[alexgartrell]

Spend a Ton of money on world class industrial designers and sell a rebranded high-end laptop that doesn't suck. I can only imagine that the market for people who want Apple-style hardware (in terms of construction/quality) with Windows baked in is huge.

[2muchcoffeeman]

This is like the opinion that Apple should license their OS and allow 3rd party hardware manufacturers to create Mac clones. Or that they should create a low cost Mac to compete with cheap PCs. This is not their strength. What makes you think they will succeed in a new market segment when they are tanking at what they used to be good at?

[r00fus]

Problem with this idea, is that a competitor will essentially reverse-engineer the high-end machine, duplicate it as close as possible and basically do 1/10 the work to get a similar or even better product out the door.

Unlike Apple, Dell doesn't own the OS, so there's no differentiation there. They also don't own any of the internal componentry so no control there either.

Intel and Microsoft have no real incentive or desire to prevent this kind of piggybacking from happening.

Ultimate result: Dell doesn't innovate in design, and goes for cheap, low-margin to compete where it can: price.