We won't be asking consumers to pay a premium for longevity, but it's nice to hear that you'd be willing to!
Personally, I am waiting until av1 hardware decoders are more common, and BT 5 LE Audio (so they can stream to wireless headsets easily) is out as well.
I think you should offer a first-class Linux experience with this laptop. It's a genuinely underserved market, with a lot of overlap for people who care about the repairability and upgradability which are core to your offering. A market with premium mind share, as well.
When I say first class, I mean something specific: you should spend some of your engineering budget making a really good driver Linux driver for your touchpad, and open source it. That would be huge. I'm sure your hardware is up to snuff, but your control over how good that feels in Windows is very limited.
There are a bunch of developers who have stuck with the Mac for essentially one reason, the touchpad.
Windows is dominant in laptops, but with distinct verticals, and I struggle to figure out which one this would fit into. Cheap semi-disposable laptop for a broke college student? Clearly this will cost more than that. Gaming? No way you'll have enough power and battery with that form factor. Excel ninjas who get it from work? Why would they care about expansion and repairability?
But "I'd rather be using Linux if the experience just sucked a little bit less" is underserved. Obviously you can't offer just Linux, and maybe licensing shenanigans with Microsoft mean you can't even consider this (although I really hope that's not a factor anymore).
Anyway. Good luck, it's a cool idea.
It's funny how completely random this suggestion feels (I figured you were going to suggest a customized distro based on Ubuntu or something), and yet I completely agree. Most everything uses libinput these days, and a whole lot of the "feel" is baked into the driver at compile time. Getting it right yourself (or even just making it more configurable for users) would be an enormous step forward.
Definitely worth understanding his understand motivations, then considering collaborating and/or funding him.
[1] https://bill.harding.blog/2018/04/12/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
[2] https://bill.harding.blog/2020/04/26/linux-touchpad-like-a-m...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24700537
> Obviously you can't offer just Linux
Yes, you can: https://puri.sm/products/librem-14
The distinction is they're not trying to develop a new computer that only runs or officially supports Linux. Instead they're leveraging the sales volumes of these OEM/ODMs which do offer Windows in order to keep prices in line with similarly specced laptops.
Compare this to Purism, whose offerings are much more expensive compared to similarly specced laptops, and because of this unlikely to gain mass market appeal. An initiative like Framework needs some amount of mass market appeal to make the repairability aspect really make sense, else it'll just be expensive and resource intensive to manufacture small quantities of these systems.