I Wanted to Love the Framework 13 Pro...

[00:02] Framework 13 Pro. It solves a lot of the issues we had with prior frameworks. It feels more premium, better matching other laptops at this price point. It more comfortable recommending it to an average laptop buyer. It has a haptic

[00:15] screen, and more efficient processor options. It ticks a lot of the boxes we of Framework's extremely unique benefits. It's fully modular and completely upgradeable, and it's a consumer first laptop with both Linux

[00:30] and Windows support. Plus, Framework continues to innovate by having fast LP Cam 2 upgradeable memory. This is the first time we've reviewed an Intel Series 3 laptop with that, but the downsides to its upgradability are still

[00:45] there. This is heavier than most 13-in laptops, and it only has a single fan cooling solution, so its components do not perform at their best. Also, unfortunately, due to recent price hikes, it's still really expensive. It's

[00:59] still the best framework laptop by a mile, so it might be worth that extra cost to you. But in this video, I'll make sure to compare it to other alternatives as well. These and the Framework will be linked down below and

[01:11] also on our website, bestlaptop.deals, where we track prices so you know when it's the best time to buy. Let's start with what makes the Framework 13 Pro better than the Framework 13. The chassis looks and feels so much better

[01:23] than the prior Framework 13. It now comes in a sleek black color, which looks much better than the silver to me. This new one does pick up fingerprints, which the silver didn't, but it's not as bad as most black laptops like the Blade

[01:36] 16. Honestly, I think it still looks better than the older model, even with fingerprints on it. It also feels more premium and a little better built, less flex to the keyboard deck and lid. The new one also has a more full squared off

[01:50] look, whereas the old one has a bit of a taper leading up to the front edge. I especially since the main part of the laptop isn't actually any thicker. The only trade-off appears to be a slight increase in weight, but it's minimal.

[02:05] This is not to say, though, that this is a light or thin laptop. For its screen size, it is still much bulkier than something like the XPS 13, which has a similar screen size and is much more compact. Back on the 13 Pro, the front

[02:19] edge is a bit sharp where you might rest your wrists, but you'd probably only notice this when you don't have support for your arms, like on a plane or train. On the positive, the ports look more cohesive than prior years because their

[02:31] modularity isn't as obvious in the black color. On the other hand, I would love one of the more colorful keyboard combinations than the plain black on ours. I like the one with orange and gray accent keys best. That one feels

[02:45] more devcoded to me. Other than that, the keyboard is basically the same as prior years. I find Framework's keyboards to be pretty comfortable. I use them a lot and they are near the top of my list. The 1.5 mm of key travel

[02:58] feels ample enough to me. You get a bit more room than lower travel ones like on the XPS's, MacBooks, and the ThinkPad X9's, all of which are competitors. It's not quite as clicky as Lenovo's most satisfying keyboards like they have on

[03:12] the Yogas, but it is quieter. Great for limiting distractions in a meeting. The key presses require a little more force than the Yoga as well, which I prefer, but Josh prefers less resistance to a key press. The keyboard layout is

[03:25] standard on the 13 Pro as well, and I have the option to keep my precious right control key, which has been replaced by the co-pilot key on every other laptop. I've sort of gotten into the habit of not using it by now, but

[03:37] that's besides the point. There are dozens of us. The new haptic trackpad is great. Tracking is smooth and accurate, and both Josh and I didn't experience any palm rejection issues, which is very rare on Windows laptops. Part of this is

[03:51] that the trackpad isn't ridiculously large where your palms rest on it. Out settings, though. The feedback of the click feels soft and minimal, which you may or may not like. I prefer a little more click than this, so I would change

[04:07] my settings, which you can do. Now, let's talk the new display. It is still let's talk the new display. It is still a 13.5 in highresolution 2880 by 1920 a 13.5 in highresolution 2880 by 1920 IPS panel with a 3x2 aspect ratio and

[04:19] 120 Hz variable refresh rate, but it now gets brighter and has touchscreen capabilities. Both are great additions to an already nice screen. The one that the coating seems to cause a screen door effect. When looking closely at

[04:34] white colored content, you can see colored pixels peeking through. We've seen this on other touchscreen laptops as well. And also contributing to this is the fact that this is a matte panel and not reflective, which other than

[04:47] that is a good thing. So besides that one con that we mentioned, it's an excellent display. Josh said it was one of the best displays he's ever seen. As he said many times, both the aspect ratio, high resolution, and high

[05:00] brightness means you can see more lines of code or rows in an Excel sheet than you might expect in such a small form factor. Compared to a lowresolution 16in, it's literally not a competition. Even compared to a higher resolution

[05:13] 16-in panel, this 13.5 in screen still does very well. This is one of the the 13-inch form factor as it fits in the smaller bags I use, but I still get

[05:25] laptop. When it comes to ports, Framework has the best in the entire industry. You get four hot swappable ports and an insane selection to choose from. There are options for a fast full-sized or micro SD card reader, 10

[05:39] gig Ethernet, display port, HDMI, whatever you like. The headphone jack is always there, so you don't need to use up a port slot for it, but you can buy one if you need to for some reason. This new one has changed the mechanism to

[05:52] release the ports from a button to a switch. When it's red, it's unlocked, and when it's black, it's locked, which I think is a nice indicator. The locking doesn't seem to be any better or worse than last year's in terms of sturdiness.

