“The PC world is buzzing lately about how laptop manufacturers are struggling to compete with Apple’s MacBook Air, which has exploded in popularity since the introduction of the third-gen model in 2010. This year’s fourth-gen update is proving to be the must-have laptop of the year. For every laptop manufacturer not named ‘Apple,’ the race is on to make new super-thin and super-light laptops,” Jason Cross reports for PCWorld.
“Here’s a question for you: why didn’t HP, Dell, Acer, Samsung, or some other huge PC manufacturer build the Air before Apple? The answer is: They did,” Cross reports. “Sony and Dell built nearly-great products with critical flaws and instead of challenging their engineers and designers to find ways to address those flaws, they concluded that nobody really wanted these systems. Apple didn’t give up, though. Drive too thick and too slow? Apple commissioned a special case-less SSD that could fit in its slim design. It worked to make the motherboard smaller, the components cheaper, and crammed as much lithium polymer battery as it could fit in the case. By 2010, the Air had evolved from an overpriced, underpowered status toy to the must-have computer of our day.”
Advertisement: Limited Time: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
“My point here is not simply that PC manufacturers are quitters. It’s that they have the entirely wrong mindset to build must-have products. Several times a year, I have meetings with major PC manufacturers about their upcoming product lines, and the tenor is always the same: ‘Our customers told us this is what they want, and our market research says this is what people are buying, so we made this great product to address that market!'” Cross reports. “Building a better Air – or even just a cheaper one – is proving to be difficult. Those unibody aluminum chassis on MacBooks make them really rigid despite the thin design, and Apple has booked solid all the lathes capable of carving a laptop body out of a single block of metal.”
Cross reports, “Here’s a bit of free advice for the PC manufacturers: lose the optical drive. No, not just in your upcoming ultrabooks, in everything. I’ve asked four PC makers this year why they’re still putting DVD drives in their 13-to-15 inch laptops while struggling to make them thinner and lighter. They all said the same thing: ‘Our customers say they aren’t ready for that yet.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse.” – Henry Ford
Related articles:
ARN reviews Apple MacBook Air: Excellent performance and portability – August 8, 2011
Apple cornering the market on ultra-thin, ultra-light, ultra-rigid laptops – August 7, 2011
‘Ultrabook’ makers squeezed by Apple’s control of unibody metal chassis supply – August 4, 2011
Analyst: Apple’s MacBook Air selling out in some locations – August 2, 2011
PC makers struggle to match MacBook Air pricing with ‘Ultrabooks’ – July 29, 2011
Laptop Mag reviews Apple’s new MacBook Air: ‘The perfect notebook’ – 5 out of 5 stars, Editors’ Choice – July 21, 2011
WSJ’s Mossberg reviews Mac OS X Lion: ‘The best computer operating system’ – July 21, 2011
2011 MacBook Air benchmarked; outperforms all 2010 MacBook Pros – July 21, 2011
Apple debuts new MacBook Air with Intel Core i5 & i7, Thunderbolt I/O & backlit keyboard – July 20, 2011
This site posts the same 4 stories over and over. *yawn*
Please feel free to leave and never come back.
…although some people love to take the time to let everybody know they disapprove, another option to leaving, i guess, but maybe it’s the highlight of some people’s day. i, too, see posts repeated in different sites,,,easy to not click on them.
OF COURSE APPLE STORIES SEEM THE SAME:
GENERALLY they go:
APPLE PRODUCES SUBERB GROUND BREAKING DEVICES
APPLE USERS LOVE THEIR APPLE STUFF
COMPETITORS DESPERATELY COPY, FLOP, AND DIE
yeah i know it gets tired and repetitive after YEARS of the same stuff.
🙂
After living through the dark days of the 90s, these stories never get old or repetitive.
Agreed. I took so much abuse for being an Mac user in the 90’s and doing desktop support for Macs at my company. Payback is a bitch.
It’s also immensely pleasurable when friends who scorned me for using a Mac, now ask for my advice to buy a new Mac themselves!
I have one modification to make to your comment:
COMPETITORS DESPERATELY COPY (poorly), FLOP, AND DIE
I had to correct someone recently, when they said all the music sold in iTunes had DRM.
