I'm Returning My Framework 16
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The debate around OLED displays in laptops heats up as the author of a recent post shares their decision to return their Framework 16, citing issues with OLED brightness in low-light conditions. Commenters chime in, revealing that some OLED displays use Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) at low brightness levels, which can cause flicker that's noticeable to sensitive users. While some defend PWM as the only viable way to drive LEDs, others point out that certain devices, like iPhones, allow users to disable PWM dimming in accessibility settings. The discussion highlights the complexities of OLED technology and the varying sensitivities of users to its quirks.
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Dec 24, 2025 at 7:55 AM EST
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It seems like he's looking for a PC laptop with Apple build quality and display quality, and there definitely aren't many options there. I'm not sure why he even considered the Framework, it's pretty obvious from looking at it that the downside for the configurability is the laptop not being as solidly built as less configurable/repairable alternatives. I would have suggested a Dell XPS if he's ruled out the X1 Carbon, but it looks like Dell still hasn't backtracked from their decision to ruin the XPS keyboard by replacing the function keys with an even less functional ripoff of the Apple touchbar from 10 years ago. I guess the best move is to suck it up and go with the X1 Carbon and deal with the screen resolution for the IPS version being 1200p.
Hint: it was released in a year ending with 25
I just turned all the lights off (even the Christmas tree) and ran through a handful of usage situations and couldn't see any issues. I turned some lights on and did the same, I couldn't see any issues. I asked Claude, and got told to do the finger test, and that is barely perceptible. I then used my phone to record the screen and yes - I can confirm that there is an effect that my pixel 9a's camera picks up, barely noticeable at 240Hz, and definitely noticeable at 480Hz.
Maybe the guy is particularly sensitive, but from the framing of the rest of the article I think he's blowing a few things out of proportion.
Basically I just trust IPS more than any other technology :)
allow dimming display beyond normal max dimming:
restore to normal brightness range: (substitute the actual output name for our display instead of eDP; run xrandr without args to list)Try to be helpful.
Then again, every Wayland compositor family has their own tools...
In terms of text clarity, "2k" OLEDs (1920x1200) are a bit blurry. IPSs and 3k OLEDs are about the same and noticeably sharper.
Like the taskbar, dock, menu bar, etc.?
How so? Is this because some proprietary software that isn't available on ARM on Linux?
There’s been a bunch of Windows ARM laptops that aim to directly compete with the M series Macs. Linux compatibility will depend on make on model.
Why have no manufacturers copied this obviously great construction technique? It's not like a Framework is wildly cheaper than a MacBook, we're already paying a premium, so the costs of subtractive CNC can't be it.
https://youtu.be/lJx6cF-H__I
It's probably just that it costs a little more to do it and most customers wouldn't pay a premium to have it.
True but they divide their sales among several models. Gaming models, 2-in-1s, 13" to 17" and so on. Apple not only has fewer models they often keep the same case design between generations which also benefits economies of scale.
I had the same conclusion after daily driving both for 2 years; until yesterday, when my water bottle opened in my backpack and soaked them.
When I got home, I ripped apart my Framework and dried each piece. I left the M1 by my heater and tried to dry it out. This morning, I put the Framework back together, and everything except the keyboard works. The M1 won't boot.
While I did pay a ridiculous amount for my Framework, the keyboard is 50$ to replace. After the design of the MacBook had me feeling it was more premium, the MacBook was actually the one to fail first.
Haven't had a laptop rescued yet, but there was a phone simply dropped in water in my family. I put it in a 1 kg rice bag, drove to the repair shop. I don't know what magic they did but it worked for 2 more years until we upgraded it.
I’d try again in 2-3 days. Water doesn’t leave any (or much) residue after it dries. Unlike other drinks.
You may also find that rotating it into different positions accelerates it.
Then there's the screen that falls backwards.
Should've bought an old Thinkpad, instead.
Frequently the author brings up that for 2,000 euros they expect a premium experience, but no where is there an evaluation of the value granted by upgradability and repeatability of the machine, and only briefly is there mention of the configurability.
