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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?

Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by MBCook on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @04:25PM (#10467134)
When I still used PCs I bought/used business PCs (and laptops). While they were better than pure consumer models, they still had a lot of the same issues and design decisions.
Re:The Nightmare of Replacing a Battery on a Mac Laptop by scholia on Wednesday October 28, 2015 @06:45PM (#10467942)
I'm tempted to ask "Such as?", but your experience is more than a decade out of date, so I'm not sure why anyone would care ;-)