Review: Framework Laptop’s 13th-gen Intel upgrade helps fix its battery problem

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When you read a laptop review, even if the new laptop looks identical to last year's model, the company has usually sent the reviewer an entirely new product to set up and test. For this review of the Framework Laptop 13—for all intents and purposes, a brand-new product and the third iteration of Framework's original repairable, upgradeable laptop PC—Framework's PR team sent me a box full of parts that I could use to upgrade the laptop I reviewed last year.

So this is a review of the 2023 iteration of the Framework Laptop 13, but it's also a review of a box full of parts. We won't regurgitate everything we said about the Framework Laptop last year (or the year before that) except to comment on how the design of the system is aging and how the various new components change the experience.

The big takeaways? If you're considering a Framework Laptop for the first time, the company has fixed many of the things about the laptop that we listed as cons last year, especially the battery life. If you're upgrading an older model, at least one or two of the components in that jumble of parts we got is worth considering as an upgrade. And in either case, you might want to wait for the upcoming AMD Ryzen edition—at least, as long as the computer you're currently using can get you by until "late Q3," when those laptops and mainboards are currently slated to ship.

Upgrade experience

Specs at a glance: Framework Laptop 13 (2023)
OS	Windows 11 22H2
CPU	Intel Core i7-1370P (6 P-cores, 8 E-cores)
RAM	32GB DDR4-3200 (upgradeable)
GPU	Intel Iris Xe (integrated)
SSD	1TB Western Digital Black SN850
Battery	61 WHr
Display	13.5-inch 2256x1504 non-touchscreen in glossy or matte
Connectivity	4x recessed Thunderbolt ports with customizable "Expansion Card" dongles, headphone jack
Price as tested	$2,079

This round of upgrades for the Framework Laptop 13 (previously just the "Framework Laptop" but given the "13" as a retronym to distinguish it from the next Framework laptop) includes a new motherboard with 13th-generation Intel Core CPUs on board. But there are a bunch of cheaper products you can consider if you want to spruce up an existing Framework Laptop without springing for a pricey new board: a new larger battery, a redesigned hinge, new display bezel colors, louder speakers, and a matte screen option, in addition to pre-existing upgrades like a redesigned lid and the full array of expansion cards.

Given the option to get a whole new laptop or components I could use to upgrade last year's review loaner, I opted for the box of parts, which came with the highest-end Core i7-1370P board, the matte screen, the new hinge, the new speakers, and the bigger battery. The iFixit-style replacement guides for each component are well-illustrated and easy to follow; dealing with tiny wires and ribbon cables might still be a bit intimidating for neophytes, but if you have any experience building a desktop or upgrading the RAM in one of your older computers, you ought to be able to handle everything here.

If anything, the way the Framework Laptop is designed makes it easier to replace a bunch of parts at once than to do it one thing at a time—many of the steps you need to follow to replace the display panel, for example, also need to be followed to replace the hinge. All told, it took me around an hour to do all the upgrades, with the display panel and hinge being the most finicky (mostly because of cable routing) and the battery being the simplest.

There's also one other upgrade, one that you might not need to spend money on. Framework announced that it had made a change to the way its HDMI and DisplayPort Expansion Cards work; apparently, when mixed and matched with ports other than USB-C, these display outputs could "keep subsystems powered" whether they were in use or not, potentially consuming extra power. There's a firmware update that will fix this issue for DisplayPort Expansion Cards. Updating the HDMI Expansion Card is possible but requires soldering.

The laptop I built

Of all these upgrades, the step up in battery life is the most important, and we'll talk about that shortly. But in my heart, the one I like best (because it's always in front of my face) is the matte screen option, with its lack of reflective coating. In our testing, this display panel performed pretty similarly to the glossy panel, so the one you pick should come down to which finish you prefer; the matte panel had marginally better contrast and brightness (466 nits and 1415:1, compared to 423 and 1310:1 in the glossy), and the glossy panel had marginally better color gamut coverage (99.4 and 76.1 percent for sRGB and DCI-P3, compared to 96.4 and 69.5 percent for the matte).

