Slashdot Mirror

I hope not, it looks pretty good.

Which is strangely more expensive then their new 24' 1920x1200 models. for example

Note the 24' models also use IPS panels instead of the cheaper TFT panels the 20' monitor you linked to use.

Unless it's just made by LG.

UltraSharp U2913WM
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=225-4201&~ck=baynoteSearch&baynote_bnrank=14&baynote_irrank=0

Try here. Dell 2007FP is a 20 inch 1600x1200 screen.

The laptop was mis-priced due to a bug in Dell's system, one of the engineers on the project tells me. It's now $1449 , as you can see at http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/xps-13-linux/pd .

Can the title here please be fixed?

The entire OS is only really usable with a touch screen.

Not just a "touch screen" but a "multi touch screen," do you know what one of those costs? I cannot blame the OEMs for trying to offer desktop bundles and laptops at a decent price.

I read TFA where is says the new laptop is for sale now, but it's not listed on their website anywhere. http://dell.com/xps13 and all you see are 4 models, and all include windows 7 home premium. There is no option for another OS.

Search for "xps 13 developer" from within dell.com and you get three links to their wiki containing press releases about this new product.

Here it is: http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop.aspx

Heh... that space-related url says "Enterprise D" :-)

This one works, too: http://dell.com/sputnik

Also: http://linux.dell.com/ currently redirects to their non-user-editable Linux Engineering wiki. They really should make it easy to get from there to the page selling the Sputnik laptop. Because yes, hackers often just guess urls for common services instead of bothering with a search engine.

Here it is: http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop.aspx

Heh... that space-related url says "Enterprise D" :-)

This one works, too: http://dell.com/sputnik

Also: http://linux.dell.com/ currently redirects to their non-user-editable Linux Engineering wiki. They really should make it easy to get from there to the page selling the Sputnik laptop. Because yes, hackers often just guess urls for common services instead of bothering with a search engine.

Here it is: http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop.aspx

Heh... that space-related url says "Enterprise D" :-)

This one works, too: http://dell.com/sputnik

Also: http://linux.dell.com/ currently redirects to their non-user-editable Linux Engineering wiki. They really should make it easy to get from there to the page selling the Sputnik laptop. Because yes, hackers often just guess urls for common services instead of bothering with a search engine.

http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/xps-13-linux/pd?dgc=SM&cid=245280&lid=4585108

http://www.dell.com/us/soho/p/xps-12-l221x/pd

XPS 12 ultrabook has 1920 by 1080 on a 12 inch screen. Screen is also touch and flips for use as a tablet. I was actually looking at it before moving on to something else.

These Opteron models are the new server line from AMD. The desktop version based on the same architecture (the Trinity alluded to in the summary) closed some of the gap against Intel. But Intel remains the market leader on single core performance, performance per core, and power utilization. AMD continues to push the number of cores upward more aggressively, but there's not many workloads where that matters enough for their slim advantage to result in a net win. And the lower efficiency means that sometimes even having more cores doesn't aggregate into enough speed to be a useful alternative. That leaves AMD to compete on pricing. And the CPU is a relatively small part of the total budget on larger servers. Load up a Dell 815 for example and you'll find the CPU pricing seems small compared to what filling its RAM capacity up costs. And then there's reliable storage, at a while higher price level altogether.

The rule of thumb I've been using for the last year, based on benchmarking of CPU heavy database work, is that I expect a 32 core AMD server to be about as fast as a 24 core Intel one, while using significantly more power. The 40% performance per watt gain claimed here--from AMD's own hand-picked best case scenario benchmark--is only enough to make the Intel performance and gap decrease in size, not go away. We'll see if these new Opterons benefit from the re-engineering work done recently more than the desktop ones did; so far it doesn't look good.

