Framework 13 Pro Review

It’s been two weeks since I received my Framework 13 Pro, and I am still very happy about my purchase. I have the Intel® Core™ Ultra 5 325 Series 3 processor with 16 GB LPCAMM RAM and a 2TB SSD that I took out of my old laptop. You can get details of my configuration, and the shipping and setup process in my first impressions post.

In this post, I’m going to provide a more in-depth review of the laptop, categorising my feedback based on how much I like each aspect.

Table of Contents

Differentiator

This category is for standout features that really elevate the experience of using the Framework 13 Pro. These features truly differentiate this laptop from others I’ve used.

Battery Life

The battery life on this laptop is the best I’ve ever had on a laptop. I’ve historically been used to having less than 5 hours of screen-on-time on a charge on my previous laptops, but the Framework 13 Pro is getting around 10 hours. It definitely isn’t the 20 hours of battery life that they claim, but it’s quite good.

When I am actively using the laptop with the screen brightness at 20% (which is plenty for indoor usage), it draws around 6W according to upower. The highest I’ve seen it go is 20W when I was playing Geoguessr with the CPU on performance mode. When idle, I’ve sometimes seen the laptop drawing less than 5W.

On standby, the battery drains at around 1% every 2 hours¹. I can reliably leave the laptop unplugged overnight, and not worry about it dying unless it’s already below ~10%.

Fan Noise

My understanding is that the excellent battery life is due primarily to the improved efficiency of the Intel processors. As a side-effect, the processor runs cool (it’s sitting at 34°C as I’m writing this) and so the fan rarely has to spin up. I think I’ve heard the fan spin up once while doing a Nix upgrade. The chassis also stays cool despite the fans not spinning up.

Build Quality

I wrote extensively about the build quality in my first impressions post. The chassis is very solid and I have no complaints.

If I were to nitpick, it would be nice if the front feet on the underside of the chassis were a bit more pointy. I am used to keeping my laptop open and holding it by the corner² with my index finger hooked around the foot, and my thumb on top of the chassis. On the ThinkPad, the foot is very pronounced and it’s easy to grab it and feel secure while holding the laptop. The Framework 13 Pro has more rounded feet, making this manoeuvre more difficult. However, the need for holding the laptop open while moving it is significantly decreased because the Framework wakes from sleep more quickly than any laptop I’ve ever had.

Good

This category is for features that work as expected but aren’t differentiators for this laptop.

Screen

The screen is a 2880x1920 resolution matte screen. I run Hyprland at 1.5x scaling and it looks great. I can’t see any individual pixels without getting very close to the screen.

The screen wobble has not an issue for me. I don’t really use the touchscreen at all, so that probably helps. When just typing normally, the screen does not have a noticeable wobble (or at least it doesn’t wobble any more than I do from fidgeting in my chair).

The screen gets plenty bright and plenty dim. I normally run it around 20-30% indoors, and it’s perfectly fine. I took the laptop outside once, the screen worked in daylight pretty well, even at under 100% brightness. I think that the matte screen helps a lot. Even indoors, it really reduces glare compared to a glass screen. That being said, it’s weird for a matte screen to be a touch panel.

A lot of people say the 3:2 aspect ratio is good for programming because it gives more vertical space. I don’t really understand the hype. I don’t read the code anymore anyway.

Fingerprint Reader

The fingerprint reader is reliable and fast. It’s a lot better than my ThinkPad T14s’s fingerprint reader. I don’t know how it compares to a MacBook Pro, but it feels about as reliable as a phone fingerprint reader from about 2020. It’s fast and reliable enough that it’s faster than typing my password for login and sudo access.

I did have to add a systemd resume script to restart fprintd on wake from sleep because of an fprintd bug. Here is the Nix config for fixing this:

sumnerevans/nixos-configuration@ac7c358:nixos/hosts/scarif/default.nix:46-56:

# A suspend race can leave fprintd holding a stale claim on the Goodix
# reader. Restart it asynchronously after resume so it can claim the device
# again. Check the upstream merge request for a fix before removing this:
# https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libfprint/fprintd/-/merge_requests/259
environment.etc."systemd/system-sleep/fprintd-resume".source =
  pkgs.writeShellScript "fprintd-resume" ''
    if [[ $1 == post ]]; then
      # user.slice stays frozen until this hook exits, so enqueue the restart.
      ${pkgs.systemd}/bin/systemctl --no-block try-restart fprintd.service 2>/dev/null || true
    fi
  '';

Expansion Cards

I have quite a few friends with Framework laptops, and so the expansion cards are about what I expected. My current expansion card setup is two orange USB-C expansion cards in the back two slots, an HDMI in the front-left slot, and a USB-A in the front-right slot. I really like the orange accent, it matches the orange keyboard accent, and gives some character and playfulness to the laptop.

