Inside of this box is the new Framework 12, a laptop that is going to bring
repairability and also so much cuteness.
But unfortunately, it's in a bunch of pieces. So, let's put it together. As you can tell, this one has already been
put together and tested by our Labs, but we get to do it again. They were kind
enough to disassemble it for us, just like Framework does after they test
these. Okay, so we have our keyboard. We also have a screwdriver right here and a
stylus. Now, at the moment, you can't order a stylus, but you can use any
stylus that supports MPPP 2.0 or USI
2.0, which are things that I know, but you can definitely configure it in the
BIOS. We also have a 60W power adapter,
which you do have to pay extra for. WD
Black SSD that once again you do need to option. And do note if you are getting
an SSD for this that it has to be one of the 30 mm long versions. You can't get a
full fat 80 mm SSD and throw it into this. And also you cannot get more than
one stick of RAM. Here we have 16 gigabytes of DDR55600.
And we also have a lot of IO, a hilarious amount of IO.
We have HDMI, USBC, USBC, USBC, USBC,
USBA, DisplayPort, and another USBC. I
would recommend not getting that many IO modules because they can add up
price-wise. This is like like $100 worth of IO. Please be a cute color.
Otherwise, I don't know what we're doing with the title and intro. Hell yeah.
There we go. It's fun. Oh, we get
stickers. Look at this. They have a little duck in a spaceship. Fantastic.
If you're watching this channel, you probably have already heard of Framework, but if you haven't, they are
a fairly new company that makes laptops that are completely repairable. So, if
you get the DIY version, they arrive looking something like Oh no. Oh no. Oh,
I cannot one finger open it. They arrive looking something like this. To turn
this not complete laptop into a functional laptop, we need to add in a
couple of things. So, first of all, our RAM. We have 16 GB right here. And very
sadly, they only have a single RAM slot here, which does mean that you're only
going to be able to have single channel memory, which will reduce your
performance a little bit. Also, they use a little bit of carbon in this heat
shield right here in order for like EMI and also cooling. But one bonus for that
is that they have a little magnet here for the keyboard pogo pins and the RAM
flap just sticks to it. So, it's way easier to install your RAM. Now, if you
do leave this flap down, obviously your keyboard is not going to work, but
Framework realized that that might be a problem, and they do have a message that
comes up that says, "Hey, dummy, put the
flap back." Up next, we have our WD 1
TBTE and totally normal size, completely
average SSD. One thing that's really nice about installing the SSD right here
is it is totally toolless. So, you just take this little tab, push it in, boom,
your SSD is not going anywhere. A lot of the time you will have these very tiny
little screws that for one are very easy
to lose and kind of difficult to get in, but also if you do lose it, everyone
uses different threads and standards, so getting a new one is basically
impossible, and you just have to tape down your SSD. You can see the names of
the people that worked on it. We do also have two two- watt speakers and a
50watth battery, but we will talk about the testing of those later. And a pretty
small little heat sink for a pretty small little processor. Now, we just
need to screw it together with the included screwdriver. I do really
appreciate the DIY version of this because it gets you used to going in and
out of your laptop. A lot of laptops these days are actually pretty easy to
crack open, but many people that I know don't have the confidence to undo a
couple of screws and pop it apart. What IO do we want? Headphone jacks. All
headphone jacks. No, that's already on here. You don't have the option. You
can't pull a Dell or an ASUS and omit the headphone jack on this. So, right
here, you can see that red means unlocked. And also inside of it, there's
a screw that you can move to permanently lock these in position. The point of
that is so that if these are deployed in schools like framework hopes that they
will be, you can't have your kids going there and just taking these out and just
whipping them at you. Hey, that was close. One thing to note about these, if
you're using the display outs, is that they do not play well at all with
capture cards. Uh, your display IDs get
super confused when you have display out to an adapter to a display. the it it
gets all messed up. So maybe don't try and do screen capture with one of these
or put aside several hours to set it up cuz it will be awful. Now that we're at
the point where we normally start our unboxing of laptops, let's have a little
look. The construction is almost entirely plastic, but it's too plastics.
So right here we have some hard touch stuff. And then along the outside we
have a bunch of TPU so that if you hand this to a child and then give it a
little bit of a drop, hopefully it will be nice and rugged. Also, as we saw
before, on the inside, there is a metal chassis to help with rigidity and
reliability, and metal's nice. I had to
say three things. I was I blanked for the third.
This says, "Pie is better than cake." Uh, you know, when I think about it, I
agree. No, there's only one good pie, too. Pumpkin and strawberry and
blueberry and apple. All right, the power button is over on the side. So,
we're just going to press that. And I'm going to press on into the segue to our
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door. Holy bezels, Batman. You know
what? This screen looks a lot better than I expected. It is nice and bright,
and brightness can make up for a lot of sins. One thing in the config that you
can specify is if you want to include
Windows with your purchase or not, which uh I would recommend just not and then
don't worry about it. I guess am I not supposed to say that? No, pay for Windows. Now, Framework claims that it
can do 400 nits and we tested it and it actually gets closer to 500 which is
pretty darn good. that is bright enough that even with it being glossy, you
could use it for like word editing and stuff like that in the outdoors. What we
get here is a comical 66% of sRGB. We
did measure a 4.69 delta E2000, which is
not great, but also given how limited
the color space is, that is much better than I was expecting. But at the same
time, everything just looks kind of washed out. like nothing is punchy,
nothing is grabbing my attention. What I
will say is that if you have no clue what sRGB means or DCIP3
or color spaces, you will probably be
totally fine looking at this laptop. It isn't going to blow you away, but the
contrast is pretty nice. And just looking at it here, it's fine. I could
watch Netflix on this. I would be totally happy. Also, it is a touchcreen,
and it seems quite well done in the touchscreen department. A lot of the
time the touchscreen digitizer and the display behind it might not be perfectly
aligned. But this one right here, I
don't see any of the Well, I guess I can if I'm like this close to it. So, unless
you use your display about here from here, it's totally fine. Also, we have a
stylus. Hello.
