Horgeon is right. Or mostly so. I think there may have been some advances in
coreboot since I last looked into it although it's still unlikely to be
feasible. Porting coreboot is non-trivial as it is even if there was support
for Intel. We have an engineer who might be able to accomplish it under the
right circumstances currently although I'm doubtful things have improved to
that extent. That is probably still a lot of development that would need to
be done. There would probably be significant work involved and by the time we
seceded with just one model it would be an older discontinued model (well,
generation technology wise). We don't sell enough laptops at the moment to
make it happen either.
There might be a partial solution to the problem if people were willing to
purchase one particular older generation technology wise model. We maybe
could stock up on a particular model, port it, and six month later, when
these generation is basically discontinued start selling them. The problem
with this is I think too many people would be too fussy. They would expect
lower prices or complain about it not being the latest and greatest. It isn't
costing us any less so how do we get the price lower? It's just got some
major stumbling blocks.
I think long term we need to focus on a 15-15.6" model with 1366x768 -
1600x900 screen with a non-x86 solution. There are probably a number of
problems still to resolve. For instance the graphics solutions that would
support such a screen in non-86 systems are dependent on binary blobs. If not
for 2d then at least for 3d. This is a backwards step compared to an Intel /
x86 solution.
I think for the moment it's better to stick with focusing on what we can do
rather than on something we can't and is unlikely to be feasible in the short
term. Building up the demand for hardware that is better supported (by free
software) is likely to lead eventually to such a solution. Until then though
the best approach is to simply stay the course, keep our policies about not
selling hardware dependent on non-free components (non-free firmware not
including the BIOS, non-free drivers, etc), and move forward when the demand
allows.
