The business model of system76 was what I was personally looking for and I've been very happy with my latest laptop from them. For me personally, the luster would have been lost coming from Dell.
Alienware was bought by Dell not that they outsourced their hardware.
A white-label, more configurable, plain ubuntu version of the pixelbook sounds like a dream.
Dell makes Chromebooks. These Chromebooks run coreboot. Ergo, Dell makes laptops that run coreboot.
There's nothing in my comment about building off the back of Dell's existing program to sell Ubuntu machines to customers—a program whose success story is reported to be bizarrely hit-or-miss with respect to driver issues, even.
Dell's Chromebooks are a success. They're shipped in large quantities. They have no driver issues. They run coreboot. So my advice is simple: if you're a company trying to sell to folks who want a "Linux laptop", then stop sourcing components/machines from otherwise clueless Wintel vendors and trying to shoehorn a traditional distro onto that. Start with the BOM used in Chromebooks. Approach Dell and say you'd like to place a large order—because that's the business they're in, by the way. Now build your company's products on that platform instead.
Substitute "Dell" there with any other competent vendor that has demonstrated their hardware plays well with the FOSS stack powering ChromeOS .
> Partnering with Google for the chromebook supplychain seems like the better theory/plan.
No, that's an ignorant theory. Google is not known for hardware, and certainly not as a supplier for commodity hardware. Even ignoring all that, the response you should expect from Google in regards to playing along should not be enthusiastic agreement.
I've written this elsewhere, but I'll repeat: it seems a shame that folks like System76, Purism, aspiring Kickstarter campaigns et al aren't leveraging the supply chain already in place for Chromebooks. In the case of Purism, for example, x86-64 Chromebooks comparable to Purism's low end models can be had from Dell for 3/4 the asking price of the former. Considering that the driver situation is necessarily a solved problem for Chromebooks, and they're already using coreboot, it seems silly to start a parallel effort to deal in hardware the way System76 and Purism are doing, rather than just approaching Dell about a white label deal to supply you with hardware components that are already known to work.