I'm trying to work out why they think manufacturing their own laptops is going to be a profitable business. Margins on consumer hardware are razor thin even for the big players like Dell who have the advantage of scale. So far just being open source friendly has not been nearly enough of a market differentiator.
That said, I wouldn't mind considering a system76 laptop for my next workstation, except that they don't support one thing that Dells do exceptionally well: driverless docking stations. (And no, USB and Thunderbolt docking stations don't work well under Linux and I have no reason to believe they ever will.)
I like Drew on the blog post use a Thinkpad X200, and it more than suits my needs for a laptop, and I even shelled out the money for one of the 51nb x2100s. If System 76 bucks the current trend and makes a laptop in the style of an old thinkpad (To quote Drew: "The integrated GPU, Bluetooth and WiFi, internal sensors, and even the fingerprint reader can all be driven by the upstream Linux kernel. In fact, the hardware is so well understood that I have successfully used almost all of the laptop’s features on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Minix, Haiku, and Plan 9. Plan fucking 9. It can run coreboot, too. The back of the laptop has all of the screws (Phillips head) labelled so you know which to remove to service which parts. User replacable parts include the screen, keyboard (multiple layouts are available and are interchangeable), the RAM, hard drive (I put a new SSD in one of mine a few weeks ago, and it took about 30 seconds) — actually, there are a total of 26 replacable parts in this laptop. There is a detailed 278-page service manual to assist you or your local repair tech in addressing any problems that arise.") I think they could easily charge a very healthy premium and get a lot of people to line up for it (myself included).
That said, I wouldn't mind considering a system76 laptop for my next workstation, except that they don't support one thing that Dells do exceptionally well: driverless docking stations. (And no, USB and Thunderbolt docking stations don't work well under Linux and I have no reason to believe they ever will.)