I've bought myself a Surface Laptop 3 (15", i7 version) 11 months ago. I had been looking for a laptop powerful enough to code on, that would look "premium" for business purposes, lightweight and the charge had to last a full workday(or more). This laptop checked all the boxes, and performed wonderfully since then. To the extend that now we're considering getting it for our employees.
First off, The support was horrible: on my first purchase (with MS directly ever by the way) they blamed me squarely for a 1 day old (!) Factory broken display (it would turn on but when it got a bit warm it would show only stripes; switching off and waiting for cool off would 'fix it': did I say less than 24 hours old!?); I sent it in and they said I broke it and told me I could buy a new one.
Also when I got a new one, the new keyboard was broken and they refused to replace that as well. Again, blaming me from something that came broken from the box.
And the rest of the experiences was not much better but at least they took them back without whining (there i learned my lesson and went to a shop instead of order online). Horrible battery life (far from what is promised on the tin, even with relatively low workload), random freezes and crashes, weird balance feel compared to, say an iPad or mb air and slow compared to old and new apple products (iPad and macbooks).
After all I was most angry about the bad support; I never had that with apple even when it was my own fault (they repaired a water damaged mb air without issues and replaced two iPad pro keyboard which where damaged by dropping for free) which this was not.
I tried to give them a chance and I tried: I got most of my money back luckily as after the first fiasco I prepared for that and returned them to the shop in the box, but definitely will not buy again soon.
I didn't see this initially, but I now see frequent, .5-to-3 second lagging response to the touchpad, seemingly fixable only by reboot. Googling suggests a lot of other folks have seen a similar problem. For my machine, there's no lag from the touchscreen or from an external mouse...only the touchpad.
Re your USB problems...I'm not sure if I've seen that specific error, but I have noticed that I simply cannot plug in two external USB cameras and expect them both to work. The first one plugged in always works, the second appears as a device, but no software I own can get an image off of it (where the same two cameras can easily be used by other Windows boxes).
And, yes, I've also seen multi-screen problems when I put it to sleep with no external monitor and try to wake it up after it's plugged into the external monitor (plugged in through a USB-C hub). Basically, I had to plug in the monitor after it woke to avoid this.
Also...the detachable screen is a cool concept, but given that the seemingly larger portion of the battery life is in the keyboard half, and that the screen half has no power or USB ports, it really blunts the applications I might have put the detachable screen to.
Yes, definite problems here. I've wondered if I would've been happier with the Surface Laptop rather than the Surface Book.
Didn't feel like it to me, for development and fairly casual gaming.
> “not enough resources for USB”, freezing, the multi display setup gets often messed after undocking and so on.
Not my experience at all; in fact I was impressed at how well it remembered all my different multi display arrangements.
googling
Answer seems to be maybe:
https://www.most-useful.com/ubuntu-20-04-linux-on-surface-pr...
https://old.reddit.com/r/SurfaceLinux/top/?sort=top&t=year
TBH I hadn't really considered Surface's before due to them being Microsoft devices.
These limitations seem small, but are enough to degrade the experience.
Overall, I do agree that the hardware feels quite nice, and besides those issues I listed, the Linux experience is quite good. I was very happy to not be forced to use Windows.
Like you pointed out, Mac feels premium because of the software/hardware tight coupling, and it just works. Windows is the same, but for reasons can feel less polished than MacOS.
I turned an old Macbook into a Linux box, and it's fine*. It does what I need it to do, but it doesn't feel premium at all. I just wish I had really slick, solid, premium-feeling alternatives.
It seems to me that Microsoft or Facebook or SOMEONE with a bajillion dollars could afford to do this and really make a dent in the space and give us more alternatives. I guess the demand just isn't there. Very sad.
> Chromebook shipments have grown 122% year on year to a total of 9.4 million units in Q3 of 2020. [1]
It covers big market, from tablets [2] to enterprise [3]. And they have AArch64 models [4].
[1] https://www.zdnet.com/article/pc-shipments-google-chromebook...
[2] Lenovo Chromebook Duet (10.1") 2 in 1 ($266.79) https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/student-chromebo...
[3] Dell Latitude Chromebook Enterprise https://www.delltechnologies.com/en-us/chromebookenterprise/
[4] https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/developer-information-f...
The companies I can see who are in the right position to profit from developing and giving away an OS that's at least as user-friendly as MacOS or Windows and as open as Linux are Intel and AMD. But it's hard to imagine either of them making something that's a joy to use.
