RichardC (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on September 28, 2013 6:02 am wrote:
>
> If you look at laptop design and then smartphone design over the last 10-12 years,
> everyone else has tried their damnedest to copy Apple just about as closely as they can.
> And with good reason, because Apple has figured out the trick of taking mostly commodity
> components and making a premium product which commands a high margin, through a
> combination of excellent design, manufacturing, marketing, and support.
>
> Aluminum-case laptops, chiclet keys, online app stores, touchscreen smartphones,
> usable tablets, superthin laptops, retina screens. Where Apple goes, the others
> try to follow. Often with great success (I just got a Samsung Galaxy S3 myself ...)

Many of the features Apple introduced and other copied are things I do *not* want in a laptop.

Chiclet keys just take me back to the days of the TRS-80 Color Computer. I did not like Chiclet keyboards then and I still do not like them.

I dislike glossy and glare prone displays even more. For a desktop display where I control the lighting environment, I might find them acceptable but in a laptop intended for portable operation where that is unlikely to be the case? No thanks.

I would much prefer "tough" to "thin" and the whole embedded non-replacable battery thing just rankles me because of my existing experience with the life expectancy and failure modes of prismatic lithium-polymer batteries. When they wear out they have a tendency to expand in volume and crush everything normal to their largest area surfaces.

Had I built a few small form factor PCs with arrangements to carry data back and forth between them instead of buying my last last laptop, then the PCs would still be usable while the expensive laptop which I had to return twice for warranty repairs is now a pile of junk.