As soon as I saw the email announcement for the 13 Pro, my face fell. My assumption was that this was a brand new, incompatible chassis, and that my current 13 would be obsolete, and if I want to go further, I'd have to buy a whole new chassis in one go. Essentially a full laptop replacement, completely betraying the entire point.

And then I click through and see the compatibility table and my jaw drops. Amazing! Yes, it's a new chassis, but all the parts that matter will fit into my old chassis. And if I want to upgrade the chassis, I can even do that piece by piece as well, not all at once.

I'm also glad to see another Intel mainboard, and one with the new, actually-powerful iGPUs. A part of me has considered over time defecting to AMD, but I'm still just more comfortable with Intel, for some reason that probably isn't rational. My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6. But I know these days it's hard to reason about real-world performance just by core count, especially with the different flavors of cores we have now.

Another worry: the thermals of the original 13 chassis have never been great, and I'm concerned that the new mainboard will throttle a bunch under load when installed in the old chassis.

At any rate, I may not upgrade this year, given RAM prices. I have 64GB of DDR4 in my current laptop, and replacing that with the same amount of LPCAMM2 LPDDR5X is probably more expensive than the rest of the laptop itself.

But maybe over the next few years I'll ship-of-theseus myself into a new laptop.

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CarVac 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> My one concern is that their CPU options top out at 4 performance cores; the i7-1370P I have right now has 6.

I was looking at benchmark comparisons between my i5-1240P which has 4 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, and the Ultra 5 325 which has 4 performance cores and 4 low-cache ultra low power efficiency cores.

The 325 is still faster multicore than the 1240P.

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enochthered an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I had the same emotional ride. I'm glad they've kept to the "brand promise" of being able to upgrade an old machine.

I'm two years into my fw 13 and think I'll start by upgrading the chassis. I also bought 64GB of DDR5 (it was on sale, if you can imagine such a thing) - The trackpad, speakers and battery are the parts of the machine that I don't really love so will be happy to upgrade those.

I think if I can I'll keep the silver top cover - A bit of a "I had a fw before they were cool" statement

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notenlish 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The thermals hopefully won't be a problem, since the new Intel chips are quite efficient.

	▲	kelnos 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Looking at Intel's specs, it seems my current CPU has a base of 28W, boost up to 64W. The high end part Framework is selling for the 13 Pro has a base of 25W, boost to 80W. So seems basically the same on the low end, with the new part boosting quite a bit higher. Presumably you get more perf per watt on the new CPU, but still.
	▲	stavros an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Does anyone know whether the AMD chips are more performant? I like AMD more as a company, especially since I like healthy competition. I'd prefer an AMD chip if it's as efficient and performant as the Intel ones.

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_-_-__-_-_- 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is my plan as well, start with the chassis and find a newer mainboard second-hand. I configured a 2TB SSD and 64 GB of LPCAMM2 RAM to see the price for the new 13 pro and it was doubled from about 1500 CAD to over 3200 CAD before tax. Upgrading the mainboard, when I have a perfectly functioning (and fast) 12th gen Intel i5, is out of the question for now.