[ildon]

The way I see it is that Apple competitors have given up on premium portable devices. Apple tech is so far ahead that consumers looking for the best non gaming hardware will most likely choose Apple devices.

For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.

As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).

[Arn_Thor]

Does it really require that much R&D? Slap one of the excellent AMD mobile processors with built-in GPU in there, standard cooling (they don't use much more power than they did 5 years ago. They surely have the blueprints for the last XPS machines), and a bigger NVME. It's all more or less commodity hardware in a name-your-preference shell.

[camillomiller]

It’s easy until you can’t really fine tune the software because you use windows and it’ll eat the battery alive for reasons you can’t control as a manufacturer (but customers will still think it’s your fault)

[eastbound]

It’s the year of Linux on the laptop! That would be a serious opportunity.

[gaazoh]

OEMs have been doing basically this for years with their phones for decades at this point, pushing customized builds of Android with every phone they make, this has been successful to close the gap Apple created when they released the iPhone.

I guess a hurdle smartphones didn't have as they were breaking into a new market is compatibility; outside of the tech world, virtually all of corporate and personal environment is dependent on Windows and Windows-only software. Steam has shown it can work with SteamOS and Proton, making gaming on Linux a reality for a wide audience. What's missing is a major OEM to build a high-spec laptop with a custom Linux build to optimize performance and battery life, with a decent Windows compatibility layer and that would provide software companies an incentive to sell native Linux versions and support. Is Samsung really going to keep their laptop line depend on Windows, and leave it on the side-line as they will never be able to really optimize battery life and performance and compare to the MacBooks?

[bipson]

Even with Linux (where the manufacturer could fine-tune) if they want to, the story isn't much better.

The performance/power gains come from the own ARM-chips and a OS/build system/framework fine tuned to make use of that

[Arn_Thor]

sure, you'll have some unhappy customers but that's not new. They used to sell just fine. I wonder if it's the neverending hunger for bigger margins that's really doing them in. It's not enough to make SOME profits when you need to show shareholders you're making MORE profits.