These articles are needed to correct the meatheads who are still spreading FUD (that wasn’t true in the ’90s, let alone today).
Good salesmanship does not consist in giving customers what they want. Good salesmanship consists in convincing customers that they want what they need.
The PC manufacturers haven’t noticed that they are competing with Apple in markets that Apple created. You can never pass anyone by following them.
A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.
– Wayne Gretzky
Non-Apple PC manufacturers are playing where the puck was.
“Non-Apple PC manufacturers” are not even playing the same game as Apple. 😉
MDN,
The link goes back to this article – not the PCWorld one.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/237992/windows_laptop_makers_cant_catch_up_to_the_macbook_air.html
Gotta love how the people in the comments section there are bashing the Air and saying there are plenty more powerful and durable and better battery-life ultrabooks out there. That may or may not be the case. I own an Atom-powered Acer Aspire One. I bought it because it was cheap and I needed something to access the Internet with on my term. Would I do so again? Never. It’s specs are dreadful, it runs Windows and it seems to crash just because it was turned on sometimes. Really, it crashes or freezes for any damn reason. So if I did things over, knowing that job was going to last longer than I’d expected, I’d go with a MacBook.
It was the same with Novell when I worked for them as a Sys Engineer. When attempting to convince software development to develop new apps, they’d tell us ‘bring us the numbers’ and we’ll see if there’s enough demand to warrant it.
Today, it’s the same thing with everyone except Apple. Apple builds and the people follow, other companies take a poll first to see if there’s enough demand.
You see where lack of vision took Novell. Look where vision is taking Apple. In today’s world, you need to create something so good the people will line the sidewalks waiting for you to open your stores.
well, you have to give Google credit for trying out a lot of new and different stuff too. some is very good, like Google Voice. a lot is half baked and doesn’t work out, like Google TV. and some is just a rip off, like Android.
it’s the rest of the industry that’s so lame.
They bought Grandcentral which they turned into Google Voice. The crappy thing is that after Google bought GC, they just let it sit there for over a year with no communication whatsoever. If you were a GC user, you were abandoned, as stuff stops working, and Google was non-responsive. Totally typical of their customer service, or lack thereof. How hard would it be to update the GC users that something was happening and GC wasn’t being abandoned? Nope, not Google’s way.
Google mostly churns out crap, that’s undisputed. When I was still with the dark side, I gave Picasa a try because so many of my friends were raving about it. Sure, compared to Windows picture viewer it was a step up, but compared to iPhoto it’s a pale imitation. Google can’t get out of beta mode most of the time,
Really?
Picassa and iphoto seem about the same to me in terms of usability although iphotos handling of fcebook photo albums puts it a bit ahead of picassa for me.
You’re not an iPhone/iPad user so the ultimate usability of iPhoto is lost on you. I like how it seamlessly syncs with my iPhone and creates albums so I can customize how I view photos. Rather than have everything lumped together in the camera roll, iPhoto segregates photos into albums quite nicely for me. So it’s not just a desktop application, which is what Picasa is effectively. It forms part of the iPhone ecosystem.
Google has the fantastic 80/20 policy for their developers. 80% of the time they work on whatever project has been assigned to their team; 20% of the time they work on whatever project they think is interesting. 1 day a week they get to either invent some new idea that they think is cool or work on a project that some co-worker came up with that sounds cool. There’s no pressure on this – it doesn’t have to go anywhere, but it often does. Among other things, this program produced Gmail.
At a company I worked for about 10 years ago, we had our own secret version of this that management didn’t know about and that’s what produced all of our cool new things that our customers raved about. Anytime we would demo something new to our boss, he would ask “When did you have time to work on this?” We would sheepishly answer, “In my spare time.” He would get a grumpy look on his face but never say anything. Without fail, every one of the tools that we would show off to new customers was developed in this off the books sort of way. (We didn’t even feel guilty billing our hours to a customer project, but that’s probably because we were bad people.)
In other words 80% of what Google develops is total unmitigated crap, and 20% barely passable, beta-ware.
