> Dell and Apple can learn that there are consumers out there who want low cost minimalist options with long battery lives and long operational lives.
They don't want their business and low marigin sales.
Also Macbook air has what, 18 hours of battery life ? That's enough for vast majority of users.
The real advantage of long battery life isn’t so much the duration when new but both reducing the number of charge cycles and preserving battery life as the device ages.
The number of consumers who not only complain about planned obsolescence but also put money where their mouth is, is tiny. It's easy to get people on board with the idea behind projects like Fairphone, but then they do a price comparison and buy a cheap Huawei.
The market for Linux laptops is already a small niche and those aren't all that limiting for users when it comes to processing power and software support. Now take away the modern web browser and very few people would consider it for anything more than a little tinkering.
I don't mean this in a "capitalist bad" way, it's mostly great but there are certain innovations and technologies that don't fit well with a need to get the most return possible on capital invested. There's a "dead space" of techs that would benefit everyone, need some capital to create - but don't allow a lot of value to be captured.
A bit like how we see more VC excitement about "vat grown meat" (a centralised industrial model that exacerbates supply chain dependency and further alienates people from their food - but is perfect for capturing value) vs working on "super potatoes" or algae-based systems that would be low-dependency and could scale down to individuals.
Orthodoxy is that government is supposed to help with this stuff but they have their own incentives (some of them a result of industry capture) which rarely align with decentralisation, degrowth or reduced dependency. For example recent battles to get laws passed to even allow you to repair your own stuff.