It's more than just audio quality. Whilst I could spend time on quality, I'll address a serious issue with all modern laptops, that is they simply do not have enough audio gain.

Desigers design to the dynamic range allowed by the bit level and power output of the speakers/audio amplifiers—there is never anything left in reserve.

Let's go back to my 1930s radio receiver for comparison. Back then, a radio set with say a 5 Watt audio output would give 5W output when the radio station reached 100% modulation of its carrier signal. And to reach this condition the radio receiver would have its volume set to about half way (the volume potentiometer set to about 12 o'clock), so the listener could always increase the gain to 5W on soft low level audio. This was the normal situation with just about every radio receiver ever built in the pre-digital era.

That scenario is no longer possible with modern laptops (and much other digital equipment). In a noisy environment, you can no longer trade quality for distortion/clipping which one often wants to do. Same goes for audio recorded at low level, here one cannot reach full volume as there is no reserve audio gain. How many YouTube videos and MP3 files have you heard that have such low level audio that they're essentially inaudible? If you're like me then you'd have to answer hundreds if not thousands.

The fact is modern digital designers haven't a clue what to do when it comes to listener audio ergonomics. That they don't is a damn nuisance.

The fact that they need to spend some weeks training in an ancient radio factory is an indictment on the poor state of our modern tech education (why didn't their educators tell them to always design in reserve gain in situations such as this?).