You can’t honestly be this ignorant and unintelligent. PLEASE tell me it is just an act!???
Larry Page has shut down the 80/20 option. In a blog post earlier this year, a Google engineer also said that most people were using that 20% work time to fine tune their 80% work mostly. Meanwhile, Google also cancelled the Google Labs where that 20% flourished most.
Page seems to be following Steve Jobs’ razor focus on fewer products philosophy.
“Google CEO Larry Page is making good on his promise to put more wood behind fewer arrows as the company focuses more of its resources and efforts on its core products.”
…
“Google recently killed off a couple of other projects that were not gaining traction. Last month it pulled the plug on Google Health, a personal health records service, and turned off the lights on Google PowerMeter, a service for monitoring Web-based home energy use.”
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20081185-266/google-shuts-down-google-labs/
And since then, “Google will no longer support its Android app-making tool. Launched only a year ago, Android App Inventor is a wysiwyg tool to create apps without any coding skills.”
http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/266841,google-ditches-android-app-inventor.aspx
Seems like Page et al. at Google are spending their 80% time on aping Apple, and 20% of their time defending/hiding their actions.
+1
I just love crappy memes being succinctly sliced and diced.
That is exactly what happens when you get the marketing or accounting guys in the leadership roles instead of the innovators.
no it’s not Just Content. it’s the Just Works Apple Ecosystem that let’s you seamlessly share/access that content across all your Apple stuff and also your TV, which is just about to get a huge boost with iCloud and iOS 5.
without a Content Ecosystem, a stand alone tablet is just a gadget. Google’s ecosystem is mainly about communications, which is great for smartphones but not significant for tablets. you don’t buy a tablet to make calls, altho you can, or text, altho you can, or take pix, altho you can do that too. so Android tablets are just gadgets, mainly for techies/gadget lovers that like to mix and match software/services and change them constantly to always have the latest stuff. but they are >10% of the market.
of course cheap tablets from Asia will flood the market soon – the race to the price bottom has already started. they will take a chunk of the measured market too, just like cheap MP3 players do vs. the iPod (and all of the unmeasured market in the second/third world).
bottom line, for the foreseeable future the iPad will dominate the market like the iPod has with about 70% of total sales. most of the other 30% – say 25% – will be Android in name, and its fans will brag about that fraction as a significant share of the market. but it will be a fragmented and profitless bunch.
oops sorry! posted this in the wrong tab, meant it for the article.
Gadgets alone are not enough anymore. Manufacturers will be judged by their top to bottom solutions and how that gadget works with an infrastructure and enriches the experience. Isn’t is ironic that Apples whole software and hardware integration philosophy has proven to be the correct one? Microsoft is like a turtle on it’s back flailing with an inability to get back up and match the mighty Apple.
Google is flailing around searching for an ecosystem but so far it’s proven to be a dud. Outside search, they have no idea how to monetize their product, forcing them to give it away for free. This leaves them vulnerable to advertisement spending downturns because essentially they’re a one horse town.
Microsoft is probably the only company that could muster the programming & hardware expertise to challenge the iPad, but I don’t hear anything about them going vertically integrated.
You’re wrong BoC. M$ is very well versed in vertical integration. Just look at Zune and Plays For Sure.
Remember when HP used a first gen MBA to slice a cake at the CEO birthday party? They did their best to mock Apple and downplay the MBA. Who’s crying now HP?
Windows computer makers can’t dump the DVD drive because they don’t have a first class app store like Apple does.
Most of these companies are just glorified systems builders. They buy parts, put them together, install windows with assorted crapware and sell to the public. They can’t keep up because innovation is something that is foreign to their business model.
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”
— Steve Jobs
Great quotes by Steve. Do you have a reference of when he said them?
It appears this was from a Fortune interview in 2008. I thought it was older than that, but must be mistaken.
http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2008/fortune/0803/gallery.jobsqna.fortune/
Like I always said Since i changed to Mac there’s nothing steve jobs can’t do . He puts his mind to do what no one want to do , and gets it done. He takes his mind where no one has gone before. Thanks steve
Don’t stop
Steve ( VisionDesigns1 )
I’d argue differently (but with the same outcome). Jobs & Apple know better than most what they can’t do well and cut it out. Then they really execute on what’s left.
