Welcome to The Drive, a new weekly column looking at some wacky, interesting, cool, and pivotal things within the tech space! I'll also highlight anything noteworthy from XDA reviews published in the week.

To kick things off, I'll start with the Framework 13 AMD laptop currently being reviewed. Without spoiling too much, it has been a pleasure to return to a modular laptop. I recall the days of replacing the CPU inside a notebook but everything is soldered to the main board these days. This does provide considerable gains to battery life and performance but comes at the cost of serviceability. The Apple MacBook Air with the M2 CPU is a glorious machine. It’s powerful, lightweight, cool, and efficient.

I loved using it for an entire day without having to hook up to an available power outlet. But it’s not perfect. The base specification with 8GB is simply not enough in 2024. It’s not possible to upgrade the RAM, which renders the machine obsolete. Running Gimp with a few RAW images loaded in for editing or a handful of tabs open in Firefox can quickly make macOS become sluggish, which isn't a great experience and one I wish Apple would have addressed with the M2 launch.

Enter Framework. The company has made it a mission to provide excellent notebooks with the ability to replace just about anything inside them. The display, keyboard, Wi-Fi card, RAM, storage, and even the battery, can all be replaced without sending the laptop for servicing. Much like a custom mod-friendly mechanical keyboard, you can put together the laptop when it’s delivered, which is a great way to see how serviceable these laptops are.

It also helps that the Framework 13 with its AMD Ryzen 7000 series chip and Linux OS is fairly efficient for longer work days. There are still more tests to complete with the Framework 13 AMD, but it's looking good so far and is a breath of fresh air with the sea of fully integrated systems. Having everything supported out of the box with Linux distributions is also a nice touch. Saving a few seconds logging in with your fingerprint is something I'm glad I don't have to miss with the MacBook Air.

Reviews you may have missed

Lenovo ThinkBook Plus Gen 5 Hybrid

Have you ever wondered what a (decent) Windows and Android PC would look like? Lenovo's ThinkBook Plus Gen5 Hybrid may be a mouthful (what Lenovo laptop isn't these days?), but it seems to get the mobile and desktop OS mix just right.

Radxa X4

Single board computers (SBCs) have come a long way, something our resident expert Ayush Pande would attest. The Radxa X4 is something special. It's a beginner-friendly x86 SBC with some serious firepower. I'm talking plenty of RAM, 2.5Gb networking, and performance for days.