[06:04] Both are good, but if I accidentally leave it unlocked, I'll get the occasional mishap of the port detaching from the laptop because of the charger. The only thing missing regarding ports is Thunderbolt 5 capability, but all

[06:17] four ports do support up to Thunderbolt 4 speeds and 140 watt USBC charging. So, you can really do whatever you like other than that. Over other 13-in laptops, the ports are a major bonus. There really is no comparison. Okay,

[06:32] let's get into configuration options. Because if you don't need as much RAM, strong CPU performance, or the special high-end integrated GPU of the Intel X choices to save some money on this laptop. Firstly, the one I would

[06:46] recommend is the lower tier Intel Ultra 5 chip with 16 gigs of RAM. That pre-built config is only around $1,600, and you're still getting all the premium features of this laptop I've mentioned. We don't have that specific chip in, but

[06:59] we do have the Ultra 7 in the Slim 7i Ultra on our graphs, which should be a little better. You could also get it with an AMD chip, but it's actually more expensive. The Ryzen 7 for $2,300 will provide more performance than the Intel

[07:12] Ultra 5 will, but its battery life is not going to be nearly as good. We did do a motherboard swap into the new 13 Pro chassis so that we had both the Intel X7 and Ryzen 7 versions to test. The AMD one did much worse on battery

[07:25] than even Intel's more power-hungry chip here. So, the final option to get both good performance and battery life is to splurge and spend $2,900 on the X7 config. You can cut that price down, though, if you only need 16 gigs of RAM,

[07:42] which is what I would do. The X7 chip outperforms the Ryzen 7 chip in last year's framework by about 16% in Geekbench multi-core, but single core is around the same. Neither frameworks are stellar performers here. When we look at

[07:56] Cinebench, we see a 27% improvement over last year's AMD chip in last year's framework chassis. This is solid, but the framework's power limit is holding back this X7 chip. Only 30 watts sustained, which averages around 35

[08:09] watts when you factor in bursts. Something like the ThinkPad X915P feeds the same CPU 15 watts more and performs much better. At the other end of the spectrum, HP isn't feeding their Omnibook Ultra's X9 enough power to even

[08:23] justify it being in that laptop. It doesn't perform much better than the X7 in this framework. Both it and the ThinkPad are worth considering if you're not married to the modularity of the framework as they cost a lot less. Not

[08:35] only does the modularity have a cost in terms of price, but also in its cooling design. Framework has retained a single fan cooling solution like prior years. Laptops like the ThinkPad have more robust two fan cooling solutions and

[08:49] keep their chips running cooler. The core temps of the framework are very high. As with all of the Framework 13s we've tested in a very intensive workload like Cinebench, it gets very warm on the keyboard deck and underside.

[09:02] Too hot to have on your lap comfortably. This goes for all the framework configurations we've recently tested. I do have a positive of the new one though. The Intel 13 Pro is not running its fans nearly as high as the others.

[09:16] It's actually the quietest of its competitors. This means that with some comfortable fan curve for tasks like these, just like you can with Apple's MacBooks, which also get hot because they prioritize quieter fan speeds. So,

[09:31] we tried the framework control app to manually raise the fan speeds earlier than the stock performance mode. The laptop got much louder, but cooler to the touch, and it didn't perform any better. This cooling

[09:44] solution is likely a limitation. Even if you try a lesser performance mode, the laptop still feels warm when you're doing something intensive on it. At least you can trade fan noise for performance in some modes, though. When

[09:56] you're not maxing it out, this new Intel framework stays almost dead silent. It also only gets a bit warm, never hot. I used it for about a week for office work Premiere Pro and it never got

[10:10] uncomfortably warm or loud in those tasks. It definitely feels cooler than the AMD chip in the same chassis. We've found the Intel chips to be more efficient than those chips for real world tasks. Looking at GPU performance,

[10:22] the new framework does well, significantly better than the AMD model, which is not a surprise as it includes the powerful B390 iGPU. However, it does not perform as well as similar chips that are getting more power. Compared to