Though the matte option is nice, there are other kinds of screens you simply can't get on the Framework Laptop. There's no OLED or 4K panel or high-refresh-rate option. There's no touchscreen version, either—if you want one for accessibility reasons or otherwise, the Framework Laptop can't accommodate you.

I still like the general design of the Framework Laptop a lot, even a couple of years in. Like a living thing slowly evolving into a crab, premium laptop designs have all settled on "2.5-to-3-pound-13-or-14-inch-aluminum-slab" as the ideal shape to take. The 2.87-pound Framework Laptop is a couple tenths of a pound heavier than Dell's XPS 13, Apple's MacBook Air, or Lenovo's ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but it gets close enough that its weight isn't a reason not to buy it.

The keyboard and trackpad are both good, the fingerprint reader and camera are both a little clunky-looking but are perfectly serviceable, and the laptop's metal exterior feels firm and stable. I can't say the second-generation hinge made a night-and-day difference for the screen's stability, but it doesn't wobble as you use the laptop, and you can easily open the lid with one hand without lifting the rest of the laptop with it. Official support for Ubuntu and Fedora (and unofficial community-provided support for a few others) is a nice touch for people who don't want Windows.

The laptop's big functional day-to-day selling point remains its Expansion Card system, four recessed Thunderbolt ports (previously USB-C, though upgradeable to Thunderbolt in the 12th-gen model with a BIOS update) that allow you to integrate the necessary dongles into the body of the laptop. USB-A, DisplayPort, HDMI, Ethernet, and microSD cards are all available, as are 1TB and 250GB storage modules—mix and match them however you want, though at least one port needs to stay USB-C for charging purposes.

Good CPU performance, much-improved battery life

On paper, you wouldn't expect the Core i7-1370P to change much from the Core i7-1280P from last year (don't read too much into the last two digits; Intel doesn't make an i7-1380P). Both chips use an identical architecture, with identical amounts of cache, identical core counts (six performance cores, eight efficiency cores), identical power limits, and an identical Intel 7 manufacturing process. The i7-1370P has faster peak clock speeds—400 MHz faster on the P-cores, 300 MHz on the E-cores—so you'd expect slightly better performance and break-even or slightly worse battery life.

On the performance side, you get pretty much what you'd expect. Single-core performance improves by somewhere between 10 and 14 percent in our tests, while multi-core performance is up by 8 to 10 percent, depending on the test. It's not a ton, but if you're coming from the 11th-generation model or some other laptop with an even older processor, you're still benefiting from a huge boost.

In our Handbrake video encoding test, power usage stays nearly identical to last year's model while performance goes up, which means it will be more efficient when chewing through big CPU-heavy jobs.

But the real surprise is that the new Framework Laptop motherboard provides this modest performance boost while substantially improving battery life. Framework said that all of its upgrades would add 20 or 30 percent to the Framework Laptop's runtime, but in our PCMark-based battery test, battery life improved by around 40 percent just because of the motherboard switch—the RAM, SSD, screen, ports, and 55 WHr battery were all the same.

Swapping the 55 WHr battery for the 61 WHr version boosted battery life by another 13 percent on top of that, which is roughly in line with the 11 percent capacity increase. Expect a similar increase if you're pairing the new battery with an 11th- or 12th-generation Framework motherboard, though we're still waiting on the BIOS update that will let us test the 61 WHr battery with our 12th-generation motherboard. That means measuring the runtime increase in percent and not minutes—the battery added 78 minutes of runtime for the 13th-generation Framework motherboard, but it would add closer to 50 minutes for the 12th-gen version.

Increasing the Framework Laptop's battery life from the six- to seven-hour range to the 10- to 11-hour range is a significant improvement. We'd expect models like the X1 Carbon or XPS 13 to improve just as much by jumping to 13th-generation processors, so the Framework Laptop's battery life may still end up being a bit mediocre compared to others in its size, weight, and price class. But battery life was the biggest reason not to buy last year's Framework Laptop, and things have improved enough with this year's upgrades that it's no longer the case.

