I don't think Framework aims to be a laptop that you just set it up and forget. You own everything and that comes with some concessions. Things won't always work, software will always be tricky to make fully compatible, etc.

But that's the price to pay to actually own your laptop.

That said, I heard Mac OS quality has been going downhill since a few years ago

If that m1 today came out as a 12” retina MacBook (2lb) it would be the first Apple product I’d ever line up for.

Neo is way too heavy.

I built my own web tmux type thing running on a beefy metal box (for rust builds) that I access over tailscale. I was using HAPI, but I wanted to simplify and use rust for the back end and my own elm-like front-end to improve performance. I haven't published it since it's pretty specific to my workflow (I ruthlessly keep it as simple as possible), but you can think of it like a Herdr type thing in the browser. It also has a phone interface and I generally use speech instead of typing as a lot of my compositions can be stream of thought.

I use an MBA and an iPhone, but a cheap tablet or phone would work just as well. I care about network, portability, screen size + quality, and speech to text. Pretty much nothing else matters, CPU / GPU irrelevant as long as it can run a browser. I might build a native non-browser version at some point for better resource management on the client, but it hasn't been an issue so far. I would love a pair of glasses I could render text on with speech to text. It's such a gap in the market, might just build my own bespoke thing if I can source the components for it. An e-ink tablet would also be a great option for working outdoors...

I built a mobile client for agents called Cosyra. For this use case I'd say use chat to prompt an agent because it will queue the message for when you have internet and sends it as an https request so it's pretty lightweight. You can check it out here: cosyra.com

So any cuck-coding machine serves the purpose?

Yeah I just remote access my agent via cloud relay. There is no need in my experience for the laptop to have any oomph at all.

I love the T Series Thinkpads... had several of them and recently did a RAM and SSD upgrade to one that is still running great. The only thing they need to improve is the trackpad. It's not bad, but the macbook trackpad is still king.

Macbook Air mid-2012 here. 8GB. I use Nixos without a desktop env, this little machine refuses to die or become obsolete. I have a 3090 in a desktop for messing around with LLMs but that's headless.

Since 2020 t14/t16 thinkpads no longer have a user swappable battery without removing screws. So you can get a 50wh standard battery or 82wh. Before 2020 you could get a slightly larger 96wh battery with a bump out, plus the small internal battery.

A power bank with a usb-c 65w pd will work for most laptops. Many of these will be 100wh/20000mah or 150wh/30000mah, to meet airplane limits.

I use a T480 as my daily driver and recently upgraded to a 72wh battery after the old 24wh pack died. I bought a Lenovo-branded Total Micro battery off of CDW to ensure I was actually getting what I paid for, as the last battery was a cheap knockoff that barely lasted a year. The 72wh battery was about a $10 difference to the 48wh battery and will easily last 10 hours but could last 14 hours with conservative use.

This is the specific battery I bought: https://www.cdw.com/product/total-micro-battery-lenovo-think...

Agreed. I had an x201 and an x250. The 250 main board eventually stopped working (I think due to flex when the laptop was picked up from one corner repeatedly -- a known issue from what I understand). My x201 still runs great (with occasional refreshes of the thermal paste). A version of the x201-x220 era machines with modern internals would be my dream machine.

IMO, Dell Latitudes stopped being business-quality and started being consumer-quality _many_ years ago. Crap keyboards, crap touchpad, cheap painted plastic case, etc. You need to step up to at least the Precision line to get anything decent.

Although, Dell have refreshed all of their product lines lately, so even this is outdated advice. Looking through their current lineup and I don't see _any_ with real physical touchpad buttons or pointer sticks, unfortunately.

Two-finger tap acts as the right-click. Also clicking and holding the bottom-right corner.

But I don’t pretend that any of these gestures make trackpads usable.

The HP Fury 16 has buttons below the touchpad. Maybe there are no other new laptops with buttons in that position.

The ThinkPads have them below the spacebar. They are conveniently placed if one uses the little red stick, not so much for the touchpad.

ThinkPads seem to still have physical buttons for clicking:

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadt/th...

Even my very light Fujitsu U939 has two real mouse buttons. On the other side, I allways have a small mouse or a trackball with me. The cursor buttons are also in full size and he has also 2 seperate PgUp and PgDown buttons. I have no idea how people can work on a notebook without these buttons.

I thought i was crazy looking for mouse buttons in laptops, seems like the cool thing to do is leave them out.

My daughter got some low-end Dell laptop for her school machine and the touchpad w/o buttons is fucking excruciating. They had her using OnShape last year with that touchpad. I tried it and nearly gave the machine a toss in frustration. I had her use my older Dell machine w/ buttons to see how much less shitty it is (and then I gave her a USB mouse to use because OnShape with any touchpad is still difficult to use, IMO).