Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop
by scholia on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @12:58PM
(#10465694)
On the hardware side the race-to-the-bottom with prices really made it much harder to find good computers that weren't built like toys.
That's a consumer-oriented view. Dell, HP and Lenovo continued to supply solid business laptops and portable workstations. Some were even ultraportable, including the ThinkPad X series and Toshiba Porteges.
Not sure why you think "the PC guys didn't target that market very hard" since they had more than 90% of the market. But if you were just watching the consumer market, perhaps you didn't notice?
The hardware is very well designed, well put together, feels like a premium piece of equipment. PC laptops used to (and cheap ones still do) feel like junk. Apple is willing to put expensive trackpads (amazing!) in their laptops instead of accidentally crippling the machine with one piece of penny pinching.
OS X does everything I need and does have all the unix stuff underneath so I can use it to do development in an environment very similar (relative to Windows) to the Linux servers code is deployed on.
And OS X has a good community of software developers making great programs like MarsEdit, BBEdit, and all sorts of other things. There is paid software (Office, Photoshop, etc.) if you need it, something that isn't the case with Linux.
The total experience was so much better than I remember with Windows, and I can work well on it. I don't have to worry about tracking down weird drivers. If something is wrong there is one place to go: Apple. I remember the fun of Dell telling me it was Windows and to call MS, who would tell me it was Dell's fault.
So that explains the rise of OS X. I'd place the 'fall' of Windows at two things (this is just speculation on my part): stagnation and hardware.
Stagnation is obvious. Windows XP was great, but it sat around forever while Apple kept improving OS X. Then we got Vista (I won't judge it) very late, then eventually 7, then by 8 and 8.1 MS was actually starting to move again.
On the hardware side the race-to-the-bottom with prices really made it much harder to find good computers that weren't built like toys. By and large the PC guys didn't target that market very hard. Their 'upscale' laptops often felt like lower end ones with better specs but the same build. It seems like this is turning around (a bit) as MS tries to force it, which is great to see.