Framework’s software and firmware have been a mess, but it’s working on them

But the hardware mostly does a good job of functioning as a regular laptop while being much more tinkerer-friendly than your typical MacBook, XPS, or ThinkPad.

In its community support forums, Framework employees, including founder and CEO Nirav Patel, have acknowledged these issues and promised fixes but have remained inconsistent and vague about actual timelines.

This wasn't a dramatic functional change, especially for people who were mostly using those ports for basic Framework expansion modules like USB-A or HDMI, but the upgrade opened the door to high-speed external accessories, and all it would need was a BIOS update.

That 12th-gen Framework BIOS also doesn't support the 61 WHr battery that the company released in early 2023 alongside the 13th-gen Intel refresh.

A beta 3.06 BIOS update with the promised improvements for the 12th-gen Intel Framework Laptop was posted back in December of 2022, but a final version was never released.

The result is multiple long forum threads of frustrated users asking for updates, interspersed with not-untrue but unsatisfying responses from Framework employees (some version of "we're a small company" is one of the most common).