Same price as Apple's 27" display:
Dell UltraSharp U2711

I can't believe people keep on complaining about the bulldozer's FP performance. Does nobody realize the shared floating point unit is a 256-bit one, TWICE AS WIDE as the usual 128-bit? Also, assuming you're an HPC user, did you run actual benchmarks? Because we did, and for our (only modestly parallelizable) HPC workload, compiled with a bleeding-edge compiler (not Intel) that supports AVX and running on a bleeding-edge Linux kernel, Bulldozer was remarkably competitive with Intel's offerings at the time, with Interlagos and Westmere getting about the same amount of useful work done per clock cycle.

That's pretty sad for AMD considering Westmere doesn't even implement AVX. Did you try Sandy Bridge, which does support AVX?

Also, if AMD's FP performance is truly that abysmal, please explain this? AMD bribed Dell more than Intel so that they now market Bulldozer-based Opterons as "excellent for oil and gas exploration, scientific and medical research, video rendering and other challenging HPC projects"???

Uh, you really think marketing copy is all that meaningful? Of course Dell is going to say that machines they sell are an "excellent choice" for some application. They want to sell them!

Judging by sales figures available to the general public, the percentage of HPC customers for whom AMD is the best fit is fairly small.

Also, Intel's improved HyperThreading still ain't worth shit if you saturate the FP units, while AMD's "clustered multithreading" succeeds to squeeze out a significant advantage owing to the fact that not all of our FP code is easily vectorizable so that sharing the 256-bit FP unit between 2 execution threads works better than trying to keep it busy with 1 thread's vectorized instructions.

You have no idea what the fuck you're talking about here. AMD "clustered multithreading" is a different take on hyperthreading intended to provide a large speedup for integer code by providing dedicated integer execution resources to each thread. Because the FPU is shared, for FP code AMD CMT is effectively equivalent to Intel HT. Whatever benefit you see from saturating one FPU with two threads instead of one? It'll be there on Intel too.

Judging by your sloppy ill-informed post I'd guess that you don't actually code (or at least are not one of the low level optimization wizards) and are severely garbling information you picked up from your coworkers.

I can get external WiFi hard drives if I want more storage space and play media from them.

Wifi harddrive? Really? Those things have terrible transfer rates, cost at least twice as much as regular harddrives, and further require extra power draw. I haven't used one with an iPad so I'm not sure how the experience is there, but I have not been pleased with them.

Regardless, the iPad still does not offer always-in extensible storage. Max you can ever do is 64GB. For around $100 I can put in a 128GB SD card into the surface for total always on-board storage of 160GB (which incidentally is about the same price to go from 32 to 64 GB on the iPad).

That is correct. But that matters more than you would think.

I'm not so sure. On my desktop install, I have full office, Adobe CS6 (Photoshop, Illustartor, InDesign, Premiere), Matlab, Visual Studio, and a couple games and those massive beasts only take around 20GB of storage, which is around what the Surface has for Appdata. On my windows 8 install I have around 70 apps installed, and the total diskspace they consume is around 2GB. Remember, these are metro apps which are for the most part very light.

The iPad also has a USB port. How do you know ANY of those things (apart from mice) will have drivers in WindowsRT?

By way of $30 dongle. You can't just connect anything you like to it. USB drives, mice, and external harddrives for instance are not supported. It is intended as a "camera connection" kit for transferring pictures from a camera, and not much else.

As far as windows RT peripheral support, yes mice, keyboards, USB drives, and portable harddrives will universally work through standard drivers. Aside from them Dell and HP are supporting Windows RT with their printer lines. Yes, many still aren't supported, but the list is growing. Microsoft already announced Xbox 360 controllers will work with Windows RT.

Look, the same people shipping windows RT products are also the ones making peripherals and writing drivers for said peripherals. If Dell is selling a Windows RT tablet, they're going to make damn sure their printers and other accessories will also work with their Windows RT tablet in particular and other Windows RT tablets as a consequence. This is not true with Apple, where device makers can only hope that by making their printer or other hardware compatible with iPad (where at all possible) they can at least get one of Apple's customers to purchase through them.