Something Linux-based could work, but Linux is kind of stuck with a lot of decisions made thirty years ago. The kernel is pretty good, but the basic abstractions of POSIX-like operating systems are perhaps not what you'd design if you were creating them from scratch in 2020.
If some company wanted to create an Apple-like desktop experience with purpose-built hardware but with an open OS, this could be a good route: implement all the drivers needed to run well on bare metal on the company's own hardware products, but anyone can run it in a hypervisor on any computer.
A better goal would be to isolate OS features to give us more choice. The file system would be independent of the GUI engine, which would be independent of the executable manager, etc. It would give one mix-and-match ability. Possible partitioning:
- Execution/task manager
- GUI
- File system
- Security system
- App and upgrade manager
- IntegratorIt seems like Microsoft or Google could double-down on the software-hardware integration and build a seamless, premium product that really, truly competes with Apple. It seems like it would be beneficial for MS or Google to identify and partner with (or acquire?) a hardware partner and develop their systems hard against that, creating a seamless hardware-software interface like Apple does with its devices.
And I guess I'm just baffled that nobody else is doing that. On the contrary, everyone seems to be going the Microsoft route of developing for as many hardware configs as possible.
Fascinating.
Microsoft is probably the most strategically important company on the planet. Literally too big to fail.
Tesla is, if anything, similar to Apple in how closed-off they are. Teslas are attractive because of their design and powerful electric powertrain, but polished they are not.
Why when there is no third OS that has even 1% share and all Linux combined is about 3%. And desktop Linux is bad.
I use MacOS (whatever it is called this week) Mint and LXDE
Love Mint (typing on it) The Apple OS has a lot of rough corners (e.g. (max/min)imising windows is a world of pain) LXDE is acceptable because it is on my PI and I do not use the desktop much
I have not used Windows desktop for about a decade, has it really gotten that much better?
I am really happy with desktop Linux
There are a huge range of reasons. There's no consistency, everything changes every 2 years, the documentation is awful when it exists at all, if software is outside your distro's package repo it's a bitch to install, there are too many different distros, the community is full of pricks, fragmentation is a time-honored pastime, complexity is fetishized... fuck sound still didn't work consistently on the last Linux based media center I built. A cursory search of the internet will turn up innumerable reasons Linux Desktop is bad.
Which isn't to say that MacOS and Windows aren't bad (and getting worse), but they're still a damned sight better.
Just a reminder there's like 7 different context menu styles in Windows 10, not to mention two control panels.
And as you say, Windows 10 still sits there having confusing and mediocre system UIs.
With my really simple needs, macOS and Windows is just mostly memory-wasting fluff to me. I switched away from Macs when I realized that what I need and what I can get is cheaper than getting a Mac. ("Cheaper" because I am very sensitive to cost vs. utility. I am typing on thinkpad t430s I found in the trash which I spent just a little to get a better screen, having everything else already that was missing.)
That said, sometimes get frustrating, but they don't happen frequently for me.
In the days of electron and web apps, it's clear that the users either don't care or developers are shooting themselves in the foot.
In either case, consistency died a while ago.
It all depends on the distribution (hence "too many different distros" is good). Choose Debian XFCE and you will never see any change, everything is rock-solid. Tested with my relatives.
In contrast, in all my years of using Apple computers, I've rarely if ever had a driver related issues that wasn't easily solvable by updating my OS.
I switched to Linux when I left the company and while I ran into issues installing it on both my PC and laptop (not Mac), the end result works perfectly. I think all the digging around has made me better understand computers. A lot of the Linux command line skills are transferable to Mac.
(just my data point)
Error messages, crashes, graphical anomalies, hardware kind-of working. There are often fixes, but how much time are you willing to spend trouble-shooting? When you get a new computer or reformat, will you remember what you had to do?
I've experienced this class of issues on a range of hardware and software over 2 decades.
My best guess: Too much design-by-committee, and losing track of emergent concepts - like responsiveness, how the overall ecosystem affects performance, and how the various parts (designed by different people and teams) work together.
Another potential root cause: The way software dependencies and linking works, and the expectation to compile software on your machine.
Keep in mind that the context of my original comment was with respect to having "premium" devices. People pay thousands of dollars for a Macbook because the hardware and the software feel very high-end. The UI/UX is generally seamless. Stuff "just works". There are regular updates. Any software written for MacOS will work on any other Mac, because the hardware/software integration is so tightly controlled. Is it perfect? No. Are there things Linux does better? Sure. But taking the entire Apple ecosystem into account, it feels cohesive and thoughtful, and it feels like it's worth the money.
