Tldr: It's worse than a Mac in every way except that you get a piece of mind that you can repair it yourself by buying overpriced replacement parts from Framework if it breaks.

You can buy 2x M4 Macbook Airs for the same price, get significantly better performance, portability, screen, trackpad. Keep one in the draw in case one of them breaks. But Macs are tanks and will easily last 10+ years.

I think Framework is one of those things that sound cool to geeks, but basic math says it makes no sense.

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eigenspace 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

For me it was really just that I constantly felt like Apple was doing everything they could to entrap me in their ecosystem and make it maximally painful to leave.

The breaking point was when I tried out their "Hide my email" feature and I just knew what direction everything was going. At that point I just decided I wanted out, and was more than happy to deal with the idiosyncracies of Linux and Framework to get away from that.

Linux and Framework have problems, but their problems don't feel malicious and/or negligent the way problems with Apple or Microsoft feel. I'd rather deal with some annoyances but feel that I'm part of a community project to build something pro-social, open, and sustainable rather than closed and focused on entrapment and rent-seeking.

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Orygin 3 days ago | parent [-]

You don't need to enter their ecosystem to use the computers.

I have been working on MBP for years now and I don't even have an Apple account, I just install my browser and whatever apps I need and then go on with my day.

The most "Apple" feature I used is the time machine but it's usable without any account.

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eigenspace 3 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah, it was mostly the stuff on iOS that drove me away, macOS can be used as a relatively open and okay laptop OS without their lock-in features, but I also found that those lock-in features were the only things that were really compelling to me about their laptops.

Without their special stuff, I just find macOS to be an okay, but rather opinionated and frustrating OS to use, whereas I find KDE on Linux to be a bit less polished, but much nicer at least for me as a software dev.

I think macOS is nice if you use it exactly the way that Apple wants you to use it, otherwise it's just painful.

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Orygin 3 days ago | parent [-]

> I think macOS is nice if you use it exactly the way that Apple wants you to use it

Do you have an example? Apart from a few small opinionated decisions, I find Macos to mostly get out of my way.

Of course it lacks the customization that Linux offers, and there are a few UX issues with the DE (switching desktop animations, window management, etc), but for a software dev, being UNIX is pretty good and opens lots of opportunities.

Compared to Windows which is actively hostile towards its users, it's night and day

	▲	eigenspace 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I don't have any major things to complain about, but I think those small opinionated things just build up rather heavily for me over time. There's a lot of little third party fixes for various things, but often Apple will break those third party fixes with new MacOS releases, and once you upgrade a computer you're not allowed to downgrade which is legitimately infuriating if it breaks something you rely on. I think I recall something back in 2019 where the Catalina update also broke my favoured programming language because of some notorization change or something, and the process to approve improperly notorized apps was somehow broken, but I don't remember what exactly it was. That was around the time I switched to Linux, but my memory is fuzzy. And yes, I agree I'd much rather use MacOS than Windows any day. I think I would be fine on a MacOS machine other than for gaming, where Linux and Windows are just way way way ahead in terms of compatibility and performance. But given the choice between MacOS and Linux, I just feel more comfortable and more respected on Linux than MacOS, both in terms of customization, and general ideology. Call me paranoid, but I really do believe that Apple wishes to lock down MacOS just as much as iOS is locked down, they just haven't found a way to do it yet that wouldn't cause a massive loss of users.

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kvuj 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think a good portion of their sales have been ideological in nature.

Back when it came out, Apple was starting to add firmware locks to more and more components like the battery and the rest of the industry were getting worse and worse ifixit repair scores. Nowadays, a lot of companies are starting to take repairability by the end user more seriously (look at the neo) which is hurting the value proposition of Framework's laptop.

	▲	commandersaki 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I much prefer the parts pairing that is required by Apple. Parts pairing is a mitigation to theft, but in my opinion should be a stronger anti-theft measure. I don't think Apple goes far enough with this. At the moment, a locked part, that is a part that has been taken from a mac with the activation lock still enabled, should render unusable on another mac, or at least show up in the parts setting as marked lost or stolen, and should at render as completely inferior to that of a genuine or authenticated part. This doesn't hinder repairability, as you will find with the Macbook Neo. It just thwarts a secondary market for stolen Macbooks and/or parts.

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HereBeBeasties 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd have loved to buy a MacBook instead, but the price gouging on RAM and SSD at the time was insane (less so six months later) - massively cheaper to buy a DIY framework and put your own RAM and SSD in.

	▲	aurareturn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Mac VRAM is an absolute bargain if you need high bandwidth ram such as for local LLMs.

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0xedd 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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