Generally speaking, if your equipment is actively powered it will be generating heat and therefore condensation isn’t an issue as it’ll be a good few degrees warmer than the surroundings. Does that preclude the possibility of condensation altogether? Of course not, but it would have to be a really quick swing from cold to hot-and-humid for anything serious to form due to your equipment staying colder than the dew point.

The bigger problem I faced was equipment ending cold-bugged. I have a setup very similar to yours and some drives would not start after being too cold for too long. I insulated the cabinet and put some ESP8266-controlled fans in there. It stays well above freezing now in the winter and cools itself appropriately in the summer.

The one thing I can’t control easily is humidity. A friend of mine tried running some server equipment in a damp basement and that caused a very high failure rate. It was noncondensing, but just the damp air was enough to kill a couple of components. Aside from the odd rain storm, I get nothing that high plus the insulated cabinet helps as the warm interior reduces the relative humidity (as temp goes up, so does the air’s ability to carry water and hence relative humidity goes down for the same chunk of air at different temperatures).

FW13 AMD and Debian Bookworm gives 3-5 hours, but I’m almost exclusively tooling around with GNUradio and so on, so don’t for a moment consider that to be a realistic figure for “normal” use.

Calling a 3:2 display a con is a bit harsh considering it’s very much a personal preference.

If you’re primarily a media consumer then sure, 16:9 is preferable as you end up less letterboxed with most contemporary media. This being the case, you might have been better off waiting for a Framework Laptop 16 with its 16:10 ratio display. I believe it also has better speakers.

If you code, edit documents, basically anything that involves vertical scrolling through stuff, the more vertical you can get the better. It also affords a deeper palm rest without having a stupidly wide chassis.

I have a super-ultrawide on my desk, but although it allows for two native 16:9 windows side-by-side, it’s more commonly arranged with thee square-ish windows across its width as unless I’m doing something very wrong with Python, I really don’t need the width. More vertical, more better for my use cases!

R710 (or anything of that era, really) = fan heater / air con ballast that happens to be able to compute as a side-effect.

I think I might be sidestepping this one by rarely shutting down the machine in the first place, just suspending it. Resume times are near instant for me…

Assuming they’re running at their rated 5250 watts, which they’re probably not:

5250 watts x 24 hours = 126kWh per day. PER DAY!

126kWh x 30 days = 3780 kWh a month, which is approximately four times my entire domestic electricity consumption (including my own home lab, operational network, two EVs and heat pumps).

That is preposterous and ruinous financially. You do not want to do that, I promise you.

They almost certainly won’t be running at their rated maximum power, but even 20% of that run 24/7 is still a ruinous amount of electrical load. Unless your power is somehow free, you want to think very seriously before deploying that.

Somewhat disillusioned with the quality (or lack thereof) with some of the ThinkPads we’ve had recently. I’ll freely admit fence-sitting for the last couple of years, and I hat-tip those who bought products from this embryonic company as I wasn’t sure if they’d be a flash-in-the-pan or not. They’re still here a few years later.

Well, the AMD processor option seemed to be a nice performance / endurance balance and whilst I could’ve just plumped for a T14, the FW13 seemed like a nice option now.

I’ve always played “extend the lifespan” with my tech and hence my previously-favoured X270 got upgraded batteries, more storage, WiFi 6, LTE upgrades, more memory and so on. With the Framework, having a platform that actively encourages you to fiddle with it was appealing rather than one that merely allows it (and even then can cause issues at times).

So far, it has exceeded my expectations on every level. I daily drive it in place of a couple of different ThinkPads and I can happily say I don’t miss them at all for any reason other than nostalgia. The X270 has just had its external battery pulled and the internal one set to disconnect and shoved on a shelf. I honestly never thought that would happen, but here we are.

Framework don’t have the economies of scale that Lenovo do, hence they’re more expensive than a similar-spec Lenovo. Is it worth it? For my use case, and assuming they stick around for the foreseeable? Sure :-)