Don't understand the downvotes. I believe that it's exactly this. It's an industry where you can point to a competitor's machine and compare gigahertz and megapixels and terabytes and gigaflops and build press releases on those numbers, where an industry leader tries to make a point with "It doesn't run Rocket League!", where manufacturers like Dell can put a nice touchpad in one machine and then build twelve awful ones a year later because they have so many models on so many markets that no one is even able to say with confidence why certain models have been more popular than others.

Design and UX-wise, the current laptop market is a shitshow and Apple seems to be the only company that consistently cares about the little things. Sure, they've messed up in the past (butterfly keyboards), but there is still a sense of progress.

Fan noise is the same. I bought a machine from a Linux laptop vendor. At the time of purchase, I raised my concerns about the risk of ultimately ending up disappointed when it arrived (particularly how pricey it was). They insisted that I would be happy, and that it would be much better than my 5 year old laptop that I was replacing.

Not only was that not the case, it was worse than my own pessimism that I started with.

The fan noise and the trackpad were so bad to the point that it felt like a joke, even though I knew it wasn't. People are just oblivious to this stuff and march onward none the wiser, even the people who should be doing things like comparative analysis on quality against their competitors' products.

I bought a Vostro 5301 (13" with 11th gen intel cpu) and the fan ran All. The. Time.

I returned it after doing all the windows and driver updates, choosing "quiet mode" in the Dell Power Management software. The fan would kick on while cpu strolled along at 10 or 15%. Replaced it with an xps 13 which has been fine. (I have had several xps so decided to chance it).

It’s an interesting point. There must be some metrics i.e. latency, accuracy that a trackpad can be measured by

Perhaps it needs to be a score via a user test e.g click these small randomly appearing boxes in the shortest time possible

I remember Wacom bragging about corporate secret quantitative measurement methodologies in Surface 3-4 era, but what completely solved pen computing stagnation was Microsoft dropping them completely and Apple Pencil casually stepping in, so,