Really, we are talking about difference in between them selling 250 euro laptops vs 270 euro laptops.
Taiwanese consumer electronics industry got, kinda, ossified.
Their mainstream products are almost as boring as "white goods" these days.
There is a gigantic "commodity laptop" market and the less than 10% enthusiast/gaming niche in it.
And YES, Intel is chopping down the tree it sits on. A lion share of their desktop CPU/Chipset/Wifi sales are in the commodity sector. If they strangle Taiwanese guys to the point they drop them in favour of ARM SoCs, it will trigger a magnitude 9 earthquake in the market.
This thread has people hailing Dell and HP as quality laptops. In other threads, there is no end to the troubles people have with Dell XPS. HP has a poor reputation as far as I remember, without remembering any specifics, except that they had overheating issues at one time.
I guess the difference is probably between business and consumer laptops, where the former tends to be Dell or HP? Except Acer, as noted, because Acer is trash. Don't buy Acer.
It's because it's expensive paid repair service so I bought it, but I don't think I really like to repair my laptop so many times. (And not to mention classic power adaptor problem with has built-in it for pretty long time)
For Asus and Acer, we always joked them with a "built-in timer", they will break when time is up. Just like all those eco-friendly things. Very environment-friendly company.
That's not how markets work, except in the lowest of the low end (where margins are already awful).
That doesn't mean the entire company/product lines operates this way or the market as a whole is incentivized to do the least amount work effort possible.
It is nihilistic, but is it any less true?
Also, not price, profit. Revenue minus costs. It costs company to make a product make user happy, so if they can skip that without impacting their sales, they will - doing otherwise would be leaving money on the table.
> That's not how markets work, except in the lowest of the low end (where margins are already awful).
I argue that's how markets work in any highly competitive space.
> the market as a whole is incentivized to do the least amount work effort possible.
But isn't it? As a company, you want to make money. Existence of competition causes you to make less money. If you don't fight back this pressure, you'll get pushed out of the market. This incentive structure applies to all your competitors as well. This is exactly how competition makes products cost less.
There are some good ways to decommoditize and get people to pay $399 instead of $349.
* "Modest Rugged". Robust hinges, maybe some sort of drop-protection. Not Toughbook quality, but at least "I can leave it with clumsy people and children and not worry about it". I get more of that out of a used-to-death X230 than from a new HP Stream or the like.
* Premium packaging experience. I've bought some nicer-grade PC PSUs and they come with fancy fabric sleeves and pouches to hold the spare cables. Why can't my laptop come in a basic travel sleeve, maybe with a matching pen and mouse? It would probably add $5 to the BOM, yet make the product feel dramatically more premium.
* Longer warranty. I know the Europeans get 2 years by law, but really, saying "here's our unit with three years of guarantee on it for $20 more than theirs with 1 year" at least provides the signals of quality.
* Experimenting outside the touchpad. I can recall when you could get all sorts of different pointers-- side trackballs, eraser pointers, things with the buttons on the back of the case. There are a lot of people who prefer Thinkpads just for the eraser, or love Apple's touchpads... but there's no reason Asus or MSI couldn't come up with something to build the same loyalty.
* Better out-of-box experience. Throw a 16Gb flash drive, worth maybe $5 in quantity, with a clean software image on it, so you don't have to pester the user to make a backup themselves. Install a decent set of freeware people will actually use. I can see there's probably incentives to push MS Office trials, so it's not surprising nobody pre-installs LibreOffice, but why not paint.net, 7-zip, VLC, Firefox? Think of how Microsoft's stores do a significant business on "you can get a laptop without a bunch of crap installed"as a selling point.
I gave them a second chance, but the 419 Euro T100TA convertible also failed me after just about two years (doesn't turn on anymore; no idea why). Oh, and that device was probably affected by the price fixing.
So, my decision is simple: No more Asus. (And that's the nice way of putting my personal opinion).