Design and Keyboard

• Unchanged lightweight aluminium frame from its predecessor
• Modular ports are a fantastic feature
• Responsive keyboard, although a meagre trackpad

The actual look and feel of this 2025 Framework Laptop 13 model hasn’t changed, with Framework sticking with the same compact chassis you’ll find on the Intel Core Ultra Series 1 iteration.

It comes with a silver aluminium frame that’s slim and svelte and goes a long way to remind me of the 10-year-old 2015 MacBook Air. It is durable and easily portable at 1.3kg, and I’ve had no issues slinging this into a bag to take on my travels when I’ve been out and about for work in recent days.

For port selection, I’d usually talk about the pitfalls of a laptop, and why it needs more ports. However, with this DIY version of the Framework Laptop 13, the only person you’d have to blame for the ports is yourself, as Framework has kept with the same ingenious modular method.

The ports come in their own little boxes, in varying different colours, and to put them in, you take one and slide it into the grooved slot on the underside of the laptop until it clicks, and that’s it. You can choose which ports you want on the online configurator and make this laptop suit your needs. For mine, I had a range to choose from, and kitted it out with three USB-C ports and a USB-A in the four slots. Mine also came with a DisplayPort for more conventional display out, which is handy.

You also have the option to add everything from an Ethernet port to an HDMI and Micro SD, or even add up to 1TB of storage as an expansion card. They all connect via USB-C to the laptop’s main board with ease, and work as an external SSD would, it seems.

Framework says setting this laptop up, including building it, should take between 10 and 20 minutes, and in going through the process with their handy web guide, it took me around 20 minutes to go from a pile of pieces – SSD, RAM, keyboard and bezel – to a functioning laptop that just needed an operating system. 

Given the ease of understanding the instructions and the fact you only need a T5 screwdriver for undoing and fastening a couple of screws, it’s reasonably idiotproof, and can be done without much technical knowledge. I quite enjoyed the whole process of putting it together.

Being a more compact frame means the Framework Laptop 13’s keyboard tray is smaller with fewer keys. You get the usual alphanumeric keys, as well as a function row and arrow keys in the bottom right corner. The keys themselves have quite a tactile feel with a shorter travel that made them feel rather responsive in writing up thousands of words a day for work. It is also backlit with a dimmer white backlight for after-dark working.

The trackpad isn’t a strong point, though. It’s perfectly fine for general navigation, although it lacks the silky smooth and responsive surfaces I’ve gotten used to on premium ultrabooks that sit at the same price as this one.

Display and Speakers

• Upgraded display gives smoother motion and more detail
• Decent black level and contrast for an IPS screen
• Speakers are fine for basic workloads

By default, the Framework Laptop 13 ships with a 13.5-inch 2256×1504 resolution matte display with a standard-issue 60Hz refresh rate, although if you pay an extra £130/$130, you can get the stronger screen my sample has – a 13.5-inch 2880×1920 120Hz screen that benefits from more detail and smoother on-screen action thanks to a higher refresh rate with a pleasant 3:2 aspect ratio.

This isn’t an OLED screen, so we aren’t getting the deep blacks and immense contrast ratio you may expect from a laptop at this price, but its 0.25 and 1640:1 results out of the box are still reasonably respectable for an IPS screen.

With a measured 500 nits of peak SDR brightness, on-screen content also has a fair amount of pop, while that higher resolution also gives it some good detail.

Colour accuracy here is reasonable, with 99% coverage of the mainstream sRGB space giving accurate colours for productivity workloads, while the 81% DCI-P3 and 77% Adobe RGB results mean you may be better off with another screen if you’re undertaking creative, colour-sensitive workloads a lot.

Framework hasn’t changed the speakers with this 2025 edition of the 13-inch model, opting for the same pair of 2-watt downwards-firing options. They aren’t the best things in the world, but they have decent volume and body and are fine for general listening.

Performance

• Ryzen AI 7 350 offers solid power
• Integrated graphics are just okay
• Storage and RAM are entirely configurable

As mentioned previously, this laptop is available with three processor options, with mine shipping with the middle child in the Ryzen AI 7 350. This is an eight-core and 16-thread processor with a boost clock of up to 5GHz that looks to be quite a respectable option for both potency and efficiency.

