> "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," said Dell.
Who could have known that people wanted quality AND affordability?
If you have spent any time in those gigantic corporations, you know that there is effectively no one there who can actually speak sense and effect change.
No one can say "our laptops are too crappy and too expensive, let's fix it" and actually make it happen.
The people in the marketing department who wrote "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices" probably don't give much of a shit about Dell and its products, other than the fact that they get a paycheck from the company every 2 weeks; many of them probably have MacBooks at home, and many of them won't even be at Dell 18 months from now as they chase the next step in their career.
It's kind of shocking to many people too that even the C-suite execs don't have the power to change much there either. Remember that email from Bill Gates where he suddenly realized that the Windows install experience was shit and asked his underlings to fix it? Of course, nothing got better, and Windows is still a giant turd many years later.
What is a real miracle is that a company the size of Apple has managed to still give a shit after all these years and insane growth. There's plenty of missteps in Cupertino for sure, but compared to the competition it's night and day. Who knows how much longer it'll last.
I worked at an Apple Store before I got the opportunity to move into the corporate world. I was doing sales and I was super enthusiastic about the products (~2005).
I remember this couple thinking about buying their first Mac. The lady was skeptical and asked if I had a Mac at home. I was so surprised by the question that I blurted out, "Of course!" It was like asking if I breathed oxygen.
They both laughed and she seemed to trust me after that. She saw that I wasn't a used car salesman and they bought whatever it was that we were discussing, probably an iMac.
I always chuckle to myself at how preposterous the question seemed to me at the time. But yeah, a lot of people just show up for the paycheck and have absolutely no buy-in about what their company makes.
* as they get laid off
Did the old 11" MacBook Air not teach the Wintel brands anything?
Nope. They use standard chips without a dedicated controller, because it's all controlled directly on the M-series chip, saving them a bunch of money. Which that, with the Macbook Neo, they absolutely pass the savings down to you.
Truly a shocking outcome!
When I finally convinced my father to get a Mac ~2005/2006, he left me a voicemail saying that all he'd done was take it out of the box and he could already tell that it was a good purchase.
There were, if I recall correctly, one or two generations of Dell XPS that came close but they started cheaping out on materials almost immediately after it.
The old-ish ThinkPads were great if you want a rugged laptop, but that's not really because of better build quality, there were just more material.
My experience with software development suggests this is not the main driver. The main driver seems to be management not caring about quality, UX, long term maintainance costs, externalities, and by viewing customer service as a cost rather than as branding.
People do know how to make things properly the problem is all those people are in China for a laundry list of reasons as long as my arms in a circle
It's an artifact of geopolitics that Apple and Foxconn and separate legal entities.