You can with the right application. You mentioned Dropbox as one of them.

Ah, I see. Thanks, but not really what I was looking for.

I can't see that being the only criteria for any enterprise use.

Of course it's not the *only* criteria. But say I want to equip a salesman with a tablet. I want him to be able to accept signatures, to run custom sales software, to connect to our corporate network via VPN, to be able to download inventory data, to create purchase orders... etc. Netbooks, Ultrabooks, Macbook Air, etc. can probably do 90% of that. But accepting signatures is a great feature for a mobile salesperson. Or even the ability to pass the device around a room easily, which a tablet allows and a clamshell form factor prohibits, is a great feature. Windows 8 tablets do all of the above and the extra 10%.

I can't believe people keep on complaining about the bulldozer's FP performance. Does nobody realize the shared floating point unit is a 256-bit one, TWICE AS WIDE as the usual 128-bit? Also, assuming you're an HPC user, did you run actual benchmarks? Because we did, and for our (only modestly parallelizable) HPC workload, compiled with a bleeding-edge compiler (not Intel) that supports AVX and running on a bleeding-edge Linux kernel, Bulldozer was remarkably competitive with Intel's offerings at the time, with Interlagos and Westmere getting about the same amount of useful work done per clock cycle. There are some HPC benchmarks on AMDs website that seem very unlikely in light of the mainstream press. However, in light of our own benchmark results, they seem quite reasonable (although we never quite could make it look that good for AMD; probably because AMD didn't go to the same lengths to squeeze the maximum performance out of the Intel systems). Either way, AMD simply blew Intel away on a per-node-price basis, even when compared to Romley. All the way, I was the one arguing that "we should try Intels" based on reviews I saw online, but once we got all the benchmark results in, I simply couldn't argue anymore.

Also, if AMD's FP performance is truly that abysmal, please explain this? AMD bribed Dell more than Intel so that they now market Bulldozer-based Opterons as "excellent for oil and gas exploration, scientific and medical research, video rendering and other challenging HPC projects"???

Of course, this is all for a very specific workload and may not hold for all HPC workloads, but I have a strong feeling that even generally spoken, the Bulldozer's FP performance for HPC applications is just fine. It's just that most FP-intensive applications used in most of the benchmarks we're seeing in "end-user" space are not compiled to take full advantage of it and/or not running on an Operating System that takes full advantage of it and/or not very relevant test cases for the Bulldozer's parallel HPC potential. For example, one of the things we found out is that Intel's frequency scaling is more aggressive than AMD's, so Intel suffers badly if you put all the cores on a die to work at once. Also, Intel's improved HyperThreading still ain't worth shit if you saturate the FP units, while AMD's "clustered multithreading" succeeds to squeeze out a significant advantage owing to the fact that not all of our FP code is easily vectorizable so that sharing the 256-bit FP unit between 2 execution threads works better than trying to keep it busy with 1 thread's vectorized instructions.

/rambling rant

...

If every single one of the development teams for every single one of the dozens of different programmes in use have the same attitude ("Who cares if it's hogging RAM and churning CPU cycles, they're both cheap these days!"). then every single one of them runs more poorly than it might, forcing us to either upgrade the hardware unnecessarily at great expense, or accept a god awful user experience. That's not a good situation just because each developing company wants to cut corners and shave a few quid off the costs.

But it's totally reasonable. The bottom of the line DELL ships with 2G of RAM:
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=svctbpd1&model_id=vostro-260&c=us&l=en&s=soho&cs=ussoho1&

Twice the RAM on your current systems. And that's just the bottom of the line, now. I think it isn't reasonable for you to complain about brand new software performance on a poorly stocked system -- and your systems are poorly stocked. Hell, you are *at* the minimum for running windows 7 (or 8).

Your alternative is to insist on performance from each of your dozens of software providers, which will certainly cost a great deal, too.