Contrast that with Linux. With many Linux distros, it doesn't "just work." The OS itself can change very often. The software ecosystem is fragmented. You have to use apt or yum or some other package manager. Sometimes you need five different package managers to install the software you want! On top of that, you can't necessarily run all Linux software on every distro or any hardware. There's little to no UX/UI consistency. As someone else pointed out, Qt vs GTK apps can and do look totally different and there are no style guides or any enforcement mechanisms to make sure that users enjoy the experience. It's the wild west, which is good in many ways, but in the context of making a device feel like a premium device, a wild west methodology fails that criteria pretty hard.
In other words, Linux is fantastic for computer nerds like us who like tinkering with things and don't mind rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. But it is no way, shape, or form a "premium" experience.
There are some non-Apple laptops with much better displays BTW, even Lenovo ships 500 nit displays and wide-color gamut ones with some their laptops nowadays. Dell and other manufacturers ship OLED display with some of their gaming laptops, which far outperform any Apple laptop display.
Regarding Aluminium vs. hardened plastic / titanium I'd say it's just a style question, I have never had any issues with my Thinkpads and they're way more resistant to scratching than Apple laptops (a poor colleage of mine badly scratched his new Macbook with his steel wrist watch only days after receiving it).
Regarding upgradability I prefer being able to extend RAM and hard disk as well as easily replace the battery, again Apple is a poor choice in regard to that.
Regarding repairability Apple actively keeps me from being able to repair my machine, take e.g. a look at Louis Rossmans' Youtube channel to learn about some of the crazy stuff Apple does to keep independent repair shops out of the game. Again nothing that I want to encourage.
That said the introduction of the M1 chips is pretty great, I plan to buy a Macbook Air as my second laptop for office work, I'll keep developing on a Thinkpad with Linux though.
> I like Apple laptops but they're not great in terms of repairability, extensibility, modularity and openness.
I just don't care about any of those. If I need it repaired, I'll pay the vendor to do it. If I need it extended, I'll pay them to do it - or buy something new. I don't care if it's modular. I only care about openness insofar as I can tell what it's doing. The rest is a waste of my time.
I suspect I'm not the only one who feels this way, given the way this thread has gone.
What other brand has leaked schematics and boardviews? Replacement batteries, iFixit guides, and skilled independent technicians keeping the A1398 and A1466 going as long as possible? I doubt Apple will return to their glory days of making those laptops new, but I feel like the repairability of 2014 Macs is still better than many Dell/Lenovo/HP/Sony alternatives. At the component and logic board level.
I've tried PCs, they just aren't on the same level as Apple's hardware and I hate Windows.
I've seen some cool customizations of Linux but would really rather not have to spend that time myself to get to a place where I'm productive. I want something that 90% "just works", but that's also pleasing to use.
I really wish there was a solid third option, new tech is so cool yet the options available today seem so boring!
In what way is Apple so bad that you would pay twice as much (thousands of dollars more) for a competing product?
I'm annoyed with having to give my money to one of the richest companies on the planet, solely because nobody else will actually compete. I run Apple hardware daily; it's clear that I'm fine with them as a product, especially if I want it cloned.
Basically: I will pay a premium for an Apple-esque open laptop.
As if that weren't frustrating enough, redeeming the warranty required about five hours total of phone conversation per incident. At every step of the way, they would demand I repeat dozens of irrelevant troubleshooting steps, or they would tell me the problem isn't covered (contradicting the last person I'd been handed off to), or they'd tell me it isn't covered but if I agree to pay to extend the warranty by another year then many he can ask his manager to backdate it and squeeze this in, etc. etc. As you might be able to guess, it's all sales/lies/incompetence and eventually I got through to someone high enough up to initiate the replacements under warranty.
Of the many Macbooks I've had, only one ever had a failure that required service. I just scheduled a time to drop the computer off, then picked it up a week later and it was fixed, didn't have to argue with anyone about my warranty.
Also - in my opinion - the XPS may be the best build quality of non-Apple laptops, but it's not even in the same league as a similarly priced macbook.
