I have this fantasy of starting a company dedicated to building Linux laptops for developers. Great displays and keyboard, generous ports, beefy specs, with a willingness to trade off size and weight.

I think it hasn't happened yet because it's probably economically not viable.

A lot of what's nice about Macbooks is in the software. The battery life is at least partly due to software, making good/attractive use of the display, handling sleep states well, multimonitor support, and so on. You'd have to put thousands (tens of thousands?) of (expensive-)person-hours into Linux to close that gap enough to matter.

It has happened though. https://system76.com/ I don't know why any developer in 2016 would buy an apple machine honestly. What little software perks they offer aren't really applicable to coding (over what's available in linux and increasingly windows with the linux subsystem), and any productivity requires an external monitor, real keyboard, etc so a lot of the nice build quality features are wasted too.

Isn't that along the lines of System 76 [1]? I haven't tried any of their machines, and they aren't exactly trying to compete with Apple, but they are Linux first.

[1] https://system76.com/

It appears that they are essentially a reseller of Clevo / Sager laptops, though. On the plus side you are guaranteed good support for the hardware using most distros, the build quality looks to be a bit below, say, a Dell XPS, though.

One problem is that (apart from devs) Linux only supports "typical" computer users, and then only OK. For example a lot of Apple users are multimedia professionals and Linux multimedia apps are simply not in the same league. The same can be said for lots of other categories of apps. Could an accountant switch to Linux without Intuit compatibility? Etc.

I think we underestimate how hard it is to polish hardware to Apple-level tolerances.

Especially because:

1. It takes a lot of capital to even attempt.

2. The traditional players in position to do so do not have it in their DNA (Dell, HP, et all).

I'm not expecting a unibody design and flawless color gamut or anything. Even basic OS functionality like sleep/wake, (dis)connecting external displays, trackpad responsiveness, etc., is vastly inferior on Linux laptops.

Well, depends how well you know Linux. My old Asus Zenbook has been a great servant, running the same Arch installation since I bought the laptop. Superb fonts, suspend/hibernate etc works, Intel and Nvidia GPUs both work, WiFi connects automatically and I can manage the networks from Roxterm, I still have a pretty good battery life and nothing beats my Xmonad setup.

And yes, the build quality doesn't match Apple. But actually I really don't care. Over three years of daily usage already and I can't really complain. Next thing I'm checking the Razer, Dell and Lenovo selection, but it seems I just don't need an update yet.

I'm a developer, I do hard stuff for work. Setting up a Linux distro is peanuts compared to the issues I face daily. And no, OSX is far from a usable operation system for my usage.

People are not so obsessed with quality and design and Steve Jobs was. We need a company who produces laptops that come close to Apple's quality bar.