[ildon]

The way I see it is that Apple competitors have given up on premium portable devices. Apple tech is so far ahead that consumers looking for the best non gaming hardware will most likely choose Apple devices.

For competitors, spending a huge amount of money in R&D to try to compete with Apple, will be most likely at a loss. At least until some chip manufacturer (read: Intel) doesn't step up their game.

As a consequence, competition has moved to the middle-low quality segment, one in which they can still compete because of 2 main factors: Apple is not interested in that segment and most companies won't move away from Windows (even if they probably should).

[Arn_Thor]

Does it really require that much R&D? Slap one of the excellent AMD mobile processors with built-in GPU in there, standard cooling (they don't use much more power than they did 5 years ago. They surely have the blueprints for the last XPS machines), and a bigger NVME. It's all more or less commodity hardware in a name-your-preference shell.

[camillomiller]

It’s easy until you can’t really fine tune the software because you use windows and it’ll eat the battery alive for reasons you can’t control as a manufacturer (but customers will still think it’s your fault)