[10:36] the Omnibook, they receive about the same amount of power in gaming, 30 W, but the Omnibook consistently performs better. We feel this might have to do with the distribution of power between the CPU cores and iGPU cores. Gaming

[10:49] laptops you could get in this price point though, like the Legion 5A, are over twice as good as either of those. And this is only a 5060. We've seen 50 80 laptops drop into this price range too, like the Omen Max 16. This trend

[11:04] Cyberpunk, where the new Intel framework delivers barely playable frame rates. The ThinkPad is much smoother here. In more intensive games like Forza, the framework doesn't do great even at these lower resolutions. Although with the

[11:17] custom fan curve, it did at least stay cooler on the keyboard deck, even if it performed worse. You'd want to stick to lighter titles or lower settings on this laptop. For creator tasks, this is not the laptop to get. It has a smaller

[11:31] screen and it underperforms with its hardware. Even a MacBook Air outperforms it in video editing. Even in Photoshop, the Air does better. This doesn't mean you can't use it for creative work. I used it for reviewing our videos in

[11:43] Premiere Pro. As I said, it worked for simpler projects when I lowered the playback resolution, but it's far from ideal as a video editing laptop at this price point. Battery life is one of the big claims. this framework has made on

[11:57] this new 13 Pro. And they get closer to their claims than I expected, which I don't normally get to say about manufacturers. They claim 20 hours in streaming, 17 hours in active web usage, and 11 hours in video conferencing. The

[12:10] test we run is office tasks until the battery dies at 300 nits, which is a bit brighter than they are running it, and ours lasted around 15 1/2 hours. This is a very strong result. Their battery is around 10 watts bigger than prior years,

[12:22] which is helping, but the efficiency of these Intel Series 3 chips is probably doing most of the work. It also has a variable refresh rate display that goes contributing as well. Funnily enough, I accidentally tested this laptop once on

[12:36] its best performance mode instead of its best power efficiency mode, and it still lasted 13 hours, which is great. As far as how well it performs on battery, it performance much, but it does still underperform laptops like the ThinkPad.

[12:50] this year. The Framework speakers used to be a low point of this laptop. The Framework Pro uses a different design. They are now sidefiring, not downward firing. And the speakers themselves are different. They now sound louder and

[13:04] clearer. But even with these improvements, they still don't sound as good as other premium laptops. They just sound good enough that you aren't going sound good enough that you aren't going to be mad about it. Take a listen.

[13:37] sounds on the new Framework 13 Pro. It does have a privacy shutter for the camera and the microphone. It does not have IR for Windows Hello, but there is a fingerprint scanner in the power button. Overall, we think it looks okay,

[13:49] but we've definitely seen better webcams at this price point. Here's how the webcam looks and sounds in normal overhead office lighting. For Linux, we did a full install of Iuntu 26.04 and ran the standard updates, not just a

[14:02] framework and iuntu's instructions, which were really easy. Everything worked. Screen brightness, keyboard, backlight, haptic trackpad, touchscreen, issue we ran into seems to be we're recording a video on the webcam crashes

[14:17] errors that came up, some of which said that we didn't have the right drivers. If you've seen this issue before, we would love to hear more about it with a comment below. Overall, even on a laptop certified for iuntu, it's still not

[14:31] quite plug-and-play out of the box. Look, previously frameworks have cost more than comparable laptops with the same specs. Most laptop buyers weren't willing to pay more for a laptop that looks and feels less premium, and most

[14:43] don't upgrade their laptop, so they don't see the value of that. When the pre-orders came out for the Framework 13 Pro, they were at very competitive prices. Given the massive improvements to this laptop, we thought Framework

[14:55] could finally break into the mainstream. But unfortunately, the ramp apocalypse came for Framework. Right before we finish this video, they announced significant price hikes, which just brings it back to being more of a luxury

[15:09] device for techies. If you have the money for the Framework 13 Pro, the performance while feeling cooler to the touch during performance tasks and has a larger screen. Then, of course, there is the MacBook Pro 14, which is still a

[15:23] little more premium than the frameworks and performs a lot better, particularly at this price point where you can get an M5 Pro chip. Josh would buy the MacBook Pro 14. Seth would buy the X915P, but I would still buy the framework. I'd

[15:36] 16 gigs of RAM before the price goes up again because the 32 gig version is way too expensive now. It's a fantastic and innovative laptop, but it's clearly not

[15:48] for everyone like we'd hoped. Our full list of laptops we recommend is bestlaptop.deals, and we keep that list up to date well after our videos go section where you can literally select the course you're studying, your

[16:01] hobbies, and your budget. Then it makes specific recommendations. That's all a wonderful rest of your day and I will catch you later.