The Open Source Laptop and the Golden Age of Open Hardware 93
An anonymous reader writes to this short feature featuring "Andrew 'Bunnie' Huang on why he decided to build an open source laptop, how the slowing of Moore's Law is making it easier for individuals and small outfits to compete against major corporations in the computer hardware market and what hobbyist hardware makers in the U.S. could learn from China's Shanzhai, famed for their cheap clones of the iPhone and other popular handsets."
I'd love to build laptops (Score:5, Interesting)
Companies should sell laptop shells and let us buy the parts individually, just like a desktop computer.
Yes, learn from shanzhai manufacturers (Score:4, Interesting)
Go ahead and make a 14" form factor laptop, and put in a 12" 800x600 screen (blacken the surrounding bezel so it doesn't look like ass), install a VIA board and cpu and modify the BIOS so that it reports an i5, while you're in there also make it report 8GB RAM instead of the 2GB that's actually in there, then solder a 64GB USB drive inside because, face it, no customer who cheaps out this much actually uses the 500GB advertised capacity anyway. And if the entire thing feels too good in your hand, put in some metal weights in the extra space you have in there to make it more realistic, because quality things have a certain density, and you also don't want to draw suspicions for being the lightest 14" i5 laptop in the world. Well, at least not until that injection mold for the Sony replica is finished. And of course never sign contracts or NDAs, who leaves paper trails for these things?