I don’t really have much need to swap out expansion cards on a day-to-day basis. However it’s nice to have the configurability when you need the option to swap ports from one side to the other. I did that a few days ago to get the HDMI on the left side to make it easier to plug in to my TV.

CPU Performance

The Intel® Core™ Ultra 5 325 Series 3³ CPU in this thing is pretty good. I have not had any real issues with the performance. It’s not a beast by any means, but it’s fast enough for the largely thin-client workloads that I have.

Having only 16 GB of RAM hasn’t been that big of an issue, either, although it has made me more conscious of what is using up RAM.⁴

One of the best aspects is that the wake speed is excellent. On a lot of my previous laptops, it takes on the order of a few seconds to resume from sleep. With the Framework, this is not a problem. I actually initially thought that sleep was broken because when I opened the lid, the screen was already on and waiting for input.

I saw some people on the internet setting up local LLMs on their Framework 13 Pros, so I tried it out. I installed ollama and it is able to run qwen3:1.7b at 130.15 tokens/s. I don’t really think it can run a powerful enough model to do any programming tasks, but it’s pretty cool that I can run a local LLM at all.

I also saw someone using Omarchy’s dictation feature on their Framework and I found out that Omarchy uses Voxtype, so I thought I’d set that up in Nix. It took a bit of effort with Claude to configure properly, but I’m happy to say that it works pretty well. It’s pretty quick, all things considered.

In the same vein as CPU performance, the BIOS is fine. There aren’t many settings that you can configure in there, but I think that’s fine. There isn’t really anything that I want to configure since everything is working well out of the box.

Keyboard

During my initial impressions I thought the keyboard was a bit more mushy than my ThinkPad, and I still agree with that assessment. The resistance at the top of the key press is less than I would like. Overall, though, I got used to the keyboard quickly, and I’m able to type at 90-100 WPM which is my max speed on any keyboard.

The keyboard backlight works well. You press Fn+Space to cycle between different backlight levels and there is no way to control the backlight from the OS. (This is similar to how ThinkPads work.) The levels it cycles through are: off, low, medium, high, and auto. It was not obvious to me that the last mode was “auto”, and it took looking at the Framework documentation to figure that out. The auto mode seems to prefer backlight levels that are lower than the “low” level, even in the darkest environments.

Speakers

Everyone seems to complain about the speakers. I think it’s a bit overblown. They aren’t MacBook Pro quality, but they are better than my ThinkPad. I don’t know anyone who buys a laptop for the speakers and people who truly care about audio quality probably don’t think that any laptop speakers are good enough.

I rarely use the speakers on my computer anyway, and the only times I see myself ever doing so are for watching long-form YouTube videos or listening to podcasts. For those use cases, the Framework 13 Pro’s speakers are totally sufficient. If I want to listen to music, I’m going to pull out my headphones and plug them into the headphone jack.

As an actual review of the speakers, the bass is the weakest point, and the sound stage in the mids is a bit muddled, but the highs are fine. However, I literally haven’t noticed until writing up this review because I use them so infrequently.

Detractors

This category is for features that detract from the experience of using the laptop.

Trackpad

My biggest disappointment with the laptop so far has been the trackpad. In my first impressions post, I mentioned that the multifinger detection of the trackpad is a weak point. It still feels slightly inconsistent, but after a few weeks of using it, I think the bigger issue is palm rejection. When the left thumb is touching over the trackpad while I’m using the trackpad with my right hand, it sometimes registers as a finger on the trackpad. Then, sometimes when I do a three-finger press with my right hand, the extra finger confuses things and it registers as a two finger press instead. It also fails to reject my right palm at times, and since I have focus follow my mouse in hyprland this sometimes causes focus to switch unexpectedly.

I think that the nice large size of the trackpad, combined with the fact that it doesn’t have physical buttons at the top of the trackpad like ThinkPads do causes this behaviour.

All this being said, the trackpad is not that bad. The haptics are really good, and it has a nice smoothness. I’ve even been able to play Geoguessr just fine with the trackpad.

Conclusion

I don’t generally have very difficult requirements for my laptops. I don’t need it for gaming, I’m not doing any crazy creative work requiring high colour accuracy, I’m not producing music or videos. The things I care about are durability, portability, and battery life, and the Framework 13 Pro satisfies my requirements in these area.

I am very happy that I bought this laptop, and I see myself using this for many years to come.