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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

reading the topic and not the article, my gut feeling is high quality products, whether it be phones or laptops. But, -especially- laptops.

I've been looking for a replacement for my x201 thinkpad for about two years, for me, it's the last high quality laptop that exists with linux support. Taking OSX is fine because it's widely used and has a POSIX backend/bash/etc

So, if you want high quality hardware and a POSIX OS then OSX/Apple is definitely where you go.

and it runs linux better than most laptops /anyway/.

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A related aspect of this is that Apple focuses on just a handful of models while companies like HP and Dell seem to have hundreds, making it even harder to choose.

Let's say I read that the HP Xbook 2788Q is the greatest laptop ever and has perfect Linux support, and want to buy one. First of all since HP has so many different laptops, finding a store that actually carries a particular HP laptop is very tricky so it's basically impossible to get a hands on look at the laptop before buying. Then it turns out that HP doesn't sell the Xbook 2788Q in my country, they sell the (visually similar) 2789P instead. Are there any major differences? Is the reviews for the 2788P relevant? There's no easy way to tell, making it very difficult to compare and buy laptops.

Apple makes it easy, a MacBook is a MacBook all around the world so I know exactly what I'm getting.

I think that simplicity of their product line drives some of the corporate sales as well. If I tell some random IT department to get a macbook, there is only so bad of a machine they will pick for me. HP, Lenovo, and Dell have some really shoddy machines at their cheap end. At a startup you can specify exactly what model you get, but when it's a large IT department saying "generic windows machine" is much more of a risk than asking for "a mac".

HP, Lenovo, and Dell have some really shoddy machines at their cheap end.

Which is another problem as well. Everybody has plenty of experience with terrible machines from HP/Lenovo/Dell making it more difficult to accept that this particular machine might actually be awesome. Almost no one has used a terrible Apple computer.

> reading the topic and not the article, my gut feeling is high quality products, whether it be phones or laptops. But, -especially- laptops.

Revenue from Mac (laptop and desktop combined) sales was only 13% in 2013. Moreover looking at the year-over-year growth Mac sales saw the biggest decrease. I guess more recent numbers are not much different.

The problem for Apple is also that their laptops are consumer machines not business machines (no docking station, subpar integration in Microsoft ecosystem). The Notebook market is shrinking and I suspect consumer market is shrinking much faster than business.

I wouldn't be surprised if they sell the Mac division and concentrate on iPads with keyboards. The new 2015 MacBook is a hint in this direction.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/01/these-ch...

This is a funny reply, if you remember yesterdays discussion about Apples missing computer innovation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10980023 enjoy

Interesting; and I agree with their point.

For me a well crafted tool is more important than a highly performant one in terms of GPU/CPU throughput.

Build quality and driver support mean a lot to me, which is why I'm still using a 5-6 year old Thinkpad X201

Yes, I agree with that too. I prefer a well done computer, that is stable and low maintenance compare to a super high end one. But I wouldn't mind, if Apple could offer both: close to cutting edge hardware plus a stable OS.

I also used Thinkpads as long as I was on linux. But I dropped linux because it took so much more time to administrate compared to OS X.

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