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Comment by Taylorious | Hacker News Reader

Preach it. I can't find a decent Ultrabook. It's amazing that there are so many that dont even have at minimum a 1080p screen. That really should have been part of the Ultrabook specs.

What is really astounding is how completely clueless OEMs are. Intel, a chip manufacturer, not only had to go to each OEM and convince them to make some competition for Apple, but they had to help them design the laptops too. What the hell do engineers at Dell, HP, and even Lenovo do all day? They are the ones who should be coming up with laptops and telling Intel what they want.

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I'm just complaining, but it feels like Lenovo is busy pissing off all the loyal ThinkPad users. Each iteration takes ThinkPad one step closer to shiny crap laptop, like a Dell or HP. And they still can't get decent resolution screens, even on 14" models. Some of the newer stuff looks neat (like the Helix), but has nerfed hardware, like 8GB RAM max.

I don't even really care about "ultra" book. The old X-series ThinkPads were great. 12", a few pounds, portable enough. They killed that line by switching to a crap consumer screen.

I wonder if the laptop market will go to hell and the shiny factor won't be an issue cause consumers will be buying other things. At that point, perhaps laptop companies will once again focus on people willing to spend a lot on good hardware.

I think you're overselling the old screens. They were bad TN screens with a crappy resolution (1024x768, 1280x800). At least the x220 and x230 have a very nice IPS screen, even if it's still with the crappy resolution.

Unless you mean the SXGA+ X61 with the gorgeous 1400x1050 IPS screen with just the right aspect ratio. But those only existed officially in the crappy tablet form factor. It's possible to mod one of them to a normal X61, but it's highly non-trivial and takes a lot of time and money.

From what I hear from a friend that worked in laptop development at Dell and HP, most of the actual design is done by the Chinese companies that will eventually manufacture the hardware. American hardware companies have stripped themselves down to the point where they basically just specify and test outsourced designs. It's a system designed to produce commodity hardware at low prices, not innovative products.

That mostly just shifts the frame without answering the core question. Why can't the chinese design a decent laptop?

R&D spending: when you are in a race to the bottom, you can only afford to invest in safe designs, and most of your focus is on efficiency. In contrast, Apple can afford lots of R&D spending.

and yet, long term, it's apple that makes the bulk of the profits in this sector, while the rest rat race tothe bottom.

I m not sure if its by design, or these smaller companies just cannot come up with a long term plan...

They're stuck in a local optimum. These companies have to be structured in a certain way to succeed at low margin, high volume commodity hardware sales. It isn't easy to adapt that to higher-end products, and when they try the market is slow to recognize changes in a brand, which discourages them from trying.

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