and doing web browsing so all in i think it’s a very good web browsing and media consumption device and on the browserbench.org speedometer benchmark test we got a great score of 211.3 that puts this device pretty much on par with the other intel i7s we’ve looked at from this generation along with the ryzen processors that are out there as well all right let’s take a look now at some gaming we’re going to begin with red dead redemption 2.
this is running at 1080p at the absolute lowest settings it plays pretty nicely around 30 frames per second give or take it’s not going to rival a gaming laptop by any means but it’s performing as well as some of the other intel i7 machines we’ve looked at from this generation these iris xe graphics are a big jump up over the prior generations of intel chips we have played with here so it’s nice to see you can run a triple a title here at the lowest settings and we could probably squeeze some additional frame rate out of this if we went down to 720p all right next up is no man’s sky one of my personal favorites we’re running this at 1080p at the lowest settings right now we’re doing about 35 frames per second i’ll put the spaceship on the ground here and see what happens when we hop out and this game can vary its frame rate quite a bit because all of the content in this game is procedurally generated but right now we’re still sticking to around the 30 to 40 frames per second mark on this i did see it jump into like 27 frames per second here or there but generally it’s staying well above 30 which is great to see on a computer that doesn’t have a discrete gpu this is another game where you’ll see a little more performance if you jump down the 720p but at 1080p it is quite playable and this is something we’ve seen on a number of other i7 based machines from this generation and on the 3d mark time spy benchmark test we got a score of 1721.
that puts this machine’s performance right up there with the samsungs the dells and the lenovos that we’ve looked at here over the last couple of months with the same or similar processor so that tells me there’s really no performance hit for making the computer easier to work on which is great and we also ran the 3d mark stress test and there we got a passing grade of 98.5 percent and you can see that even under full load it’s able to keep the computer pretty cool so we’re not going to see all that much throttling here nor are we going to see any really big heating issues with it either one thing to note though is that when you are stressing this computer the fan is loud it’s not a high-pitched wine it’s just a loud fan that is unavoidable if you’re trying to keep things super cool but the performance here is great generally when you’re just working on the web or doing something that’s not all that stressful on the processor the fan is completely silent it’s only really when you’re running one of these games that you’re really going to hear that fan going so overall this is a great laptop from a brand new startup it feels like a very mature product my only gripe with it is the bounciness of the display here but beyond that i am really pleased with it the performance here is every bit as good as all of the other name brand laptops we’ve looked at running with this processor inside as you saw it does very well with games and other demanding tasks as well and it’s very compact and of course it is probably the easiest laptop ever to work on you just pop those five screws out and you’re in and i think if you are someone who cares about the right to repair or just wants the industry to move back to a time when you could do a lot of your own upgrades and enhancements you really should seriously consider this because i’m sure the industry is looking at framework and whether or not there’s a consumer demand for this kind of open hardware if framework fails i think it sends a pretty big message to the rest of the industry to keep locking their computers down because it says that consumers don’t care and i know a lot of you write in all the time about e-waste and how difficult it is to get into these computers and how you can’t upgrade things well here you go you’ve got one that really is every bit as good as its competitors and is probably the most accessible piece of hardware i have seen in quite some time so it’s on all of us consumers to
decide whether or not this is an important feature to have on a laptop and if it is i think we’ll see the industry move in a different direction and if not well it’ll be more of the same so thanks to my brother josh for putting his money where his mouth is on this one he’ll be able to upgrade this as long as he can find parts for it and i am very interested to see what happens with framework next by the way in the video description you can check out a video i did with my brother at his maple syrup farm up in vermont he’s got starlink running up there and he’s got a really cool process so definitely check him out and the videos that you’ll see on his channel will likely come out of this laptop so that is going to do it for this look at the framework laptop until next time this is lon simon thanks for watching this channel is brought to you by the london tv supporters including gold level supporters hot sauce and video games brian parker chris allegretta tom albrecht thomas anfang jim tannis and handheld obsession if you want to help the channel you can by contributing as little as a dollar a month head over to lawn dot tv support to learn more and don’t forget to subscribe
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