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Framework Laptop 12 review


A sturdy, thoughtful, cute design that just can’t compete in its price range.

The upside of a slightly older processor is a more stable computing experience, in both Windows and Linux, since the companies and communities involved have had more time to add support and work out bugs; I had none of the sleep-and-wake issues or occasional video driver crashes I had while testing the Ryzen AI 300 version of the Framework Laptop 13. This keeps the laptop feeling nice and responsive for day-to-day use and helps keep a lid on power usage for battery life reasons, but it also limits its performance for extended CPU-intensive workloads like our Handbrake video encoding test. It adds some subtle refinement to elements of the original Framework Laptop 13 design, including some things I hope end up making it into some future iteration of its design—softer corners, more color options, and an easier-to-install keyboard and trackpad.

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