There are limits to how enormous the battery can be. Over 100Wh and you can't fly with it, so nobody is going to do that. That's less than double the capacity of the current Framework battery.
Yet. There will be competition for the Snapdragon series. At least if Arm doesn't shot itself in the foot with lawsuits; if they do, the real action will shift to RISC-V. I'm sure that the Nuvia developers are already working on a RISC-V chip just in case...
An Arm motherboard would be a great thing for one of those third parties to make. I don't think Framework has the resources to take it on right now. It's time for them to do an update to the AMD boards, and they do a new Intel one every year...
There are some other premium Chromebooks. Google started things off with the Pixelbook, which it appears they are now discontinuing. HP and Samsung have produced some high end Chromebooks.
They're a niche market: C-level executives at companies that use Chromebooks, developers at those companies, Linux fans who will mostly use the Chromebook to run Linux apps. They make more economic sense as an adaptation of a laptop that is already being sold for other markets rather than as a dedicated product.
The Pixelbook line never did enough volume for Google to make money on it. It was a proof of concept, a way of showing that a Chromebook didn't have to just mean a low end and cheaply built Acer or the like, but could be something that higher end users would happily use and not be ashamed to be seen with when they do a presentation. Now that other companies are making premium Chromebooks, there is no longer a need for Google to produce them.
16 million students!! The school only has a bit over 11,000 students, and just over 12,000 faculty and staff. In other words, they had about 700 addresses per person. After the sale they will only have 350.
That hasn't been completely true for a few years. If you just walk onto campus with a wireless device and use the public network (the one that doesn't require authentication) you get a 10.x.x.x address behind a NAT and it has some firewall restrictions. (They're pretty light; it's mostly to keep out some network attacks.) I think you do still get a public address if you plug into an Ethernet port, and you may get one if you use the MIT SECURE wireless network.
MIT's network policies are not purely about what makes financial sense. The Institute was one of the birthplaces of the internet, and they see the ongoing development of it as one of their core missions. MIT has a close relationship with W3C, which is located a stone's throw away. Their network is multi-homed to the max; I think they peer with ALL the backbone providers that operate in the US. The school has ludicrous amounts of internet bandwidth; I think it's now measured in terabits per second. After all, they have to be able to cope with thousands of students watching Netflix along with all the research!
And just in case there is a REAL internet collapse... they have an emergency info site at mit.NET that is hosted far away from the campus. That would let them get some information out even if Cambridge were wiped off the map and all the name servers for .edu were to fail.
MIT had about 700 IPv4 addresses for every human being involved with the Institute - students, faculty, and staff. They're only putting half of them on the market, so they will still have 350 per person. I don't think it's going to compromise the quality of their network services or the availability of IP addresses for people who want them.
Like most large institutions, MIT doesn't give public IP addresses to most client devices (desktops, laptops, phones, and tablets); they get DHCP address in the 10.x.x.x range behind a NAT because it's a bit easier to firewall them that way. But real IP addresses are available if you need them to run services.
