There are competitors who can create good high end PCs, but at the moment they suffer from a severe case of bad taste. Maybe most producers being Asian doesn't help either - nothing against them, just the tastes seem to be different.
This is most pronounced in car designs. Japanese and Korean cars designs generally look like they are "trying too hard", especially in the recent years in their high-end models. Maybe they are going for the funky-factor of the ricers, I don't know. British, Italian, and French cars usually look the least desperate. German and American cars are somewhere in the middle. Just my opinion.
Being Asian myself, I concur we have different tastes. ;-)
Most Asian cultures(Japanese, Indian etc)have their own aesthetic sensibilities. I concur that they are different from the "default" western sense of style. I just don't think it is true Asians have "questionable" taste!
NB: I am not getting into culture wars etc or claiming victimization etc, I just think that sentence is not true.
To be more specific, perhaps I should've emphasized that "modern" Asian cultures have questionable tastes, which is in direct contrast to traditional Asian sensibilities. I feel that modern Asian cultures are too busy imitating what's trendy in the west. It doesn't help the fact that instability of the past century made people lose faith in their indigineous cultures, while the western culture has evolved quite a bit since to adapt to changes of the world, thus leaving a big gap to catch up.
I'd venture that the vast portion of the old Asian cultures are appreciated now-a-days merely for their exotic aspects, even by Asian people themselves. Whatever is preserved for practical reasons don't always fit in a coherent manner, there are plenty of rough edges to work out.
I guess a bad analogy would be that Asian culture is like Unix, Apple is Europe, Windows is USA, China is BSD, and Japan is Ubuntu. The kernel is the philosophy, command line is the traditional culture, GUI is the pop culture, and the internet is globalization. Windows eventually took over and became more accessible over time with its killer GUI apps. For the time being, Unix lacks the ecosystem to build killer GUI apps, so they created Wine to run Windows apps. There are also plenty of native Unix GUI apps that sprang up, but most are created in response to their existing commercial counterparts, and many of their GUIs are imitations. FreeBSD has been around for a while, went through several regime changes, and is still kinda authoritarian with its userland programs. Ubuntu is later to the game, has the most success in adapting to modern GUI needs, but there's still some distance to go to catch up to Apple and perhaps Windows. Even though Unix is weak in GUI stuff, it's strong as servers, especially since the internet became popular.
Sorry about the silly analogy, perhaps I need to take a nap. :)
Also, all the makers have far too many options to choose from.
Both seem like solvable problems to me, but perhaps they are doing well enough as it is?
Also go for simplicity, I suppose. No fake parts designed to look "high end" in a phony way (kind of like "spoilers" on cars).
To me the utmost example of bad taste is the leather coating ASUS is going for in their latest creations. But then I don't like leather in general.
Just try to remove as many superfluous parts and elements as possible I guess. Just as Apple does - battery covers are superfluous. Mouse buttons are superfluous. Multimedia buttons are superfluous. Shiny areas anywhere but on the display are superfluous. And so on...
Important: large borders around the screen are superfluous and look cheap.
I can't think of a situation where multiple colors would look good (ie notebook cover red, bottom black), but I am not a designer.