The Framework Laptop Is Great For A Linux-Friendly, Upgradeable/Modular Laptop

The Framework Laptop is sold as a fully-assembled laptop or in a DIY Edition where you can install your own desired components. The fully-assembled Framework Laptop has a base price of $999 USD for a Core i5 1135 G7, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Or there's a performance edition with Core i7 1165G7 with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage for $1399 USD or the "professional" edition at $1999 USD for a Core i7 1185G7, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB of storage.

The Framework Laptop DIY Edition starts out at $749 USD for the base model with a Core i7 1135 G7 installed, $1049 USD for the model with a Core i7 1165G7 installed, or $1,449 USD for the model with i7-1185G7 installed. With the DIY Edition you are left responsible for sourcing your own storage, memory, and WiFi. We were provided a review loaner unit for testing of the Framework DIY Edition laptop.

The Framework Laptop currently is centered around Intel Tiger Lake. Unfortunately, no AMD Ryzen options at this point or for say any Arm based designs. While this is quite an upgradeable and well designed laptop, at least currently it doesn't hold any claims about being open-source down to the firmware or like -- compared to some of the goals with the EOMA68 effort. The initial Tiger Lake based laptop at least is still relying upon proprietary system firmware / BIOS. Given all of the gains made by this laptop, it would be great if they had at least a Coreboot port available while still limited by the Intel FSP, etc. Hopefully this will be an area they pursue further moving forward.

For the assembled Framework Laptop, the company is offering just Windows 10 with no Linux option(s) currently. However, Linux has been running well on the laptop and an obvious area of interest for the company given their DIY/enthusiast target customer (and hence reaching out to test it on Phoronix).