Why I'm Spoiled by Apple Silicon (But Still Love Framework)

I think Apple's success at using power management data from their mobile products to make computer hardware with really good power management is highlighting just how bad computer power management has been.

When you close the lid on a laptop, there are a lot of layers that all have to do the right thing. How is Windows configured? How do the drivers installed on that laptop handle the Windows state transitions? How do all the pieces of hardware on that laptop (CPU, etc.) work together to implement the various states?

I think it is possible for a computer manufacturer like Framework to work with operating system vendors like Microsoft and Canonical, and hardware vendors like Intel and AMD to improve how power management is implemented in their hardware.

There is always some level of "friction" involved when you are trying to integrate across different vendors. Some of the best Windows hardware I've used was made by Microsoft. The Surface line, at least in my experience, is really good.

It will require an investment of course, but I think it is possible.

The complaint about power usage in suspend is especially sad because it’s pretty much a common problem for Linux on laptops. Not sure if that’s what applies here, but the numbers about match what I see with my Framework. Basically: if you want to use secure boot you usually also want kernel lockdown mode, and you cannot hibernate a lockdowned kernel. At least not without out-of-tree patches.

IMHO that’s a giant issue. If you can’t hibernate (aka suspend to disk) you will never be able to get that power consumption low. And telling people to not run secure boot or lockdown is not really a good answer either. Especially since the default installer already sets those things up. I get that „Linux on laptops“ is not a priority big enough to get a proper fix for that. And that it’s not an easy issue to fix. But the current state is really really sad.

As suggested in the blog post, the battery life issue is complex.

You do need a CPU/SoC that’s efficient, and while Intel and AMD can do this it’s traditionally been a struggle for them.

Next, the OS needs to be capable of taking full advantage of the chip’s efficiency. Windows could be decent here in, but Microsoft doesn’t believe in an operating system that’s ever truly idle (and neither do the third parties living in your taskbar tray), so even on relatively efficient laptops much of that potential is wasted. Linux is kind of all over the place, depending on your hardware, which governor you’re using, how it’s configured, whether your browsers are configured to use GPU acceleration or are burning power intensive CPU cycles, etc.

Then there’s sleep. Most of the problems here come down to x86 laptops not implementing proper S3 sleep but only “modern standby”, which attempts to emulate the sleep mode that Apple uses that allows for emails to be fetched etc while in a near-sleep low-power state. The problem is that modern standby is not implemented well in Windows or Linux and how individual laptop firmwares handle it can vary a great deal, and the sum of it is that it generally speaking doesn’t work, which is why so many x86 laptops drain themselves after being “asleep” for a couple of days. My ThinkPad does this too.

It’s possible for x86 machines to manage this state correctly, as proven by Valve’s Steam Deck which can be put to sleep and drain its battery slowly enough to stay alive for a week or more. This seems to require a level of integration between the hardware and the OS (an Arch based Linux in this case) than practically all laptop vendors are either willing or capable of.

Battery life is the only thing stopping me from getting out of the Apple ecosystem. As soon as a viable Linux laptop with "enough" battery life becomes available, I'll make the switch. At that point there's nothing on Apple side that couldn't be done better in Linux (with a bit of work, but that's okay).

I travel a lot, and often on standby for work during that time. I need to be confident that when I pull the laptop out, there's ALWAYS enough juice to respond to a situation immediately without worrying about anything else.

If Framework offered hot swappable batteries, even if a quick restart is required, I'd be fine with that because at least I wouldn't be stranded in that case. And I'd be happy to pay as much as a MacBook, or a bit more even, purely for ideological reasons. Apple's dominance is bad for all of us.

This sounds like the so-called "modern standby" (S0 vs S3, if I remember correctly). I bought a thinkpad a while back with "modern standby" and the thing wouldn't last the night suspended, and would often wake me up with its fans howling and end up being very, very hot while suspended. I disabled "modern standby" in the BIOS and it was back to sleeping for weeks without losing charge. I have no idea if that's what's going on with Framework laptops, but "modern standby" is one of the dumbest changes I've ever seen in PC hardware. To my understanding it's to make laptops behave more like phones, but I've never experienced any meaningful difference in resume behavior between S0 and S3 suspend.

Reminds me of the windows laptop-closed-but-loses-power-while-hibernating bug that’s been around for ages (10+ years at minimum). Linus (LTT) has made multiple video regarding that over the years.

Obviously, that’s windows. But I do wonder why sleep modes in Linux/windows don’t actually work effectively. I mean they ‘work’ as in slowed battery drain, but still nowhere near any of the MacBook series (with/without the M* chips). Idk something about them, they get it right..

The Arm architecture isn't why Apple Silicon is so good at this. Apple's silicon engineers have been very good at designing a system of power states that is extremely efficient, and have tight coupling with the OS. Linux on a framework laptop gives you none of this co-design.

Author here. I'm posting this before bed. If there are any suggestions or questions I will answer in the morning.

As a Linux user I feel you.

The Mac Desktop is vastly inferior to the Linux world (for power users) but the hardware is so, so good.

For me it is about having a completely silent setup. It is so, so hard to go back to noisy fans.

I really hope Asahi Linux keep going so I can have the best of both worlds.

I want to love framework, and I really do want to get behind their mission, but a few things stand out.

First and this is the elephant in the room, it's probably better for the environment to buy a refurbished think pad. The most environmentally friendly product is one that gets reused instead of going to a landfill.

The 13-in framework only offers one SSD slot, The expansion Bay offers a nice storage option but these are a bit overpriced and then you're down to three ports. The design itself feels really prone to failure, if you're popping in and out expansion cards all the time eventually the ports are going to fail which seems like a really weird design choice. It probably would have been smarter to do something that requires actually screwing in components.

To get comparable specs, you seriously need to spend about 50% more on average, and this is just me comparing ThinkPads to Frameworks. If I wanted to look at laptops on sale you can easily find framework specs at half price.

Finally the support issues don't really inspire confidence, if my Lenovo laptop has issues I can walk into a variety of authorized repair centers and just let them sort it out. Framework simply doesn't have this, I don't have the appetite to pay a premium price and not have this as an option.

Extended warranty options are iffy. You have to first pay more for the prebuilt laptop, and then at the performance tier ( Amd 350) you have to drop $1,690 to get a 3 year warranty. It's out of stock anyway.

The Lenovo E14 Gen 7 with a Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 255H Processor is about 1030$ direct from Lenovo with a 3 year warranty (2 years is available, and is my risk tolerance sweet spot, so I can save 60$ there).

The only reason I'm looking at the E14 is I REALLY want two SSD drives. If I'm ok with just one I can buy a refurbished P14 for around 780$.

I think the core issue is Framework is still a boutique brand, if they ever reach the size of a major OEM then they're pricing will be more competitive.

I wish Framework offered a laptop with an ARM64 processor.

I have a Surface Laptop 7 with a Snapdragon CPU on Windows 11 and it's been awesome so far. Insane battery life, especially in standby. I can reopen it after 48 hours and it only lost 3% of battery, while it stayed connected to WiFi and received notifications all along.

The standby experience is so bad on Linux laptops that I almost always shutdown and optimise for boot speed.

On the MB a shutdown is quite rare and getting into the system takes 1s with the fingerprint reader. That’s such a huge difference it feels like magic.