The Framework 16 Laptop

I have been waiting about a year to receive my pre-ordered Framework 16 laptop. It is not cheap—mine cost about $3000. But it will hopefully allow me to update it in the future. It also has the largest complement of SSDs (6 TB) that I have seen, and has slots for 6 ports which are hot-swappable and (mostly) interchangeable. It also comes with the AMD Ryzen 9 7940HS processor. While this is not the fastest processor available, it is fast enough, and very energy efficient.

I got the DIY model in Batch 7. They are not taking orders for Batch 19! I got 32 GB of DDR5 memory in one slot, so I can double it if I need it later. Somehow, I neglected to get the RGB keyboard, and will have to get it. They also failed to include their Torx 5 screwdriver. Luckily, I had one. I do not play games, so I did not get the graphics module. I was also fortunate that it was shipped to me just two days before the Taiwan earthquake. I also decided to buy my own Windows 11 Pro since it can be found online for $40 or less.

Assembling the FW16 was fun, and their videos of the process were excellent. A word of advice: do not have coffee before you assemble this since steady hands are a must. The screws that hold down the two SSDs are truly tiny. A magnetic screwdriver is a must. 

I am quite operating system agnostic. My main machine is a Mac Studio, My music server is Linux (OpenSUSE Leap 15.5), and I also have a Windows desktop machine. But I rarely use the Windows Desktop because I run Windows in Parallels on my Mac, and once I installed it on a SSD, it is faster than on my Intel desktop.

I had a first-generation Lenovo Carbon X1, and it badly needed replacement. It is no longer updatable, so is not secure enough to use. I decided on installing Windows because I can also run Linux programs via Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The picture below shows OpenSUSE Leap 15.5's Yast2 program open on the Windows desktop.

The touchpad takes a LOT of force to click, but too little to touch. I had to disable tap-and-drag and tap-to-click to make it usable. The touchpad cannot tell the difference between a tap and the start of a drag.

The FW16 has the best sound I have ever heard on a laptop. Playing classical music actually images so you can tell the instrument locations. The fingerprint reader works flawlessly.

My RGB keyboard has arrived. You go to keyboard.frame.work to configure it. There were no instructions, and I managed to remap keys accidentally. There is a manual at get.vial.today, but you must reflash the keyboard to actually use the vial configuration version.  The neatest feature allows you to assign multiple actions to a key on click, hold, double click, etc. But it is not available on the Frame keyboard site.

I guess I do not understand why people like continually-changing colors on their keyboards. There is only one option for a static color on all the keys. In principal, you can program any key to do anything, and in any color programming QMK (Quantum Mechanical Keyboard) firmware. I would like to set up my colors à la my Logitech keyboard, where you can assign different colors to the different groups of keys without programming. But at least I can now see to type!

Battery life seems quite poor, but it needs further testing.

I video The Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra concerts, and (alas) sometimes miss the focus. I bought the Topaz Video AI program to use to attempt to fix these. For the first time in my post-Mac experience, It takes DAYS to process a 45 GB video. So I purchased the Framework Laptop 16 Graphics Module (AMD Radeon™ RX 7700S). 

Note the QR codes to scan to get instructions for how to replace the parts. I am increasingly impressed with how easy it is to disassemble the laptop to replace the cooler card with this new video module. Note the little red tags that indicate which screws to loosen to detach the old insert:

It took about ten minutes to install the card, and everything worked.  However, while the video card does cut the time for Topaz Video AI in half, it still takes 2 days to remove motion blur.