What makes you think $399 is below their cost? Dell can sell a laptop for $399. I don't see why they couldn't sell a tablet for the same.

Note: I am not the grand parent poster.

Like it or hate it, Device Manager is a cake-walk to use and anybody can figure it out in a few minutes.

You get "Unknown device" in the device manager and you have no idea what it is or what driver or anything, you can't grab a driver from windows update, because windows update doesn't have it. The only way to know is if the driver is installed that you don't have installed because you don't know what driver you need which is fairly difficult if you're just given a machine, with no information as to what it's components are and expected to install a version of Windows with whatever drivers it needs without opening the case.

At least on Linux you can do a lspci and identify what hardware is there and what drivers you need to install. With stuff like "Hardware Drivers" (in Ubuntu) where you just point and click to install proprietary drivers when you want them, it's not really any worse than Windows at that point.

Is there a good resource for finding Linux friendly hardware?

Some Linux OEMs like:

http://system76.com/
http://www.dell.com/linux
http://www.hp.com/linux
https://www.avadirect.com/
http://cosmos.linuxbeach.net/
http://www.eightvirtues.com/
http://www.emperorlinux.com/

I have been looking for this because I am in the process of trying to build a machine that is Linux friendly and I have been struggling with this.

Linus uses Apple hardware at the moment to my knowledge.

First, a RAID array does not "[run] with a hotspare." When a failure occurs, the hotspare becomes a fully integrated member of the array, at which point you would be running without a hotspare, which on a redundant array isn't that much of a problem considering the Dell replacement would be there within 4 hours of reporting/determining a hardware failure.

It took Sun 3+ weeks to send us a replacement hard disk under warranty and required multiple phone calls. This happened on multiple occasions and was one of the main reasons we decided to stop buying Sun servers.

Yes, the spare became an integrated member of the array. That's true. My point was that the hot spare was now a member of the array and we had no remaining spare disks in the array. Since the server hardware only allowed drives with the Sun firmware, we couldn't keep a supply of spare disks around to swap into the arrays as needed.

Second, Dell servers do not have "firmware-locked disks." I've never heard of such a thing. It's a pretty absurd concept that you could only have OEM hard disks in your box, and an unrealistic expectation that clients would comply.

They did: "In the case of Dell's PERC RAID controllers, we began informing customers when a non-Dell drive was detected with the introduction of PERC5 RAID controllers in early 2006. With the introduction of the PERC H700/H800 controllers, we began enabling only the use of Dell qualified drives."

Same thing with Sun, at least at that point in time.

Finally, hardware RAID is leaps and bounds above software RAID. There's a reason it's cheaper to go with software...

Software RAID was perfectly adequate for our needs: as backup servers they didn't need to have the utmost performance. As a bonus, we weren't reliant on a specific make and model of hardware RAID card: we could connect the array to any system running MD. Even under heavy load the demand on the CPU was negligible.

The Sun server was the main Samba share for the lab: lab instruments would write data to it and researchers would access that data on their desktops. It also used software RAID with multiple arrays set up. CPU usage was similarly low, even at high loads, and it worked quite satisfactorily for the lab.

You might have saved money up front, but over the life of the server, you could potentially lose much more when you consider catastrophic hardware failure which would be fully covered under the warranty of the Dell box.

SuperMicro offered a comparable warranty, so that wasn't really an issue.

Dell had restricted drives to their brand but a firmware update removed the restriction. Here is a link to a discussion about it:

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19324790.aspx

A search of Dell shows a number of machines that use it linky

What is the resolution on that Dell laptop? Tell me about the throughput on the Dell thunderbolt port. How is the resolution on that Dell Inspirion all-in-one (iMac equivalent)? 1600x900? At twenty inches? Ouch!

Not really the same parts as Dell.

Seth

I install over 20 Dell servers a year running CentOS. I've never needed a single driver update. All of them are fully supported. Dell manufactures their servers specifically to be Linux supported.

cf. http://linux.dell.com/

Looks like the game's changed...

