I have carried the second generation Framework Laptop 16 for nineteen days, through two flights and one very long conference. The short verdict is that Framework fixed the thing that made the original hard to recommend. The first Framework 16 drew power for the expansion bay interconnect whether or not you had a graphics module installed, and battery life sat around six hours of ordinary work. The new board gates that rail properly. On the same test loop, editing text, running a browser with thirty tabs, and compiling a mid-size Rust project twice, this machine reached eleven hours and four minutes. That single change moves it from a desk machine to a travel machine.
What changed inside
The mainboard moves to AMD's Strix Halo successor, marketed as Ryzen AI Max 490, with 16 Zen 6 cores and a 48 compute unit integrated GPU. Framework offers 32, 64, and 128 gigabyte memory configurations, all soldered, which remains the one place the company's repairability story bends to physics. Framework's own explanation is that LPDDR5X at these speeds cannot run through a socket, and that CAMM2 modules capable of the required bandwidth did not exist when the board was designed. A CAMM2 mainboard is promised for 2027.
Everything else stays modular in the way that made the company's reputation. The keyboard, touchpad, speakers, hinges, display, battery, and every port module remain user-replaceable with a single screwdriver that ships in the box. The expansion bay still takes either a graphics module or a spacer. What is new is the power management: an ACPI change plus a hardware gate means an empty bay draws under 40 milliwatts instead of the 2.1 watts the previous generation burned continuously. That is most of the battery improvement right there.
Performance in practice
The integrated GPU is genuinely capable. Baldur's Gate 3 at 1600p with medium settings held above 60 frames per second, and Cyberpunk 2077 managed 48 at the same resolution with upscaling on. For creative work, DaVinci Resolve exported a ten minute 4K timeline in 4 minutes 12 seconds, which is respectable for a machine with no discrete card installed. Adding the optional Radeon expansion module cuts that to 2 minutes 40 seconds and costs about three hours of battery, a trade most people will make only when plugged in.
CPU work is where the machine surprised me. A clean release build of a 380-crate Rust workspace finished in 3 minutes 51 seconds, faster than the M4 Pro MacBook Pro I keep for comparison, which took 4 minutes 18 seconds. Sustained load makes the fans audible at about 42 decibels measured at head height, clearly louder than the Apple machine but not the jet engine the previous Framework 16 produced under the same test. Thermal throttling started at minute nine of a twenty minute stress run and cost roughly 8 percent of peak clock.
The story is rarely the launch. It is what breaks, what ships, and who owns the mess at 2 a.m.
The parts that still annoy
The keyboard deck flexes. Not badly, and not in a way that affects typing, but if you press firmly in the area above the touchpad you can feel it move, and on a machine costing $2,099 in the configuration I tested that is noticeable. Framework's modular input system means the deck is a set of interlocking pieces rather than a single milled part, which is the direct cause. The company says a stiffer magnesium frame is in evaluation for a future revision.
The touchpad remains merely fine. Tracking is accurate and the surface is glass, but the click mechanism is a diving board rather than a haptic engine, so clicking near the top edge takes noticeably more force. Windows precision drivers handle gestures correctly. After three weeks I stopped noticing, which is either adaptation or resignation. The speakers are better than the last generation and still thin below about 200 hertz, a physical consequence of the space the expansion bay takes.
The repairability argument, five years in
Framework has now been shipping since 2021, and the second generation 16 is a useful moment to check whether the promise held. It largely has. Every mainboard the company has released for the 13 inch line still fits every chassis it ever sold, and owners of 2021 machines can buy a 2026 board for $649 and keep the rest. That is not a marketing claim, it is a shipping product with a part number. The company has also published schematics for the expansion cards and a mechanical CAD package for the chassis.
The counterweight is price. A comparable Dell or Lenovo with similar specifications runs $300 to $500 less at list, and corporate buyers get discounts Framework cannot match. The upgrade math only works if you actually upgrade. Framework's own data, which the company shared at a press briefing, says 23 percent of 13 inch owners have bought at least one replacement part, which is far above industry norms and still means three quarters of buyers paid a premium for an option they never used.
Who should buy this
If you run Linux, this is the easiest recommendation on the market. Fedora 43 and Ubuntu 26.04 both work out of the box including fingerprint reader, suspend, and the expansion bay, which is not something anyone could say about a comparable Dell without reading a wiki page first. Framework maintains upstream kernel patches and the machine's firmware updates arrive through fwupd. The developer audience Framework aimed at is well served.
If you need the lightest possible machine or the quietest possible machine, look elsewhere. At 2.1 kilograms with the graphics module and 1.8 without, this is a large laptop, and it sounds like one under load. But the specific failure of the original, that you could not take it anywhere without a charger, is fixed. That was the objection I heard most often from people who wanted to like the first version, and it no longer applies.
Skarvonix will keep following this beat with reporting grounded in how systems behave outside the launch keynote.
