That might be an interesting approach, I was thinking more set 4 price points and let people then vote which trade-offs to make to meet those price points.

At the moment I'm looking at a new developer laptop (though next year is more likely) and you can see that striation already.

I want a QHD display, 16GB RAM (or better) and an SSD, I'm not really fussed about the processor anything i5 or graphics but most machines with my requirements have a monster i7.

I would pay a pretty premium for a 4K display, no graphics card, big battery, ~15" diagonal.

Companies seem to think that if you want a 4K you also want Performance. No, seriously I just want this as a glorified text editor. Give me screen resolution, and give me battery life. I'll pay more if you leave out the GPU because then it'll be lighter and draw less power.

I think if you actually had one of those you'd be very disappointed. 4k is rather a lot of pixels. You need at least a reasonable 2D GPU if you want to be able to move windows around without ghosting everywhere. Blitting everything through the CPU would be far more power-hungry than delegating it to dedicated hardware.

Not to mention that a lot of people would be upset at not being able to watch Youtube fullscreen in decent resolution, for which you would need hardware decoding.

OP probably means no discrete GPU, which these days means intel graphics. The latest ones should be able to drive 4K without issue.

They can comfortably and on linux really well, I like them for everything but gaming/heavy 3D they are great.

Compared to nVidia and AMD, Intel used to be much better. These days the driver situation isn't as rosy. There's a spotily maintained X driver (no releases in 3 years, updated by git snapshots) that is even being replaced by the generic modesetting driver in some distributions to avoid bugs. If you want flicker-free GUIs, tear-free video and general lack of bugs it's a bit of a crap shoot right now. The kernel driver does seem to get steady progress though, which is why the generic modesetting X driver seems to be a way forward.

Meanwhile both the AMD and nVidia situations have improved with more robust open source drivers appearing. I don't have experience with those to know if they've surpassed the Intel drivers in general quality though.

The price could be one of the clustering axes.

Unless it's like these guys. They are doing one plus style direct sales. So they could effectively cut at least 30% off. The drawback is that you have to order online and wait.