Here’s the real story why no one else can do what Apple does all the time…
Everyone else mostly competes based on offering the lowest possible price. That’s the main purpose of a “netbook.” Let’s design and manufacture these things to be as cheap as possible. We’ll undercut our competition on price and (hopefully) make profit on volume. This stuff about “market research” to give customers what they want is nonsense; I don’t think customers are asking for flimsy plastic garbage with low performance and battery life.
Apple competes based on VALUE. Let’s design MacBook Air to offer highest possible quality and user satisfaction, for a price that provides a good profit margin. If no one else can match its value, it will be a winner.
There are still Windows users who post comments saying MacBook Air is just an “expensive netbook.” They don’t understand that by choosing a netbook (or almost any Windows PC), they are choosing something that was INTENTIONALLY designed to be as cheap (low quality) as possible, because the goal is to sell it for the lowest price.
On the other hand, Apple’s goal is highest quality and user satisfaction for a reasonable price, because Apple designs products to offer best value, not lowest price.
Which do you want to use for hours each day…?
Ken hit the nail on the head. The ‘competition’ just follows a script: Cheap, whatever is on the shelf components. Apple is always pushing the boundaries. If there’s something that doesn’t fall within their vision. They either change it or force the change.
I don’t care how expensive or revolutionary you try to make your box. When you have Windows as an underlying operating system, you’re essentially dragging a 10 lb weight round your neck. You’re handicapped before you start.
The upside of Windows is it’s generic; driving mass, undifferentiated consumption. The downside of Windows is it’s generic. There’s a limited degree of customization you can achieve with your Windows box. When every other manufacturer is running the same underlying software, the only way to distinguish yourself is by adding bells & whistles (101 useless ports and slots) or by undercutting your competitors. Real innovation is difficult within a generic environment because when your users open the lid of their notebook, they’re confronted by Windows. That in and of itself is like putting a 100 lb boat anchor on your product.
Yeah, that’s certainly true for me. Even if the competition was able to match Apple’s hardware, I would not seriously consider it because it would run Windows.
In addition to “why can’t PC makers make . . .” It is what you say “no” to, as does Steve and company.
Of course, everyone is going to have an opinion as to what to include, and by the time you include everything for everyone, you have that original 11 pound laptop that Gassee created!
It is what you have the sense to say “no” to because of technology advancement and the conviction to go ahead and do it! It wasn’t too many years ago that Gates was touting the “every 18 months advancement” in this industry and changing to keep up with it. Now, most industries in the PC world wants to stay in the dark ages of computing.
Milling machines not lathes. Apple’s vendors own more computer-controlled milling machines than any other company in the world. It creates a huge hurdle over which competitors cannot jump.
I had to laugh when I saw “lathes” used in the excerpt. Made me imagine an MBA shaped like a soup bowl.
Finally people are getting the huge advantage and significance of the laser lathe that custom makes all Apple’s enclosures. That only took how many years?
Can’t they backwards engineer it?
This unibody design that Apple has is hard if not impossible to beat. Even though it came out 4 years ago, only now are people finding the brilliance of it. The unibody laptops have been the best looking, best functioning machines I have owned, and the MacBook Air is the pinnacle of this achievement. I really wonder how they can make them any better from a form factor. But this is Apple after all, only they can only best themselves.
Microsoft just received another order of replacement chairs.
I’ve asked four PC makers this year why they’re still putting DVD drives in their 13-to-15 inch laptops while struggling to make them thinner and lighter. They all said the same thing: ‘Our customers say they aren’t ready for that yet.’”
In pursuit of light, toss the optical. HOWEVER, there is no death knell for optical drives in laptops ringing. WE THE PROFESSIONALS still REQUIRE optical drives in our Macs, including our daily workhorse laptops. MacBook Air is brilliant and has a huge niche, but it requires a computer on a network with an optical drive.
There is no impending death of optical. We buried that dumbass rumor last spring. REMEMBER? 😛