All right, with us is the brand new Framework 12. Speaking on behalf of this whole team, this is one of the devices we’ve been super excited to get in this year. It’s got all the goodies of a framework, meaning it’s completely upgradable and repairable. It has fantastic Linux support and a vibrant community behind it. Now though, we get one in a smaller 12-in form factor that’s also a two-in-one with some super cool looking colors. It feels like it would be the perfect gift for a student just getting into computers and wanting to build their own machine to use at school for notes and simple tasks. Unfortunately though, the processor options for this machine just really limit its potential to much more than that. It doesn’t perform well enough to be a daily driver for someone like a serious programmer, which is who these frameworks are usually trying to appeal to. Its screen is also disappointing for a 2-in-1 with incredibly large bezels. Its chassis isn’t the sturdiest and it has some fan noise even in light use. It just comes across overall like a prototype device that’s simply too expensive for anyone other than a tech enthusiast. So, with that said, here’s Sierra with the ins and outs of this very interesting and very unique device. Let’s get into the fun stuff first. Checking out this brand new chassis. Firstly, unfortunately, it does look and feel very cheap with its plastic pieces surrounded by rubberized TPU trim. There is significant keyboard deck flex, a little screen flex, and whole laptop flex. Honestly, its bezels are also gigantic. It almost looks and feels like a toy laptop. All of that to say, I still kind of love it. Our version we’re reviewing is the black one, which is the only option if you buy pre-built. If you do the DIY kit, though, which I would definitely do, you get tons of fun color options: lavender, sage, bubblegum, and gray. The black looks okay, don’t get me wrong, but I would have much preferred lavender if I got to choose. There’s also a version of the keyboard deck with a lavender touchpad, which sounds so cute. Overall, that’s how I feel about this laptop. It’s incredibly cute. It’s not premium or luxurious, but it feels solid enough for the types of people I think it’s good for. The word Josh used when he saw it was retro. It reminded him of those gray desktops we all used to have with Athlon processors. I have no idea what that is. Back on the Framework 12, the hinges are strong enough to utilize the touchcreen comfortably, and it doesn’t flop around at all. It also has a nice soft edge to the laptop thanks to the trim material. Functionally, it does what it needs to do for a twoin- one. Since taste is subjective, though, let’s talk about some of the choices they made that I don’t like as much. As I briefly mentioned, the bezels are huge. This 12-in laptop stretches beyond that with how much larger the lid has to be than its screen. This leads to a laptop that is just about as thick and deep as an average 14-in laptop. It is only more compact widthwise. Something like Dell’s XPS 13 feels a lot more compact. I also don’t love that you can only get a great keyboard regardless of the color you get. The touchpad is the only thing that offers colors, and it’s only lavender. It also weighs more than a 12-in laptop should, almost 3 lb. It weighs more than Lenovo’s Yoga Slim 7X, which has a 14.5 in screen by comparison. It’s not super heavy, but it’s heavier than it should be at this size and made of mostly plastic. Lastly, because of its sturdy hinges, you do have to use two hands to open the lid rather than one. The chassis as a whole is interesting and even kind of fun if you ask me, but I know not everyone will feel that way, as there are certainly some trade-offs you’re making for the benefits of a framework. Back on the display, it’s a 12.2 in LCD IPS panel with a resolution of 1920 x 1200. It gets up to 470 nits of brightness, which is nice to see as you will be less likely to notice reflections on its glossy finish. Unfortunately, its colors are pretty poor. It only covers 68% of sRGB and 52% of P3. As with most of these worse screens, I found it noticeable on reds, which looked a bit more orangey and washed out. It also has some very minor backlight bleed in the bottom left corner. The best part about this screen, though, is that it’s a touch screen with both USI and MPPP 2.0 support, and you will be able to get a matching stylus soon. It’s not available yet, but it will offer pressure, tilt, and two programmable buttons. I used the Microsoft Surface 1776 stylus instead to take some notes in OneNote, and I really enjoyed the experience. Gliding on the screen felt smooth, precise, and responsive. Moving on to the keyboard next. I think Framework has done a decent job here. The keyboard itself is good, but the experience is downgraded by how much deck flex there is. This keyboard is pretty clicky and seems to have decent key travel, but the plastic coating feels a little cheap. Unlike most laptops these days, our unit has a right control key instead of the silly co-pilot key, which I am very grateful for because I don’t have a chance to accidentally press it. Its layout is also standard other than that. Although the up and down arrow keys are a bit compressed, so those you might