With this in mind, scores in both Geekbench 6 and Cinebench R23 are solid in terms of single-core speeds against its more powerful brother, the Ryzen AI HX 370, in comparably priced ultrabooks such as the Asus Zenbook S 16 (2024).

Multi-core performance is good too, sitting somewhere between the M3 and M4 MacBook Airs, meaning this laptop is reasonably up to snuff for more intensive tasks. However, it still isn’t as powerful as the Intel Core Ultra 9 285H powerhouse in the MSI Prestige 16 AI Evo (2025) or the M4 chip in the base MacBook Pro.

You get a Radeon 860M iGPU with this chip that is just okay for 3D-oriented or graphically intensive workloads. It isn’t as strong as the beefier integrated graphics in the top-end Ryzen AI HX 370, and means only real casual gaming would be possible here.

RAM and storage are, as with a lot of this laptop, up to you. Framework will spec this laptop for you with up to 64GB of fast DDR5-5600 RAM and even up to an 8TB WD SN850X SSD if you wish. For my option, I opted for 32GB of Crucial DDR5-5600 CL46 SODIMM laptop RAM, and a mid-range PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD in a 2TB Crucial P310. 

This laptop supports ‘standard’ M.2 2280 length drives, for ease of use, and Framework has a list of compatible RAM with this laptop available on its website if you aren’t sure what to go for.

With this in mind, there is enough RAM capacity for more intensive tasks, while the SSD here is noted as a fast one in my testing, with respective sequential reads and writes of 7002.83MB/s and 6308.00 MB/s.

Software

• Choice of operating systems, including Windows and Linux
• Windows installation process with Rufus is easy
• No bloatware, although Copilot+ PC functionality is present

As with the design section, normally I’d bemoan a laptop for having too much bloatware or unnecessary system software, but that isn’t the case again with the Framework Laptop 13.

You have the option either to have it preinstalled with Windows 11 Home or Professional, or you can bring your own OS, be it Windows, or Arch or Fedora Linux distros. For convenience, I chose to install Windows 11 Home on the 2TB Crucial P310 I had in the system.

Doing so is as easy as if you’ve ever installed Windows on a new PC or to troubleshoot an old one, thanks to Framework’s step-by-step guide to download a Windows 11 ISO and create installation media with the handy Rufus tool on an external flash drive or SSD you have spare.

This is a necessary third-party solution with these Ryzen AI 300 versions, according to Framework, as there aren’t proper Windows 11 network drivers for the AMD Wi-Fi cards inside the system. As a result, you have to create a bootable Windows installer that removes the need for an online Microsoft account at setup.

Once Windows 11 has loaded in, you need to grab a driver package from Framework’s website, which is an executable that auto-installs network, graphics, sound drivers and more besides, before auto-restarting into a proper, clean Windows 11 environment with no bloatware or additional software to speak of.

With that Ryzen AI 7 350 chip inside, it means this Framework laptop has all the features of one of Microsoft’s designated Copilot+ PCs, for better or worse. This includes generative AI in the Paint and Photos app and the clever webcam effects for background blur, maintaining eye contact and more, although Microsoft’s controversial Recall feature is still missing.

Battery Life

• Lasted for 10 hours and 31 minutes in the battery test
• Capable of lasting for one to two working days

Framework doesn’t provide a specific estimate for this laptop’s endurance, although it comes with a reasonably large 61Whr cell that, combined with the efficiency of its internals, should result in decent longevity.

In the PCMark 10 battery test with the display at the requisite 150 nits, the Framework Laptop 13 lasted for 10 hours and 31 minutes. That meets our usual 10-hour target for laptops, although it falls quite some way behind the 12-16 hours and longer we’ve tended to note modern ultrabooks to last for. In fact, it’s barely half of the comparably priced Dell Pro 14 Premium‘s near 23-hour result.

My sample also came with the 60W USB-C brick, which is a purchasable extra on the online configurator for £40/$55. It can get the laptop back to 50% in 40 minutes, while a full charge took 106 minutes. That’s okay, if a little slow on the full charge front.

Should you buy it?

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