The thing is, a lion share of all AMD notebooks on the market is developed, and manufactured by a single OEM.

If you look inside recent lenovos, or huawei laptops: scratch, scratch, and you see Qinghua Tongfang logos on PCB, and body parts. The PCB design, and parts list is nearly identical.

Very few big brand companies have in-house engineering for laptops, and the few who have, have it for Intel only.

This is really cool information.

My current laptop is a €3.000 Lenovo X1, which I'm not particularly impressed by.

I was impressed by my 440s which lasted 5 years though.

Where would you suggest I go for my next laptop?

X1 has a 15w ULP CPU. Is it the performance that doesn't satisfy you? If so, the 45W Ryzen should indeed blow it out of water.

I cannot find any new machine on the market with the OLED screen X1 has though.

Sorry, it's an X1 extreme with a i7-9850H, also 45W. Compute capability wise, I'm quite happy.

I've been disappointed with build quality compared to the older 440s. The nvidia prime setup with a shared frame buffer also makes the external display ports more or less useless under linux.

I feel like I've paid a high lenovo premium for a more-or-less average notebook. If all branded laptops are using the same platform, I'm wondering if there's a way to avoid paying that premium.

Well, I myself have not seen any notebook as of late that satisfies my standards on build quality too.

I myself long time dreamed to build my own, fully custom, factory quality notebook, and possibly spin a small business around that.

Dell XPS has set a new high in laptop quality after a decade of boring, rebranded OEM designs, and Taiwanese cookie cutter engineering, but it is still not reaching the level of Japanese notebook brands before 2008.

I could've vouched for Panasonic, but they don't have 45W models. And despite their still excellent quality, they are not aiming at the power user demographics, like programmers.

Can't we buy directly the Qinghua Tongfang hardware from some place like Aliexpress, or from a higher volume/lower margin reseller like Walmart or Bestbuy?

Walmart had Tongfang laptops by the way under different labels

That sounds great and good to see AMD cpu as intel has been very problematic in last few years (especially on linux, but windows as well), 32gigs ram for that money is great when thinkpad t495s comes with 8gig ram soldered on the board.

But where is the trackpoint?

The trackpoint is a patented IBM/Lenovo thing, isn't it...?

For the most part, but for example HP Elitebooks and some Dell models have copies of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointing_stick

However, the non-Lenovo/IBM models seem to be somewhat worse (probably for patent reasons).

It’s got to be expired now. It’s been over 20 years.