“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.”
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“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
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