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0 pointsmakeitdouble2y ago0 comments

There's a volume zones of people who want "a laptop and nothing more", will pay for better materials and Apple has perfected that segment with a few caveats [0].

To your point, then comes the lower end ("just give me something cheap"), the corporate middle ("the same laptop as at work"), and the super high end (gaming, CAD, anything needing special software or a discrete GPU), with the outliers (linux etc)

IMHO windows laptop nowadays are for people who either don't really care, or have already a very specific target or limitation.

For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple.

[0] resistance to abuse isn't there. A macbook's screen will be dead pretty quick if not handled with appropriate care. A Lenovo Flex for instance will take it a lot longer.

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dividedbyzero2y ago

> For instance Lenovo or Asus definitely care about pushing laptops' limits and design. A lot. IMHO more than Apple.

It's a bit more nuanced. Lenovo/Asus seem to be experimenting a lot more, but more like by throwing (relatively) easy-to-build variations at the wall to see what sticks, then release a few more polished SKUs. Apple doesn't really do that, but they do attack those limits and design aspects they care about very aggressively and with a ton of resources (e.g. battery life pre-M1, manufacturing tolerances).

makeitdoubleOP2y ago

One of the issue is laptops aren't a growth angle to Apple. For instance the efforts they made towards the CPU and processing architecture wouldn't have made sense without the other products benefiting from it.

We've seen that with the touchbar: it got a first release, and basically no improvements, no bug fixes, no better support from there. A laptop only feature gets no love from today's Apple.

Even the iPad saw little to no progress in recent years, outside of sharing specs with the mac.

I posit we'd see a foldable/bendable phone from Apple before we ever see something significant form factor change in laptops.

datavirtue2y ago

The touchbar got shit on and it was probably expensive at the same time. Worthy innovation perhaps, but the customers didn't value it. I think that was the reason it faded out. I actually used it for audio adjustments, but I didn't need it.

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