People (not necessarily the author, but likely many commentators that make similar complains about the frameworks price) will lament how manufacturers don’t have upgradable ram, etc and then turn around and are upset at the bulkiness of a repairable laptop, or the price.
I think ultimately what frustrates me is that people don’t consider the ability to repair or upgrade your machine part of a “premium” experience, but that’s is just something I have to accept. I think it is unfortunate that our consumerist culture places so little value on it though.
Rergardless, what I feel like we see here (along with a lack of scale from a small company) is the core tradeoffs that we’d have to make to get back repairability, etc. framework certainly isn’t above criticism, but if you don’t care about these things then why look at this machine? A large established brand is always going to offer a a better value on the things you care about.
Framework makes sense if you're going in on the sustainability idea, but other than that it's really just an expensive laptop that's not compelling against its competitors
Get away from Intel and management engine.
I would be very surprised if many frameworks are upgraded ship of Theseus style for decades, or if the total cost of ownership (and even ecological impact, most of the nastiness is going to be the electronic internals, not the metal casing) is lower than for someone buying a more integrated laptop ever 5-6 years.
Hard to say. If people boast about a ThinkPad lasting a decade, I see no reason (post Moores law) that this can't last that long. The only think not obvious on how to replace is the screen and speakers.
A good test would be to work out what's the oldest in-use Framework (which should be one of the first, if not there's an build quality issue) and see how many upgrades were needed to keep it functioning compared with similar era machines from other manufacturers.
In that lens, the config I played with (before ram prices surged) ended up around $2200 and it felt nice knowing I could upgrade the GPU down the line for $400 instead of pondering if I can last another year or 2 before things fall behind. As long as the chassis and screen is solid I can deal with some compromise for that value.
Even on desktops where constraints are easier, piecemeal hardware upgrades of anything but storage and ram has never been worth it or done much to extend system lifespan.
for everybody else, a Mac is perfect ;-)
You can't do that with the 16, only the 13 [0] and you can't upgrade ram on it. Which is kind of the problem in a nutshell. Over time fewer user modifications make sense due to the context of the whole computer as an integrated system.
0. https://frame.work/products/deep-computing-risc-v-mainboard
Buying and repairing a framework is never going to be cheaper than going through consumable trash laptops, and buying top of the line laptops and trying to use them longer is never going to be cheaper or better than buying medium grade laptops and upgrading more often.
What you're paying for right now is the customization capabilities and the ideology. Upgrading and customizing a single platform with a community, vs. a fixed one-off design that'll be lost next time you upgrade.
If Framework isn't already compelling to you at this time, then you're not the target audience. They might drop in price, but they'll never win a race to the bottom.
I think this is much less general than you make it out to be and has an extremely strong dependency on how you use the thing and of your preference. It makes me think of the boot theory.
Personally, for the type of work I do, I rarely need the latest ludicrously fast CPU. But I use it a lot and love to do so comfortably. To me, that means a great screen, a quiet fan, and a nice keyboard and touchpad.
Buying a mediocre computer and changing it more often means you'll always have a mediocre experience. A case in point: at work we have HP Elitebooks. The brand-new 2025 models I see people receive have worse screens and trackpads than my 2013 MBP. Sure, that box was quite a bit pricier even in nominal terms, but it had the same amount of RAM (16 GB) and SSD (512 GB) as these new computers. I'll also grant that the new ones have a faster CPU but the SSDs are somehow absurdly slow. I haven't seen a single one of these machines last more than 10 years fully functional. My mom still uses that MBP.
But the experience is sub-par. In the period 2013-2015, we never got to experience a nice laptop. For the office work these people do, that 12-year-old Mac would be an all-around better experience.
The HP screens at the time were truly horrendous. They're leagues better now but still poor and clearly worse than the 2013 mac. They are relatively contrasty, but the colors are all weird.
The trackpads have also improved a lot, but there still is some kind of odd lag when you use them [0]. They're horrible enough that many people still prefer carrying a mouse when using them away from their desks, and the mice we're provided aren't some Rolls-Royce ultra-premium affair, just a crappy, laggy Bluetooth Dell.
