Yes, I'm well aware. My point was that I and many others would happily pay extra to pad their margins if anybody would just make a laptop screen/chassis/motherboard barebones combo worth paying for. In my judgment, nobody has understood the audience well enough to convince the business types to let them even try to actually get a truly professional-grade machine to market.

And when I say professional-grade, I mean sturdy, expandable, and hackable to the core. Designed for Linux/*BSD first, that still runs Windows if the end user wants to install it themselves. If something like the Novena can succeed with a 1.2GHz ARM, I'll be damned if something similar with a quadcore x86 wouldn't do a hell of a lot better. It may bring in small change to a Dell of the world, but there has to be _somebody_ in China who would think otherwise.

The way to do it, I think, would be through a crowd-funding type of platform. 3D print a prototype, prove the sales are there, and then you can spend the money on design and tooling for manufacturing.

I wouldn't mind seeing that.

Every attempt I've seen, though, has either failed, or fallen prey to the lock-in-based lure of Microsoft.