I mainly use my MacBook M1 Pro with Apple Silicon for work. Recently I’ve had a few weeks off. It’s been sitting in my laptop bag waiting for me to return to work.

Since I’m back to work tomorrow I got it out to see if it was charged enough for the train journey in the morning. 90% remaining. After 3 weeks. It wasn’t turned off, just closed.

In contrast, my Framework 13 with an AMD Ryzen 7840HS is almost always dead when I go to use it. It’s very frustrating. I’m not using it every day so it often goes 2-3 days without being opened. I haven’t measured it but I read that I should expect it to lose 3-4% in suspend every hour. Is that a joke?

I was running Fedora Workstation on the 13 for a long while until I had a short stint with Arch Linux. It wasn’t stable enough so now I’m on Fedora Silverblue which has been delightful.

However, the Framework’s battery life continues to be an issue.

I’m a true believer of Framework’s mission. The technology is awesome. But why is the battery life of modern laptops (other than Apple Silicon) so bad? I don’t think it’s unique to Framework, but it affects my love for this groundbreaking device.

Apple Silicon is built upon ARM64 which is apparently core to such great battery life. Do I need to get an ARM mainboard as soon as Framework offers it as an upgrade? I’m not sure. It appears to be way more complicated than just switching to ARM64.

I still love my Framework, despite its flaws. I will just keep it plugged in so that it’s ready to go when I want to use it.