Horrible horrible support. Incredibly frustrating doing all of the steps on phone support to even get someone to come out. They advertise it as better than an Apple store, but after the first year you have to mail it in with a two week repair delay
I now use a MacBook with zero issues, while the XPS never worked properly (they forgot thermal paste after the first repair) and it died entirely after barely 2 years. Huge waste of money
What jurisdiction is this, that they can get away with not properly honouring warrantees?
Just another anecdote but they kind of add up, just like the stories about the butterfly keybord on Mac.
That said, personally I don't use Macs as I've given up adapting to the CMD-tab behavior (and misplaced fn/ctrl etc) after trying hard for about three years.
It's no longer "ongoing", as it was fixed and has been for some time. This is noted elsewhere in this thread, too. You can't try to claim someone has no credibility then wade in with incorrect facts.
The TouchBar is bad and I wish they'd remove it, yeah.
The MacBook Pro has cooling issues, an awful keyboard and feels flimsy. The Zenbook had only a pseudo 4k display, a massive charger and a large bezel, although I believe that's gone on newer models.
I wouldn't call one premium and the other not. They were both kind of underwhelming.
M1 does shake things up somewhat, and will make an even larger difference at the high end.
Apple has also made some poor decisions in various areas in the past like poor thermals, power-sucking dGPUs, and of course the butterfly keyboard. The M1 Macbook is very nearly perfect though, and I don't know how any of the PC vendors are going to top it.
I do often look at a ThinkPad and wonder, though.
Unfortunately, there’s no retailer out there that I trust to actually display these high-end laptops so you can go actually get a feel for them. The Microsoft Stores was the best bet, but those are all closing. I shopped for an all-metal laptop 2 years ago after leaving Airbnb and was wholly disappointed with this $600-$1400 lineup at BestBuy. I ended up getting a Huawei Matebook Pro X (sic) from the Microsoft Store in San Francisco. I put Linux on it, but were I to do it again I’d just spend 2x more on an actual MacBook.
That said, to me the existence of the Matebook _proves_ that what I'm after should be possible, and it just comes down to nobody actually doing it.
I'm just past the point in my life where I want to itemize this stuff. Take my money and give me the best package possible. I've got better things to do with my time.
The entire buying experience also feels very sales-like - which, yes, it's absolutely a sales process - but the buying experience with Apple is leagues better and feels more human. This isn't even hardware, but website UI/UX... why on earth is it like this in 2020? This is much easier to solve than hardware chain issues.
- Ships with CoreBoot
- Much nicer fit/finish than the average non-Apple laptop (all metal, aside from the rubber palm rest)
- Display wasn't defective :)
- There's a logo, alas
- Comparing to my work Macbook Pro, I'd say viewing angle and brightness are both on par, and the screen is indeed glossy
- I don't know if the trackpad is actually glass, but it does feel nicer nicer than pretty much any other trackpad I've used (to the point where I don't miss having a nub like on my usual Latitudes/Precisions and ThinkPads)
- No crazy vertical integration hardware-wise, but it being one of the main targets for Fuchsia is kinda cool, I guess
- It has both touch and screen-flipping, but it's easy enough to just... not use them (and indeed, most of the time I don't)
- I can't speak to the support aspect (since I've never had to put in a support request, and typically prefer fixing things myself anyway), but Google unfortunately has a, um, reputation...
I've been pretty happy with it; it's a nice solid machine, and while I ain't a fan of Chrome OS at all, the Crostini support makes it at least usable for my purposes (and the first-class Android app support is a nice bonus).
The main downside for me is that Chrome OS seems to be the only option for it that doesn't have some major drawbacks like missing audio support or suspend/resume issues.
Made in Japan and oodles of legacy ports...
I use Stealth 13 and impressed with its metal body and touchpad, also no shiny RGB logo
I've had stellar longevity out of Apple hardware. I'm usually able to use it for a handful of years and sell it on ebay to put a good chunk towards something new. I have noticed certain models/runs have specific issues, laptop keyboards are probably the most recent and obvious, but for the most part you know what you're getting. Screen lamination problems or pinched monitor cable being a few others.
When looking at alternatives saving only around 20% on the cost made it difficult when not being confident about longevity or resale. Sadly, other aspects weren't appreciably better (soldered on RAM, camera quality, performance, battery).
Razer still has hilariously bad product management.
One of their newest (non-hardware) launches is Razer Pay, a QR payment and Visa prepaid solution for Southeast Asia. It's been around since mid-2018, but they've just launched their prepaid card in Singapore.
