THE CRUNCH
Framework's updated Laptop 12, now built around Intel's Wildcat Lake chip, keeps the formula that made the original appealing to students: a 2-in-1 convertible design, a touchscreen with an optional $59 stylus and a repairable, modular build. Tom's Hardware's review, published on 13 October 2026, finds it competitive on performance with rivals such as Dell's refreshed XPS 13, but concludes that the repairability carries a real price premium.
The review unit used the top Core 7 350 option, a 6-core, 6-thread chip with a 4.8 GHz maximum turbo clock that runs between 15W and 35W. Wildcat Lake is the cut-down sibling of Intel's Panther Lake, built on the same 18A node but with only two faster P-cores, half the last-level cache and single-channel DDR5 or LPDDR5X memory only. In Geekbench 6 testing it matched the Core 5 320 in the XPS 13 on multi-core speed and was just shy of 5% ahead in single-core, while trailing the A18 in Apple's MacBook Neo in both single- and multi-core, though the multi-core gap is much smaller.
That performance comes in a chassis that is impressively close to its closed rivals given the bulk of modularity: 0.72 inches thick and 2.8 pounds, against 0.5 inches and 2.2 pounds for the aluminium XPS 13. The trade-offs are a plastic-feeling exterior over a metal structure, a 1080p 60Hz display and a fully configured price of $1,491 in the review configuration, against a $549 starting point that excludes memory and storage.
The central tension the review identifies is cost: once configured, the Laptop 12 ends up roughly $200 to $300 more expensive than the competition, which raises the question of how much buyers will pay for repairability. Customisation is also uneven at launch, with the DIY version needed to pick from five colours while the prebuilt model currently ships only in Sage.