Creating my own laptop brand, how?

Hi, ive received all kinds of very educated help from members at the devshed forums, hopefully someone can inform, or advise me in this situation as well!

Ive been thinking for some time, how would one go about creating a company that sells laptop computers (in the part of the world that would be considered "the west") on a small scale?

- From where would the parts come?
- Where could they be assembled?
- Should you even buy parts, or just go for some finished product and stamp your brand on it?
- How many computers would you look at buying as an initial investment?

Business trips to asia would not pose a problem.

Please post any ideas or advice Thanks!

In general its not possible, basically it comes down to the fact that size and power is generally a huge issue, one of the ways an OEM will reduce size is by removing sockets, and without sockets you can't really modify the design so you end up with a single customized board for the entire system. On top of that all the OEMs are trying to one up the competitor by making it smaller, so the designs are all constantly changing, this helps keep anybody from making standardized parts.

This makes a company that sells laptops very very hard to do as a start up, basically your options boil down to getting a bunch of engineers together to design your motherboard (there are probably a few companies that will do it for you) or you can buy laptops from another OEM and modify them in some way (there are a bunch of companies that will take something like a MacBookPro and replace the case and screen). The first option will be very expensive to start and you would need decent investment to do it, and the minimum to get it produced will probably be a lot of 1,000 or around there (i know that is how intel sells their CPUs). The second option is much less work and easier to start, design the case to fit the mobo of the computer your modifying and you can buy parts that fit your case, but this also leaves you very limited to what can actually be done with the hardware since you have very little control over most of the electronics.

I would say its generally hard to start a company that actually makes laptops, you would need a very large investment. Instead focus on making specialized laptops by retrofitting laptops from other manufacturers, and your initial investment will probably be determined by what the minimum orders you can get for the parts you have built special order (if you do that).

Thanks for your answer! So, the best way go to about it would basically be ordering parts and assembling it myself, more or less like building a stationary computer..?

Where would i get a empty shell case, mb, gfx, hdds etc for a good price? Contact asian retailers? Hmmm..

Edit:
Okay, found two resellers of barebooks:
http://www.uniwill.com/
http://www.clevo.com.tw/en/products/

Anyone have any more resellers?

Where to get the components? Hdd, cpu, ram etc..

dell now has an options to make the laptop 'for resale' - I don't know if this removes the dell logo - or not.

newegg.com has laptop hdd and ddr2-sodimm (notebook) ram that you can get. they might also have the GO/Mobility versions of video cards that are used in laptops

thats not what i said, i said retrofit other laptops, basically just replace the case, its not too expensive to have something like a case designed since it needs no electronics, the case must be custom designed because every OEM has their own standard (and you would need to reverse engineer it), you can't go out and buy it, once you have it designed you can get someone in china to mass produce the parts for your new case pretty easily, then you can swap and replace parts from other laptops (which amounts to little more then changing the hard drive), those barebone laptops are not a good idea, its no more then a disassembled laptop, its not "laptop parts", and you can't really buy the parts separately unless you design the motherboard (which is expensive)