The app and backend quality is below average for a large company like Razer (think: multiple incidents of double charging, and authorisation charges not being refunded), and has the app's UI is ugly.
Nobody in the entire laptop industry cares or even knows about our complaints. There seems to be practically zero overlap between the professionals that use laptops -- such as software developers -- and the hardware engineers that design the laptops. As you've alluded, it's an insular industry with mostly foreign players such as Clevo in Taiwan.
The market exists though. I suspect it would be profitable too! I regularly buy laptops for about AUD $5,000-$6,000, including the Clevo laptop I'm using now for work.
My requirements are much more mundane than yours, but will similarly never be met:
- Alternative keyboard layouts: Why must a $6K laptop for professionals (or gamers!) do idiotic things such as compress the arrow keys or hide the Ins/Del/PgUp/PgDn keys? Why can't I choose the keyboard layout?
- Wider keyboards: I can't stand "gapless" keyboards that make touch typing the rarely used keys difficult. Most laptops reuse the 13-inch model's keyboard on all larger sizes, which wastes enormous amounts of real estate. (My current laptop is wider than my full-size 101-key keyboard, not including the number pad.)
- Decent webcams and microphones: Is there some law that only mobile phones and tablets can have decent cameras?
- Narrow-bezel screens: This is starting to very very slowly become the norm, but is still hit and miss.
- Lightweight power supplies: Only Apple seems to have heard about Gallium Nitride power electronics, everyone else ships their more powerful laptop models with a power supply that is the size and weight of a brick. (My current laptop's brick is 1.9 kg!!!)
- Integrated 5G: I'd like to have Internet connectivity without tethering, just like an iPad.
If anyone from Dell ever reads YC News: I very nearly bought the new Dell XPS 17, but then I saw the keyboard and I immediately cancelled the order: https://i.dell.com/is/image/DellContent//content/dam/global-...
Compare with a Clevo 17 inch laptop keyboard: https://accessoriesales.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/1165_...
They seem to have found the room for full-size up/down keys, a number pad, as well as dedicated keys for ins/del/home. I never have to press the "Fn" key in normal usage!
Every few years I look at Dell's top-of-the-line laptop, but decide against buying one because of at least one glaring flaw.
This is actually a fantastic point! Some models of Dell/HP/Lenovo have easily removed keyboards by design in order to install additional RAM/service parts etc. All they have keeping them connected other than some sliding plastic tabs is the ribbon cable. I can't believe no one has ever made drop in replacements either from the manufacturer or as aftermarket parts. Having Ctrl/Alt/Super/Fn keys in a dozen different configurations due to different vendors makes switching between different devices a huge pain.
Imagine if you could even get customised switches on your laptop!
Considering how small my cheap 65W GaN charger is, I would have been disappointed in Apple engineering if theirs were still as heavy and big as they are.
The trick is to have a bunch of microphones along the edge of the display, all the way around. This then enables beam-steering and noise filtering by keeping only the signal common to all microphones.
Mobile phones often do this kind of thing, but PC developers are stuck in this local minimum that they seem completely unable to escape.
Speaking of which, the iPhone 12 Pro has a HDR OLED display that goes toe-to-toe with a USD $35K Sony BVM-X300 Master Monitor: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_czpXW3yKE
Meanwhile... good luck finding a decent 17" laptop with an OLED screen!
As far as I can tell, all OLED laptops made in 2020 used the exact same Samsung 15.6" panels, and then all other OLED manufacturers also simultaneously agreed that no sizes above that need exist:
https://www.oled-info.com/here-come-oled-laptops-sdc-start-p...
https://www.oled-info.com/boe-demonstrates-new-oleds-monitor...
Keep in mind that Samsung makes an OLED panel for Apple that is capable of 1,200 nits peak HDR brightness, but is incapable of making a laptop screen that exceeds 400 nits for some mysterious reason. I can't prove, but strongly suspect that all PC parts are now being made in the supplier's legacy plants, and the top-tier stuff is exclusively reserved for mobile device manufacturers...
The HP has a much better keyboard. So much better. It runs Linux, not quite perfectly but pretty darn well. I actually like that the HP has a touchscreen, it’s often way quicker to reach out and touch a spot on the screen than to maneuver the mouse pointer to that same spot and then click. The HP has a regular USB port so I don’t have to keep a USB-C adapter around. The charger isn’t a giant heavy wall wart that falls out of older outlets. It’s a bunch of little things like that.
We have different needs. Your needs are not mine.