They also degrade from daily use: the screen hinge loosens so it moves if you look at it wrong, barrel power connectors from older models somehow become unreliable, and USB ports start to get loose (although when new they tend to be extremely tight). USB-C ports tend to become mushy.
Newer models tend to be quieter, but up until a few models ago, the fan would go wild for no reason (I work with many "non tech" people, so they basically use Outlook and browse a few random websites).
Now, if you only ever use your laptop tethered to a big screen and whatnot, and it's basically a very compact and easy-to-cart-around desktop, then sure, I can understand not caring one bit about all this: you never go out in the rain, so you never get wet feet!
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[0] This is possibly a Windows driver issue, since on my lower-end Elitebook (840 vs 1040) from 2020 running Linux, this doesn't happen.
The boot theory is different: It is about buying something not crafted with proper materials which will quickly fall apart and cost more in the long run. However, unlike technology, there is no cowhide 2.0 coming out 6 months after, with all leather made the cowhide 1.0 way instantly dropping in value and fading into irrelevancy.
Low-end laptops tend to be build around older SKU's which are no longer of interest but function no worse than they did when launched, and mid-tier laptops tend to be made with current SKU's in the more reasonable binning categories.
At the same time, the replacement rate also means that whatever high-end laptop will soon have it's rear handed to it by a mid-tier machine of the next chip generation. While it's outdated within a year or two you of course won't replace it that soon, but that upgrade might stretch your upgrade schedule 50% to justify it - from, say, 4 years to 6. More years of being generations behind.
Keeping a Framework around for longer also only makes sense when considering upgradability.
> A case in point: at work we have HP Elitebooks. The brand-new 2025 models I see people receive have worse screens and trackpads than my 2013 MBP
HP Elitebooks are expensive, high-end machines. The issues you see is because HP, Dell and Lenovo all cater to IT department buying strategies, and therefore all offer a bargain screen option as the machines are bought in bulk and mostly used docked. You'll find that they also have an mid-tier screen option (usually a color-accurate 1080p or 1440p panel), as well as a high-end option (say, 4k OLED touchscreen with wacom digitizer).
The trackpad is a different story entirely. If you're used to a Mac trackpad, things are a bit grim on the PC side. There's some nice ones coming out though.
> They also degrade from daily use: the screen hinge loosens so it moves if you look at it wrong
Everything degrades from daily use. My hinge loosened on my last Mac, the screen damaged itself because the 15" panel did not have the necessary rigidity to main the intended 0.5mm gap to the keyboard keys (confirmed as the second panel did the same), the shitty magsafe port overheated as using pogopins for high power transfer is a terrible idea, all I/O on one side died, and the battery had inflated at least once...
My Dell XPS 13 costing 1/3rd never had any problems, and when replaced it just felt a bit slow and had a somewhat aged battery.
Price is not an indicator of quality or expected reliability, nor is the brand itself a reliable indicator. Use common sense, take a look at the product and avoid the bottom of the bargain bin.
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Do get a good mouse and keyboard though, it has a much more direct impact on your user experience and a mouse that costs twice as much isn't as much of an issue as a laptop costing twice as much. The keyboard and mouse also lasts longer if kept well.
However, Framework has already indicated that they are looking into providing an input module that spans the entire width of the device to eliminate the need for the spacers.
I don't really know what the "creaking screen" is about though. IMO the F16 screen and hinges are a higher build quality than the F13. I had to upgrade my F13 hinges to the 4kg hinges to keep it from bouncing and moving.
The market assigns almost no value to these tenets, nor do the consumers participating in it.
But... lately I've felt a hankering to run Linux as a first-class citizen rather than a VM and that's definitely a gap in Mac functionality. I wouldn't sacrifice the five years I enjoy MacOS on my machines for the ability to then move them to Linux, but it would still be nice.
We sacrifice our freedom now, because of convenience and feature sets thinking everything is going to work out in the end. In 25 years I think we are all going to look back on this moment and wish we didn't make the choices we did, myself included.
Arguably less, as if you have the right relationship with Apple, you can let your employee walk into any Genius Bar™ for fix, or walk into Apple Store or visit your own smart hands crew (with inventory on hand), for an incredibly straightforward swap.
