There is something wrong when you go to dev conferences, where Apple never shows its face, and you have a sea of Apple laptops in the crowd, many of them Google employees. Then there are the thousands of Google employees back in the office trying to invent the future with walled garden Apple hardware and operating systems.
If you start with an existing Linux system and polish it, instead of starting from scratch, write the drivers and design the hardware to match, and use the needs of your own tens of thousands of in-house producers to guide you, surely you, Google, could come up with something even more attractive to your own developers, artists, producers, inventors than a product built by your competitor that optimizes for thinness, restrictions based on Apple's future plans, and lock-in to Apple stores, products, and services.
Just visited the Palo Alto Apple store and I'm pretty sure a Microsoft Surface Tablet has a better keyboard than the new MacBook Pro. They really smushed down the keyboard to make the whole configuration thinner, but whereas the old Pro's were halfway between the quality of a dome keyboard and a mechanical keyboard IMO, the new ones are even worse than domes.
I'm running Xubuntu on an old(ish) Vostro 3750 and with the exception of it's somewhat mediocre touchpad (Alps sucks) literally everything works exactly as you'd expect but that wasn't the case when this was a new machine (certain bits where flaky but got fixed over the following year), if they could provide the experience I have now on a 3 year old machine on a brand new machine with top of the line hardware then they'd be onto a bit of a winner, it would certainly top any list I'd look at for a while since my primary requirement for any hardware is does this work properly on Linux already.
IMO Canonical needs to commit to a partnership with a vendor to produce a machine they can fully focus and support on, that way you get a product you know will just work and can be polished to a high degree.
Now, this is totally the fault of developers and not Apple. Maybe Linux needs some sort of all encompassing app store to incentivize development.
The app ecosystem is just light years beyond anything that Linux offers. Yeah, I can spin up a kubernetes environment pretty quickly from the command line using minikube or a few alternatives, but on OSX I can use Kubesolo which ties into Corectl and lets me control systems from the task tray. Not to mention when I'm going to get new employees to hop on board if they're using OSX it's stupid simple as opposed to fighting various Linux configurations/security/etc.
1password has to be run inside of Wine which means the Chrome plugin can't connect to the application so you have to copy paste usernames/passwords into websites which all but defeats the purpose of it. Yeah, you can use keepass, but that's like trading in your 2016 VW for a 1994.
Then a ton of tiny $2-10 apps that just make my life and job more productive. Popclip is my must have, it's tiny, you wouldn't ever think about using it if you weren't introduced to it, but once you know about it you wonder why it's not on ever system.
Yoink is incredibly useful, it's a bucket where you drag files to input them into other applications. Yeah, that's not difficult, you can cp or move stuff around but once you get used to using it you want it around.
There are Linux alternatives to just about everything but they're nearly always disjointed and nowhere near the quality of the OSX version.
And if I look up software I can almost always KNOW that there's an OSX version available (sans games). The problem is that Linux, in the laptop/desktop world is still a last effort (if any effort) citizen. And that is hugely unfortunate.
But yeah, it's goofy that this isn't a reliable use case. I feel like it is in Windows but I use it a lot less.
1) Their goals. They are trying to get Ubuntu more widely adopted, not to polish it, at least, not yet.
2) Orders of magnitude, risk involved and business model. Apple is like what ? 100,000 employees and 50 billion in revenue. And Canonical is something like 1000 employees and 50 million in revenue ?