Trammel Hudson, the guy behind Heads, does a lot of interesting maker type projects too. His personal project site is worth checking out: https://trmm.net
Chromebooks use coreboot. What's the idea behind sourcing parts from upstream vendors who are hostile to the goal of openness, rather than from some manufacturer (e.g., Dell) already shipping Chromebooks?
Mine only has 4GB ram but it's otherwise quite powerful, and has an M.2 slot. There is a very big range covered by chromebooks, even among the cheap options.
There are Chromebook configurations where a i3/i5/i7 CPU and 4GB/8GB/16GB RAM are among your options. Just about the only thing that's consistently undercut is storage capacity, but options also include Chromebooks with user-upgradeable SSDs and SD slots.
It sounds like you're working off an outdated understanding of Chromebook options, one where 2011-era limitations play a major role in your perception of how suitable they are for getting work done.
No, I'm quite aware of what chromebooks have to offer, and there isn't a single general purpose workstation style chromebook. Find me an i7 (quad-core) chromebook with 16+ GB of RAM and expandable storage. The closest was the 2015 Pixel, sold at some extortionate price, and still with limited storage.
The thoughts in each of your two comments are at odds.
It also may be the case that there are no existing Chromebook configurations that satisfy your criteria, but recall that the context here is a design and manufacturing strategy for Purism to produce the Librem. There exist Chromebooks with comparable specs and comparable price points. If you think that existing high end Chromebooks are a bad value proposition, that's fine, but then the same is true for you of the existing Librem, so what are we even doing here?
Even disregarding that, what would there being no existing Chromebooks have to do with the discussion? We're talking about getting a shop who's interested in producing a custom design work to try to source parts from more diverse and more agreeable vendors. Of course you can't order that hypothetical machine today—the fact that it doesn't exist is fundamental to the discussion.
Your comment only makes sense if the proposal here were, essentially, "Purism needs to take an existing Chromebook and rebrand it as the Librem." But that's not what I said, because there's no value in it and it wouldn't make sense—you'd be better just buying the unrebranded version directly.
I'm not sure what you are arguing for. I'm not entirely sold on their value proposition. I just think that they are building something like a chromebook without the conventional limitations of chromebooks. The talk of sourcing friendly parts or replicating chromebook's methodology isn't very accurate because a) The deals that Google can get can't necessarily be replicated by others b) There probably aren't magical "friendly" parts. The parts are mostly similar across laptops with significant engineering and s/w work done by Google (for coreboot etc.), or by Purism in this case for their laptops.
