In 2024, I watched a video by Linus Tech Tips that got me really excited. AMD was coming out with the Ryzen AI 300 series CPUs, which promised Apple-rivalling battery life and performance from an x86 platform. The timing was perfect too—I had just graduated university and started a full-time job, and finally would have money to gift myself a new, expensive computer to last me the next decade or so. The CPU, based on this review and those that would come in the months ahead, would have to be a Ryzen 300 series. The body, I hoped, would be that of a Framework Laptop 13.

The Framework Laptop is a beautiful concept. It takes the repairability of laptops of the past—with their upgradeable memory, storage, CPU—and kicks it up a notch. Not only can you repair and swap out all of those, you can also upgrade your motherboard, change out your screen bezel for a new look, replace your battery if it starts puffing up, and even swap ports out so you can always have the ones you need. It’s the perfect laptop for someone like me, who grew up tinkering, repairing, and building computers for fun and profit.

It was a long wait, but in February of last year Framework finally upgraded their Laptops 13 with the Ryzen 300 CPUs I’d grown to want. I placed an order as soon as I could, and I was in the Batch 3 of shipments. I got my laptop soon after, and named it bismuth, as I name all my devices after elements in the periodic table. I was enamored with bismuth for a bit, but things started going downhill almost immediately.

The battery life (or rather, the battery dead)

The battery life wasn’t very good! It’s unclear to me why, but I never got more than 4–5 hours out of the thing. And it’s not just me—people on the r/framework subreddit were nearly universally underwhelmed. Even accounting for the Framework 13’s smaller battery capacity, this should’ve been an 8–10 hour laptop. I really wanted a laptop that would last a long time away from the wall, ever since I started working from cafés and going to local hackerspaces like the Queer Computer Club. But at a 4 hour runtime if I cranked the screen brightness, this would be little better than the laptop I was replacing it with.

Stop, drop, troubleshoot

Ever since I got the laptop, I would run into an odd issue where the screen would occasionally flicker gray. Sometimes it would only be half the screen, sometimes it would be all of it. The flicker would always go away in a few seconds, but it didn’t feel great that this was happening pretty much out-of-the-box on a new laptop.

I have a long email thread with Framework Support about this, where they made me try various troubleshooting steps, but the intermittent and irreproducible nature of this problem made it a pain to debug. I would essentially have to always be on alert for this to happen whenever I used my laptop, and use the valuable seconds I had to do whatever latest step the Framework support team suggested, and then I would never conclusively know if I fixed the problem, I would just remain on the lookout for it again. I don’t think we ever figured out whether it was a hardware or a software problem.

Frame work? I sure hope it does!

One of my friends at the aforementioned Queer Computer Club, ari, showed me a very funny trick—if you hold your Framework Laptop 13 from the front left corner and jerk it up, it registers a click.¹ It becomes less funny when you realize that this is happening because the entire frame of laptop, trackpad, battery and motherboard included, is bending and twisting from forces that a laptop might experience, say, if the owner needs to pick it up and run to something.

It doesn’t have to be a jerk either—with the amount of pressure my left palm puts on the palmrest while resting on the laptop, the right side of the laptop noticeably lifts up, to the point where it can be pushed back down. Again, this is happening because the frame of the laptop is bending. This is not good for a computer I intend to own for a decade! I would like my computer to be able to swap out the motheboard and battery, yes, but I would also appreciate if the computer kept those parts safe so I wouldn’t have to replace them more often!

MediaTek WiFi (that’s it, that’s the joke)

Funny enough, ari listed the quality of the WiFi chip on her laptop as a positive. Maybe I just got a lemon, because the WiFi on my laptop was really bad. It was a MediaTek RZ717 chip. It was really bad at detecting networks, it would take a good 30–40 seconds to re-associate with a WiFi network it was connected to after waking up from sleep, and the throughput would sometime drop very low out of nowhere. This was a replaceable part so I eventually replaced it with an Intel AX210 and that pretty much solved all my problems here, but it’s annoying that I had to.

Toby Fox boss battle–ass display

Last month, I got a stuck pixel on my screen, very prominent to me because it was at the bottom-middle-ish of the screen—exactly where your eyes would go if you were writing stuff in a text editor. Whenever this happens to me, I run it through one of those “unstick your stuck pixels” 10 hour YouTube videos, and that did temporarily fix it. It came back again the next day, I did the video again, it went away again and didn’t come back. Will it come back again? Who knows. I assume that the alternative here would have been to replace the display, but again, this is a computer that is barely a year old out of the box. I should not have to replace the display, or even think about replacing the display, on a computer that is one year old that I didn’t break.

Other stuff that broke

• fprintd hangs sometimes if enabled, preventing the laptop from going to sleep. I have no idea why, my work laptop is also a Framework 13 with the same fingerprint sensor and that uses fprintd just fine. I ended up disabling the fingerprint scanner.
• At some point, it lost the ability to remember WiFi passwords when it was re-associating with the networks after restart or wakeup from sleep. No idea why, but it only happens on Linux so I suspect it’s a software issue (though it’s weird that none of my other Linux computers with Intel AX210s had it).
• The lid detection sensor is under the caps lock key, ie. exactly where my wrist, with my watch whose strap has a magnet, goes. I experienced “random screen blackouts” for months until another QCC friend, Sarah, pointed the sensor out to me so I could avoid it.

N strikes…

Individually, all of these problems could be tolerable. And honestly, I expected some of them going in. I’d read the reviews, I’d seen the forum posts, I’d watched the videos. I wanted to support a company that was trying to make computer repairability a mainstream idea again, and I was willing to tolerate a fair bit for that.

But all of these happening on the same computer feels like a bit of a slap in the face. Every time one of these things came up again, I remembered that I had paid $2,800 CAD—that’s used car money!—for this computer. This computer that had barely better battery life, and much worse build quality, than my Lenovo ThinkPad X395 that I bought off a guy in Markham for $150. Sure, there’s way more performance in here, but I was barely using it. The most that I do with my computer is play the occasional video game, and I have a Steam Deck for that too. At that point, what was I even here for?

A couple weeks ago, I was in Vancouver with a friend, and they bought a used five-year-old ThinkPad X13 for themself, because they needed a computer to use at school. I caught myself wishing for that computer, despite having a “better” one in my backpack right that moment. And I realized then—I can just sell it. I can just sell my Framework and get most of my money back because it’s still the newest AMD model and has memory and storage in it already, both of which are more expensive now. I could then buy a used five-year-old ThinkPad like my friend. I would have a laptop that I like more, and two grand to spare.

…and you’re out

So I sold it! bismuth is gone. I feel a little sad, because I’ve had some great times with it. But I hope it’ll be happier at a home where it feels wanted.

I think the lesson for me is to never buy a laptop new again if I can help it. Business computers from five years ago are great. They’re fast enough, they have enough battery, all the kinks in the software and drivers have been worked out, they’re built better, and they’re cheap as hell. I’m back at my ThinkPad X395—tennessine. I still have issues with it—I didn’t buy the Framework for no reason!—but for now, I’m happier.