AFAIK they just resell commodity generic laptops under their brand and they do some System76 specific things to them such as open source bios firmwares. I may be wrong but when I looked into them years back thats what I uncovered. I think if they want to differentiate themselves as a high end ubuntu/developer machine they're going to need the things people want (or don't know they want). My personal needs are high res, bright, color accurate, crisp displays (currently loving my Samsung Galaxy Chromebook) and high quality keyboards. I don't really know of a device that has both.