> Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.

Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.

You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.

Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.

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Grombobulous 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.

The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).

Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.

Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.

IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.

The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.

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cosmic_cheese 2 hours ago | parent [-]

As far as I can tell, Framework’s claimed battery numbers require Windows to achieve, which is more than enough reason for many to not consider the FW 13 Pro as an option. If it can’t run Linux without sacrifice compared to Windows there’s no point.

Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.

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ufmace 13 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.

I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?

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Grombobulous 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s still going to be a respectable performer in Linux. The whole point of the 20 hour stunt was to show that it’s a major improvement and not a small one. Maybe it would have been better to show a default-settings Linux and Windows for comparison but I can understand why they wanted to hit 20 hours for marketing.

Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.

For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.

My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.

	▲	Klonoar a minute ago \| parent [-]
		In three comments you’ve moved the goalpost on the 20-hours-of-battery comment multiple times. Just take the L, dude.