mispress. The most noticeable issue with the keyboard is the missing backlight. This is definitely something I’d like to see in version two. A fingerprint reader would have also been nice. As it stands, the laptop features no biometrics for Windows Hello. The trackpad is surprisingly smooth and comfortable to use. The click isn’t too deep or loud, which is pretty rare on mechanical ones like this. Both Josh and I found that it felt soft to use, which was very enjoyable. When I tested its accuracy, I got one of my better scores. So, I would say it’s pretty accurate. I found it to be one of the highlights of this laptop, honestly, which is good as it’s pretty important to your overall experience. Ports are another highlight of framework laptops because you get to pick what you want and their placement. The USBC ports can come in a bunch of colors, including the matching ones. There’s also a new style to the port latching mechanism where there’s a switch that holds them in place, and you can switch it out to take them out easily. I much prefer this to their 13’s button style. It feels more secure to me, and I think they are easier to switch out. In addition to the four expansion slots with the customizable ports, there is also a headphone mic combo jack on the left side and a power button on the right. This location can lead to easy accidental presses, which turns the screen off. Very annoying. Other manufacturers who place their power button on that side have made some improvements here where you have to hold it down for a while for it to do anything. We’d like to see Framework release an update for this. Oddly enough, there also appears to be a standard Kensington lock slot toward the back on both sides. I say appears because Framework doesn’t mention them at all in their specs, but we’ve seen enough laptops to know what they look like at this point. Now, let’s look at performance. This laptop uses a low-owered Raptor Lake AQ processor from two years ago. Those processors weren’t the most efficient, so you either got poor performance and low power draw, or high performance and horrible power draw. Let’s see how this does across its different modes. In each mode, the i5 in this laptop performs nearly the same, pretty poorly. So, you might as well just use balance mode for everything. That’s the mode I wrote the script on, and the fan noise stayed low. It was more annoying that it would turn on and off at seemingly random times. The main difference on the lowest mode appears to be a lower spike in max power draw. Everything else is pretty much the same. Compared to other processors, it’s bad. Worse than Lunar Link, worse than Ryzen 5, and even worse than our other 13th gen processor in our old framework 13. That one is a slightly higher tier i7p processor. There is also a lower powered i3 version of this framework 12, and its numbers have been added to our Geekbench and Cinebench graphs, courtesy of another reviewer, Elevated Systems. So, thank you for that. Moving over to Cinebench, which tests the processor when it’s maxed out. It’s just not competitive to any modern processor, even low-end ones, which are absolutely affordable at this price point. The i3, in particular, is abysmal. I’m honestly disappointed here. Even basic things like downloads were a bit inconsistent in our testing. In my basic multitasking use, writing the script and making our graphs with Excel, however, I never experienced any lags or issues, and neither did Josh. It still has plenty of performance for tasks like that. It doesn’t draw much power during performance use either. What’s interesting in this graph is that the MacBook Air draws less power and performs much better. It is available at this price point, and this is going to be a common theme of this laptop. The framework does manage to keep its CPU relatively cool during performance tasks, but I think it’d be pretty shocking if it didn’t with how poorly it performs. As far as graphics performance goes, it’s still very bad. We’ll start with Time Spy, which is a DirectX12 gaming benchmark. If you plan to do any light gaming on your laptop, you would be better suited to buy a newer Intel chip. Laptops with these chips are available in this price range. The Omnibook X Flip, which is also a 2in-1, and the ZenBook 14 with Intel’s Aerolake, which offers significantly better CPU performance as well. Looking at Wildlife Extreme, which we can use to compare to Mac OS, the MacBook Air 13 with M4 absolutely dominates. Unfortunately, they don’t have a 2in-1 option, but it is a much more premium feeling machine. Now, in performance use, let’s talk about how warm this laptop gets. Starting with CPU tasks, we see it land at the bottom of our chart, meaning its keyboard deck is the warmest of all of its competitors. Its underside appears to be even worse. Unlike on the Framework 13, though, you dealing with all plastic components instead of metal. Ethan and I both felt that it didn’t feel as hot as the readings would indicate. With this kind of material, you really have to touch it for a while for the heat to conduct. While connected to an external monitor for my light use tasks, it continued to get a little warm, but it never got annoying to me. Just a little warmth that was noticeable while typing. When it