And to your point, it's almost never needed.
I haven’t heard of any big company tyat repairs their own hardware in about 20 or so years.
Though I suppose what you say is perhaps still true, if you allow "almost" to do a lot of work.
It's not a substantial share of the overall laptop market because, quoting from above…
people don’t consider the ability to repair or upgrade your machine part of a “premium” experience ... will lament how manufacturers don’t have upgradable ram, etc and then turn around and are upset at the bulkiness of a repairable laptop
The flip side is technorati gripe about Apple (lack of) repairability, but their revealed preference then shifts back to this: a claim to want reliability but actions of shoppings for premium performance and fit and finish in slim value-holding form factors. To achieve those, particularly with durable value (and resale value to prove it), there's a way to make things that "repairability" generally makes compromises from.
Research has suggested Apple's approach — laptops with 4x the usable and resalable life span — results in less e-waste per capita than both the disposable and repairable ecosystems.
And I have this feeling most people are kind of the same page as me.
Replacing a stick of ram is still much cheaper than buying a whole new MacBook, but these systems seem to be reliable enough that ram failures aren’t front of mind. Same for SSDs.
So for me, there is little value in that in most scenarios. There are a few laptop chassis that I am very fond of and have wished I could "use that chassis with that hardware", but even then I haven't seen Framework chassis designs that give me that impression. I'm not saying they're crappy, but I'm thinking of different types of brushed metal, magnesium alloy stuff, etc.
How often does your RAM fail you?
Ok granted my new desktops have 128GB, but that's massive overkill so I can have like 12 VSCode's open. For normal people 16GB has been the sensible amount for at least a decade.
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/16-3xs-gamer-5070-ti-qhdplus...
It’s my entire professional life’s computer investment - a MacBook Pro in 2013 and an m1 MacBook on 2020.
'Premium' means things like build quality, speaker and microphone quality, camera quality, display quality, etc. etc. These are all things that are much more important to most people than raw specs.
"It's One Banana, Michael. What Could It Cost, $10?" - Lucille Bluth
I understand where you are coming from, I guess it just makes me sad to see more and more people moving away from tech that is less in their control. And i consider upgradability and modularity and important aspect of that.
In the last 20 or so years if I wanted a few years newer CPU for whatever reason it usually meant I needed a whole new motherboard, and that often (but not always) also meant new RAM.
TBH, I have a Ryzen 5950X based tower and while it is faster than my previous desktop which was a i7 4970K (or whatever it is), the previous machine would be fine tbh. I am not even sure why I upgraded tbh.
Where I think repairability really makes sense is in things that don't materially improve and should last 30 years (e.g. appliances).
[0}: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qbrLiGY4Cg
The thing is it would probably be the same issue with a Framework or any other brand of laptop as they all have some final limit on RAM or GPU RAM.
If you upgrade the GPU or motherboard you have to ask what will happen to the old one. You can reuse some of them but most probably will just be e-waste.
There’s a chance when upgrading a whole laptop that the old one will a new use somewhere.
I also wouldn't be buying anything from them in the future one because supporting a certain individual developer, DHH, who holds political opinions incompatible with my existence very easily makes the "buying Framework for cultural revolution" reason extremely moot. Their CEO avoiding the issue and throwing a red herring (Hyprland) into the discussion didn't help either.
I know I'm certainly not the only one who feels this way.
When I learned that Framework started sponsoring DHH's distro, my immediate thought was that I'm not going to buy anything from them ever again.
On the other hand, you can boycott only so many companies before you start boycotting yourself out of existence. One has to draw the line somewhere.
I just hope Framework is going to come to its senses and eventually stop supporting distros that are controlled by an openly racist individual.
It's unfortunate I feel similarly (though less strong) about Louis Rossman.
Are you? Or is it just that they are capable of working with people who have different political views to them? DHH is clearly right wing but I don't think it's abhorrent to work with right wing people full stop.