Go to Apple's online store and spec out a mini - I chose the 2.5GHz 500 GB one, replaced the processor with a 2.7 GHz i7 and upped the RAM to 8 GB. That makes this an i7 with 8GB RAM and an Radeon 6630M GPU, and it clocks in at about $999.

Now, let's go to Dell and check out desktops. The only i7 desktop it shows me is the "OptiPlex 990 Ultra Small Form Factor", which has an 2.8 GHz i7, 4 GB RAM and an Intel HD3000 GPU. Right off the bat, it's already $949, and when I up the OS to Win7 Ultimate 64bit (that's only fair - OSX has exactly ONE version), it jumps to...

$999 ONLY!

It's kind of give-and-take - the Dell is 2.8 GHz, but only 4GB RAM and the GPU is kind of anemic. The Mini's a slightly slower CPU, faster GPU, and on top of that, it's smaller and less power consuming

But there's more! Suppose I'm using it as a dev machine (which is what I'd use it for) - Xcode is free with the mac. Visual Studio Pro costs another $499! Even with the $99 I'd spend to get stuff onto the Mac App Store, the Mini's a bargain!

Summary: 2006 called. They want their Apple bashing back.

Sure they do!
http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/thinkpad/xtablet-series/x230t/
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/5169094-5169094-5102710-5256972-5256964-5071191.html?dnr=1
http://www.dell.com/us/k-12/p/latitude-xt3/pd

But they still have all the same drawbacks that made them unpopular before the iPad. Of those, the Lenovo is the only one really worth your while. I suspect after Windows 8 launches, we're going to see a whole new set of convertible/hybrid tablet PCs that are built for consumers with better prices and longer battery life. We've already seen a slew at Computex, some which were bizarre, some which were very promising.

Eh, I'm not sure that it'd be as difficult as you suggest.

Yes, Dell and friends want to get into software support like they want an extra hole in the head(which is why, unless you are paying for a nice support contract that lets you talk to a real support guy about why the TOE feature on the BCMXXXX LoM is corrupting packets under Server2000whatever, the advice is 'reboot, reimage); but if somebody came to them with an order for a suitably large number of standard-configuration boxes, they'd take it, no problem.

Consider Dell's existing "Hardware and Services for OEMs" program. Currently, it's mainly server-based, with offerings for people who make assorted enterprise network appliances, but workstations are also available. Basically, you, the OEM, supply the software and the customer support. Dell fulfills all hardware orders(with Dell designs, dell branded, unbranded, or customized-chassis, depending on volume and how much you pay) and handles all hardware replacements and FRUs. Dell ships more whiteboxes, you get to sell your linux softswitch or firewall appliance, or enterprise search widget, or what have you without developing any hardware supply chain or expertise. Simple enough.

Certainly neither Dell(nor, for that matter, Valve) would want to get dragged into the morass of 'let's support "linux", everything from antique versions of Redhat to Timmy-tweaker's ub3r Gentoo ricebox!'; but Dell wouldn't blink at shipping and (hardware) supporting the box of your choice if the volume were right, and Valve presumably wouldn't have any problem with saying 'Steam Just Works on Ubuntu Gaming Groundsquirrel LTS: if you can get it working elsewhere that's cool too".

It may not be Linux, but it is not-Windows...

Dell has been offering their workstation class computers for federal government procurement with FreeDOS for years:

http://www.dell.com/us/fedgov/p/precision-m4600/fs

Sucks they won't do this for mere mortals though.

Only selling a high end model is not going to foster adoption, however. It's when they sell the low end models that Dell would actually matter. People who spend $1500 on a laptop are not as common as those who spend $500.

You mean like how they're selling Vostros for $349 with Ubuntu on them. Right now.

Dell's official page for Project Sputnik legitimizes it.