Poop. can go from soft to heavy to soft.
This is quite a good stylus, I do have to say. One thing that does seem
slightly annoying is the rejection of my hand while I'm using the stylus isn't
quite as good as I expect. I also got used to not touching it within how long
did I do this? Like 30 seconds. So, I don't think it's going to be a huge
problem long term. And moving over to the performance of the Framework 12, it
is fine. As long as you have your
expectations set properly, you won't be too disappointed in this. But if they
aren't set properly, when you find out that this has an i5 1334U with 10 cores,
12 threads, and a max speed of 4.6 GHz,
you uh might be pretty underwhelmed. That said though, this processor is
perfectly fine. And they also have an i3 version which is a tiny bit slower and a
little bit more cut down. But both of them will work perfectly fine if what
you want to do is like school work, drawing, that sort of stuff. Not a whole
lot more. I guess we've already been over all the other stuff. 16 gigs of
RAM, 1 TB SSD, Wi-Fi 6E. I do really
like to see that they did not cheap out on the wireless chipset and also you can
replace it or upgrade it later if you need to. and Intel UHD graphics, which
uh let's see how well those do. All right, so we're getting over 100 FPS at
720p. Do we dare try 1080? Get freaking
wrecked, Mr. Bot. And I score again.
Laptop's perfect. I'm pretty surprised. We are playing Rocket League here at 70
to 80 FPS. You can see it right there.
But it's working pretty darn well. This is better than I expected, but I was
also expecting pretty much nothing. So, there is that. If you're curious, the
framework 13 is No, never mind. It's
trash. This if you're curious, the framework 13 is like 120% faster in
games according to our Labs. And that makes a lot of sense because this does
not have a modern processor. But I guess as long as you have your expectations
absolutely through the floor, you can game on this. Do you know what is better
than fine, though?
This keyboard is great. There's loads of
travel on the keys. And even though the chassis isn't quite as stiff as I would
want, they make up for that by having loads of travel on the keys. They have a
really nice tactile feel to them. And overall, I'm going to give the keyboard
a solid A. The trackpad also is pretty
darn great. It doesn't have the most satisfying click that I've ever felt,
but I can't tell if it's glass topped or not, but it does feel like it's glass
topped. So, either way, they want that one. The tracking is awesome. The click
feel is pretty good, and also the taps feel great. It's a good little trackpad,
or I suspect things won't be quite as good as when we turn on the speakers.
Uh, it sounds wide, which is about the
only compliment that I can give. Uh,
bass, not a whole lot. Treble, not a
whole lot. Whole sound stage, pretty
crushed sounding. It obviously is not fair in the
slightest to compare this to a MacBook in any way. This machine right here is
like three times the cost. But just for comparison's sake, we can play a crab
rave on the Mac just so you guys can hear, you know, decent, bad. All right,
framework 12.
MacBook Pro. Obviously not a fair comparison, but
yeah. Ouch. Here we have a 1080p webcam
and actually looks pretty darn good. One thing that I do really appreciate is up
at the top they have a little toggle for the microphone so you can no longer hear
me. And also they have a toggle from the camera so you can no longer see me. I
really appreciate laptops that take your privacy seriously and that is an
excellent step in the right direction. As for the camera itself, it is 1080p
and it is doing a great job here. It is
exposing for my face pretty well. It's
not perfect, but this is pretty difficult lighting right here. It also
is not making me look like a ghost or orange like many of them do. We can
point it directly at a light right here. And yeah, that's pretty darn serviceable
given that I am pointing it directly into some studio lights. So overall,
pretty darn good job. What unfortunately is not so great though is the battery
life. This guy right here, we have a 50Wh battery and that got us just over 5
hours of battery life, which is pretty disappointing in a device like this. If
you get something from basically every single other established laptop maker
with this kind of specs, you will get more battery than that because they are
able to spend years realistically of
engineering time optimizing the BIOS and the screen and how every single bit of
your laptop interacts, which unfortunately Framework just has not had
the experience to do yet. So, the Framework 12, it starts at $550, but
that does not get you a complete laptop. So, we can't really consider that as a
starting price. That said, though, if we look at how I would configure one, we'd
get lavender, of course, because I want it to be very nice and pretty. Actually,
no bubble gum. The bubble gum one's sick. WD Black, bring your own Windows.
We'll just activate it later. 16 GB of
RAM, lavender keyboard, two USBC's,
a type A, and an HDMI, which brings my
personal config to $838.
Now, that is perfectly fine. Really,
it's neither expensive nor cheap, but it
is knocking on the door of the MacBook Air, and I think that's where you're
going to start running into problems. So, you really have to figure out what
you want from your laptop. This right here is going to be able to be upgraded
in the future. You can do kind of whatever you want it with it. And I
really, really appreciate Framework's vision for a laptop. That said, if you
get an i5, we're looking at $988,
which is $11 off of a MacBook Air, which has a
screen that blows this one out of the water and more than double the battery
life. Overall though, I do have to say I quite like the Framework 12. It is a fun
laptop when so many other laptops are trying to be serious and boring. It
doesn't have any significant flaws. The keyboard's great, trackpad's great,
screen is acceptable enough. So, if you
are a turbo nerd and you want to be able to fully disassemble your laptop and
that's something you're into, I think you should go and pick one up. It's I
recommend it. I like it. And I also like you for watching to the end of this
video. Huge thanks for watching. Hit like, get subscribed, and have a great
old day. I'll see you in the next unboxing.