And yeah I've read the supposedly awful things he's written. I don't agree with them but they aren't that bad. I am centre-left for what it's worth (in the UK, which is probably just left in the US). But I also have the ability to understand other people's viewpoints.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/bad-therapy-08849dc9
I wouldn't be around if this was policy where I live (Let's put aside that the UK is in fact pretty fucked on that)
> I wouldn't be around if this was policy where I live
If what was policy? Higher thresholds for mental health diagnoses?
Cancel culture isn't a good thing, left or right.
Cancel culture is the present-day replacement for blasphemy.
Leave trans people alone.
The threshold for puberty blockers in the UK was already so low that less than 1000 people a year crossed it. They are also already the compromise. The actually non-reversible non-compromise would be HRT. Which would not be a big problem because the detransition rate is extremely low if you apply a standard risk weighing model for medicine. But detransition that does happen is most motivated by the prevalence of transphobia - not the earnest belief that they were trans and are actually cis. HRT has pretty much the same effects as letting people go through natal puberty, except in the way that's not messing up 98% of the people affected in a way they will never be able to be considered normal and/or need half a dozen cosmetic surgeries. It is incredibly fucked up that this movement comes down to "we will sacrifice 50 trans kids to save one confused cis kid".
Anyway, if you have specific concerns, please find a matching chapter in this masterpiece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JiOc0r31-Os
I don't think we should cancel people that want to do something good over a few mistakes, while Microsoft gets to be openly hostile to users, Google does developer verification bullshit and Apple does blatant corruption right in the oval office. Don't even get me started on Zuck running servers on your personal hardware to get around private mode.
I may or may not agree with DHH views, but all that is just one guy's opinion which really doesn't matter that much, against one of the few companies that did something good with hardware in recent years.
Keep everyone to the same standard.
I would've been fine with it had there been a correction, but Nirav didn't even acknowledge the issue. His posts in the big megathread (for which they purposefully chose to merge into the one with the most incendiary name to make the entire point look bad) only address general sponsorships and Hyprland, a community that, from what I hear, has improved a lot. No word on their biggest sponsor check ever going to RubyCon. No word on Omarchy, a distro Nirav seems to have a personal stakes in (filed bugs, keeps interacting with DHH, keeps glazing them on social media).
I've found that if you're in the habit of repairing laptops, Frameworks may come cheap to you as you might have spare storage and ram around. Not being forced to buy ram and storage is one of the "luxuries" of buying framework.
This happens all the time, especially with Apple. Complaints about the inability to side load or use alternative stores for example. Nobody forced you to buy it. It's stupid when people do it for Apple and it's stupid when they do it for Framework.
Heck maybe even 3. The desktop scene doesn't feel that much better, but them all allowing "sideloading" as we call it today alleviates full control of the OS.
What is the implication of this? You're not allowed to criticize a product unless you're being forced to buy it? What is the list of companies you're allowed to levy any critiques of, then? Your electricity provider? You could always move, right?
Is this the mentality that leads people to only ever criticize government power and let all others off the hook?
You can objectively compare the features between two products and criticize them that way. But to criticize the price you need to attach a monetary value to those features. With a framework one of those features is repairability, which to some is worth nothing, and to others it's worth a whole lot.
So is the frameworks pricing absurd? That depends on what you need.
To be fair at least Lenovo and to some extent dell also offer this for individual customers.
It usually is not an option on the latest processors for premium models though as soldered RAM becomes more prevalent there. A minor problem of the author might be that they are looking at the relatively high tier models, which ime have less options for "saving" money, while something like thinkpad e14 might also have been a good candidate instead.
The challenge for framework is to build a modern laptop, that doesn’t have these tradeoffs. Which is an impossible challenge, hence why all of the other manufacturers ditched it. (That and repairability being bad for business)
So, a framework laptop, that’s as light, thin and fast as a mbp, while being a comparable price and being able to pull tabs to swap ram. The better their engineering, the closer they get to this and the more customers they can please.
I'm convinced that a lot of people have Dunning-Kruger effect when it comes to niche products like Framework. The fact that Framework exists at all is amazing, and like you said, it's frustrating to see the lack of understanding of the core value proposition of framework both in this post and HN.
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