Dell start selling PC's [sic] with Linux (although in 2001 Dell Drop[ped] Linux on Desktops and Laptops); also, AFAIK you have always (well, since at least the late 90s) been able to order PowerEdge machines from Dell with Linux pre-loaded (Red Hat Enterprise, natch), and Dell has been pretty good about supporting Linux on their servers (see, e.g., the Dell Linux Engineering Web).

I purchased a dell laptop (m1530) with Ubuntu several years ago, with extended tech support. I had a harder time getting it to run properly than any other laptop in the last few years. Whenever I tried calling the tech-support, I had to transfer several times because they couldn't be bothered creating prompts for it in their phone support menus. I was actually told by their tech-support that my laptop stopped working because I did updates. With 12.04 I was finally able to get the sound working. Their website used to say "the most important thing you need to know about linux is that you don't get Windows". Look at their ubuntu website now. It has a underpowered laptop with a 15 month-old version of Ubuntu that you can't customize at all.

Not quite yet. You can't order one online with Ubuntu preinstalled. Seriously, they should have updated their website prior to this press release.

Even now, there are some notebooks available on their website, and you can probably get even more options when you ask them on the phone.

Actually the Inspiron is a 531S:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/topic.aspx/global/products/inspndt/topics/en/us/inspndt_531s_sv?c=us&l=en

And it has been used almost every single day since I took delivery of it. Sometimes it's on for days on end and has been for weeks on end on the rare occasion.

Also after having done phone support for both Dell laptops and desktops (from 2006-2008) my experience has been the opposite: the consumer line anyway tended to run too hot back then with what I considered to be a critical design flaw: ventilation for cooling systems being on the bottom of the unit right where the typical laptop user would have their lap - blocking the cooling process.

That's like comparing "EMC" hard drives to Seagate. Show us Dell, IBM, and HP pricing for the se modules if you want to be fair, but thats not what you wanted /eyeroll

Poor poor apple shill, 750GB 7200rpm drive with 32GB mSATA caching SSD $175, far superior and a lot cheaper! You could have figured that out yourself, not really very hard, but then you wouldn't get your paycheck!

So, let's start with the cheapest laptop Apple makes, the 13 inch MBP - i5 with HD4000 graphics and 4GB RAM, 500GB drive at $1199.

Dell - no similar laptop, even their $1800 or so Lattitude only has HD3000 graphics, they're all 2nd gen i5 processors.

HP has two at first look: $999 model and a $1399 model. Reviewing the specs, however, show that these are actually competitors to the 13" Mac Air, at $1199 which weighs less and comes with better confirmed battery life than HP posted. So, HP is also appears to be out in most comparisons, although they might have a slightly less expensive Air model. I didn't look deep enough to figure out exactly what the differences between their $999 and $1399 models were, nor how they compare exactly with the Mac Air. I just gave them the benefit of the doubt and stated they were mostly comparable, and dropped the issue of screen resolution differences (HP is wider, but shorter than the Mac Air, but not enough to belabor over in this comparison)

I didn't bother to look any further - I think the above speaks for itself across 2 product comparisons and continues to support what I found a year ago when matching 15" laptops. There is little, if any, "Apple tax" on the surface, and none when looking at what comes with the system as a whole, at least for a large portion of their products.

I call shenanigans on all of you.
Dell still sells laptops... and refers to them as such:
http://www.dell.com/us/p/laptops

I decided on a Dell XPS 13" Ultrabook. It looks like a MacBook Air and has i5 Sandy Bridge / SDD combo that cold boots in 14 seconds, and features always-on charging USB 3, wakes from sleep to update e-mail, etc., footprint of an 11" screen, Gorilla Glass on screen, aluminum and carbon fiber frame, glass touchpad, supposed 9 hour battery life, 3 lbs., blah blah blah. It's amazing what leaving off the optical drive and redundant ports will save and get you. /shill At work I chose a Lenovo x220. It's nice to pick up and carry a laptop with one hand and not feel like it's going to break your wrist or have it flex so much that the fan scrapes.

