“The answer clearly has nothing to do with technology. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Sony, and Toshiba, along with smaller players, have all the skills required to design just about anything,” Steve Wildstrom writes for TechPinions. “Everyone is building their systems using the same components and, for the most part, the same manufacturing partners.”
“I think the real problem lies in the marketing DNA of the computer makers, which has evolved to meet the demands of corporate customers and the retail sales channel,” Wildstrom writes. “While their requirements are entirely different, both drive design away from the clean and simple designs and low-cost, high-quality manufacturing that are Apple hallmarks.”
Advertisement: Limited Time: Students, Parents and Faculty save up to $200 on a new Mac.
Wildstrom writes, “Corporate sales are the lifeblood for many PC makers… The result of this need to meet very fine-grained requirements is great complexity. The buyer of a 13″Mac Book Air has one choice to make: a 128- or 256-gigabyte solid-state storage device. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1, one of the most Air-like products, offers three different processors, optional Bluetooth, two flavors of mobile broadband, four Wi-Fi radios, 4 or 8 GB or RAM, and a choice of a conventional hard drive or two different SSDs, making 432 total hardware combinations.”
Read more in the full article here.