That said, I would would wager that your needs are moreso met as an existing, direct market though - whereas what I'm after is splintered and left only to Apple.
To each their own, of course.
My guess is that, at this point, Apple has absorbed the vast majority of people who care about these things. And that is causing the other manufacturers not to care, because they have already lost the audience who does...
It's like adding 'I want a million dollars' to your list.
Not sure if it's caching on HN or whatever, but to that point: so is, clearly, my entire list. If I'm saying I'll pay whatever price, though, you bet I'm putting that on there. ;P
Edit: and to be fair, I'd take a logo that isn't an eyesore - the other commenter on this thread used some odd language for it, but I consider the Razer logo to be an eyesore. Bright green is not something I want on my laptop.
The Apple logo, as annoying as it might be, at least doesn't look like someone took a crayon and scribbled on the back of the machine.
For laptops I don't have much choice except to put a sticker over the logo.
In the PC world, the consumer space is dominated by anti-design nerdy guys who demand every port imaginable, and for good reason, and the business end is similar with their own legacy demands. Big changes in any way, be it features or lack-of are frowned upon and mocked (no wireless less space than a nomad -lame).
No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different. And even then, you can just bootcamp Windows or Linux and buy the 'real' Apple you want anyway. Honestly, its a small miracle something like Apple even exits in the tech space. Its usually a race to the bottom on half-cooked features, general cheapness, and terrible UIs. Somehow Apple broke free of that and never looked back.
Complaints that you commonly see about Apple products are, I find, similar to reading complaints when you're apartment shopping: those who complain have reason to do so, and those with good experiences don't necessarily feel the need to write about them.
For instance: those who experienced botched Catalina upgrades that caused Mail.app issues? I never experienced that, and I've two significantly sized accounts attached. In fact I upgraded my last machine from High Sierra to Catalina with no issues at all. The "beta" parts of macOS that people call out are just never things I've fought against - and I run a fairly custom-ish setup to boot.
On that same note, I could throw a rock and find a KDE user who complains about KMail having issues... but you won't find many KMail users saying "yeah it just works and life is great".
Software is complex. I wouldn't call macOS "beta" and by the same token I'm not going to label other OS/DE combos that either.
(They also fixed the keyboard, so I'm over that complaint. Would I prefer the ThinkPad keyboard? Absolutely. But the new one works fine and fits the design aesthetic of the device.)
tl;dr: The only "agreement" I find myself signing is that the thing looks and feels, and functions, like a premium product. I find myself endlessly frustrated that if I go car shopping for a premium item, I have different options... yet I just don't feel like I have this with computers.
> No one is going to win here because no one else can have Apple's market. The incentives to win on the PC side are just too different.
This is exactly why I'm saying that my ideal product wouldn't compete with the PC market. I fully recognize that's a losing battle.
Yes yes, I get the economical barriers. I'm past caring. It is so incredibly frustrating to look outside the Apple ecosystem and feel like the entire PC industry is content to sell the bare minimum of quality (outside of Gamer hardware, which looks obscene - but I get that it's subjective).
It's a horrible business idea on the numbers and nobody would do this, but if some lunatic out there wants to blow the money, build and sell a laptop at whatever price point you want that:
- Supports CoreBoot
- Isn't a rebranded Clevo shell and has close enough fit and finish to a recent MacBook. Read: No. Plastic. Case.
- If there is ever the phrase "panel lottery" uttered about your machine, you've messed up.
- No logos, or throw them on the underside like Purism.
- The screen has to be relatively close to the MacBook in brightness + viewing angles. Give me an option for a glossy screen.
- Trackpad must be glass. You won't get close to the MBP trackpad on the first or second pass, but try.
- Go for some crazier vertical integration ala the M1. I don't care if it blocks upgrading certain parts, since I consider the industry to move fast enough that I won't _want_ the machine anymore in 4-5 years.
- There is no need for touch of any kind, nor the ability to flip the screen or anything. Just make a damn laptop.
- Edit: high quality boutique feeling support. I don't need an Apple Store equivalent, but at least invest in this.
I get why Apple can do all of the above. I would pay literally twice what I pay Apple for a competing product. Currently, every laptop that I try feels like stepping back a few years.
The upcoming Purism Librem 14, in terms of images, feels like it could _feel_ close - but I'm not impressed with their other products so I'll believe it when I see it. I remain shocked that System76 hasn't bothered with this.
End my rant about this industry, I guess.