With generous return policies (Costco / BestBuy / etc.) take a few out for a test drive and see what sticks.

http://www.dell.com/uk/p/alienware-m11x-r3/pd

You mean this? Ofc mine is the r1 version and yeah you can't buy that anymore (first hand at least)

Why not buy something that comes with Linux pre-installed, and has next day on-site warranty included in the base price?

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=sqct12&model_id=vostro-1440&c=us&l=en&s=soho&cs=ussoho1

It's relatively inexpensive, has a reasonable amount of horsepower, is reasonably light-weight*, and it has Ubuntu preinstalled, so switching it over to Edubuntu should be as easy as "apt-get install edubuntu", and you have a reasonable assurance that everything will work out of the box, and the *base* warranty option on it, because it's in the SMB line of products, includes next business day onsite hardware support. They've also been known to give some very nice deals to educational institutions.

* - It's not as small/lightweight as the V130 I'm typing this on, but that has been replaced by the V131 and they seem to have removed the Linux option on it. That being said, if you get a V131, everything'll work out of the box, too, and that is a smaller/lighter system.

but instead they decided that selling $150 replacement batteries wasn't enough, now they need to sell $150 replacement batteries AND $150 replacement battery services. That's a marvel.

That's totally made up. Apple charges $199.00 for the retina macbook and $129 for other macbooks to replace your battery, including parts and labor.
A new Dell 9-cell battery costs $145.99.
Lenovo and HP charge $160 or so.

but I am willing to pay a $500 price premium to any company that is willing to sell me a laptop that has a standard sized keyboard. I type 50 pages of text or code per week. IT IS WORTH IT TO ME.

To my knowledge, no such thing exists.

For your consideration:
Dell's Precision line of laptops has some models with comfortable full-size keyboards. I'm typing this on a Dell M6400 which is nice to type on; full-size keys (plus backlit, nice in projector low-light situations), and a 10-key keypad and a real row of FN-keys at the top (although the fn-keys are maybe 70% the size of the other keys).
Relevant to the original topic, the screen is 1900x1200. It is a gorgeous screen for a laptop.
Anyway, having added some SSD's (SATA2) in it, the machine is quite responsive (I have this one maxed out at 16gb ram, but that is comfortable to work with for a while). Downsides = big, heavy, and the power supply is the size + weight of a six pack (ok, maybe half that volume but it is huge). If you want a good keyboard + horse power + really nice display and great storage options (in addition to the two internal sata hdd slots, I added a 750gb drive in a optical-bay caddy since I almost never use DVD's these days) so I'm pretty well set for storage. (As an aside, this machine was built by Foxcon - I've taken it down to the motherboard a few times for various upgrades and replacements and - I have to say - Foxcon did *nice* work).

I'm going to use this another year or so then see if I can find something similar that has can use internal PCIe SSD(s) - I want to bypass sata and go for a PCIe x4 or x8 device (*shrug* I haven't seen that in a laptop yet for storage, but when that comes out it will be time to upgrade).

For a laptop, this one has a pretty sweet keyboard. You can find used ones on ebay at very affordable prices these days, thought I might suggest the M6500 or later because the M6400 doesn't have a function mPCIe slot. Study up on the various screen options, CPU options, GPU options (I've been pleased with the Quadro FX 2700m) so you understand the exact configuration you're getting.
*shrug* I'm just sayin, you can find laptops with nice keyboards if you look around a little.

Dell ships computers with freedos on them today.

Wow. Just... wow.

In 1993 it was more or less impossible to buy a PC without dos and Windows 3.x on it because Microsoft charged a lot less to OEMs if they agreed to ship a copy of Windows 3.x with every PC sold. (IIRC it was $99 per copy or $19 per copy if you agreed to ship Windows on every machine.)

