Building an Open Source Laptop

I tried doing this as well, about a year and a half ago. I gave up relative early in the process, though, as I had hit the upper limit of my electronic design skills, and figured I'd better wait a wee bit more until they would either be on-par with the difficulty of the task, or a good-enough SBC shows up. Based on that experience, I'd venture thinking the price is in the 1000 USD range, with the costs of actually producing the boards (alleviated by more or less preferential access to the required tools) being a significant drag.

That being said, I think it's worth it. I can't think of a single laptop which I'd actually love to use forever, or at least until it's so old that it becomes utterly unusable. The only thing that prevents me from declaring this one as the one I'd like is that OpenBSD is a bit shaky on that architecture IIRC.

The cost of making one it probably several thousand dollars, not counting the year and a half of Bunnie's time.

From then on it depends on how many you want, and if you can find an assembly house that will take a tiny order for (say) 1000 of them. Even in large runs I can't see it costing less than $1000, partly due to the FPGA on the board. Handcrafted aluminium and leather cases are also likely make up several hundred dollars of the price. That case looks particularly resistant to mass-production.

I appreciate the goal but I'd rather we started with an IP-free core manufactured by multiple fabs and work up from there. The Chinese got somewhere with this by ripping off MIPS but I'm not sure that is the right solution.

Then there's the wireless stack and peripheral space which is even more complicated.

Edit: this was my intention when I went to university in the early 90's but I found sitting in front of a Sun workstation drawing squares (gates) very tedious.

Awesome stuff.It's time for a standardized case - a big problem with laptops.The folder is cool though.

While accepting the other replies, I do wonder how hardware trust is achieved. The security point about open source is peer review. For a dunce like me, I can pretty much rely on people much smarter than me to review open sourced code. In reasonable time, if there is a iffy routine buried in some bit of software, such people will out it. So, people like me can pretty much trust it, and even if something is missed but later found, again, we can be sure the discoverer will report it, while a commercial organisation might be motivated to hide it.

But, how does that work with hardware? How do we trust all the chips? How do we know there isn't something iffy built in at manufacture? Then, how can those same cleverer than me people discover it? How do they inspect the encased silicone circuit?

So, in that vein, I see the point you might have been making, and actually, I think its a worthwhile question. Because to me, it does look like what you describe, a sort of closed source hardware which runs all open source software. And I personally dont know that that is safe. Or is it?