Still sucks that it could be mandatory. I work in a government job in Australia and we have “Flexible Hours” which means that any time worked under or over the standard 7:30hrs per day counts towards a flex balance. Then we can use the excess flex balance to then taking shorter days or even take a couple days off if we have the balance for it. It works wonders for staff morale and retention.

I believe Framework said they are looking into fixes for this issue, either with firmware patches or if neccesary a hardware revision of the USB A module. Current workaround is just to not put USB A into those two back slots.

They were talking about the usb modules. The back two on either side (the ones closest to the screen) have an issues where the USB 4 Type C to USB A adapter is not fully going to sleep when nothing is plugged in. So ArsTechnica’s reviewer most likely had one of the USB A modules plugged into those two USB 4 ports which causes their apparent poor battery life.

Stock android on the Pixel’s have just an “Internet” button which controls both wifi and mobile data. You can press it, then it will show toggles for wifi, mobile data.

I believe the price difference came from you being part of the Lenovo business store, I didn’t use that the last time and just used the standard consumer store.

I just re-entered the specs on the consumer store for the X1 Extreme Gen 5 16" and got 5,214 Australian Dollars. Otherwise it might be if you aren’t in Australia, did you get the local dollar amount and convert to AUD or did you use the Australian store directly?

Anyway, doesn’t change the main point as you say that if you are bargain hunting, the Framework 16 isn’t the way to go but it’s still a good laptop from what we can see. I don’t mind spending more for the framework since I believe in what it stands for. Plus who knows what might come with upgrades down the line.

I just got a pre-order for one of the Framework 16’s. The issue Framework has at the moment is scale. Lenovo has the size and customer base to produce an absolute insane number of laptops compared to Frameworks operation. So cost is going to be 30, 50 or even 100% more than the big boys like Asus, Lenovo or HP. They won’t ever get that scale unless people believe in it and buy one.

However, there’s one other thing which I justified my purchase with. I could buy a Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Extreme with the i7-2700H, 32gb of ram and a RTX 3050ti for $AUD4,929. Or I could buy the Framework 16 with Ryzen 7840HS, 32GB ram, Radeon 7700s for $AUD3,916. Both of these processors and GPUs are similarly speced, in fact I believe the benchmarks had the Framework slightly ahead, but the framework comes out over $AUD1000 cheaper. Yes the Thinkpad X1 Extreme is their uber premium model, but just as you pay a premium for Lenovo’s business grade hardware, you pay a premium for Frameworks repairability.