Muazzam wrote:
Ironically, the most common computers used in corporate sector are open standard, for example, Thinkpads, aren't they?
While there really aren't many open standards for laptops and other mobile devices the way there are for desktop systems - I have yet to hear of any company selling generic parts which an individual could construct a laptop from, though I wouldn't be too surprised if there was at least one, and there are plans around for electronics hobbyists to build their own tablets based on Raspberry Pi and things like that but those are all going to be custom builds - to the extent that any laptop or notebook manufacturer follows any open standards, Lenovo and Asus do (unless it's a Windows-based tablet PC, in which case all bets are off). Dell and HP, meh, depends on the model, but for the most part not very much. Most others don't follow any standards at all, they only care that they can get Windows 10 and a huge pile of shovelware (and often, spyware) to run on it without crashing too often.
Interestingly, some of the most compatible laptops come from Linux-oriented vendors such as
System76,
Linux Certified Systems,
zaReason,
Think Penguin, or
Emperor Linux PCs. Some of them, such as
The Linux Laptop Company, focus on existing hardware, either rebranded or repurposed, while other do in fact make their own machines that use all-open-standards hardware and firmware. Whether you intend to run Linux or not, you will want such hardware for your own OS dev, so that's actually a good (if often pricey) way to go.
(Yeah, pricey. Want to know why there are so many cheap - in quality as well as price - Windows boxes around, sometimes selling for less than a copy of Windows itself does retail? Simple: the shovelware. Most of the cost of a low-end PC is subsidized by the makers of that junk, who actually
pay the OEMs to install it with the expectation that they will get a full purchase or subscription later. This is also why a lot of cheap PCs come loaded down with a lot of adware and spyware - well, that, and the manufacturer wants you to come back a year later to upgrade the hardware that is now too slow to run anything because of all the junk it runs in the background, like spammers and phishers they count on their always being someone careless or uninformed enough not to realize what is going on. While the big players generally don't deliberately bundle spyware so much lately - too much risk of getting caught at it, which can hurt their PR, though that doesn't always stop them - it was a widespread practice circa 1996-2002, when most people hadn't heard of spyware yet, and a lot of the smaller OEMs will really hose you with that even now. Mind you, some of the really sleazy operators will also load you with unlicensed copies of Windows and other commercial software, knowing full well it will bite you rather than them, so
caveat emptor.)