Apple's MacBook Air had an upgrade last month when the company from Cupertino launched a more powerful and better equipped version than the one presented and launched in October of last year. The new version of the MacBook Air it is faster than the most expensive MacBook Pro from 2010 and it is much cheaper, so for any user it is a logical option. For laptop manufacturers, the MacBook Air it turns out to be a problem mainly because of the popularity that Apple's product has gained lately.
The PC world is buzzing lately about how laptop manufacturers are struggling to compete with Apple's MacBook Air, which has exploded in popularity since the introduction of the third-gen model in 2010. This year's fourth-gen update is proving to be the must-have laptop of the year. For every laptop manufacturer not named 'Apple,' the race is on to make new super-thin and super-light laptops. Here's a question for you: why didn't HP, Dell, Acer, Samsung, or some other huge PC manufacturer build the Air before Apple? The answer is: They did.
It seems that PC manufacturers are starting to worry about the attention that MacBooks have been getting lately. According to those from PCWorld, PC manufacturers try to please consumers and do not put so much emphasis on radical changes that could affect their sales in a positive or negative way. For example, Apple gave up optical drives in the MacBook Air and chose to introduce very fast SSDs, but PC manufacturers do not do this because market studies tell them that at the moment consumers do not want this.
Sony and Dell built nearly-great products with critical flaws and instead of challenging their engineers and designers to find ways to address those flaws, they concluded that nobody really wanted these systems. Apple didn't give up, though. Drive too thick and too slow? Apple commissioned a special case-less SSD that could fit in its slim design. It worked to make the motherboard smaller, the components cheaper, and crammed as much lithium polymer battery as it could fit in the case. By 2010, the Air had evolved from an overpriced, underpowered status toy to the must-have computer of our day.
The big difference between Apple and the rest is that Apple rarely gives users what they need, but gives them what the company thinks they need. That's what happened with iDevices, that's what's happening with Macs, and for now consumers are satisfied with this strategy, considering that in recent years Apple has recorded increasingly high sales. From my point of view, PC manufacturers still have a big advantage: the price. If laptops were sold at the same prices as Macs, then many would give up buying a PC and switch to a Mac for the stability and reliability offered by such a system. The high prices make many people put off the idea of buying a Mac, but in the future things will change radically.
