So, rewind to earlier this year: There were 2 laptop announcements of interest to me.
First was the snapdragon X arm laptops that were going to come out. qualcomm was touting that they would have great linux support and they were already working on merging things upstream. Nothing is ever that rosy, but I did pick up a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x that I have been playing with. Look for a more detailed review and status on that one in a bit. Short summary is that it’s a pretty cool laptop and mainstream linux support is coming along, but it’s not yet reading to be a daily laptop IMHO.
The second was framework announcing a new batch of laptops would be coming out with some nice upgrades, so I pre-ordered one of the ryzen ones. But reader, you may ask: “don’t you already have a framework ryzen laptop? and aren’t they supposed to be upgradable? So why would you order another one?”. To which I answer: yes, and yes, and… because I wanted so many new things it seemed easier to just order a new one and get a spare/second laptop out of it.
I have one of the very first generation framework 13 laptops. It was originally ordered as a intel 11th gen cpu/mb shipped in July of 2021, almost 3.5 years ago. So whats in the newer/latest version that I wanted?
- Better hinges (the old ones are kinda weak and you can cause the display to ‘flop’ if you carry it by that.
- New top cover. The old one is the old multipart one, the new ones have a one part aluminum one.
- New camera thats supposedly better.
- New battery (ok, I replaced the battery in my old one a while back, but always nice to have a new battery)
- Replacement input cover (the thing with the keyboard/touchpad). After hammering mine for 3.5 years, the tab and/or alt keys stick and result in moving between windows being frustrating. Also, new one has no windows key, just a ‘super’ key.
- Higher resolution / refresh rate display. (120hz and 2880×1920 and matte vs 60hz and 2256×1504 and glossy). In particular the glossy is very anoying in highly reflecting areas.
So, I could have replaced all those things, but at that point it seemed like it would be easier to just move to a new chassis and have a spare.
Of course things didn’t go as planned. The laptop arrived and I swapped my memory and nvme drive over to it and… it didn’t boot. Spend a fair bit of time with framework support back and forth. They wanted movies / pictures of most everything and had me do a bunch of things to isolate the problems. They decided it was a bad monitor/display cable and input cover. So, they shipped those replacements to me (they had to replace the display because the cable is attached to it). Unfortunately, they shipped them USPS, so it took about 9 days and because we don’t get USPS here I had to go rescue it from the local postoffice before they sent it back.Today I swapped in the display and input cover and everything worked like a charm. A quick switch of memory and nvme I am am now booted on the new laptop.