So I use linux on my laptops as my primary OS. Mint on my thinkpad, crouton with xubuntu and chromeos on my chromebook. I often talk to other developers here

So I use linux on my laptops as my primary OS. Mint on my thinkpad, crouton with xubuntu and chromeos on my chromebook. I often talk to other developers here in the bay area about their computers, which are almost invariably macbooks. The reason that they continually cite for macbooks is battery life. 10 to 12 hours of typical usage including web browsing. A bit less if you are doing a fair bit of compiling. If you want to make a laptop, you can do fine with commodity hardware, provided you pick devices with an eye on power. That may mean working with suppliers to get better drivers. I personally don't care if they are proprietary blobs or open source... but power consumption on linux vs. windows is often tracable to driver issues. I mean a reasonably good screen and keyboard and trackpad are all important, but reasonably good ones exist out there. Iou need to spend a lot of time tuning battery life. You need to figure out which commodity hardware devices draw the least power. You need to make the computers sleep instantly when the screen is closed. Get battery life up. If you are going to innovate on hardware, this is where I would do it. Lenovo has a internal battery so you can hotswap external batteries. Dell had a separate arm processor with their Latitude |ON feature and got crazy battery life, and the Moto X had a separate dedicated processor for certain functions to improve battery life... maybe have your machine include a low power multicore arm processor and use that as much as possible, only using your intel cpu when the arm is overwhelmed or can't run a specific program. The other thing is you have to make your first product good enough so you can improve your second product. Because to really make something good, you have to innovate.