comes to fan noise, this is a very odd laptop. Its fan noise is somewhat similar whether you doing light tasks or performance tasks. This makes this laptop quiet compared to others during performance loads, but it can make this laptop feel loud when doing lighter tasks. That’s in a quiet room because the fan’s max noise isn’t that crazy. In a co-working space, you probably won’t notice them at all. One thing though that does make the fans more noticeable if you are in a quiet room is that they do turn on and off. That change in volume is a bit jarring. In graphical tasks, it’s a similar story. Relatively consistent fan noise with a very warm chassis, especially on the underside. So, one of the benefits of a lower performing processor is usually better battery life. The Framework 12, considering its 50watth battery, which is the smallest on our list, does okay. Not good or great by any means. For our Office productivity use case, which emulates Microsoft Office tasks and emailing, it lasted exactly 9 and a half hours. We don’t usually talk about this part, but this test also gives a score, and we usually like to see a score above 90,000. We were worried with this one’s lower performance that it might score poorly, but it actually did quite well around 120,000. So, this means it is still very usable on battery. If you’re wondering about its max performance while unplugged, it does drop a bit. In our video playback test where we play a downloaded movie on repeat until the battery dies, it lasted around the same amount of time, a little over 9 and 1/2 hours. Similarly priced laptops with newer processors last much longer on this test. These 13th gen processors are not very efficient, so this result isn’t super surprising. We see a similar score from the prior 13th gen framework. Now, let’s talk about the speakers. According to our team, the speakers had a nice quality and depth within the mid-range, but they definitely lacked highs and lows. They also had a bit of a muffled sound to them. Take a listen. [Applause] Here’s how the webcam looks and sounds on the Framework 12. It does have a physical privacy switch on both the microphone and the webcam. However, we don’t feel that it looks and sounds very good. Linux is super easy to use on a framework laptop, even if you already have Windows installed. We installed Windows 11 ourselves and then used a boot drive for Fedora 42 and everything functioned as expected. Speakers, brightness, webcam, trackpad, keyboard, the whole bit. Now, let’s end by talking about Framework’s best feature, upgradability. 10 out of 10. Gold star in this category. Framework has made it even easier to tinker with your laptop. All the screws in the back are seated so you don’t lose them, which was a big help when we were taking it apart to put in the SSD. Ethan and I have both built some frameworks here, and this one has felt the easiest so far. The keyboard doesn’t have a cable that you have to detach when you access the internals. Instead, it connects via pogo pins. The 2230 short SSD slot is also toolless, but Ethan wanted me to mention that while this might sound good in theory, he found it more difficult than your standard screw. Your mileage may vary. The RAM is super easy to install or upgrade, although it’s disappointing there is only one slot. There are also spare screws inside in case you need them. Despite every bad thing about this laptop, it excels at its mission, being an easily repairable 2in-1 laptop. Definitely the only one of its kind. I think a techie would love something like this to mess around with. Back to you, Josh. Thanks, Sierra. So, to sum up, the Framework 12 is a very fun and super unique laptop. Its pros are that it looks retro, it’s fully upgradeable and repairable, it has a good trackpad, using it with a pen, feels natural, and it has out of the box Linux support. Its cons are that its chassis is the least sturdy we’ve seen at this price point. It has a mediocre screen. It has some fan noise in light use, and its processor is just completely outdated for a $800 to $1,000 laptop. Overall, if you are an enthusiast who loves Gen 1 products and you want a toy to play with, buy this. But if you are looking for a more useful laptop, say you’re a student looking for a laptop for computer science and you do want the benefits of a framework, then get the new Framework 13 with AMD. It’s a much more mature device. That being said, as a whole, for most laptop buyers, we feel frameworks are just too expensive. Yes, they do have unique benefits, but even factoring those in, we still feel they’re about $200 to $300 more than they should be. Hopefully, as framework grows, their volumes increase and they can drive down those prices. For now, if you are looking for a good laptop for school or coding, there are a lot more premium devices that you can buy for your money. Make sure to check out our website, bestlaptop.deals, where we list all the laptops we recommend. We have multiple filters so you can quickly narrow down your search based on your specific use cases. Finally, big shout out to Chad. We actually couldn’t get this device in for review, at least not in a reasonable time frame. So, he lent us his. Till next time, go do something awesome with your day and we will catch you later.