It would cost substantially more for a small-scale company to produce a laptop with the quality of MacBooks than it costs Apple. That cost difference would have to be passed to the consumer.
More compromises: lack of ports, missing basic functionality in OS, very high cost for ram and ssd.
Especially trackpads. Almost nobody makes good trackpads except Apple. I don't get why.
> The new Yoga Pro 7 is extremely quiet in daily use; the fans are usually not spinning when the laptop is running basic tasks. During gaming, you can expect around 36-42 dB(A) of noise from the device, though this depends on CPU utilisation. Noise levels only went as high as 36.2 dB(A) in our stress test and remained constant at that. The Yoga Pro 7 reached a much louder 47.3 dB(A) in High Performance mode, which we think is unnecessary. Our review unit didn't give off any other electronic noises.
> Our measurements indicate that the new AMD-based Yoga Pro 7 is highly efficient and uses a paltry 7.9 watts at idle with screen brightness turned all the way up and refresh rate set to 90Hz. There also aren't any issues under load: you can expect power usage to be around 60 watts during gaming.
> The Yoga Pro 7 had a really strong showing, lasting nearly 10 hours at 60Hz and 9 hours at 90Hz even at max brightness. When brightness was adjusted to 150 cd/m² (equivalent to 81% of max brightness on our review unit), the device even managed to hit 13 hours in the Wi-Fi test and 15 hours during video playback.
Those things were built like tanks back when IBM owned the brand. My intro to Unix as a kid was installing a mail ordered copy of Ubuntu onto one! Survived years of physical abuse and reinstalls, and still boots up fine almost 20 years later
Because hackintoshes are much, much, much less common than someone slapping Linux on some random bit of kit. And nobody complains about OSX breaking or not running perfectly on non-Apple hardware. As evidenced by the term "hackintosh" itself.
It's very hard for a Linux hardware company to gain any ability to innovate when so much of the market goes elsewhere.
IMHO, it's nigh on miraculous that System76 is as great as it is. I would dearly love for them to be able to do more, but the reality is that most folks complain that it's not exactly what they want, and/or not exactly at the price point they want, and give their money to someone else. (Then they complain that Linux doesn't support their new Windows hardware adequately!)
The smartest thing Apple ever did was force you to but Apple kit to run Apple software. Had they not, they'd have suffered the same fate. And we'd be discussing how much OSX sucks because it doesn't support the consumer Dell models adequately. (If OSX even continued to exist.)
Smart? Nah that was just the common practice at the rise of the Mac. IBM was somewhat insane for making such an open platform for anyone to play in. Yet, had they not done that we would not be having this discussion.
DEC, Amiga, Osborne, the Java machine, etc. all were basically just locked up ecosystems based on proprietary software not built for tinkering.
The amount of firmware has since exploded, and it's gotten much more complex to boot (pun intended.)
I think that's more the problem than specialized hardware.
That's gonna be interesting to see, one-size-fits-all laptop for Linux. Watching how disputes on THE TRUE AND THE ONLY EDITOR still ongoing, Vi/Vim/NeoVIM crowd vs EMACS adepts (VSCode users not to be considered as REAL GUYS of course, just frontend devs or even traitors of GNU), do you expect those crowds even can agree on should be there blobs/proprietary firmware, SecureBoot and TPM/Pluton used in such laptops? I seriously doubt.