For the past five years, we've been paying a lot of attention to Framework, the upstart PC company focused on modular, repairable, upgradeable, and customizable laptop designs.
So far, Framework has done a solid job of offering a steady stream of hardware upgrades for its systems, particularly the original Framework Laptop 13. But the company's track record on software support—including BIOS updates and driver updates with performance improvements, bug fixes, and important security updates—has been more of a mixed bag.
As of our piece in April 2024, multiple iterations of the Laptop 13 board had gone years without a BIOS update or updated driver package. The first iteration of the laptop still only had "beta" support for Windows 11, which had been out for 2.5 years by then, and the company was also struggling to provide Linux support and promised functional upgrades for other models.
We spoke with Framework CEO Nirav Patel for that article, who acknowledged the issues and provided some explanations—mainly, that Framework is a small company and that it relies on upstream hardware makers like Intel and AMD for some updates. But he also promised that improvements were coming.
Patel said that a dedicated team at Compal, the white-box PC manufacturing company that makes most of Framework's hardware, had been hired and was being onboarded. And once that team was up to speed, the plan was to continuously cycle through Framework's entire catalog of old and current products, making sure that no model was neglected for long.
Patel's "mid-summer [2024]" timeline for making these changes turned out to be a bit optimistic, but it does seem as though the team has made real progress over the past calendar year or so.
Real improvements
This thread on Framework's Reddit gives a high-level overview of the release dates for Framework's driver packages and BIOS updates, and, for all its products going back to 2021's 11th-gen Intel Core version of the first Framework Laptop, the company has shipped at least one BIOS update in the past eight months. Most models have seen at least one update in calendar 2025. The driver packages tend to be a bit older, but the oldest ones are from June 2024, and the Core Ultra Framework Laptop and all AMD models have gotten at least one driver package update in 2025.
BIOS updaters for the company's Linux users are also available for almost all Framework Laptop models. Many of these can even be downloaded and installed automatically with the software updater in whatever Linux distribution you're using, thanks to Framework's use of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (as I found while testing SteamOS on the Ryzen 7040 version of the Framework Laptop 13).
The one exception is the 12th-gen Intel Core version of the Laptop 13, which was not coincidentally the most egregiously outdated version of the laptop when we wrote about Framework's update efforts in early 2024. The LVFS-based BIOS updates can't update the Intel Management Engine firmware on these laptops, since LVFS won't distribute the Intel binary files necessary to make those updates happen. But Framework does offer a version of the BIOS update that can be installed via the hardware's built-in EFI shell, so Linux users can get complete firmware updates without needing to use Windows to install them.
These updates have included security fixes as well as new features, like Thunderbolt certification for the Core Ultra version of the Laptop 13 and an across-the-lineup Battery Extender feature for the 61 WHr battery that promises to prevent battery degradation by limiting the maximum charge for laptops that are plugged in for five or more days.
"Our sustaining software update team is fully powered up, and we've been releasing several BIOS and driver updates each month, spanning all generations of our products," Patel told Ars this week. "We're providing updates for as long as AMD and Intel are committing to delivering the upstream updates that we would need for these platforms."
It's especially important that Framework has a regimented and consistent process in place as its lineup steadily expands. The company is currently supporting six distinct versions of the Framework Laptop 13 motherboard, the Laptop 16, and the Laptop 12. And Framework's first desktop (called, get this, the Framework Desktop) is still slated to launch later this year. For its first few years, the Framework team's focus usually seemed to be on getting the new stuff spun up rather than actively supporting the old stuff, but the company looks like it's striking a better balance now.
Apple’s more immersive CarPlay is dividing the auto industry