But you’ll want Ryzen to fix Intel’s GPU standstill

That's all pretty rosy! And then you get to graphics performance.

Intel's Iris Xe integrated GPU was pretty impressive when it first showed up in 11th-generation Core chips nearly three years ago... but that was nearly three years ago, and nearly identical Iris Xe GPUs continue to ship with 13th-generation Core chips. It remains basically fine for older and less-demanding games at lower resolutions, but you wouldn't choose it as a portable gaming rig except in emergencies.

On most laptops, you'd accept that as a fact of life and move on. But with the Framework Laptop, you can wait a few more months to get an AMD Ryzen 7040-series processor instead. These CPUs will combine the modern, efficient Zen 4 architecture with a more-capable integrated GPU based on AMD's newest RDNA 3 architecture, plus GPU performance that AMD says will be somewhere between 130 and 239 percent faster in games running at 1080p (the latter is a bit of an outlier). You'll also get some modern niceties, like hardware-accelerated AV1 video encoding and ray-tracing support (to the extent that ray-tracing is relevant in super-low-end GPUs—it still isn't, really).

We'll need to test Ryzen 7040 to see how it stacks up for sure—we'd expect it to be a little slower than the Intel Framework Laptop in multi-threaded CPU tasks but competitive in single-threaded performance and much better at games. It won't be a gaming laptop, really, and you'll also need to add new DDR5 memory to your shopping list. But it should be a more well-rounded upgrade from the 11th-gen Intel Framework Laptop motherboard instead of one that's so lopsided in favor of the CPU.

Better than ever, with a “but”

On the one hand, the Framework Laptop 13 with 13th-gen Intel CPUs is as good as the laptop has ever been. The new matte screen partially addresses one of our design gripes from last year, and the new CPUs use some kind of dark magic to deliver all the impressive performance gains of the 12th-generation chips with none of the frustrating battery life regressions.

Framework Laptop

From $849 at Framework

The repairable, upgradeable laptop still has a few deficiencies compared to products from the major laptop manufacturers, mainly when it comes to screen options. But if the idea has ever appealed to you, or if you've just been sitting on the fence waiting to see if Framework would survive long enough to make good on its promises, and if you don't care about playing games on it, the 13th-gen Intel version feels like a safe bet.

But if you want to play some games—or simply want a laptop today to have slightly better graphics performance than one from three years ago—and you aren't desperate to buy something right this minute, it's tempting to wait for the first AMD version of the laptop. A Ryzen 7040-series chip should make it a whole lot more usable for basic 720p to 1080p gaming—not really a "gaming laptop" but certainly a "laptop that can play games."

Either way, it still feels weird and cool to be talking about processor options in a 13-inch thin-and-light laptop the same way we'd talk about them if you were building a desktop. It's a unique, flexible laptop design with fewer shortcomings than it has ever had. If you ever looked at one of the older iterations and passed, both the 13th-gen Intel version and the upcoming AMD version are good enough to merit a second look.

The good

Still upgradeable, still repairable, and it does both without making too many other compromises.
13th-generation Intel chips perform a little better than 12th-gen versions while delivering much better battery life.
I like the matte display a lot more than the glossy one, and its 3:2 aspect ratio and resolution are still good fits for this screen size.
Expansion Card system is still really useful and cool.
Comfortable keyboard and trackpad. Good-enough webcam and speakers.
If you upgrade your old laptop, you have some options for re-using your old motherboard, including 3D-printed and pre-made case options.
First-party Linux support.

The bad

A shade heavier than similarly sized laptops from the competition.
Relatively limited screen options—no OLED, no high refresh rate, and no touchscreen.
Battery life may still be low relative to things like the newest X1 Carbon or Dell XPS 13, since other laptop makers should all benefit from Intel's 13th-generation power usage improvements.

The ugly

We'll have to wait an unknown number of months to see whether the AMD version is worth buying instead.

Listing image: Andrew Cunningham

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Andrew Cunningham Senior Technology Reporter

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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