What are those important areas?

- Speakers, Mic, Webcam - Trackpad - Aluminum chassis and form factor - Touch ID - Mac OS (like it or not, this is perhaps the most important feature for those considering Macs.)

It's very possible the competitive landscape has changed since 2010 and they are placing more focus on these ancillary features than before, but the strategy has always appeared to be to deliver a superior holistic machine. I, and their financials would argue they have been doing that from before 2010 through now.

1. Tight software/hardware integration (MS have this also).

2. Premium segment positioning in the market, motivating differentiation on quality.

3. Apple brand overall is strongly identified with providing a quality user experience.

4. Other PC makers occupy majority of market which is low-margin, so no motivation to invest in this type of (relatively speaking) niche feature.

Nothing comes close to Apple Silicon for laptops.

nvidia 1060/1070 GPU able to run VR headsets, without sounding like a hairdryer

Commensurate or better battery life

More than 16GB RAM

Easily upgradeable SSD.

More durability

Apple is not making this laptop! In fact, I have no inkling if they're going to make that if I wait another year, or ever. So why should I remain an Apple customer? I don't think Apple is interested in me as a customer. What kind of customer am I? Basically, a dev.

The first is apple hardware is reliably nice. It's just done right, with minimal corners cut. Full aluminum body (not plastic), great screen (bright, high resolution, great color (accuracy and range), great keyboard, great touchpad, amazing CPU (fast and low power), very nice GPU (better than any other integrated GPU and much lower power than any faster discrete GPU), with a great memory system (100, 200, or 400GB/sec).

Sure the best laptops some close on some metrics, but generally have lousy iGPUs or lousy battery life. Laptop memory systems typically max out at 75GB/sec, which drives the need for discrete GPUs, which drives the need for larger batteries. Sadly FCC limits max batter size, so you end up with terrible battery life and performance if you aren't plugged in. Or they have are great, except for a poor screen. Or have a nice screen and a lousy keyboard or track pad.

I also find it interesting that if you try to buy a 3 or 5 year old laptop, but far the most expensive are apple laptops. Almost as if they are built better.

My second issue is I find OSX to be MUCH less intuitive. The lack of a real package manage for the OS is painful. Having to add my own, like brew is ugly. Then the UI inconsistencies drive me nuts. Even things like cut/paste (control-c/v) are annoying. Doubly so when using iterm2 where you don't need the control-c. Or if running xquartz I'd need a state diagram to map all the copy/paste rules.

Linux seems much more sane, granted I'm more familiar with it. I'm on a website and want to drag an image in, I just drag the image from any image viewer or file browser and it works. I can drop files into signal by dragging. Or documents into thunderbird as attachments. OSX seems much more finicky about dragging objects between applications, and I end up in the finder, which I find particularly counter intuitive. Oh, sure I could try to remember that bang, splat, apple A goes straight to apps. Seems that browsing from ~ should be WAY easier, or even better just have better drag/drop supports.

Linux just makes more sense to me. 99% of my installs are apt install <appname>, not playing the do I search for the web for a DMG, or try to find it in brew, crap that was a different user, or maybe I need a 3rd app store? Oh that works in a brew cask, but not a brew app, etc. etc. etc.

I also find apple's handling of multiple monitors quite annoying. I don't have anything fancy, just N desktop of 2 monitors each, with a quick keyboard combo to switch (control-alt right or control alt-left). I ask apple folks about their setup and they seem to always mention some weird paid app that worked with the N-1 version of the Apple OS, but the devel got bored and stopped updating.

If you just need Signal, Teams, chrome, Firefox, terminal, and like a nice coherent package manager, drag and drop (not select, control-c, select, control v) of strings, images, documents I'd recommend Linux. I find OSX frustrating to use.

Generally, I'd disagree that Apple makes great hardware. I've owned an iBook and 2 MacBooks, and I think Apple generally produces shoddy quality products.

The exception being their trackpads, which are really quite exceptional.

I still think Apple deserves criticism for locking down both their hardware and their software.

Edit: To be fair, I've never owned a retina MacBook.

Apples other concern is the developer side and the app ecosystem: high end build machines and developer workstations are also relevant for their actual business which is selling apps and phones.

Computer hardware for professionals is just a boring service Apple needs to provide in order to support the rest of their business. It’s not even a visible product like a MacBook or an iMac- it’s designed to be hidden on the floor because it’s huge and noisy (the trash can was a failed attempt at working around that fact)

Edit: to follow up on the “powerful machines are a boring service” idea: If Apple didn’t want to risk the brand damage of launching a boring product, they could simply license dell or hp to sell certain servers and workstations with Mac OS to let the highest end render machines and build servers etc run Mac OS. They could easily charge a 20% premium and people would be happy to buy them.

Most macbooks dont need high memory bandwidth, most users are using their macs for word processing, excel and vscode.

I find the logo and "sameness" rather embarrassing, but it seems to be the only game in town. Please do link me to a $1200 non-Mac laptop with a high-res 15" screen, thin form factor, and nice trackpad.

For some makers that’s going to be performance or cost. For businesses laptops reliability and security are going to be big factors.

For Apple the overall experience is a large part of why people buy; Apple users want a great hardware experience integrated into the OS, and they’re willing to sacrifice performance and price to get it.

It was never about Apple having better marketing. It was about Apple owning tech loyalty.

When the macbook is no longer the favored dev machine, Apple is going to lose a lot of market share.