You’ll get far better battery life for all use cases as well as performance that matches or beats AMD. Also, if you select the X7 you’re getting the best integrated graphics on the market that isn’t made by Apple - basically on par with the M5, and far better than the top option from Framework (HX370) while sipping battery by comparison.
I’m sure AMD will come back soon with a good answer to Panther Lake, but as of right now, it’s not what you want.
Don’t worry about AMD needing your charity, they aren’t going anywhere, they’re a more valuable company than Intel, and they’ll compete in this segment in the future. It’s just not the right buy right now.
Something like a Ryzen AI HX370 and even the 350 does perform better than the 8 core X7 Intel chip, along with a number of other options.
But on the graphics side, the Intel is really fantastic.
And of course we are talking about a thin and light laptop where you’re going to appreciate stellar battery life a lot more than exceptional performance for the most part.
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.
Macbooks have a better design here. They are safe to put on top of sofas and beds. No ventilation holes on the bottom.
Search this thread for the “oh but it’s so expensive, I could just buy a new laptop from any other manufacturer every 3 years and it would be cheaper” posts - those are the normies.
“wait so i can have TWO ethernet ports???”
i have been responsible for at least three fw16 sales because I got one first, and this was the biggest thing i heard
This advice is a bit more difficult with the current LPCAMM situation. In the US, besides Framework, I was only able to find a 32GB module from Adorama, seemingly a left over new stock Crucial module that I assume must be discontinued in Crucial-branded form, or eBay. But it is far cheaper than Framework’s price ($250) and seemingly still available.
(Interestingly, Adorama’s website says that it’s “trending.”)
You’ll save at least a little bit of pocket change buying your SSD elsewhere at the very least.
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
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.
I wouldn’t think of thermal performance in laptops as “throttling,” think about it in terms of “how much power is this laptop manufacturer deciding to give the chip versus its maximum possible rating and what does that mean for me?”
Performance per watt has a massive diminishing returns curve so you often do NOT want a laptop manufacturer to push the chip to its limit.
Obviously, framework has a limitation that many other similar laptops don’t have by having one fan rather than two, but for these chips in particular I wouldn’t be very concerned as they just don’t consume enough power to create a lot of heat.
I don’t think you need to be concerned with the chassis cooling in the original versus the pro because I think most of the heat dissipation design is on the mainboard. Both versions of the laptop just have a big opening on the bottom for intake then spit out the exhaust out the back. The new chassis is unchanged in that regard.
This concept of “throttling” becomes more of a “design tradeoffs” discussion especially in the world of gaming laptops, which is why I don’t like using the term “throttling.”
Is the thin and light MacBook Pro-sized Zephyrus G14 “throttling” because its RTX 5070ti is being fed less power than a big thick Lenovo Legion? I say no, it’s just being tuned to the intended use case. No, you don’t get the “full power” of the GPU but even the thickest laptops generally don’t get that compared to desktop systems.
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.