Yes, that was known as the "Windows tax". MS imposed that contract in attempt to make windows ubiquitous as it was under fire from every direction. (I didn't say it was 1993 btw, that date was for Linux) DESQview, for instance, died off in 90-91 for all intents and purposes. And quite a few OSes stubbornly hung on through around 96, When even though proving that Win95 was in essence an application running on top of DOS and DOS could be swapped out with DRDOS, DRDOS and its brethren faded away. Another MS dirty trick that they lost in court, but won where it matters since those targeted competitors had all failed.

Minix is still alive and being used by Prof. Tanenbaum. Microsoft had all OEMs shipping Windows with every PC, and you claim it was a rich time in computing history? I am sorry but the writing was on the wall that Microsoft was going to win (painted on the wall by Microsoft, with their competitors blood)

Ironically, Bill Gates was one of the few people to see that web browsers could eventually be the Desktop OS. Hence, the decision to cut of Netscape's oxygen.

Minix still being used by it's creator is about as relevant as MS Bob still being used by Gates. Sorry, but the boat sailed long long ago wrt Minix. Same for the assumed tiny group that's still using BeOS. That one had promise but I never had the time to look at it and it essentially failed long before I got to it. Bill Gates entirely failed to see anything related to Web Browsers until Netscape had mopped the floor. That MS was able to displace Netscape and destroy them is a classic example of monopoly predatory practices. Giving IE away for free and including it with their OS distributions made it virtually impossible for Netscape to monetize their main product and raised the bar significantly on getting people to try Netscape.

Dell ships computers with freedos on them today.

In 1993 it was more or less impossible to buy a PC without dos and Windows 3.x on it because Microsoft charged a lot less to OEMs if they agreed to ship a copy of Windows 3.x with every PC sold. (IIRC it was $99 per copy or $19 per copy if you agreed to ship Windows on every machine.)

So you can buy a new computer today with DOS on it from a major manufacturer. Minix is still alive and being used by Prof. Tanenbaum. Microsoft had all OEMs shipping Windows with every PC, and you claim it was a rich time in computing history? I am sorry but the writing was on the wall that Microsoft was going to win (painted on the wall by Microsoft, with their competitors blood)

Ironically, Bill Gates was one of the few people to see that web browsers could eventually be the Desktop OS. Hence, the decision to cut of Netscape's oxygen.

There's plenty of options, but relatively few that an individual might be able to purchase for a pet project or for a small number of prospective clients.

Off the top of my head, Dell offer an OEM scheme whereby they'll rebrand one of their servers with your logo and install your software on it before shipping it out to your customer; another company called NEI will do something similar. I've actually got an NEI box right next to me now - I'm the customer of a company that uses them.

I suspect that the answer is a combination of 'don't hold your breath on that' and 'at least a year ago, did you miss it?'

In terms of sheer screaming power(and, for the moment, even supporting 64 bit memory spaces) ARM is a toy and shows no terribly strong signs of making any strides in that area that Intel would really be worried about.

On the other hand, it would appear that an awful lot of netbooks and laptops were never sold, possibly never even built, because of tablets and smartphones... If things like this turn out to be a good fit for some 'cloud' niche or other sales of select Xeons could see similar hits.

At least so far, you don't go up against Chipzilla benchmark-for-benchmark. The world evolves around you such that your virtues are now more desirable than his...

...on its back [apple.com] there are...

No VGA, DVI, HDMI, nor Displayport... That is what I meant... You can't hook up any computer that's not Thunderbolt

I couldn't find that monitor that allows "hooking up 5 computers" in Dell's website

Sorry, I was wrong; it's six.

Oh, nope, the five computer one is here

I'm not a fan of Dell, but their monitors are cool.

...on its back [apple.com] there are...

No VGA, DVI, HDMI, nor Displayport... That is what I meant... You can't hook up any computer that's not Thunderbolt

I couldn't find that monitor that allows "hooking up 5 computers" in Dell's website

Sorry, I was wrong; it's six.

Oh, nope, the five computer one is here

I'm not a fan of Dell, but their monitors are cool.